Episode Details

Learning about the civil war can be difficult for someone new to the game, especially when it comes to military terminology. While many have casual familiarity with such terms as "regiment", "brigade", "division" and "corps", they often use them interchangeably, seemingly choosing whichever word sounds "cool" to them in the moment, or, to give the novice a little more credit than that, simply confusing them because they are new terms to him or her. But these terms are not interchangeable, as cool as they may sound, and they have very specific meanings. These meanings vary from war to war and between nations, but we're not concerned with those meanings. For our purposes here, the definitions of these terms will focus on the American Civil War-era military usage. This upload is designed to be one of many companion uploads to the main episodes of Addressing Gettysburg. This, is the Gettysburg Glossary.

A few things to note before moving on are that, when discussing numbers of soldiers, there are two types of figures given here: the "on paper" figures, meaning what the respective unit sizes should be if recruited and mustered into service at full strength, and the average numbers as they were at Gettysburg. So, when listening to episode 1, Antietam to Chancellorsville, for example, a brigade's stated numerical strength would be somewhere in between the "on paper" numbers and the Gettysburg average. Disease, including infection, was the number one cause of death during the Civil War. These diseases were contracted in various ways. Some were a result of behavior, many more were a result of camp life, and others were the result of medical treatments.

Now a word about the Gettysburg average: All one needs to do is read two books on the battle of Gettysburg to find that no one truly agrees on the actual number of men involved. Throughout the fifteen and a half decades since the battle, scholars of the battle have looked at the numbers in an effort to come closer to a more realistic figure of totals. Some historians have the numbers at 95000 Union soldiers against 75000 Confederate soldiers. Some say 80000 to 60000. The minutiae of exactly how many each army had isn't as important as recognizing that most historians seem to agree that there's a difference of about 15000-20000 in favor of the Union. Also, it would be a mistake to assume that the Union victory at Gettysburg was mainly due to its outnumbering the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. If that were the case, the North would have won the war long before April of 1865. So when it comes to the numbers we use in Addressing Gettysburg, they are used more for illustrative purposes than actuarial figures. When our sources are conflicting with each other on these figures, we yield to the numbers used by the National Park Service of each battlefield we discuss, or the American Battlefield Trust. The terms discussed in this upload can be found, along with a multitude of others, on the American Battlefield trust's website. We extrapolate on many of these definitions.

And now, the Gettysburg Glossary.

Military Units

Company: A group of 50 to 100 soldiers led by a captain. 10 companies = 1 regiment. Smaller units within a company are platoons which are made up of squads.

Regiment- the building blocks of the army were regiments. On paper, each regiment, was comprised of ten companies of 100 men. Those companies would be recruited in a town or several nearby towns and sent to their respective state capitals to be trained and mustered into service as part of a regiment. Regiments would be numbered in order of appearance, for the most part, for example, the First Pennsylvania Volunteer infantry, the second pennsylvania volunteer infantry, etc. This was also done for cavalry units with the word "cavalry" replacing the word "infantry". So, there would be a first pennsylvania volunteer infan