All for the Union

This is the Civil War diary and letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, and it is a rather remarkable story. He was born in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island. His father died when Elisha was sixteen and since he was the sole support of his mother, two younger brothers, and a younger sister he quit school (Potter and Hammond’s Commercial College in Providence) and worked as a clerk in the office of Frederick Miller, a mill supplier. He worked there until June 5, 1861 when he enlisted as a private in Company D, 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers. He was only nineteen years old at the time of his enlistment and therefore needed his mother’s approval which she gave reluctantly. He remained in this regiment until it was disbanded on July 28, 1865, and he participated in every campaign of the Army of the Potomac from Bull Run to Appomattox with rapid promotions up to the rank of Lt. Colonel in 1865.

The men of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers must have been exceptional. From the beginning to the end they always took top honors at parades and inspections. Elisha was clearly an outstanding soldier but he could not have had that much influence on the regiment when he was a corporal. (He was not a private very long.) However, he did have a speaking acquaintance with all the officers including the generals. A couple of times Governor Sprague of Rhode Island appointed high ranking officers to the Rhode Island 2nd Volunteers who were not acceptable to the men of the regiment and they did not serve. The regiment was in Governor Sprague’s doghouse for some time.

It is interesting to see the war from an enlisted man’s point of view. After the battle of Williamsburg the Union troops advanced toward Richmond, getting as far as Mechanicsburg, and apparently were holding their own but were ordered to retreat. To the enlisted man it didn’t make sense and there was never any good explanation. The book is full of days of marching. Often they would march to some place one day, and on the next day they would march back to the place they had started from. Often there was a long time between battles and I suspect that much of the marching was to make sure the soldiers were not idle.

Near the end of the was Elisha was made a lieutenant colonel—he was 23 years old.

There are those who, when reading a work of fiction will turn to the back of the book to see how it came out. I should probably have done the same thing because when I had finished the book and read the acknowledgments I read the following:

I am much indebted to Ken Burns and the staff of Florentine Films for making Elisha Hunt Rhodes famous almost one hundred and fifty years after his birth, and for their wise choice of quotations from All for the Union in assembling their documentary film The Civil War. Without them this book would have sold out relatively unnoticed.

— Warren Langdon