Wisconsin's Civil War Histories | Certificates of Service | Regimental Histories | GAR

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum initiated a project in 1992 whereby the state's roster of Civil War soldiers, published by the Wisconsin Adjutant General in 1886, was entered into a computer program. This computerized program comprises part of the history of Wisconsin's efforts in maintaining its records of Civil War participants. The Civil War Roster System is available for public use from computer terminals located in the museum's Research Center and Civil War gallery. The WVM Gift Shop offers souvenir Certificates of Service produced from information in the computer system. See Certificates of Service for more information.

Wisconsin's Civil War Records is an article by the Director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Dr. Richard H. Zeitlin, which details the history of Wisconsin's Civil War records, from the end of the war to the present. A "must read" for researchers wishing background information and history on Wisconsin's Civil War records and record keeping. Also includes a discussion explaining how the museum's Civil War database was made.

Wisconsin's Civil War Records
by Dr. Richard H. Zeitlin
Director, Wisconsin Veterans Museum

After the War | Use by Veterans | Early Efforts to Preserve Records | Today

After the War

The rapid disbanding of the Union Army at the conclusion of hostilities left a wake of paper records located in several repositories. Federal records were voluminous, but not well organized. Medical records at the Surgeon General's Office included 4,000 separate registers of wartime patients, arranged in chronological order rather than by the name of the soldier. States kept the muster-in and muster-out rolls of the units they had raised, typically in the form of company and regimental descriptive roster books, which listed the name and final outcome of each soldier. Other records turned over to the state authorities by returning regiments prior to being mustered-out of service included monthly returns, reports of casualties, bi-monthly musters (pay rolls), and a variety of other documentary materials.

However, the completeness and accuracy of the Civil War records was subject to what one Wisconsin Adjutant General referred to as "varying ideas of what was required and with different degrees of faithfulness...and ability." Federal and state records were never reconciled. In addition, materials remained in private hands, as company commanders and individual soldiers — particularly the company clerks — simply walked off with the primary documents. Because of incomplete records and/or inadequate accounting methods, much data pertaining to the effects of the Civil War upon the generation of living veterans could not be summarized adequately in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

Wisconsin maintained a set of bound "Regimental Muster and Descriptive Rolls." When the war concluded, the Adjutant General's Office made entries noting the service record and muster out details of individual soldiers, by company, contained within the 57 volumes of bound manuscript record books. Additional regimental records, 172 boxes, were stored in the Adjutant General's office and included pay rolls, casualty returns, general orders, recruitment materials, medical records, reports to the Governor, and reams of additional documents of varying degrees of completeness.

While the state's Adjutant General believed that the "record of Wisconsin soldiers is much more ample and correct than that at Washington," he nevertheless set his staff to finalizing incomplete company muster entries and to ferreting out obvious "incorrectness." The problems associated with handling those listed as deserters, for example, was complex. As veterans listed as deserters returned home without their regiments, some produced documentary evidence proving that they had not, in fact, abandoned their units. State legislators authorized the removal of some names of deserters from the state listing in 1867, while in 1868 the War Department provided a list of men cleared of desertion charges based on federal records. The state then published a list of men who remained listed as deserters.

Use by Veterans

Veterans seeking certificates attesting to their military service burdened the clerical staff of the Wisconsin Adjutant General's Office throughout the 1870s. Bounty equalizations and disability pension claims for those injured during the war kept the Adjutant General's staff busy. However, Congress passed the Arrears in Pension Act in 1879, which substantially broadened the existing disability pension legislation, and occasioned a dramatic rise in requests for Civil War service certificates. "There has been a marked increase in the business of this office for the past year," the Wisconsin Adjutant General reported in 1880.

Organizations of ex-soldiers, most particularly the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), stimulated interest in pensions among their members by championing efforts to further liberalize and expand pension benefit laws. The GAR developed effective communication linkages among veterans throughout the North. In Wisconsin, the GAR carried out a census of ex-soldiers during 1879. Ostensibly aimed at furthering social re-unions, the census of veterans also provided up-to-date information concerning the whereabouts of the ex-soldiers, which proved useful to GAR organizers.

The Grand Army's interest in pension legislation, and the appreciation of how necessary Civil War records were to successful benefit applications, led the Wisconsin GAR to support the state Adjutant General's efforts to preserve the valued documents. As Department Commander Phil Cheek explained to GAR members, the care of Civil War records was essential "for upon the preservation of these records depends the adjudication of pension claims, and the debt the Nation owes its defenders...." Adjutant General Chandler P. Chapman had been calling attention to the worn and deteriorating condition of the Civil War records as the use of the documents increased. Because of the liberalization of pension and benefit laws following the Arrears Act, the brittle documents became even more fragile. Moreover, the bound muster books were incomplete and required that a clerk refer to the files of loose documents to look up a veteran's service record. As noted in the Adjutant General's report to the Governor:

'It is seldom that a complete history can be made up from a bound record, thus necessitating constant reference to the files. Many, indeed nearly all, of these later...are now so worn and broken by use that, unless soon recopied, and their frequent handling avoided by entering in the bound records the most important facts now shown by the files alone, they will soon become so illegible as to be worthless....'

Early Efforts to Preserve Records

Chapman recommended that the Legislature appropriate funds to support the compilation of a new descriptive roster based on the old wartime descriptive musters and the contents of the "Records of Volunteer Regiments" files. Once completed, the Adjutant General also suggested that a roster of Wisconsin's Civil War veterans be published.

Governor Jeremiah Rusk, a wounded veteran and ardent GAR activist, called upon state lawmakers to vote funds to preserve the state's Civil War records. Assemblyman W.H. Blayton of Monroe introduced a bill incorporating the Governor's and the Adjutant General's recommendations. The Wisconsin GAR endorsed the proposal at its January 1885 encampment. Both houses of the legislature approved the bill by unanimous vote in April. The enactment authorized the Adjutant General to "compile, perfect and recopy the records...pertaining to the war of the rebellion." The act approved the compilation and publication of 2,500 copies of a roster containing a listing of each Wisconsin veteran who served during 1861–1865 as well as a description of his wartime service, and provided a "sum sufficient" to carry out the assignment.

Wisconsin Assistant Adjutant General F.L. Phillips, a veteran who had lost an arm at Spotsylvania in 1864, made use of a card index filing system to carry out the job. Entries were made concerning an individual veteran's service on a single card sheet and tracked through all existing records and files. Then, a complete entry would be copied from the card sheet into the new 59 volume bound manuscript, "Regimental Descriptive Rolls 1861–1865." The sheets were then filed alphabetically by regiment and thus form the basis of the published roster.

Phillips and his staff of 14 clerks directed considerable energy to the records project. Upon delving into the various records in a systematic fashion, "two great difficulties" appeared. Some of the records seemed to contain "contradictions as to important facts" which led to "irreconcilable statements as to the final disposition of the same man." The second problem that became apparent was the realization that some company records were incomplete. The Adjutant General's staff, therefore, turned its attention to actually contacting as many of the captains, sergeants major, regimental adjutants, company clerks, and private soldiers as they could to finalize problematic individual service record entries. Documents of all types were collected as were personal statements by veterans explaining their particular experiences.

The massive records retrieval effort was productive. Records were obtained from GAR posts, company captains, hometown soldiers' groups composed of veterans who had moved to other states, and men listed as deserters. However, the US War Department was unwilling to furnish pertinent records to the state because its holdings were in process of being indexed. The US Adjutant General resisted calls from the states to furnish extensive documentary information concerning the service of individual volunteer soldiers.

The publication of the two volume Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers: War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1886) did not halt the receipt of additional data concerning Civil War service. The Adjutant General's office continued making entries in its new 59 volume manuscript "Regimental Descriptive Rolls, 1861-1865." The War Department, with prodding from Congress, eventually began making available information to the state Adjutants General. New information was recorded in red — with a notation as to the date and type of document attesting to the facts being copied — in the Wisconsin "Regimental Descriptive Rolls." Final entries, dealing primarily with desertion cases and cases of honorific rank for promotions which took place after the conclusion of the war, made up the bulk of the red inked notations.

Nevertheless, the appearance of the published roster and the completion by the War Department of its own record indexing came in time to support the massive pension claims resulting from the passage of the Dependent Pension Act in 1890. Hundreds of millions of dollars were transferred from the Federal treasury into the hands of Union veterans by means of the 1890 Pension Act and its subsequent amendments. The record-keeping efforts on the state and federal level could be viewed retrospectively as having been remarkably effective.

Today

Today, Civil War rosters are a helpful resource for genealogists and professional historians. The computerization of Wisconsin's official Civil War roster makes valuable information about the state's military past more easily available to researchers. In the future, the WVM hopes to reconcile the 1886 roster with the subsequent revisions made by the Wisconsin Adjutant General's Office. In addition, if researchers can document that the database is in error, the WVM can update the information with relative ease. Though in many ways a work still in progress, the Wisconsin Civil War database is the latest innovation in the maintenance of the Badger State's Civil War rosters.

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