The Union Army (also known as the Northern Army), also known as the United States Army, was a land forces during the American Civil War to maintain the Union as a collective state. Historians often refer to the union during the Civil War as the Northern States loyal to the United States, although the term “Union” refers to a state and not a situation. The United States had a regular army of about 16,000 career soldiers at the start of the war, but during the war, the government relied mainly on forces outside the United States and President Abraham Lincoln called 75,000 militias into service for three months on 15 April 1861.
During the last two years of the war, conscription represented only 13 percent of Union soldiers but encouraged a large number of voluntary conscripts. The basic organization of the Union Army was that each regiment consisted of 1,000 men and operated at half strength or less. At any one time, up to a third of Union soldiers were missing due to illness, transfer, or other reasons, including desertion which accounted for 200,000 of the men absent during the Civil War. The Union Army was one of the first large military formations created by mass politics.
An estimated 100,000 white soldiers from Confederate states served in Union Army units. By the end of the war in 1865, about 186,000 black Civil War soldiers had joined the army, 38,000 of whom lost their lives. At the end of the war, 179,000 Blacks or 10% of the army served in the Union Army while 19,000 served in the Navy.
In the spring of 1862, George B. McClellan, who had replaced the aging General Winfield Scott as Commander in Chief of the Union Army during the first months of the war, led his Potomac Army from the York Peninsula to the James River and conquered Yorktown on May 4th. Ulysses S. Grant joined the McClellans Army, which was the largest Union Army with 125,000 men at the time, and as Field Marshal, they began a campaign that ended the war in Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox, Virginia. The combined forces of Robert E. Lee and Jackson drove McClellan’s army back in a seven-day battle from June 25 to July 1, prompting him to call for further reinforcements to counter Lincoln.
Two more black regiments, commanded by white officers, became the first unofficial units of black troops in the Union Army. A regiment of 1,000 Minnesota volunteers was the first to offer to fight in the Civil War for the United States. Free black men were rejected under a 1792 federal law that prohibited black men from carrying weapons in the US Army, even though they had served in the American Revolution and the War of 1812.
After the Union Army repudiated Lee’s first invasion of the North in Antietam, Md., the proclamation of emancipation was proclaimed and the recruitment of blacks was seriously pursued. By the end of the war, 180,000 African-American soldiers had joined the Army. During the war, 21,289,948 men were drafted into the Union Army, including 1,888,895 soldiers of color and white men born abroad. During the Civil War, more than 180,000 free black men who escaped as slaves served in the U.S. Army. When the war began, many of the liberated black men in the north wanted to fight for the Union’s cause. Thousands of free black men, commanded by their own officers, came under Major General Benjamin Butler and volunteered for the Union Army. With legal authority, President Abraham Lincoln increased the regular army from 16,000 career soldiers to 22,714 and called in 42,434 volunteers for three years.
The state’s most famous unit, the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment, was not the first regiment of soldiers to volunteer to fight for the Union Army. In July 1863 it stopped a determined Confederate assault on Gettysburg and helped save the Union lines. Dyer reports that during the war, 16 black and 41 white soldiers for the entire Union Army were killed.18 After the defeat of the Confederate stronghold in Virginia, generals issued summonses to all available soldiers including numerous soldiers such as U.S.C.T. Official figures put the number of deserters from the army during the war at 200,000 – 8% of all Union Army soldiers.
In the end, the Union Army (also known as the Northern Army) fought the efforts of the Confederate Army and triumphed over them in the American Civil War. Demoralized by defeats in Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, the Potomac Common Soldier Army felt the largest of the Union armies with up to 125,000 troops could not compete with competent leadership. As it turned out, the war itself turned out to be much longer, more extensive in scope and scope on both sides — the Union (North) and the Confederates (South) — than originally anticipated or imagined. The date of 22 July 1861 itself was the day on which Congress approved to support a volunteer army of 500,000 men for the cause.
It began with the war-related disability compensation system controlled by the US Civil War, which over time evolved into a general disability system based on retirement pensions for Union Army veterans. However, the disability pensions of the Union Army were unable to accommodate the challenges faced by blacks in proving their eligibility due to the legacy of slavery and discrimination against black soldiers during the Civil War.