19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops
19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops
Statistical Profile, 1863-1867
Statistical Profile, 1863-1867
Based principally on the 1,151 individual soldier profiles in Robert K. Summers' Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers, with comparison to the Maryland State Archives, National Park Service, and other regimental sources.
The 19th Regiment was organized at Camp Stanton, Benedict, Maryland, in the winter of 1863-64. Approximately 1,000 enlisted men formed the original ten-company regiment. Across its full existence, 1,151 soldiers served in the regiment, meaning that later recruits and replacements added roughly 151 men beyond the original cohort. The regiment remained in service until January 15, 1867, long after Appomattox.
Original Camp Stanton cohort
about 1,000 — about 100 men per company
Soldiers who served in regiment over its existence
1,151 — book-wide roster total
Original-cohort deaths before disbandment
268 — 26.8% of original cohort
Original-cohort deaths from disease
245 — 91.4% of original-cohort deaths
Original-cohort killed at the Crater
23 — 8.6% of original-cohort deaths
Explicit Jan. 15, 1867 muster-outs in biographies
556 — documented minimum; includes replacements
Explicit substitutes
103 — text-derived documented count
Explicit draftees
56 — text-derived documented count
The original regiment followed the standard ten-company organization of roughly 100 enlisted men per company. The biographies show substantial turnover: deaths, wounds, sickness, disability discharge, desertion, transfer and detached duty reduced effective strength, while later volunteers, substitutes and drafted men replenished it. The table below gives the most defensible company-level end point currently recoverable from the biographical text: men explicitly recorded as mustering out with the regiment at Brownsville on January 15, 1867.
Company A
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 60
Substitutes: 0 • Draftees: 0
Company B
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 63
Substitutes: 13 • Draftees: 0
Company C
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 59
Substitutes: 14 • Draftees: 1
Company D
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 52
Substitutes: 0 • Draftees: 0
Company E
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 59
Substitutes: 21 • Draftees: 6
Company F
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 57
Substitutes: 11 • Draftees: 8
Company G
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 53
Substitutes: 12 • Draftees: 14
Company H
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 45
Substitutes: 13 • Draftees: 3
Company I
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 59
Substitutes: 14 • Draftees: 8
Company K
Original cohort: ~100 • Final muster-outs: 49
Substitutes: 5 • Draftees: 16
REGIMENT TOTAL
Original cohort: ~1,000 • Final muster-outs: 556
Substitutes: 103 • Draftees: 56
The final-muster figures should be read as documented minima, not exact company strength returns. A biography may omit the standard muster-out phrase even when the soldier remained with the regiment, and the Brownsville group included replacements who were not part of the original Camp Stanton cohort. Company H has the smallest explicit final-muster count (45); Company B has the largest (63).
Of the original approximately 1,000 men, 268 died before the regiment was disbanded. Only 23 of those deaths were men killed in action at the Battle of the Crater. The remaining 245 died of disease. Disease therefore accounted for more than nine of every ten deaths in the original cohort.
Killed at the Crater
23 deaths • 8.6% of 268 deaths • 2.3% of original cohort
Disease
245 deaths • 91.4% of 268 deaths • 24.5% of original cohort
All causes
268 deaths • 100% of 268 deaths • 26.8% of original cohort
The location totals in the book account for 227 of the 245 disease deaths. The remaining 18 occurred elsewhere or do not fall within those three broad location categories.
Camp Stanton / Maryland training period
75 deaths • 30.6% of disease deaths
Petersburg / Virginia service
82 deaths • 33.5% of disease deaths
Texas postwar service
70 deaths • 28.6% of disease deaths
Other / outside these location totals
18 deaths • 7.3% of disease deaths
Total
245 deaths • 100% of disease deaths
A particularly important point is that 70 original soldiers died in Texas after the Civil War had ended. The postwar occupation therefore caused more than one-quarter of all disease deaths in the original cohort and about 7 percent of the entire original regiment.
A systematic lexical scan of the ten company sections shows how often particular diseases and chronic conditions appear in the individual narratives. These are mention counts, not unique-patient counts: one soldier can have several diagnoses, and the same diagnosis may appear more than once in a long pension narrative. They are useful as an index of the regiment's medical burden, but should not be interpreted as incidence rates.
Diarrhea / chronic diarrhea — 58 biographical mentions
Rheumatism — 37 biographical mentions
Cholera — 37 biographical mentions
Typhoid / typhoid fever — 35 biographical mentions
Pneumonia — 33 biographical mentions
Scurvy — 33 biographical mentions
Measles — 17 biographical mentions
Dysentery — 16 biographical mentions
Smallpox — 14 biographical mentions
Malaria — 10 biographical mentions
Mumps — 2 biographical mentions
The pattern also changed with geography. Measles and smallpox were prominent threats during the crowded Maryland training period; prolonged campaigning around Petersburg produced diarrhea, dysentery, respiratory disease and fever; and Texas service brought conspicuous scurvy, cholera, malaria and intestinal disease. The records repeatedly show men moving among regimental facilities and general hospitals as these illnesses progressed.
Hospitalization was a central part of the regiment's experience. A broad scan finds hundreds of hospital references in the company biographies. These cannot simply be converted into a patient count because some men served as hospital guards, nurses or attendants. Nevertheless, the records trace a large medical network extending from Camp Stanton and Baltimore to City Point, Fort Monroe, Alexandria, Washington, Philadelphia, Annapolis and Brownsville.
Frequently named facilities include the U.S. Army Hospital for Colored Troops at City Point; L'Ouverture General Hospital in Alexandria; Satterlee and Summit House hospitals in Philadelphia; Harewood in Washington; McKim's Mansion in Baltimore; the Marine Hospital in Annapolis; and the post hospital at Brownsville. The biographies document men hospitalized for weeks, months, and in some cases nearly a year.
The medical record also shows the long tail of wartime injury. Men returned to duty with damaged arms and legs, amputated fingers or limbs, chronic pain, deafness, respiratory disease, rheumatism and recurrent gastrointestinal illness. Pension affidavits often show that a soldier who was counted as a military survivor remained disabled for decades.
The Crater on July 30, 1864 was the regiment's catastrophic combat event. A regimental casualty account associated with Colonel Henry Goddard Thomas reports 145 casualties: 29 killed, 104 wounded and 12 missing. Eleven of the casualties were commissioned officers and 134 were enlisted men.
Killed
Officers: 1 • Enlisted: 28 • Total: 29
Wounded
Officers: 10 • Enlisted: 94 • Total: 104
Missing
Officers: 0 • Enlisted: 12 • Total: 12
Total
Officers: 11 • Enlisted: 134 • Total: 145
If measured against an approximate 1,000-man original regiment, 145 casualties would equal about 14.5 percent of that initial strength in a single action. The percentage of men actually present and engaged would have been higher because disease, detachments and earlier losses had already reduced effective strength.
The 29 killed in the battle return and the 23 original Camp Stanton men identified in the book as killed at the Crater should be retained as separate statistics. The former is a battle-return figure covering the regiment as it then existed; the latter is a longitudinal count tied to the original cohort. Replacements had joined by July 1864, and casualty accounting can also differ over men who died later of wounds.
The 19th was not a one-battle regiment. National Park Service chronology places it in the campaign from the Rapidan to the James, before Petersburg, the long Petersburg-Richmond siege, Weldon Railroad, Fort Sedgwick, Poplar Grove Church, Hatcher's Run, Bermuda Hundred, the final assault on Petersburg, and the Appomattox Campaign. Individual biographies document wounds outside the Crater as well, including picket and trench duty and later Petersburg-area actions.
The Crater nevertheless dominates the wound record. The biographies repeatedly describe gunshot wounds, shell fragments, fractures and contusions received on July 30, followed by evacuation through City Point to larger hospitals farther north. At least some of the men listed as missing were captured; the regiment's experience therefore included imprisonment as well as death and wounds.
The regiment was replenished by more than ordinary voluntary enlistment. The biographies explicitly identify 103 substitutes and 56 drafted men - at least 159 men entering through those two channels. Together they equal about 13.8 percent of all 1,151 soldiers who served in the regiment.
Company A — 0 substitutes • 0 draftees • 0 combined
Company B — 13 substitutes • 0 draftees • 13 combined
Company C — 14 substitutes • 1 draftees • 15 combined
Company D — 0 substitutes • 0 draftees • 0 combined
Company E — 21 substitutes • 6 draftees • 27 combined
Company F — 11 substitutes • 8 draftees • 19 combined
Company G — 12 substitutes • 14 draftees • 26 combined
Company H — 13 substitutes • 3 draftees • 16 combined
Company I — 14 substitutes • 8 draftees • 22 combined
Company K — 5 substitutes • 16 draftees • 21 combined
REGIMENT TOTAL — 103 substitutes • 56 draftees • 159 combined
Substitution was especially important in Companies E, C, I, B and H. Drafted men were concentrated particularly in Companies K and G. This uneven distribution is a reminder that the regiment of late 1864 was demographically different from the body originally assembled at Camp Stanton.
Machine-assisted extraction produced 1,059 usable stated ages. The median was approximately 23 and the mean approximately 24.7. More than half of the stated ages fall in the twenties, but about one-fifth were 30 or older.
Under 20 — 269 stated ages • 25.4%
20-29 — 570 stated ages • 53.8%
30-39 — 161 stated ages • 15.2%
40-49 — 59 stated ages • 5.6%
Total — 1059 stated ages • 100%
The ages should be regarded as recorded ages rather than exact biological ages. Nineteenth-century enlistment and pension records often disagree, particularly for formerly enslaved people whose births may never have been formally recorded.
The statistical military story is inseparable from emancipation. Many original recruits were enslaved Maryland men who entered federal service in late 1863 and early 1864. Others were already free. Some slave owners later applied for the federal $300 compensation available to loyal owners. The biographies also identify fishermen, sailors, oystermen, farm laborers, waiters, craftsmen and other occupations, as well as men born outside Maryland.
A fully coded social-history database could quantify former-slave status, named owners, successful compensation claims, county of enlistment, birthplace and occupation. The present profile does not assign exact totals to these categories because the wording is less standardized than the military status fields and would require record-by-record coding to avoid undercounting men whose biographies do not explicitly state prewar status.
Not every man absent from the final Brownsville muster had died. The company biographies contain repeated references to desertion, medical discharge, disability discharge, transfer, missing status and prisoner-of-war experience. A lexical scan of the company sections finds 45 occurrences of “deserted,” 53 of “medical discharge,” 68 of “transferred,” 23 of “prisoner,” and 16 of “captured.” These are textual occurrences rather than unique-person totals and are presented only as indicators of the range and frequency of nonfatal attrition.
The distinction matters. A man could desert and return, be transferred between hospitals rather than out of the regiment, or appear several times in pension testimony as a prisoner. Exact attrition categories require manual coding of each soldier's final military disposition.
The regiment moved to Texas in June-July 1865 and served at Brownsville and along the Rio Grande until January 1867. For statistical purposes this was not an epilogue. Seventy men from the original cohort died of disease there. The biographies repeatedly mention cholera, scurvy, malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and fever, along with long periods in the Brownsville post hospital.
The Texas experience changes the meaning of “Civil War casualty.” A soldier who survived the Wilderness campaign, Petersburg, the Crater and Appomattox could still die in federal service a year after the Confederacy collapsed. The regiment's mortality history therefore runs through January 1867, not April 1865.
Scale
1,151 soldiers served across the regiment's existence; about 1,000 formed the original cohort.
Mortality
268 original men died before disbandment - more than one in four.
Disease
245 original men died of disease; disease caused 91.4% of original-cohort deaths.
Combat
The Crater produced a reported 145 casualties in a single day.
Medical burden
Hospital and disease references permeate every company's biographies.
Replacement
At least 103 substitutes and 56 draftees are explicitly identified.
Persistence
At least 556 biographies explicitly record muster-out at Brownsville on Jan. 15, 1867.
Postwar danger
70 original men died of disease during the Texas occupation.
The principal source is Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers, whose 1,151 individual profiles were compiled chiefly from military and pension records at the National Archives. Firm regimental totals stated in the book - such as the approximately 1,000 original men, 268 original-cohort deaths, 245 disease deaths, and the geographic distribution of those disease deaths - are treated as primary statistical findings.
The company muster-out, substitute, draftee and age tables were derived systematically from the biographical text. They are labeled as explicit or documented counts because nineteenth-century records and biographical wording are not perfectly uniform. Lexical counts of disease and attrition terminology are included as descriptive indicators only and are not represented as unique-person incidence counts.
External sources are used chiefly for chronology and comparison. The Maryland State Archives History and Roster confirms the regiment's organization at Benedict and provides the official Maryland roster tradition. The National Park Service confirms the regiment's campaign chronology and January 15, 1867 muster-out. Where battle-return figures and longitudinal biographical counts differ, both are retained with their definitions rather than silently harmonized.
Summers, Robert K. Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops (2020). Primary quantitative source; individual profiles based principally on National Archives military and pension records.
History and Roster of Maryland Volunteers, War of 1861-6, vol. 2, “Nineteenth Regiment Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops, Maryland Volunteers,” Maryland State Archives.
National Park Service, Civil War Battle Unit Details, 19th Regiment, United States Colored Infantry.
Thomas, Henry Goddard, account of the Colored Troops at Petersburg, for the 19th USCT Crater casualty return.
National Archives and Records Administration, compiled military service and pension records underlying the individual biographies.