Book Review: Lincoln’s Banner Regiment: The 107th New York Volunteer Infantry
Lincoln’s Banner Regiment: The 107th New York Volunteer Infantry. By George R. Farr. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2023. Softcover, 359 pp. $49.95.
Reviewed by Mark H. Dunkelman
A resident of Elmira, New York, George Farr was a retired manufacturing manager and computer systems developer when an interest in a locally-raised Civil War regiment led him in the 1990s to take a deep dive into researching the 107th New York Volunteer Infantry. The regiment was raised in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s July 1862 call for 300,000 three-year volunteers in Chemung, Steuben, and Schuyler counties and saw service in both theaters of the war as part of the XIIth and XXth Corps. Despite having an active regimental veterans’ association in the postwar decades, the 107th was never chronicled in a full-length regimental history book during the old soldiers’ lifetimes. Farr determined to fill that gap and overcame personal setbacks and tragedy to achieve his goal.
He spent years accumulating the sources for this book, culling letters and reminiscences from local historical societies and libraries. Local newspapers were a rich source of material, including a 35-part series on the 107th’s history written in the early postwar period by a former officer. Farr went through the regimental records at the National Archives in Washington and turned up material at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also benefited from a handful of previously published accounts of the 107th.
Farr offers a detailed account of the regiment’s organization, charting the many war meetings at which men enlisted. His attention to detail continues in his chronicle of the 107th’s service. About a month after it reached the front, the regiment fought at Antietam, suffering roughly 70 casualties. The battle of Chancellorsville cost them 87 casualties. At Gettysburg, they were minimally engaged, with only two men wounded. It was after the transfer of the XIIth Corps to the western theater and the establishment of the XXth Corps that the regiment would see its bloodiest fighting, when it lost 188 in killed and wounded out of 350 engaged at the battle of New Hope Church, Georgia, on May 25, 1864—a whopping 54 percent casualty rate. Casualties were relatively light during the rest of the Atlanta campaign. More than 50 members of the 107th were captured during the March to the Sea. Another roughly 50 men were wounded at the battle of Averasboro during the Carolinas campaign, some of them mortally. Farr notes every death in the regiment, whether in battle of by disease. He ends his account with the story of the veterans’ activities in the regimental association, which formed in 1867 and disbanded in 1931. A complete roster of the regiment follows, drawn verbatim from the published report of the New York State Adjutant General. Notes, a bibliography, and an index close the book.
The book’s title refers to an incident that occurred on August 14, 1862, when the 107th was the first regiment to arrive in Washington in response to Lincoln’s summer 1862 call for volunteers. The president presented the regiment with a New York State flag that had been purchased by Gov. Edwin D. Morgan. Oddly, the 107th did not carry the flag into the field. It was stored at Secretary of State William H. Seward’s home in Washington and after the war passed through a succession of hands until it wound up at the Chemung County Historical Society in Elmira. Another legacy of the regiment in Elmira is an impressive monument on Lake Street, topped with a statue of a soldier and inscribed with the names of the 107th’s battles. The regiment also has a monument erected by New York State on Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg.
This book would have benefited from more stringent editing. Every now and then a general’s name is misspelled, an army is misidentified, or other errors crop up. Sequencing is sometimes jumbled; an entire paragraph of the New Hope Church account appears twice. More unfortunate is the volume’s graphic content—or lack thereof. Only six illustrations are included, three of them relating to the Elmira and Gettysburg monuments. Surely more images were available. A few bare-bones maps fail to adequately portray the regiment’s campaign and battle grounds.
Those concerns aside, Lincoln’s Banner Regiment is a solid history of a regiment that richly deserves one. Descriptive rather than analytical, it occasionally includes lengthy block quotations of speeches, letters, reports and other materials. Anyone interested in the day-to-day life of a Civil War regiment will enjoy the book. Everyone with a specific interest in the 107th Regiment will consider it a bible. George Farr is to be commended for the result of his labor of love—a regimental history of which the veterans of the 107th New York would themselves be proud.
Mark H. Dunkelman has written and lectured extensively on another 20th Corps regiment, the 154th New York. He also created the mural at Coster Avenue in Gettysburg depicting the action that occurred there on July 1, 1863.
