Book Review: Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg

Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg. By Alexandre F. Caillot. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2025, Hardcover, 310 pp., $50.00.

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

In 1897, Frank Wilkeson published his Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac. In it, Wilkeson, who enlisted in the 11^th New York Battery during the winter of 1863-64 and before he was sixteen years old, presented an unflattering picture of his fellow enlistees as far as their motivations and level patriotism. After signing up in Albany, Wilkeson went to “the penitentiary building,” which apparently served as temporary housing for the new recruits. “There, to my utter astonishment, I found eight hundred or one thousand ruffians, closely guarded by heavy lines of sentinels, who paced to and fro, day and night, rifle in hand, to keep them from running away,” Wilkeson recalled. The impressionable Wilkeson noted that “A recruit’s social standing in the barracks was determined by the acts of villainy he had performed, supplemented by the number of times he had jumped the bounty.” Wilkeson filled the story of his journey to join the army at Brandy Station via steamboat and railroad with tales of gambling, thievery, and other moral shortcomings practiced by his fellow late-war recruits.[i]

Images of those who historian Alexandre F. Caillot calls “later arrivals” have often been portrayed collectively in ways not much different from Wilkeson’s derisive descriptions. However, with Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg, Caillot attempts to show that certainly not all of those who enlisted late in the war were conscripted bounty-jumping criminals devoid of patriotism.

Late to the Fight joins a recent trend in scholarship reappraising the quality and accomplishments of the men and units who either finally experienced combat or were recruited to fight in the second half of the Civil War. Late to the Fight follows studies like Edwin P. Rutan II’s High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (Kent St. University Press, 2024), as well as his earlier “If I Have Got to Go and Fight I am Willing”: A Union Regiment Forged in the Petersburg Campaign (RTD Publications 2015), and Edward Altemos’ From the Wilderness to Appomattox: The Fifteenth New York Heavy Artillery in the Civil War (Kent State University Press, 2023).

In his study, Caillot focuses on the combat performance of two Ninth Corps regiments—the 17^th Vermont and the 31^st Maine Infantry—who fought in the same brigade from the Battle of the Wilderness to the fall of Petersburg. Caillot claims, “examining untested units comprising primarily greenhorns provides a better means of assessing their fighting ability, as rookies in this case would be less influenced by guidance from or tension with veterans.” (4) Using a blend of soldiers’ primary sources and scholarly secondary sources allows Caillot to analyze “the soldiers’ lived experience while highlighting their achievements and missteps in combat.” (5)

Unlike much of the literature on Civil War soldiers, which focuses on motivations, Caillot looks “instead on how well they perform under fire.” (28) To assess their performance, he examines three factors: cohesion, combat power, and casualty rates. Cohesion is “obedience to commands and the ability to engage the enemy as a unified force.” Combat power boils down to the unit’s “degree of success in completing tactical objectives.” Within proper understanding and context, casualty rates can also provide a good measure of combat effectiveness. (28-29)

Caillot organizes Late to the Fight into five chapters. The initial chapter covers “Raising the Regiments,” which provides helpful information about the makeup and background of the 17^th Vermont and 31^st Maine. The next two chapters cover the regiments’ performance in the Overland Campaign; one chapter covering the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and the other North Anna and Cold Harbor. Similarly, the final two chapters cover the Petersburg Campaign, with actions of the First Offensive and the Battle of the Crater examined in Chapter 4 and Peebles Farm and the Ninth Offensive (April 2, 1865) comprising Chapter 5.

The evidence for these two regiments, and surely many other “later arrivals,” shows that they did well. As Caillot puts it: “These Federals overcame challenges in recruitment and training to perform well in eight major engagements.” However, as he also makes clear, “This finding does not speak to the experiences of all later arrivals, a population of some 820,000 men who donned the blue uniform between 1863 and 1865.” (208)

Late to the Fight serves as an excellent, important, and corrective reminder of the potential pitfalls of using broad brushstrokes when interpreting any area of Civil War history; but particularly when it comes to labeling all later enlistees as unpatriotic and ineffective due to bounty incentives. Many “later arrivals” were simply too young to enlist in 1861 and 1862, while others had obligations that limited their participation earlier in the war. The methodology and analysis Caillot uses to determine unit combat performance are instruments that additional scholars will hopefully incorporate when examining other similar late war units.

[i] Frank Wilkeson. Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Press, reprint 2019, 9-17.