Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Deadly fireworks lit the predawn sky over Petersburg, Va., on April 2, 1865. Shells screeched and exploded all around the thousands of Union troops crouched in assault formation between the rival armies’ entrenchments. A captain approached Col. Bradley Winslow of the 186th New York Infantry and announced, “The general directs you now to advance.” He shook Winslow’s hand, adding: “It will be hot. God bless you!”

Winslow turned to his regiment and commanded, “Attention, battalion!” The men formed in their ranks. “Shoulder arms! Forward, guide center. March!” And with that, the soldiers of the 186th, all recent volunteers, advanced to meet the defenders of a dying Confederacy.

The story of how several hundred men and boys from upstate New York entered the fighting in the war’s closing days is one that complicates our common image of Union soldiers. Historians have long focused on the zealots who rushed to the colors in 1861 and 1862, implying that the struggle rested almost entirely on the shoulders of these men. But an examination of the North’s late-war recruiting drive and those affected by it suggests that the Union would not have survived without the help of so-called 11th-hour soldiers.

In July 1864, the Northern war effort seemed stalled in the blood and dust of Petersburg and Atlanta. Heavy casualties and expired enlistments had thinned the Union Army’s ranks, while the apparent lack of progress discouraged potential volunteers from stepping forward. Seeing no alternative, Abraham Lincoln issued a call on July 18 for half a million men and threatened conscription in any area that failed to meet its enlistment quota by Sept. 5. Across the North, citizens and community leaders began working to accomplish the seemingly impossible in that fourth summer of war: securing enough volunteers to avoid a hated draft.

The situation in Jefferson County, N.Y. — a remote place of bountiful farms and harsh winters — exemplified the crisis. “It is now settled, we believe, that we are to raise a new regiment in this county,” The Watertown Daily Reformer announced on Aug. 10. “Can the men be raised? … Jefferson County must, within the next twenty-five days, recruit twelve hundred men to save her from the draft.”

The answer seemed clear: financial sacrifice. On Aug. 19, the county board of supervisors voted to offer eligible men $1,000 bounties for one year of service. County residents would supply the money through bonds, subscriptions and an “extraordinary” tax increase. With newspapers and leading citizens appealing to patriotism but more often to fears of the draft, the funds were easily secured. Clearly, many people were willing to mortgage their farms and deplete their savings to keep themselves or their sons out of the army.

Historians debate whether the Civil War was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” but Northern New Yorkers had their own assumptions about the recruits forming the 186th New York Infantry. The Jefferson County News exhorted: “Young men, remember that you will receive the largest bounties ever paid to soldiers. Remember that the rich are now dividing their property with you who are willing to serve in the ranks of the army for the defence of our common country.” Another editor claimed: “One thousand of the poor young men of the county are getting a good start in the world” thanks to the tidy sum they received for enlisting.

Some of the “men” who answered the call were young indeed. Numerous boys as young as 14 joined the 186th thanks to parents who signed an oath on the enlistment form that their sons were 18 or older. By early September, the combination of big spending with lax recruitment standards had brought in enough volunteers for most of the county’s towns to escape conscription.

This pattern was replicated across the North, with the states not only reaching but surpassing their quotas under the July call. “Never were enlistments more rapid than now, elicited by the enormous bounties offered,” The Jefferson County News observed on Aug. 25. The federal government issued a further call in December, and there was no letup in the feverish recruiting campaign until April 1865. All told, in the war’s final nine months over 593,000 men enlisted. Few of these late-war Union recruits are remembered today, but their number included Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, and Joseph Pulitzer, a young Hungarian immigrant who would later found a publishing empire.

Under the leadership of Col. Bradley Winslow, a Watertown attorney and combat veteran, volunteers for the 186th gathered in September 1864 at Madison Barracks on the shore of Lake Ontario. The need for reinforcements at the front was urgent, and after barely three weeks’ preparation the 980 members of the new regiment departed for Virginia. They took with them the hopes and good will of their community. “Indeed it is made up of splendid material,” a local newspaper noted of the 186th, “as is the case generally with our volunteers now going forward to aid in, as we trust, finally crushing this accursed rebellion.”

Soon after reaching Petersburg, the 186th was assigned to the Army of the Potomac’s Ninth Corps and entered the siege lines. Frequent near-misses from shells and bullets indicated that the novice soldiers had entered the war at last. “We were a lot of green young fellows, liable to do most anything,” recalled 17-year-old Pvt. John B. Fowler of Company C. Fowler and many of his comrades burned to see a fight, but instead they waited and endured the miserable monotony of siege warfare.

The next five months saw Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces tighten their grip on Petersburg and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s defending Army of Northern Virginia. On March 4, after hearing from one rebel deserter that the “Secesh cause was all run into the ground,” Lt. Kendrick Brown of the 186th noted: “Prospects of a final and prosperous conclusion of the war are brighter than ever.” That same day, Lincoln projected similar confidence in his second Inaugural Address.

As spring arrived with its warm weather, Grant determined to strike the rebels and either crush them or make them abandon Petersburg and their nearby capital of Richmond. On April 1, a Union attack at Five Forks weakened Lee’s position, and Grant issued orders for an assault the next morning all across the Petersburg front.

The plan for the Ninth Corps was brutally simple: Its men would charge the Confederates directly to their front in conjunction with other Union forces elsewhere along the line. Gen. Simon G. Griffin’s brigade would assault Battery No. 28, which lay between two other enemy works that the federals had nicknamed Forts Heaven and Damnation. Griffin placed six of his regiments in a column, one regiment behind the other. “I made the formation thus because I knew the head of the column would be swept away by the enemy’s terrific fire,” he explained, “and I must have lines enough till one complete formation could reach and pass the enemy’s lines and hold them.” The inexperienced 186th New York was last in line.

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As Winslow’s men and the other troops formed up before dawn on April 2, the rebels heard their preparations and filled the air with deadly metal. “Screaming, hissing shot and shell, interspersed with the sharp whiz and ping of leaden bullets, seemed passing everywhere above our heads,” Winslow remembered. At 4:30 a.m. the attack began. As Griffin had predicted, his leading regiments advanced bravely but were shattered by the enemy’s fire. Now it was Winslow’s turn to lead his men forward.

The New Yorkers quickly seized Battery No. 28 as other regiments took Fort Heaven on the right. Winslow and his men glimpsed the rooftops of Petersburg in the distance and momentarily thought victory was at hand. But the Confederates still held a secondary line and Fort Damnation on the left. As they opened fire, Colonel Winslow was wounded by a bullet in his side.

The situation was desperate for both sides. Elsewhere around Petersburg, Union attackers had swiftly broken through the defenses and sent Lee’s men reeling. But the Confederates facing the Ninth Corps grimly held this section of the line, hoping to allow the rest of their army to escape. Meanwhile, all was confusion in the captured entrenchments. “Many of our commanding officers were killed or wounded,” Griffin wrote, “and it was with the greatest difficulty anything could be done toward reorganizing our broken regiments.” Both sides fed in reinforcements and the fighting here became the toughest and bloodiest of the entire day.

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Rebel infantrymen counterattacked, encouraged by an officer standing on the parapet of Fort Damnation, “waving his sword and yelling like a madman.” It was the first of several countercharges throughout the day. “After our Col got shot we were all mixed up every man was for himself mostly,” wrote Pvt. Martin Dealing of the 186th. The earthworks were studded with earthen ramparts called traverses that stretched back from the main walls. “The fight was from traverse to traverse as we slowly drove them back,” a Confederate recalled. “The Yankees would get on top of them and shoot down on our men, and as we would retake them our men did the same thing.” The battle finally ended at 10 p.m.; by then, the federals held only 200 yards of the captured works. The 186th New York had paid for this precarious foothold with 180 men killed or wounded.

The battered Union troops expected the battle to resume on the morning of April 3, but found that their opponents had retreated during the night. Later that day, the battlefield received a high-profile visitor in the form of President Lincoln, who toured Fort Damnation and wept as he viewed the carnage (a scene dramatized in the 2012 film “Lincoln”). The Ninth Corps marched through the abandoned city and joined in the pursuit of Lee that ended on April 9 at Appomattox Court House.

With the fighting over, the men of the 186th waited for discharge and participated in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington on May 23 and 24. An officer described the review as a stirring sight, but estimated that half of the men marching with the Army of the Potomac “have not been in service over a year,” a telling indication of the army’s terrible casualties and reliance on late-war recruits.

Shortly afterward, War Department officials made a decision that angered long-service veterans: One-year troops would be discharged early instead of serving out their full terms. The survivors of the 186th mustered out on June 2 and returned to Jefferson County, where they received a heroes’ welcome from their families and the recovering Colonel Winslow. As one newspaper opined: “Though only a short time out, the boys have made a record of which they may well be proud.”

Not everyone agreed. In the postwar decades, many dismissed late-war enlistees as “11th-hour soldiers” — cowardly opportunists unworthy of the recognition given veterans of longer service. In 1897, a veterans’ newspaper called such charges inaccurate and unfair. “No money could have paid these men for what they did and dared,” The National Tribune maintained, “certainly not the apparently big bounties which were paid in greenbacks worth but 40 cents on the dollar.” The piece concluded that 11th-hour soldiers had simply been men whose loyalty to the Union was matched by concern for their families’ well being. Indeed, as proof of their devotion to these causes, veterans of the 186th New York could have pointed to their single, harrowing battle at Petersburg.

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Sources: Adams (New York) Jefferson County News, 1864-65; Thomas P. Beals, “In a Charge near Fort Hell, Petersburg, April 2, 1865,” in “War Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States,” vol. 2; Pulaski Cowper, ed., “Extracts of Letters from Major-Gen’l Bryan Grimes, to His Wife”; “‘Eleventh-Hour Soldiers,’” National Tribune, May 15, 1890; J. B. Fowler, “An Incident of the Ninth Corps,” National Tribune, July 19, 1906; James W. Geary, “We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War”; A. Wilson Greene, “The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion;” John A. Haddock, “The Growth of a Century: As Illustrated in the History of Jefferson County, New York, from 1793 to 1894”; Earl J. Hess, “In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat”; Janet E. Klaas and Barbara N. Munson, eds., “A Soldier’s Life, 1861-1865: The Civil War Diaries and Reminiscences of Kendrick Wade Brown, Citizen of Alexandria Bay, New York and Ames, Iowa”; Marvin A. Kreidberg and Merton G. Henry, “History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army 1775-1945”; Allan Nevins, ed., “A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright 1861-1865”; New York State Military Museum, “186th Regiment, NY Volunteer Infantry Civil War Newspaper Clippings”; Hampden Osborne, “The Struggle for Fort Mahone,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 25, no. 5 (May 1917); “Some More ‘Eleventh-Hour Regiments,’” National Tribune, Feb. 18, 1897; Francis E. Vinaca Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; “The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” ser. 1, vol. 46, pts. 1 and 3; Watertown (New York) Daily Reformer, 1864-65; Watertown (New York) Northern New York Journal, 1864-65; “Which Was Fort Mahone?” Army and Navy Journal, June 10, 1865.

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Will Hickox is a graduate student in American history at the University of Kansas.