Company A, 8th Michigan Infantry
Few Union regiments saw as much of the war, across as much of the country, as the 8th Michigan Infantry. From the sea islands of South Carolina to the mountains of east Tennessee, from Antietam Creek to the crater at Petersburg, the men of the 8th marched and fought in nearly every corner of the conflict. They earned a nickname that stuck — the "Wandering Regiment" — and a record of hard service that few units could match. When our detachment falls in as Company A, this is the regiment whose colors we carry and whose story we work to keep alive.
Raised in Michigan, Bound for the Coast
The 8th Michigan was organized in the late summer of 1861 at Grand Rapids and at Fort Wayne in Detroit, drawing its ten companies from towns and counties across the state. The regiment mustered into United States service for a three-year enlistment on September 23, 1861, roughly 915 officers and men strong, and left for Washington just four days later under Colonel William M. Fenton. Like the volunteers of Company A, most had never seen a battlefield. Within a year they would be among the most-traveled soldiers in the Union army.
Rather than joining the great armies gathering in Virginia, the 8th shipped south with the Port Royal Expedition under General Thomas W. Sherman, part of the Federal effort to seize footholds along the Confederate coast and tighten the naval blockade. It was here, on the low, marshy islands off Charleston, that the regiment first came under fire — and here that it fought the battle its veterans would never forget.
Secessionville: The Regiment's Baptism
On June 16, 1862, Union forces attacked a fortified Confederate battery on James Island near the hamlet of Secessionville. The 8th Michigan held the right of the assaulting line, and in the gray light of early morning it went straight at the fort. Advancing over open ground and through hedgerows and cotton fields into a storm of cannon and musketry, the Michiganders clambered up the very face of the parapet and grappled hand-to-hand with the defenders before the sheer weight of fire drove them back. The assault failed, and it was costly — the regiment was cut up badly, losing a large share of the men engaged. For a green outfit, Secessionville was a brutal introduction to war, and it forged the hard reputation the 8th carried for the rest of the conflict.
From Bull Run to the Mountains of Tennessee
Reassigned north to General Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps, the 8th Michigan plunged into the heaviest fighting in the East. In the space of a single autumn it saw Second Bull Run and Chantilly, then South Mountain and Antietam during the Maryland Campaign, and finally the bloody repulse at Fredericksburg in December 1862. The Ninth Corps was a traveling command, and the 8th traveled with it — which is how a Michigan regiment raised for coastal service came to fight across so many famous fields.
In 1863 the wandering only widened. The regiment moved west with its corps to support General Grant's operations against Vicksburg and took part in the subsequent campaign against Jackson, Mississippi. From there it marched into east Tennessee for the Knoxville Campaign, fighting at Campbell's Station and enduring the siege of Knoxville, where Burnside's men held the city against General Longstreet through the late autumn of 1863. In roughly two years the 8th had served from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River to the Appalachian highlands — few regiments on either side could say the same.
The Overland Campaign and the Crater
In the spring of 1864 the Ninth Corps returned to Virginia and the Army of the Potomac for Grant's relentless Overland Campaign. The 8th Michigan fought through the tangled Wilderness in May, then at Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor, before settling into the long, grinding siege of Petersburg. There, on July 30, 1864, the regiment was present for one of the war's most infamous actions — the Battle of the Crater, where a massive mine was detonated beneath the Confederate works and the Union assault that followed collapsed into disaster in the crater's steep pit. The 8th went on to serve through the operations against the Weldon Railroad and the closing months of the siege.
By the time the guns fell silent, the "Wandering Regiment" had paid a heavy price. Over the course of the war it lost some 11 officers and 212 enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, and another 3 officers and 223 enlisted men dead of disease — roughly 449 deaths in all, out of the many hundreds who passed through its ranks. Under its later commander, Colonel Ralph Ely, the regiment mustered out in the summer of 1865 and was paid off and disbanded in Detroit that August, its survivors returning to the Michigan towns they had left four years before.
Why We Portray Company A
To reenact Company A of the 8th Michigan is to represent a cross-section of that entire journey — ordinary Michigan volunteers who enlisted expecting garrison duty on the Carolina coast and instead marched into nearly every major theater of the war. Their story is not built around a single famous charge but around endurance: the willingness to keep shouldering the musket at Secessionville and Antietam, at Knoxville and the Crater, wherever the army sent them next.
That is what our detachment aims to bring to life within the NCWV. When you see us in the Federal blue of the 8th Michigan — drilling, firing, or making camp — you are looking at a portrayal of the soldiers who made up the Wandering Regiment: their arms, their kit, their daily life, and the long road they walked. Come find our camp at an event, and one of our men will be glad to tell you where the 8th Michigan was on this day more than a century and a half ago, and what it took to be a volunteer in the ranks.
