Note: This review originally appeared at The Siege of Petersburg Online<\/a> and has been cross-posted here at TOCWOC \u2013 A Civil War Blog.<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Clendaniel, Dan. Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume II, 1864-1865<\/a><\/em><\/strong>. (Monongahela Books<\/a>, 2021). 220 pages, maps, notes, appendices, index. ISBN: 978-1-7330060-4-0 $30.00 (Paperback).<\/p>\n Unit histories of famous regiments abound.\u00a0 But what of the men who often toiled in relative obscurity?\u00a0 With Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume II, 1864-1865<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, and its companion Volume I<\/a>, first time author Dan Clendaniel has done an admirable job telling the stories of the 85th Pennsylvania<\/a>.\u00a0 Utilizing a wide array of primary sources, over 50 from the men of the regiment alone but also many others, the author has produced a set anyone interested in Civil War unit histories will want to own.\u00a0 He nicely fills in the gaps with his own history of the regiment, taking readers from their organization in southwestern Pennsylvania in October 1861 to the end of the war, with a large portion of the book dedicated to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign.\u00a0 Though the 85th Pennsylvania fought in few of the most famous battles of the war, their story is nonetheless an interesting and often times exciting one. Their efforts certainly helped the Union win the war, and they fully redeemed themselves after being unfairly maligned at Seven Pines.<\/p>\n In the first volume of this two-volume set, Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume I: 1861-1863<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, the author covers the 85th Pennsylvania\u2019s<\/a> formation and service in the early years of the war.\u00a0 After forming in Uniontown, PA in the Fall of 1861, the 85th moved to Washington, D. C. and worked on the fortifications surrounding the city for over four months.\u00a0 They were primarily stationed to the east of D.C. in Maryland.\u00a0 The regiment was part of Wessell\u2019s Brigade, Casey\u2019s Division, Fourth Corps when they moved to the Virginia Peninsula in the Spring of 1862. They arrived later than the initial Union forces, and so missed the Siege of Yorktown.\u00a0 They saw their first action in the dying moments of the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, 1862, and moved forward towards Richmond in the following days.\u00a0 It was at Seven Pines where the regiment saw its greatest losses, and greatest controversy. Silas Casey\u2019s Division, including the 85th Pennsylvania, were left in an exposed position closest to the Confederate forces defending the Confederate capital.\u00a0 The Confederates tried to take advantage at the Battle of Seven Pines\/Fair Oaks, where on May 31, 1862, they struck Casey\u2019s men and drove them back.\u00a0 Union reinforcements eventually arrived and stabilized the situation after more fighting on June 1. Author Dan Clendaniel makes a sturdy case for why Casey\u2019s Division should have been applauded for buying the Union army time, rather than scapegoated by George McClellan.\u00a0 Casey\u2019s Division was used very sparingly during the Seven Days battles in late June to early July 1862, and found themselves removed from the Army of the Potomac entirely in August and stationed in relative backwater theaters for nearly the next two years.. \u00a0The 85th Pennsylvania found themselves stationed at Suffolk, Virginia in the Fall of 1863, and they participated in some skirmishes at the Blackwater River. In December of 1862 the regiment participated in an expedition to capture Goldsboro, NC, and fought in several small battles along the way, though they did not take the city. The last fighting covered in Volume 1 saw the 85th Pennsylvania moved to the siege of Charleston, SC in the summer of 1863. \u00a0There they fought alongside the famous 54th Massachusetts, and though they didn\u2019t charge in two failed assaults on Battery Wagner, they did lead subsequent siege operations which led to its capture.<\/p>\n Volume II picks up where Volume I left off.\u00a0 The 85th Pennsylvania was moved to Hilton Head in late 1863 and recuperated there for several months. In February 1864 they went on a small recon mission to Whitemarsh Island outside of Savannah, GA, but the Confederates there were ready for them and captured some of the Pennsylvanians in an abortive mission.\u00a0 From there, the 85th Pennsylvania finally again saw service in the main Eastern Theater fighting, and they would stay there until the end at Appomattox.\u00a0 In late April 1864 the unit moved to Virginia and participated in Benjamin Butler\u2019s Bermuda Hundred Campaign in May 1864.\u00a0 They were now part of the Tenth Corps, Army of the James, an attachment they would maintain until the muster out of the original veterans in November 1864.\u00a0 The 85th was tasked with removing torpedoes from the James River and then saw fighting at Ware Bottom Church on May 20, 1864.<\/p>\n The unit continued to be stationed in the Bermuda Hundred lines at the start of the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, seeing more fighting at Ware Bottom Church on June 16<\/a> and June 17<\/a>, 1864 as the Second Battle of Petersburg raged to the south. The 85th and its brigade stayed in the lines at Bermuda Hundred until mid-August 1864. At that point they participated in the Battle of Second Deep Bottom<\/a>, skirmishing on August 14-15 and then seeing major fighting at Fussell\u2019s Mill on August 16, 1864.\u00a0 Here they suffered their worse loss percentage-wise during the entire war.\u00a0 September 1864 saw the 85th Pennsylvania at Fort Morton, east of Petersburg itself.\u00a0 During this time their former Colonel Joshua B. Howell, now their brigade commander, perished when his horse fell on him in a tragic accident.\u00a0 On September 29, 1864, the regiment was in the area of the Battle of Chaffin\u2019s Farm north of the James River southeast of Richmond.\u00a0 However, they did no real fighting. They were out on the far right flank of the Union line, and their brigade came closer to Richmond on a reconnaissance than any other Union unit did until the city\u2019s capture the following year. A few weeks later, the 85th Pennsylvania was supposed to join a doomed attack at the October 13, 1864 Battle of Darbytown Road, but they were pulled out of the line at the last minute by their brigade commander and saved.\u00a0 Their enlistments should have expired around this time, but a controversy kept them in the service. In any event, they were removed from the front lines in mid-October and sent to Portsmouth, VA to serve out the remainder of their time, a little over a month.<\/p>\n The original members of the regiment whose time was up left in late November 1864. Some of these men participated in a massive prisoner exchange in Georgia and South Carolina without being paid, and made it home about a month after their comrades in time for Christmas 1864. The men with time left to serve formed what was called the \u201cDetachment, 85th Pennsylvania,\u201d and they were attached to the 199th Pennsylvania in mid-October.\u00a0 The 199th was a brand-new regiment that had been assigned to the 85th\u2019s old brigade, so it made sense for the detachment to remain amongst friends.\u00a0 Members of the 85th in this detachment would go on to serve as officers in the 199th, including Robert Hughes, who became that regiment\u2019s Lieutenant Colonel. In this \u201cattached\u201d capacity, the former men of the 85th Pennsylvania participated in the Third Battle of Petersburg on April 2, 1865, and were involved in the capture of Fort Gregg west of Petersburg. They participated in the Appomattox Campaign and witnessed the surrender of Lee\u2019s Army of Northern Virginia on April 9. These men were eventually transferred to the 188th Pennsylvania in June 1865 before being mustered out later that year.<\/p>\n Author Dan Clendaniel has put together two very nice volumes on the 85th Pennsylvania.\u00a0 Both books are filled with first-person accounts from the men of the regiment, allowing them to speak for themselves.\u00a0 At the same time, he bridges the gaps between first person accounts with the history of the regiment, showing good knowledge of the Civil War sometimes lacking in independently published unit histories. The book is filled with relevant illustrations, including events, maps of the major actions of the 85th Pennsylvania, and images of many of the men discussed in the book.<\/p>\n Unlike many regimental histories, this book does NOT gloss over the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign.\u00a0 Good descriptions are provided of the fighting on Bermuda Hundred for June 16-18, 1864, Second Deep Bottom, Darbytown Road, and Fort Gregg. In addition, the author provides a lot of detail on the \u201cdown times\u201d of the Siege, particularly the regiment\u2019s time spent at Fort Morton in September 1864.\u00a0 One major topic in the book which did not involve the Siege of Petersburg was the prisoner exchange of late 1864.\u00a0 Roughly fifty of the men of the regiment were involved, and Clendaniel found an impressive array of sources for what was a rather obscure event. The author is one of the lucky chroniclers of Civil War regiments in that he had an original unit history to fall back on commissioned by the veterans.\u00a0 That said, Clendaniel did not rely on that source too heavily, to his credit. There were quite a few typos in this volume, more than in the first volume, but I was reviewing an advance copy, and Mr. Clendaniel assures me much of this will be fixed in the final version of the book.\u00a0 One other minor quibble involves his failure to clearly delineate the end of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign of May 1864 and the beginning of the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, which began on approximately June 12, 1864 with Grant\u2019s movement away from the Cold Harbor battlefield.\u00a0 Butler\u2019s Tenth corps was in the same location, the Bermuda Hundred lines, but the campaigns to which the fighting belonged were different.\u00a0 This is only a minor quibble, however.<\/p>\n As mentioned earlier, Dan Clendaniel found and utilized a variety of letters, diaries and other sources to fill out his unit history and add to the historical record of this regiment.\u00a0 One major source was the Captain Richard Dawson diary.\u00a0 It was such a good source the author dedicated an entire chapter of the book to its contents.\u00a0 That decision seemed a little odd at first. Though it caused some chronological issues, it ultimately worked in my opinion.\u00a0 Dawson seems to have disliked and\/or had little respect for the two longest-serving commanders of the regiment, Colonel Joshua B. Howell and Lieutenant Colonel Edward C. Campbell.\u00a0 Though many disagreed with him regarding Howell, the disdain for Lieutenant Colonel Campbell seems to have been nearly universal.\u00a0 Sadly, Dawson was mortally wounded at Second Fort Fisher in January 1865 and didn\u2019t survive the war. In addition to members of the regiment, Clendaniel dug deeper and found many quality accounts from the other regiments in the 85th\u2019s brigade, 1\/1\/X\/AotJ.\u00a0 Homer Plimpton\u2019s reminiscences from the 39th Illinois are particularly high quality and fairly well-known amongst those who read regularly about the Siege of Petersburg. Plimpton was the tip of a rather large iceberg.<\/p>\n The appendices were numerous in this book and provided a lot of useful and interesting additional information.\u00a0 They were a nice surprise bonus after the main text.\u00a0 Appendix A gives a nice timeline of the regiment throughout the war. Appendix B lists the men from the 85th Pennsylvania whose letters, diaries and other reminiscences were used in the book.\u00a0 It also lists the men from their brigade as well as all other Union and Confederate individuals whose accounts appear. \u00a0Strangely, to me, the actual type and sources are not listed at all here, and there is no bibliography, but more on that last in a minute. Appendix C gives the original company nicknames and officers for each of the ten companies in the 85th Pennsylvania.\u00a0 Appendix D contains a chronological list of war deaths in the 8th, including the names and companies of those killed, along with the cause and location of death. Appendix E provides a postwar list of deaths for those men who came home after the war.\u00a0 The first man died in June 1863, while the last, William Mahaney of Company C, lived to be 99 years old before passing away on April 4, 1944.\u00a0 Appendix F contains a list of men who left the regiment before the expiration of their enlistment, along with the date and the reason for leaving.\u00a0 Appendix G gives the names and companies of the original members of the 85th who mustered out in November 1864 after three plus years of service. Appendix H provides the names of the fifty-five officers and men who participated in the great prisoner exchange of late 1864.Appendix I lists the officers and men who reenlisted or joined after 1861 and mustered out in 1865. Last but not least, Appendix J delineates the dates and locations of every postwar reunion held by the members of the regiment, along with useful notes on each.<\/p>\n Although reading the book will intuitively provide you this information, a glance through the endnotes shows a wide variety of sources were used, from letters and diaries to the Official Records to period newspaper accounts and modern secondary accounts to even archival sources, the last a rarity for independently published books. The author certainly spent a LOT of time finding sources to help build on the foundation of the old unit history from the early 20th Century.\u00a0 The notes are doubly important in this book, however, because it does not appear to contain a traditional bibliography, an odd omission. I double checked Volume I, and there is no bibliography there either.<\/p>\n The maps in a unit history are always tough to do well.\u00a0 There are only a few choices: finding public domain maps (fairly easy but not generally the best quality), paying someone to create good maps (expensive and time-consuming), or attempting to create the maps yourself (time-consuming and hard to get right for units outside of your own). \u00a0Clendaniel relied heavily on the first but also utilized a few good modern maps from others, particularly Hal Jespersen\u2019s maps of several campaigns as well as several really good maps of Bermuda Hundred by Scott Williams.\u00a0 The result is a bit of a mixed bag.\u00a0 You do not often see exactly where the 85th Pennsylvania was located in a given fight.\u00a0 That said, this is almost always an area where I\u2019m left wanting more in a unit history. The author appears to have made a good faith effort to provide maps of the actions in which the 85th Pennsylvania was involved, something many authors dismiss or ignore altogether.<\/p>\n Dan Clendaniel\u2019s two volume history of the 85th Pennsylvania, including the second volume Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume II, 1864-1865<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, is a welcome new addition to the ranks of modern unit histories.\u00a0 Clendaniel has done his ancestor\u2019s unit a great service in bringing these men\u2019s stories to a whole new generation of readers.\u00a0 The large array of primary sources as well as the commentary in between made for an enjoyable and informative account of a regiment which saw several major battles, but mostly served in lesser-known campaigns of the Civil War. Those interested in the Peninsula Campaign and some of the more obscure operations along the Eastern Seaboard will want to own Volume I.\u00a0 Those with ancestors in the regiment or an interest in its story will definitely want to own these books.\u00a0 And finally, anyone interested in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign will find plenty of detailed information in Volume II.\u00a0 This was a rather well-done effort, especially given the relative obscurity of this regiment.\u00a0 Unit histories on regiments from the Army of the James are AWAYS welcome, as that army has been unfairly relegated to the dustbin of history. \u00a0I\u2019d encourage readers to buy both volumes together if you can.\u00a0 They could have fit together in one giant book, but the size would have been rather unwieldy for a paperback.\u00a0 The approach of splitting the effort into two volumes seems to be the correct decision.\u00a0 Interested readers can find both volumes available at Lulu.com<\/a><\/strong>, and don\u2019t forget to check out Dan\u2019s blog at 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War<\/strong><\/a>. If you\u2019re still on the fence, see my permanent page for this series on the 85th Pennsylvania<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n Note: This review originally appeared at The Siege of Petersburg Online and has been cross-posted here at TOCWOC \u2013 A Civil War Blog. ***** SOPO EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: This review covers the second volume in a two-volume unit history of the 85th Pennsylvania.\u00a0 While the first volume will be briefly discussed, the main focus of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[24588,3767,17697,24589,4380,20872,17696,1299,3739],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-38177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-85th","tag-blog","tag-civil","tag-clendaniel","tag-dan","tag-pennsylvania","tag-tocwoc","tag-volume","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.beyondthecrater.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/85thPASuchHardAndSevereServiceVol2Clendaniel2021-232x300.jpg?resize=232%2C300&ssl=1\")
<\/a>SOPO EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: This review covers the second volume in a two-volume unit history of the 85th Pennsylvania.\u00a0 While the first volume will be briefly discussed, the main focus of the review is on the second volume due to its relevance to the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.beyondthecrater.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/DanClendaniel-211x300.jpg?resize=211%2C300&ssl=1\")
<\/a>Author Dan Clendaniel is a direct descendant of John Clendaniel, a member of the 85th Pennsylvania<\/a>.\u00a0 He first became interested in the 85th Pennsylvania in 2009 after reading ten family letters written by John and Stephen Clendaniel during the Civil War.\u00a0 He has written a two-volume history of the 85th Pennsylvania, the second of which is the subject of this review.\u00a0 Clendaniel blogs about the regiment at 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War<\/a><\/strong>. The author \u201cis a retired public school teacher from Prince William County, Va. He taught American history and American government in Virginia for 34 years.\u201d The author is available for speaking engagements about the 85th Pennsylvania for interested parties<\/a> as well.<\/p>\nAn advance proof copy of this book was provided gratis for the purposes of this review.<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"