Awww ...

Joshua Chamberlain, 20th Maine Infantry, deserved his, of course, and retained it — different regiment

How nearly 900 soldiers from Maine earned — and lost — the Medal of Honor. This story is apropos of nothing, I suppose, but I stumbled across it this morning, and found it amusing.

In fact, 911 medals have been revoked since it was created during the Civil War. If that’s not shocking enough, 864 of them belonged to one unit: the 27th Maine Infantry Regiment and most of them have disappeared.

To understand why so many were rescinded, we need to look at why they were presented in the first place.

The 27th mustered in 1862 for a nine-month tour of duty. The unit was commanded by Col. Mark F. Wentworth and marched to the National Capital region on October 20th that same year. While deployed, the regiment was attached to XXII Corps and migrated through several encampments around the Washington D.C. and northern Virginia area. 

On June 25, 1863, just shy of the soldier’s enlistment expiration, the unit was mistakenly transferred to XII Corps in Leesburg, Virginia to prepare for the defense of the capital against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops as they made their way toward Gettysburg. 

When the mistake was discovered, the soldiers were ordered to return home. However, much of the Union’s fighting force was ordered to move North and meet Lee’s troops, leaving only a skeletal reserve to defend the city. With the Confederate army in such close proximity to Washington, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, at the request of the president, asked the Soldiers of the 27th to extend their service. 

The soldiers initially balked, so Lincoln and Stanton sweetened the request by offering a Medal of Honor to any soldier who agreed to stay. In the end, 300 soldiers from the 27th remained behind.

Their extended tenure only lasted four days. Following Lee’s defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, those soldiers returned home and mustered out of service on July 17, 1863.

One might think the story ends there, but in classic Army fashion, the paperwork for the Medals got messed up. No one maintained a clear record of which soldiers opted to stay and, rather than hunting down this information, the Army took the path of least resistance and issued Medals of Honor for all 864 soldiers of the regiment.

Typical Army solution. The error was eventually discovered, and the medals revoked, but it must have been fun for a few decades.