Talk:Eastern Iron Brigade

Military history: North America / United States / American Civil War

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Refs?

This article is in need of references. There is one footnote, which leads to a dead link. I really wonder about the accuracy of the information in this article and would like to see some citations. Here are some of the problems:

The brigade led by Phelps was in the same infantry division as that of the more famous [Western] Iron Brigade. It seems to me unlikely that both brigades had the same nickname. I can find no references in the ORs to an Iron Brigade with New York regiments.
Google searching for Iron Brigade and Phelps, Auger, or Fredericksburg yield virtually no hits. Although this is not strictly definitive, normally there is so much Civil War material on the web that something would come up. There are a number of hits that differentiate "Iron Brigade" (under Gibbon or Meredith) from "Phelps' Brigade."
I have no knowledge (nor does Google) of the "Fredericksburg Expeditions" mentioned here.
I did find one hit in Google books that indicated a connection between Phelps and South Mountain, but this is certainly some sort of confusion with the Wisconsin/Michigan Iron Brigade, because they received the nickname there from remarks by General McClellan and that is very well documented.

In fact, the only factoid in the article that makes me question my skepticism is the photograph of the medal. Can anyone expound on what is really going on here and provide some real references? Hal Jespersen 01:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Updated October 17: Well, I was able to find a little more information and apparently there are references to this brigade, particularly on New York State Civil War regimental history pages. It certainly is an odd coincidence that two brigades in the same infantry division claimed the same nickname. It is unfortunate for the New Yorkers that the publicity received by the Western brigade was so much more effective. Hal Jespersen 21:38, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is a lot to be skeptical here. The medal, if it is actually genuine, is almost certainly a Veteran's Medal produced by various veteran's organizations after the Civil War for reunions and the like. As far as I can tell digging through some records for awards and medals it doesn't appear to be one granted by the US Army.

I can find no references to a post-war feud between the veterans of the 14th Brooklyn and any of the western regiments. I'm not sure why this brigade's page needs to be mostly dedicated to smack-talk 140+ years after the war.

As Nolan states in Chapter 6 note 51, "According to William F. Fox Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, p. 117, the name "Iron Brigade" did not originate with the Iron Brigade, Gibbon's organization from the West. Thus Fox states that prior to the fall of 1862, Hatch's Brigade . . . was called the Iron Brigade. . . The same story of the naming of Hatch's Brigade appears in The History of the Fighting Fourteenth, the regimental history of the 14th Brooklyn, published in 1911."

"Neither Fox nor the regimental history of the Fourteenth cites any authority for the account of the name of Hatch's Brigade. The writer of this book has searched for some contemporaneous evidence that the name Iron Brigade was, in fact, applied to Hatch's outfit. No such authority has been found. On the other hand, immediately after South Mountain and Antietam, the name was generally applied to the Western organization, both in the contemporaneous letters of soldiers and in the Official Records."

Nolan then goes on to contrast this absence of record in Hatch's Brigade to Shelby's Raiders, which does have record of being called Iron Brigade.

In other words, if this brigade was an "Iron Brigade" the soldiers in the units never wrote letters referring to themselves as such, and no commander made reference to the moniker in his reports. While I won't say that the whole notion of Hatch's brigade as an "Iron Brigade" is truly false, if they were called the Iron Brigade, it was a very limited title and wasn't used outside of the brigade. --69.86.190.131 (talk) 04:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Added Refs

Added Reference Pages and References to Books in which this information is found.--Frank Ruiz