History of the Union 27th Ky. Infantry - Part 1
 
 The Union 27th Kentucky Infantry was recruited from the counties of
Casey,  Green, Taylor, Hart, Nelson, Hardin, Grayson, Breckinridge and Meade.
The rosters for this regiment will be going up on the Archives page as I get
them transcribed. Field and Staff and Co. C rosters are already online.
 
 This history is quoted ver batim from a book published in the early
1890's by an organization that was raising money for a memorial to the Union
soldiers in Frankfort. The title of the book is "Union Regiments of
Kentucky". The book is available in the Louisville Free Public Library.
Most of the information in the book was obtained from official documents.
The history of the 27th, however, was written by Col. John H. Ward who
was second in command of the regiment throughout the war.
 
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 Twenty-seventh Kentucky Volunteer Infantry
 by Col. John H. Ward
 
 Before Kentucky as a state had called for any soldiers to sustain the
Union cause, and perhaps before there was more than one organized
regiment at Camp Dick Robinson on Kentucky soil, Maj. W. T. Ward, Edward H.
Hobson and John H. Ward visited that camp. The night they arrived, Gen. 
Nelson (then the trusted agent of President Lincoln) sent for Maj. Ward, whom
he knew as a former soldier in the war with Mexico. The next day Maj. Ward
went to Washington City, and was commissioned as a brigadier-general of
volunteers, and given the authority to raise three regiments of infantry.
About the 20th of September, 1861, he opened camp for recruits at
Greensburg, Ky., within 24 miles of Gen. Buckner's rebel forces at
Munfordville, with whom he had many encounters, losing men in killed,
wounded and prisoners before we had a regimental organization and often
before the company to which the men were attached had been organized.
Many of our recruits came from inside the rebel lines, or very near to them,
and had to fight on the way to camp. We had no arms except our private ones,
and a few Home Guard muskets. We had no countenance from the state, as
the governor (Magoffin) was in sympathy with the South, and no money except
what we furnished from our own means, and they very limited. The men
being without money wanted to leave one small month's pay with their families.
 
 So we furnished that much to each recruit as long as we could, thus
getting twenty or thirty men for a company, and forming a nucleus. We had
no quartermaster nor commissary stores except what we gathered from the
country, and for which we gave reciepts to the people. I do not see how
troops could have greater difficulties to encounter; certainly the men
behaved as well as men could under the circumstances. Afterward, when the
military commission was formed, and attempted to furnish some things to us,
we thought ourselves well off by contrast. And as recruits were brought in,
those who were in camp, and had left the $13.00 of the first month's pay
with their needy families and had recieved another month's pay for
services, would loan it to their officers to be advanced to ther recruits
when they came in too fast for the small sums furnished by the military
commission for that purpose. Here was tried and true patriotism that people
outside the border states knew nothing about.
 
 to be continued
 
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From: Debbie Hund Hogan 
<autumn@aye.net> 
Date: Tuesday, November 25, 1997