15th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, Gettysburg, 1863

The 15th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment was raised in the spring of 1861 in the city of Athens (GA), very shortly time after the state seceded from the Union with the other six first states who left it on March of the same year.

This regiment served the most of time in the Army of Northern Virginia and its men were recruited throughout North-Central Georgia. They fought in many battles like the ones of Second Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and more.

The most desirable thing for an Army is to furnish its soldiers with regular uniforms, but the Confederacy always had many problems to achieve such thing. The commanders of the Confederate Army preferred to have their men well equipped and warm above all things. Because of that, the typical fashion of Johnny Reb was described as, “no two dressed alike”. Those men wearing half uniform clothes and half civilian were very common, and were known as “Pards”. When the men fought in long period campaigns and didn’t receive supplies on time, they subsisted with the generous donations of the Southern people in the form of great appeals and other initiatives done by the states and the Quatermaster Department. Different tones of grey, butternuts and myriad of civilian clothes could be seen in the same unit at any given time.

Our miniature depicts an example of one of those soldiers, dressed with civilian trousers and shirt, a butternut regulation jacket and one of those emblematic “patchwork” blanket that were usually donated by the family. Although Confederacy’s regulations observed blue for the color of the branch of service of Infantry, some states used different colors for the regiments raised in its territory. In Georgia, the color for the infantry’s collars and cuffs was black.