Building the Victory: The Order Book of the Volunteer Engineer Brigade, Army of the Potomac October 1863-May 1865 Book

If the infantry bore the brunt of Civil War combat, it was the engineers who got them to where they could fight. Engineers built the roads and bridges that allowed the troops to move forward and their supplies to reach the front.

The Union's Army of the Potomac, that force gathered around Washington early in the war to take Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, was at first served by the regular U.S. Army's battalion of engineers. When this force proved too small to handle all the building of works to support over 100,000 men in the field, two volunteer regiments from New York were organized and placed into what became the Volunteer Engineer Brigade.