page_title: United States military bands
section_title: Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: United States military bands / History / Civil War
context_page_description: United States military bands include musical ensembles maintained by the United States Army, United States Marine Corps, United States Navy, United States Air Force, and United States Coast Guard. More broadly, they can also include musical ensembles of other federal and state uniformed services, including the Public Health Service and NOAA Corps, the state defense forces, and the senior military colleges.
  During the colonial period, most British army units posted in the area that would become the United States had bands attached. The first recorded instance of a local American military band was in 1653 in the New Hampshire militia. The oldest extant United States military band is the United States Marine Corps Band, formed in 1798 and known by the moniker "The President's Own". The U.S. armed forces field eleven ensembles and more than 100 smaller, active-duty and reserve bands.
context_section_description: At the time of the American Civil War, U.S. Army bands had a normal strength of 24 musicians for infantry units, and 16 for cavalry.  With the mobilization of the Union Army, transition to total war, and decreasing importance of bands in signaling troops, the United States Department of War in 1861 considered cutting military bands entirely, estimated a potential cost savings of $5 million. The proposal was shelved in the face of opposition from officers and soldiers, however, a trimming of bandsmen occurred by eliminating some regimental ensembles in favor of brigade-level bands. Nonetheless, a survey in October 1861 found that 75-percent of Union regiments had a band and, by December of that year, the Union Army had 28,000 musicians in 618 bands. Bandsmen were also, for the first time, tasked with performing combat duties in addition to musical performance, frequently as stretcher-bearers and field hospital orderlies.
  Musicians were often given special privileges. Union general Phillip Sheridan gave his cavalry bands the best horses and special uniforms, believing "music has done its share, and more than its share, in winning this war". In addition to ceremonial and maneuver music, bands during this period also began performing concerts for troops with the popular music of the day, many regimental bands having formerly been civilian bands that enlisted en masse at the outbreak of hostilities. John Partridge, a soldier in the 24th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, recorded in a letter home the value the men in his unit placed on the regimental band, formerly a civilian orchestra from Boston led by Patrick Gilmore:
  I don't know what we should have done without our band ... every night about sundown Gilmore gives us a splendid concert, playing selections from operas and some very pretty marches, quick steps, waltzes and the like ... thus you can see we get a good deal of new music, notwithstanding we are off here in the woods. Gilmore used to give some of the most fashionable concerts we had at home and we lack nothing but strings now.
caption: The regimental band of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry in zouave uniform, pictured in 1864
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