39th Infantry Regiment (War of 1812)
military unit
The 39th United States Infantry was a regiment of the regular Army. It was authorized on January 29, 1813, and recruited in the East by Colonel John Williams of Tennessee. It was commanded by Colonel Williams, who had previously led the Mounted Volunteers of East Tennessee. On December 31, 1813, Major General Thomas Pinckney ordered the regiment to join Andrew Jackson's force, countermanding orders that had been sent from General Thomas Flournoy at New Orleans, who wanted them there, thus providing a disciplined core and strategic resupply for his command, which was down to about 75 men eating roots and acorns. The historian Henry Adams speculated that, without this regiment, Jackson would have fared no better in 1814 than he had the previous year.
Jackson welcomed the 39th. Since the beginning of his campaign in the Creek War, Jackson was troubled by serious discipline problems with his militia and volunteers, particularly the militia from East Tennessee. So he prosecuted a Private John Woods, only 18, under false charges. Woods had spent his last month in the camp of the 39th. The night before his execution the officers of the 39th signed and sent Jackson a petition asking for mercy.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4636158. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1813 and 1814.
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This entry incorporates text from “39th Infantry Regiment (War of 1812)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.