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55th Virginia Infantry Regiment

military unit

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 29, 2024
Entity authorityQ4640671 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 55th Virginia Infantry Regiment was an infantry regiment of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

In May 1861, Major William N. Ward raised a unit known as 'Essex and Middlesex Battalion,' one company of which, the 'Essex Sharp Shooters' had been in existence since the summer of 1860 as a volunteer company. It received the formal designation '55th Virginia Infantry' in September 1861 when Colonel Francis M. Mallory took command. It eventually became part of A.P. Hill's Light Division. In total, 1,321 men appeared on the muster rolls; of these, 1,181 saw active service with the regiment. Of the latter, 108 were killed in action and 198 died of disease. The regiment was made up of 12 companies from Essex, Middlesex, Lancaster, Spotsylvania, and Westmoreland counties, although never more than 11 companies served together at one time.

Some of the battles the 55th Virginia engaged in included the Seven Days Battles, Second Battle of Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, as well as the defense of Richmond and Petersburg.

Its field officers were Colonels William S. Christian and Francis Mallory; Lieutenant Colonels Robert H. Archer and Evan Rice; and Majors Thomas M. Burke, Robert B. Fauntleroy, Charles N. Lawson, Andrew D. Saunders, and William N. Ward.

See also

List of Virginia Civil War units

External links

The Essex Sharpshooters Archived 25 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine

55th Virginia Infantry

References

This article incorporates public domain material from Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System.

Editorial summary

“55th Virginia Infantry Regiment” enters the record as military unit. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what 55th, Virginia and Infantry can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1861, 1860, 2015—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around 55th, Virginia and Infantry.
Editorial analysis

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“55th Virginia Infantry Regiment” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, 55th, Virginia and Infantry provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

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 Mar 29, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q4640671. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1860 and 2015.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “55th Virginia Infantry Regiment” 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.