XI Corps (Union army)
unit in the American Civil War
The XI Corps (Eleventh Army Corps) was a corps of the U.S. Army during the American Civil War, best remembered for its involvement in the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1863. The corps was composed primarily of German-American regiments.
Formation and the Valley Campaign
The XI Corps was an amalgamation of two separate commands. These were John Fremont's Army of the Mountain Department and Louis Blenker's division of German immigrants. Blenker had led a German brigade at First Bull Run, although it was held in reserve and saw no major fighting, and afterward became a division commander in the new Army of the Potomac. Intended to go to the Virginia Peninsula in the spring of 1862, Blenker's troops were instead detached and sent out west to join Fremont. The division got lost and ran out of supplies, resulting in soldiers dropping out of the ranks from hunger, fatigue, and sickness. Many German soldiers angered locals in the Shenandoah Valley by indiscriminately looting homes and farms. They also did not have a good relationship with the native-born soldiers in Fremont's command—eventually, Brig. Gen William Rosecrans found the lost division and brought them to Fremont's headquarters at Petersburg, West Virginia.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4331560. VIAF identifies the subject as 115145541826196601522. The Library of Congress control number is no2015167610. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1863 and 1862.
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This entry incorporates text from “XI Corps (Union army)” 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.