47th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

The 47th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, officially the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry and sometimes referred to simply as the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, was an infantry regiment that served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and the early months of the Reconstruction era. It was formed by adults and teenagers from small towns and larger metropolitan areas in central, northeastern, and southeastern regions of Pennsylvania.

The 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was composed primarily of men from Pennsylvania who were of German heritage. It ultimately came to be known as the 47th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers due to the length of service by the majority of men on its rosters. Many of the family and friends of this regiment's members still spoke German or its Pennsylvania Dutch variant more than a century after their ancestors emigrated from Germany in search of religious or political freedom.

A significant number of 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers were immigrants from Ireland, and two were natives of Cuba. Nine or more were formerly enslaved Black men who had escaped or been liberated from plantations in South Carolina and Louisiana.

Roughly seventy percent of those who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry were residents of the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, Catasauqua, Easton, and surrounding communities in Lehigh and Northampton counties in the present-day Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. Company C, also known as the Sunbury Guards, was formed primarily with men from Northumberland County. Companies D and H were staffed by men from Perry County. The non-Lehigh Valley membership remains significant, historically, in the present day because a lieutenant governor of the state, the creator of a prosperous hat factory, inventors, and others who lived in areas other than the Lehigh Valley before and after the war became prominent civic and business leaders, post-war.

Recruited at community gathering places in their respective hometowns, most of the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers enrolled for military service at county seats or other large population centers. The oldest member of the regiment, sixty-five-year-old Benjamin Walls, was an affluent farmer who would attempt to reenlist three years later at the age of sixty-eight after being seriously wounded while preventing his regiment's American flag from falling into enemy hands during the Battle of Pleasant Hill. The youngest was John Boulton Young, a thirteen-year-old drummer boy from Sunbury. Dubbed "Boltie" (or "Boulty") and described in letters home by regimental officers as the regiment's "pet," he became the 47th Pennsylvania's first casualty, succumbing to smallpox at the Kalorama eruptive fever hospital in Georgetown on October 17, 1861. According to The Daily Item in Sunbury, the uniform that Young had worn during his brief service was a dark blue wool Zouave-style jacket with red trim and red wool pants [with] leather gaiters to protect his legs while marching," a style dramatically different from the more traditional Union blues worn by other members of the regiment. Due to his small stature, Young was also given "an undersized, nonregulation drum complete with small drumsticks," which measured just "13 1/2 inches across and...13 inches deep."

Many of the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers did so after first completing their three months' service with other regiments from Pennsylvania in response to President Abraham Lincoln's April 15, 1861, call for volunteers to defend the nation's capital following Fort Sumter's fall to Confederate forces in mid-April 1861. Reenlisting in hometowns following their respective honorable discharges from this service, they mustered in as part of the newly formed 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry in at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg during August and September 1861.