47th Pennsylvania Infantry

47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry
Also known as 47th Pennsylvania Infantry or 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers (*not to be confused with the 47th Pennsylvania Militia, Emergency of 1863)
State Flag of Pennsylvania, circa 1863.
Active	August 1861 - January 1866
Country	United States
Allegiance	Union
Branch	Infantry
Engagements	Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina (1862); Red River Campaign, Louisiana (March–May, 1864); Sheridan's 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign (Fall 1864)
Commanders
Founder	Colonel Tilghman H. Good (1861 – 1864)
Second in Command	Lieutenant Colonel George Warren Alexander (1861 – 1864)
Final Commander	Brevet Brigadier General John Peter Shindel Gobin (1864 – 1866)

Formed by adults and teenagers from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's small towns and cities, the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was composed primarily of men of German heritage. Many of their family and friends still spoke German or its "Pennsylvania Dutch" variant in their homes and churches more than a hundred years after their forebears emigrated from Germany in search of religious or political freedom. Other members of this regiment traced their roots to Ireland; at least two had emigrated from Cuba; several were field hands or house slaves who had been liberated from plantations or other Confederate-held areas of the Deep South.

Roughly 70 percent of those who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry were residents of the Lehigh Valley – the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, Catasauqua, and Easton and surrounding communities in Lehigh and Northampton counties. 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.

Recruited at community gathering places in their respective home towns, 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, 65-year-old Benjamin Walls, was an affluent farmer who would attempt to re-enlist three years later at the age of 68 after being seriously wounded while preventing his regiment's American flag from falling into enemy hands during the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana. The youngest was John Boulton Young, a 13-year-old drummer boy from Sunbury in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Dubbed "Boltie" (or "Boulty") and described in letters home by regimental officers as the regiment's "pet," he became the regiment's first casualty, succumbing to Variola (smallpox) at the Kalorama eruptive fever hospital in Georgetown, District of Columbia on October 17, 1861.

A significant percentage of the men who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers did so after first completing their three months' service with other regiments from the Keystone State in response to President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to help defend the nation's capital following Fort Sumter's fall to Confederate forces in mid-April 1861. Re-enlisting in home towns 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, Dauphin County during August and September 1861.