The Real Civil War Uniforms

In the hundreds of movies that have been made and the thousands of stories written about the United States Civil War there are always frequent references to and scenes of heated battles pitting the blue clad soldiers of the Northern Armies against the gray adorned Southerners.

By the end of the war it was technically true that the official uniform colors of each side’s army was well established as such. However, for most of the actual combat the North had its uniforms supplied by individual towns, counties, states, and often even by wealthy individuals who could afford to outfit a troop. This practice led to a great variety of different styles of dress and also to varying colors of the final uniform that the soldiers wore. Through the course of the conflict, after it became apparent that the North would eventually win and Congress finally began appropriating enough funds for “niceties” such as uniforms, Northern textile mills began churning out great numbers of matching blue wool uniforms that provided conformity to the battlefield appearance of its army.

The South on the other hand never did really have enough war essentials such as guns, bullets, or even food to ever devote its limited production facilities to making enough regulation gray uniforms to go around. Troopers that did initially get outfitted in the official gray of the Confederacy were seldom able to secure replacements when pants or shirts were either damaged beyond repair or worn out. This shortage led to many Southern soldiers wearing either their civilian clothes in battle or securing whatever clothing that they could find along their route of march. As the war drug on and the shortages of essentials grew worse at the same time that the government of Jefferson Davis was going broke the civilian attired soldiers had the same challenges in replacing worn or damaged uniforms as those who had true gray.

By the actual end of the war the Northern Army had pretty much fully standardized its uniforms in the now familiar deep blue while the South’s warriors were a motley looking, some would even say, “ragtag” crew outfitted in many various colors and styles of shirts and pants.

In point of fact there were very few skirmishes during the war that actually featured “Blue Vs. Gray”.