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1862 – 1865
The 73rd was mustered into service on South Bend's own ground, 16 August 1862, and its colonel died at the head of Streight's raiders: The regiment went out under Colonel Gilbert Hathaway, with Company C raised in this county. In the spring of 1863 the 73rd marched with Colonel Abel Streight's provisional brigade into Alabama — Day's Gap and Crooked Creek in the last days of April — and at Blount's Farm on 2 May 1863 Colonel Hathaway fell mortally wounded at the head of his men. The brigade surrendered the next day, 3 May 1863, at Cedar Bluff, Alabama; the men were exchanged, but the officers were held in close confinement for nearly two years. Lieutenant Colonel Alfred B. Wade, released from prison, assumed command on 28 March 1864 — Wade's wartime correspondence survives among the county's Civil War records at Notre Dame. The regiment's second life was railroad guard duty on the Nashville & Chattanooga, and then the garrison of Decatur, Alabama, where it earned the county's proudest defensive record of the war: on 1–2 October 1864 a garrison of five hundred men with two guns refused General Buford's surrender demand — Buford had four thousand cavalry and four guns — and repulsed him; and on 26–29 October Hood invested the place with thirty-five thousand men against a garrison of five thousand and withdrew, in the record's phrase, because "it would cost more to take the place than it was worth." The 73rd lost one killed and six wounded in that engagement. It mustered out at Nashville on 1 July 1865.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), ch. VII — the muster at South Bend, Hathaway's death at Blount's Farm, the surrender at Cedar Bluff, Wade's assumption of command, and the Decatur record of October 1864.
- Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 2 — Company C raised in this county; Wade's correspondence preserved at the Notre Dame Archives (finding aid, Saint Joseph County Civil War Records).