California Regiment

Ball's Bluff was the first major battle of the famous California Regiment. Edward Baker spent much of the 1850s in California and was identified with that state by the public. When the war broke out, however, he was in Washington as a senator not from California but from Oregon. The recruitment effort had some success, but Baker had to return to his senatorial duties in Washington. He contacted a former California law partner then living in Philadelphia, Isaac Wistar, and suggested he take over the regiment's organization. Wistar agrees but wants to do it in Philadelphia instead of New York. With Baker's approval, he began work, and it was so successful that the single regiment was proposed to become four regiments collectively known as the California Regiment.

The California Regiment is sponsored by Californians as part of an effort to keep California in the Union by encouraging California men from across the United States to enlist in the regiment. The regiment, however, was nominally only Californians; not only was it commanded by Colonel Baker, a Senator from Oregon, but the regiment was raised in Philadelphia, resulting in a regiment whose men were mostly Native Pennsylvanians. After Baker's death, the regiment was renamed the 71st Pennsylvania Volunteer Force and resumed action at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where they participated in the famous repulsion of Pickett's Charge at the Bloody Angle. California Regiment deserves to be one of the facts about the Battle of Ball's Bluff.