Company A

At the outbreak of the war, just after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s calling out of the militia to quell the rebellion, there as a great fear that the rebels would launch an attack on the city of Washington. To deal with this, an urgent plea was issued for troops to immediately head there. Pennsylvania managed to have five companies of men arrive in the Capital on April 18, 1861. One of these companies was the Logan Guards, 93 men raised around Lewistown in Mifflin County. The Logans had volunteered for 90 days, and shortly after they were discharged that summer, another call for 500,000 men to serve three years came from the government.

Three of the sergeants from the Logans- Joseph Mathews, Henry Eisenbise, and William Weber- along with eleven other Logan veterans, stayed together to form the core of Company A, which was recruited from mid to late August, 1861 in Lewistown. They attracted 83 additional recruits and were assigned to the 46th Pennsylvania shortly after their arrival in Harrisburg in early September, with Mathews as its captain, (and the senior captain in the regiment), and Eisenbise and Weber as the lieutenants. A few days after leaving Washington for a post along the Potomac River, the regiment’s major, Arnold Lewis, was killed in an argument with a drunken private, and Mathews was promoted to replace him, allowing Eisenbise and Weber to move up to captain and 1st lieutenant. Eisenbise resigned his commission in early 1863, and Weber served as the company captain until he was dismissed from the service in February 1865. The last captain of the company was John Nolte, who had served with the Logan Guards as a corporal.

The original recruits suffered casualties in most of the battles fought by the 46th: at Winchester, Cedar Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, New Hope Church, and Peach Tree Creek. Over the course of the war, the company lost 10 men killed in action (5 at Cedar Mountain), and three others who died of their wounds. One, Charles Brought, died in 1864 as a prisoner of war.

As losses mounted, the company took in 71 additional recruits, 24 of them as draftees and substitutes in the summer of 1863, and most of the rest during the recruiting drive in early 1864. Twenty-one men were taken prisoner in 1862 at Winchester and Cedar Mountain, 5 more at Chancellorsville in 1863, and 3 other along the course of the campaign in 1864. Of the 97 original volunteers who came into the regiment in 1861, 32 mustered out together with the regiment in July 1865.