William Schouler, A history of Massachusetts in the Civil War: Volume 2

[18] seventy-eight men (15,178). The whole number of men which Massachusetts furnished for the army and navy, and for which she was credited, was one hundred and fifty-nine thousand one hundred and sixty-five (159,165).

We have not been able to obtain from the War Department, for use in the compilation of this volume, a copy of the returns made by Major Clark, U. S. A., of the number of men by cities and towns furnished by Massachusetts for the war, as it is contrary to the rules of the Department to furnish copies of such papers. We have therefore been compelled to be content with the returns made by the city and town officers, in 1866, to a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, of which the Hon. Tappan Wentworth, of Lowell, was chairman. Those returns are neither complete nor entirely accurate, although they approximate to both: one thing is greatly in their favor, they do not exaggerate, nor claim more than they are entitled to; on the contrary, they fall short of what is justly their due, a discrepancy which can easily be accounted for by the probable fact that they make no claim for men which were credited to the State at large, and a majority of the towns have not taken into account the surplus of men who served in the navy, and which were credited pro rata to them by the State. The probability is that the returns referred to only included the men who were bona fide inhabitants of the towns to which they were credited. These facts fully explain the discrepancy of about ten thousand men between the number claimed by the towns and the number actually furnished by the State, and credited by the War Department. But be this as it may, the number of surplus men which each city and town furnished in excess of all demands is correctly given, in its proper place in the record of each city and town, in these pages. These were copied from the records of Major Clark, U. S. A., Assistant Provost-Marshal-General of Massachusetts, at the end of the war, before they were forwarded by him to the War Department at Washington, and were published in the Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts for the year 1865.¹