The history of the one hundred and thirtieth regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry

In August 1862, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania quickly responded to President Lincoln\u27s request for more troops. An overwhelming number of Pennsylvania volunteers promptly answered the call that supplied the Union Army eighteen new infantry regiments who were to serve for a period of nine months. This devoted group of central Pennsylvanians, rendezvoused at Camp Simmons, Pennsylvania, in mid-August 1862, was to become soldiers of 130th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers who, with no military experience and little training, would face hardened Confederate veterans at Bloody Lane at the Battle of Antietam and Marye\u27s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg. They were to do their best to halt the stampede of fleeing Eleventh Corps soldiers and hold the line stopping Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas J. Jackson\u27s advancing Second Corps troops at the Battle of Chancellorsville. An officer of the regiment may well have been the indirect cause of the innocent shooting and resulting death of the Lieutenant General Jackson. After their initial terms of enlistment had expired, most of the men who served in the regiment re-enlisted to serve their country until the end of the war. One of the regiment\u27s commanders, Colonel Levi Maish, became a member of the United States Congress. Through their diaries, letters, memoirs, and personal accounts, the men themselves bequeathed their story to later generations