Every soldier in the 101st Airborne Division wears a bald eagle's profile on his shoulder. Most assume it is a generic symbol of American might. It is not. The bird on the patch had a name, a rank of sorts, and a service record that ran through some of the bloodiest campaigns of the Civil War.

A Bushel of Corn and a Wartime Bargain

In the spring of 1861, a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe took a young bald eagle from its nest near the Flambeau River in Wisconsin. He traded the eaglet to a farmer named Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn. That summer, as President Lincoln called for volunteers, a company of recruits from Eau Claire pooled $2.50 to buy the bird before marching off to join the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Their captain, John E. Perkins, named the eagle Old Abe, after the president.

Riding Into Battle on a Shield

The regiment's quartermaster built a special perch shaped like a shield, mounted on a pole, so Old Abe could be carried into action beside the national colors. Soldiers took turns as his designated bearer through campaigns at Island Number Ten, Corinth, Vicksburg, and the Red River. Eyewitnesses said that whenever the fighting started, Old Abe spread his wings and screamed over the noise of the guns rather than trying to fly away.

The Yankee Buzzard

Confederate soldiers came to know the bird well enough to nickname him the "Yankee Buzzard," and accounts describe marksmen being ordered to bring him down, since a live symbol of Union morale mattered more than another captured flag. Old Abe had close calls. At the Second Battle of Corinth, a bullet is said to have severed the cord tethering him to his perch and clipped a few of his flight feathers. At Vicksburg, another shot reportedly grazed his wing. Neither injury kept him from finishing the war. He came through more than 30 engagements and marched home to Wisconsin with the 8th Infantry when its three-year enlistment ended in 1864.

A Capitol Celebrity

The regiment presented Old Abe to the state of Wisconsin, which built him a custom apartment in the basement of the Capitol in Madison. He became a fixture at postwar reunions, fairs, and political rallies, and photographers lined up to capture him on his old shield perch. Several of those images survive today in the Library of Congress, giving us a rare thing for a Civil War story: real photographs of the actual animal, not just an illustration.

Why He Is Still on Every Shoulder

When the Army organized the 101st Airborne Division in 1921, it looked to Wisconsin's Civil War heritage and chose Old Abe's profile as the unit's insignia. That same eagle's image is why the paratroopers became known as the "Screaming Eagles," a nickname they carried into Normandy, Bastogne, and every conflict since. The patch on a modern soldier's shoulder is not an abstract emblem. It is the likeness of a bird that actually rode into battle a century and a half earlier.

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