A single clerk’s decision to award medals for simply extending enlistments ended up costing 864 Maine soldiers their Medal of Honor more than fifty years later.
Quick Take
- In 1916, Congress ordered a board of five retired Army generals to review all 2,625 Medals of Honor ever given out.
- The board struck 911 medals from the rolls, with 864 going to one Maine regiment that received them for staying in service, not for combat.
- Civilians, including Lincoln’s funeral guard and showman Buffalo Bill Cody, also lost their medals in the same sweep.
- Dr. Mary Edwards Walker refused to give hers back and wore it until she died; Congress restored it decades later in 1977.
A Wartime Honor System Spirals Out of Control
By the early 1900s, the Medal of Honor had a credibility problem. Lawmakers worried the nation’s highest combat award had been handed out too loosely during and after the Civil War, sometimes for service that had nothing to do with battlefield heroism. Congress responded by authorizing a full-scale review of every medal on the books, a move with no real precedent before or since in American military history.
The job fell to five retired generals, led by Nelson A. Miles, a decorated veteran of the Chancellorsville campaign. Over eight months starting in June 1916, the board worked through all 2,625 awards one by one, checking each against a single standard: had the medal gone to someone for distinguished conduct in actual combat against an enemy?
Five Generals, One Mission: Separate Valor From Paperwork
The board’s rule was blunt. Any medal awarded for a reason other than combat valor was subject to removal, no matter how long ago it had been issued or how respected the recipient had become. That standard gave the generals legal cover to act, but it also meant judging decisions made by a different Army, under different rules, decades earlier.
That retroactive approach is exactly why this case still draws attention. Applying today’s eligibility bar to yesterday’s awards is a defensible way to protect an honor’s integrity, but it also risks punishing people who followed the rules that existed when they served. The board clearly leaned toward protecting the medal’s meaning over protecting individual legacies.
The 27th Maine’s Mass Medal and the Civilians Swept Up With It
No case illustrates that tension better than the 27th Maine Volunteer Infantry. Nearly 900 members of the regiment had received the Medal of Honor years earlier simply for agreeing to extend their enlistments during a manpower crunch, not for fighting. When the board finished its work, 864 of those medals were pulled, making up the overwhelming majority of all 911 revocations.
The board did not stop with one regiment. It also struck medals from 29 members of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral honor guard and six civilians, including showman Buffalo Bill Cody, concluding that ceremonial duty and non-combat service did not meet the law’s bar for valor in actual conflict.
Dr. Mary Walker Fought Back and Won
One of those civilians refused to accept the ruling. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon and the only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor, had hers stripped in 1917 along with the others. She kept wearing it anyway, every day, until she died two years later.
Under fire at Hatcher's Run in 1865, men of the 11th Pennsylvania put down their rifles to bury a dog. Her name was Sallie, and she'd marched with them for four years. https://t.co/UKJBGu0AOZ
— Likes Dogs more than humans (@Dogs_are_First) October 2, 2026
Her family did not let the matter rest. Decades later, her niece Ann Walker led a sustained campaign to restore the medal, petitioning multiple presidents before the Army Board for Correction of Military Records finally agreed. President Jimmy Carter restored Walker’s medal in 1977, with the Army acknowledging the earlier board may have gotten her case wrong. No one from the 27th Maine ever won that fight; those medals remain off the books to this day.
Why This 1916 Reckoning Still Matters Today
The episode is a reminder that honor systems need guardrails, and that Congress was willing to enforce them even against nearly a thousand living recipients. That took institutional courage most agencies today would avoid. But Walker’s story also shows the system allowed a path back when the original judgment looked wrong, which is exactly how accountability should work: firm standards, paired with room for correction when the facts warrant it.
What stands out most is scale. Removing 911 medals in one stroke, more than a third of everything the Army had ever awarded, was a statement that the nation’s highest honor could not be allowed to become routine. A century later, the 27th Maine’s lost medals remain the largest single mass revocation in American military history, a fact most Americans have never heard.
Sources:
19fortyfive.com, en.wikipedia.org, cmohs.org, ictnews.org, nationalsecurityjournal.org, wisvetsmuseum.com, digitalcommons.law.ou.edu, insidesources.com
