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Galvanized Yankees were Confederate soldiers imprisoned during the Civil War, who won their freedom by swearing their allegiance to the Union and enlisting in the Union Army. Due to doubts of their ultimate loyalty, they were generally assigned to posts far from the Civil War battlefields, often protecting the trails and settlements in the American West. Numbering about 6,000 men, there were six regiments of U.S. volunteers during 1864 and 1865. The term "galvanized” rebels or Yankees was coined by Samuel Bowles Bowles, a newspaper reporter, referring to galvanized metal, which turns colors when it is coated with zinc.

In the early days of the war, prison camps were merely holding areas where men waited to be exchanged for equal numbers of prisoners held by the other side.

Confederate prisoners captured in Virginia, 1864.

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In 1863, however, the prisoner exchange system broke down, causing prison camps to become permanent areas of incarceration, where growing numbers of men had no hope of release until the end of the war. Prison camps were horrible, filthy places which lacked all the basic necessities of life.

Worn-out clothing offered little protection from the elements, and the only shelter for the men was what they could improvise for themselves. They were seldom issued new clothing, and often starved due to meager food allowances. Many saw enlistment in the enemy forces as an escape, and took advantage of the personnel shortage in either army by joining it.

This posed a new problem to both armies, since most recruits were still loyal to their original army and would desert at the first opportunity. On December 28, 1864, at Egypt Station, Mississippi, a Confederate regiment composed of 250 "galvanized” soldiers threw down their arms and surrendered as they were charged by Union troops. These men were sent to the Union prison in Alton, Illinois as deserters, but were saved from individual trials by General Grenville Dodge, who recruited them into the 5th and 6th U.S. Volunteers. The experiment of enlisting prisoners became a concern for the U.S. War Department, and policies surrounding this practice continually changed. In 1862, Colonel James Mulligan discovered that many Confederate prisoners did not wish to be exchanged, and were willing to join the Union army; he illegally enlisted former Confederates to be used on the front lines. It was not until 1864 that President Lincoln finally endorsed the enlisting of ex-Confederates.

Events in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War continually overshadowed events in the American West. However, two important incidents gave settlers in the West reason to be concerned for their safety, especially since most of the able-bodied men had left the frontier to fight on eastern battlefields. By 1862, members of the Sioux tribe, who had been living on a Minnesota reservation for twenty years, had accumulated many grievances. Provisions and treaty goods were often shoddy or were stolen by traders. Worst of all, was the uninterrupted immigration of new settlers, which eventually forced the Sioux to give up nearly 900,000 acres of their reservation lands for 30 cents an acre. The starving Sioux had had enough, and attempted to regain their ancestral lands. As a result, settlers and missionaries fled from the Minnesota frontier, seeking safety in New Ulm and St. Paul. On the first day of the Sioux uprising, 1,500 settlers were killed, and the town of New Ulm was saved only by the efforts of ill-equipped local volunteers.