On June 19 the regiment's officers (commissioned and noncommissioned) assembled at Fort Wayne, near Detroit, for training under regular army officers—most notably Alpheus Starkey Williams—as part of Michigan's Camp of Instruction.
Major Bacon led the regiment on a bloodless foray down Virginia's Eastern Shore in December as part of Brigadier General Henry Hayes Lockwood’s Peninsular Brigade.
The Michiganders went so far as to openly taunt General Lockwood after he confronted the entire regiment in an attempt to apprehend a soldier who had stolen a turkey from a local farmer.
The unit disembarked in the Crescent City at the beginning of May, quartered briefly in the New Orleans Mint amid a hostile population, and resumed their trek up the Mississippi River soon after.
[3] Curtenius’s troops waded through a cypress swamp overnight and severed the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad near Frenier Station in conjunction with the 4th Wisconsin.
Proceeding upriver, they sickened shipboard amid logistical shortages and sweltering heat during an abortive move against Vicksburg, and withdrew to quarter at Baton Rouge.
Williams retaliated by arresting Curtenius briefly and turning the regiment out of its comfortable quarters at the Pentagon Barracks for several days, exposing the already sick soldiers to debilitating rains, heat, and humidity.
They were arrested and sent to New Orleans, leaving the regiment bereft of field officers and under the command of its fourth ranking captain, Charles Edward Clarke, on the eve of the unit's first general engagement.
One battalion, under abolitionist Captain Chauncey Bassett, fended off an entire Confederate brigade at Magnolia Cemetery long enough to keep the Union center intact.
Captain Harrison Soule's Company I, with just 44 men and officers, stymied a flanking movement by the 6th Kentucky Infantry, buying critical time for artillery to engage.
[10] The regiment quartered in a cotton press in New Orleans and recovered sufficiently by January 1863 to join Godfrey Weitzel’s operation to capture or destroy the troublesome, partially ironclad Confederate gunboat J.A.
[11] After guarding New Orleans again until March, the regiment was ordered in conjunction with fragments of other commands to destroy railroad bridges north of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, as a feint in support of a larger advance by Butler's successor, Nathaniel P. Banks.
Clark's persistent involvement in profiteering and plundering enraged Bacon, whose difficulties in accepting military subordination triggered incessant conflicts with his superiors.
[14] The 6th Michigan, brigaded under Neal Dow with the 128th New York, 15th New Hampshire, and 26th Connecticut, joined in Banks's Siege of Port Hudson and suffered 118 casualties in the ill-fated frontal assault of May 27.
The 6th Michigan Infantry's final engagement came in a night assault on June 29, in which 35 Michiganders were ordered to storm the Citadel, one of the strongest fortifications at Port Hudson.