A THOUSAND
MAY FALL
Life, Death, and Survival
in the Union Army
BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN
For My Dad
and
For the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (1862–1865)
You will not fear the terror
of night, nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
—Psalm 91
CONTENTS
Prologue
CHAPTER 1. “We Feel It Our Duty”
August and September 1862
CHAPTER 2. “To Crush Out the . . . Ungodly Rebellion”
October to December 1862
CHAPTER 3. “Stop All Firing in the Rear of Us”
January to April 1863
CHAPTER 4. “Completely and Scientifically Flanked”
April to May 1863
CHAPTER 5. “Heaping Upon Us . . . Ignominy and Shame”
May to July 1863
CHAPTER 6. “All That Mortal[s] Could Do”
July to August 1863
CHAPTER 7. “We Are Not Cowards”
August 1863 to February 1864
CHAPTER 8. “So Many Hardships”
February 1864 to July 1865
CHAPTER 9. “The Feelings of a Soldier”
July 1865 and Beyond
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Note
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A THOUSAND
MAY FALL
Ohio in the Civil War
PROLOGUE
FROM THEIR POSITION on the campus of the Adams County Almshouse—a trio of buildings that sat in a neat row along Gettysburg’s northern edge—the Ohioans surveyed the wide, flat plain that extended between the Carlisle Road and the Harrisburg Pike. To the west, a sequence of sturdy ridges creased the ground, and an unfinished railroad trace gashed into the earth. Stone fences and stands of timber supplied the Union soldiers deployed there with a measure of protection; units huddled behind fence rails, beneath the crown of Oak Ridge, and in the fingers of the McPherson’s Woods. But out here north of town there was no cover, no shelter, no refuge to be found. As they looked to their front on this warm July afternoon, the men spied only the slight earthen knob that locals called Blocher’s Knoll. War makes a habit of promoting otherwise unremarkable ripples in the ground to sudden significance, and in that respect, this day would be no different. Atop the forlorn rise, a precocious division commander unlimbered four Napoleon guns, shook out a skirmish line, and planted a tiny brigade—stretching the thin blue ribbon coiled around Gettysburg just about as far as it would stretch.
Shot and shell soon winged overhead—the first portent of enemy soldiers massing for an assault. After what seemed a lifetime, the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was nodded toward the knoll to brace the beleaguered Union line. They advanced with heavy steps and knotted throats, some inserting one last cheekful of tobacco. To be sure, such a daunting errand might have given any troops pause. But it was a distinct dread that flooded the Ohioans. Exactly two months before, at the battle of Chancellorsville, the men had been among the first troops crushed under the weight of “Stonewall” Jackson’s flank attack—a daring maneuver that delivered twenty-six thousand rebels to a federal line that derelict commanders had left dangling dangerously in the air. In mere minutes, Jackson’s howling rebels added more than half of the regiment to the Civil War’s ever-lengthening register of killed, wounded, missing, and captured. Now, on this first July afternoon of the war’s third summer—once more deployed on the right flank of a threadbare Union line—it seemed as though the past was repeating itself.1
The prospect of still more death and suffering unnerved the men, but no more than the likelihood of another embarrassing defeat. For the last six weeks, the northern press had defamed the Ohioans and their comrades in the Army of the Potomac’s Eleventh Corps as lily-livered cowards, consuming column inches with mocking editorials. A thrashing as thorough as the one the Yankee army took at Chancellorsville demanded a scapegoat, and hasty correspondents found one in the regiments that extended the federal line along the Orange Turnpike. “Threats, entreaties, and orders of commanders,” the Daily National Intelligencer harrumphed from Washington, D.C., “were of no avail . . . Thousands of these cowards threw down their guns and soon streamed down the road toward headquarters.” Even their comrades within the army joined in the insults. “Every man [in the Eleventh Corps],” one federal captain indignantly snorted, “ought to be hauled off the face of the Earth.”2
With some clever wordsmithing, other Union regiments might have transformed that disastrous rout into a defiant stand, marveling at their ability to squeeze off even one round from such a hopeless position. They might have turned for support to Henry Lee Scott’s Military Dictionary, the well-thumbed soldier’s primer that insisted there were “no troops with sufficient sang-froid and self-possession” to resist the “ball and grape” of a flank attack. But the 107th Ohio failed in that effort. As an ethnically German regiment amply stocked with immigrant soldiers—nearly seven in ten were foreign-born—its men battled ethnic stereotypes no less than the rebels. “You have no concept at all,” one soldier protested, “how deep Know Nothingism is rooted in all layers of American society.” Indeed, nativism was so woven into the fabric of Civil War America that an official field manual advised Union medical officers to regard all German soldiers as potential malingerers. “It has happened me to observe a larger number feigning and fewer wounded amongst the Germans than the Americans or Irish,” its author wrote. “I say this whilst remembering the devotion of the German race to national unity and liberty, and their attachment to their adopted country; but they love ease and money not less—many of them more.”3
So it was that on a battlefield teeming with ten thousand men, the 107th Ohio felt uniquely abandoned—and entirely alone.
MUSKETRY SMOKE lazed on the horizon as Augustus Vignos’s company hastened toward the knoll. All his life, the twenty-four-year-old captain had longed to become a soldier. As a youngster in Louisville, Ohio, a small farming community tucked in the state’s northeastern corner, he had drilled a company of neighborhood boys armed with wooden muskets on the square anchored by his father’s humming tavern and livery stable. His father’s protests prevented him from enlisting when the war broke out in April 1861, but nothing—not even his “weak” vision, the consequence of a risky childhood operation to correct crossed eyes—could keep him from the war for very long. That September, Augustus mustered into Company I of the 19th Ohio Volunteer Infantry as a musician. Thickly mustached and sporting a tuft of fringe beneath his lip, he looked every bit the part. After several weeks of training at Camp Dennison, perched in the leafy hills north of Cincinnati, his regiment was packed off to Kentucky for an unforgiving winter. Those who survived were rewarded only with a tiresome, foot-blistering march into Tennessee. War makes a habit of that, too. By April 6, 1862, when he climbed aboard an overcrowded river steamer bound for Pittsburg Landing, his fife was no longer chirping martial tunes.4
The boat carried Augustus and his comrades through a drenching rain, but delivered them to a dismal scene. Dead bodies littered the ground as far as the eye could see. Twisted and swollen, they betrayed the calamity that had been visited upon Grant’s army on the first day at Shiloh. Augustus hooked through the human debris, reaching after dark the place where his regiment would rest upon arms, wring out their socks
, and await the renewal of battle. They went in at five o’clock the next morning, halting at the edge of a field, holding the right of their brigade. An enemy battery nestled in the woods opposite belched an impersonal greeting; from the brambles that knotted the surrounding acres came the crackle of small-arms fire. Though uncovered and outgunned for much of the day, the men stood “like soldiers.” It was the same tale up and down the federal lines that day.5
Reveling in Grant’s uncanny ability to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat, northern newspapers failed to fully convey the human agonies of Shiloh and its aftermath. In fact, as northerners exulted over the headlines, typhoid fever delivered Augustus to a congested army hospital. (Bivouacking in raw mud for more than a week after fighting a battle, as it turned out, was hardly conducive to good health.) By an odd quirk of fate, back in Louisville—more than six hundred miles away—the same disease had afflicted his father. Augustus slowly regained his strength, but by the time he returned to Ohio bearing a medical discharge, his father had already succumbed to the illness. Whether at the front or at home, it seemed that Augustus Vignos could not escape the pall of death.
The Shiloh veteran was still recovering—from his own grief no less than the typhoid—when Seraphim Meyer called on him late that summer. The prominent lawyer from nearby Canton had been tapped as the colonel of a new volunteer infantry regiment, at once a reward for his fidelity to the Democratic Party and an opportunity to appeal to northeastern Ohio’s large ethnically German population. Meyer had no military experience, and he needed recruits. Augustus Vignos could supply both. His late father’s handsome brick tavern still throbbed with activity, and he “knew all the roads and trails” and most of the travelers “within a radius of forty miles.” Already restless and eager for another chance at soldiering, Vignos went to work. By September, he had recruited more than seventy men for Company H of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.6
BACK IN GETTYSBURG, as Captain Vignos steadied his men from Stark County atop Blocher’s Knoll, Second Lieutenant George Billow braced neighboring Company I for the fight. Born in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1833, Billow was eleven when he emigrated to the United States with his parents and seven siblings. They formed the tail end of the Auswanderung, the migration of self-sufficient farmers, shop owners, and artisans—according to one historian, “people who had something to lose, and who were losing it”—across the Atlantic. Buoyant reports from the growing population of ethnically German immigrants in the United States (the German population would swell to some 1.3 million by the eve of the Civil War) helped to revive dreams dashed by the soaring land prices and dwindling harvests at home. While later waves of German immigration delivered prominent political refugees and veterans of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 to American shores, the Auswanderer embarked for the United States not “to build something new,” but to “conserve something old.”7
For the Billows, that “something old” was sowing their own land and reaping their own harvests. They left Hesse-Darmstadt (“notwithstanding the noble air of its spacious mansions,” the English novelist Frances Trollope remarked, it appeared to be “a city whose glory has passed away”) for a farm near Sandusky, Ohio, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. George tilled the fields until the age of seventeen, when he was apprenticed to wagoner Ambrose Ochs—himself a recent German immigrant—in nearby Fremont. The “low wages and long days,” as one carriage maker remembered, made most boys “long for the time when [their] apprentice days would be over.” After perfecting his craft in Cleveland, he trekked south, along the towpath of the Ohio & Erie Canal, to Akron; there, he rived hickory spokes for two buggy manufacturers and started a family. By 1860, he had struck out on his own, establishing a profitable wagon-making concern.8
Not unlike Augustus Vignos, George Billow felt called to serve as war rent the nation. “Inspired by a stern sense of loyalty,” the Republican enlisted as a private in the 107th Ohio on August 7, 1862. His unruly hair notwithstanding, Billow cut a soldierly profile with his square jaw and prominent nose. Together with fellow Akronites Richard Feederle and William Bechtel, he manned a recruiting office in Adam Krohle’s leather goods store at the foot of Howard Street. “As they are all active, energetic, and patriotic,” the Summit County Beacon observed, “we doubt not they will speedily fill up a company, in this vicinity, for that splendid regiment.”9
Fresh recruits gather at the corner of Howard and Market Streets in Akron during the Civil War. Samuel Lane Collection, Summit Memory
The editor was prescient, for scores of German-speaking immigrants seized the opportunity “to enter the service of their adopted country in a regiment composed of their own countrymen” over the next three weeks. Those men joined the nearly two hundred thousand German immigrants who donned federal blue during the Civil War. Though accounting for no more than five percent of the U.S. population, German-Americans constituted more than ten percent of the Union armies. Today, even devoted students of Civil War history maintain only the dimmest memories of their service. Yet German immigrants proved—beyond even the fabled Irish, the fighting sons of Erin—to be the “most overrepresented” cohort among Lincoln’s legions. This was especially the case across the Midwest, which had experienced a surge in German immigration in the decade prior to the war. In part, the blistering condemnation of the Germans after Chancellorsville serves as an index of their size and visibility as a cohort in the Union army.10
Most German immigrants fought in native-born regiments, or else in “mixed” outfits that fielded three to five companies of foreign-born volunteers. But with nearly seventy percent of the men on its muster rolls non-native, the 107th Ohio numbered itself among just thirty Union regiments deemed “ethnically German”—the fifth of six mustered from the Buckeye State. Among the thirty-five hundred regiments that fought in the Union armies, it was at once ordinary and unique. Its ranks weathered the human ordeal of war even as language, identity, and popular perceptions of their loyalties set them apart. They were men betwixt and between, men who belonged but did not.11
Some historians have supposed that German regiments “were little more than an extension of traditional German associations and clubs,” and that “the organizing of German regiments had little if anything to do with the lofty goals of preserving the Union or the abolition of slavery.” Recovering fewer “expressions of patriotism” among ethnically German soldiers, these scholars conclude that many “did not know ‘what they were fighting for’—aside from the pay, their own survival, and perhaps vague hopes of recognition and advancement in American society.” Doubtless this was the case for many ethnic soldiers (including the not insignificant number drawn from Turnverein, German clubs that promoted physical vigor and masculine culture through gymnastics). But we should pause before ascribing “more mundane goals” or merely mercenary motives to immigrant soldiers. When the men of the 107th Ohio foregrounded their suffering and rehearsed their sacrifices, they revealed more about their culture than their ideological commitments.12
IT WOULD BE difficult to imagine a worse position than the one the 107th Ohio had been ordered to assume in Gettysburg that afternoon. After spilling onto Blocher’s Knoll, they formed a line that faced north and east, holding the tip of a sharp salient that would soon invite a fierce enemy musketry fire. Holding the line in Company A were two sons of Navarre, a tiny collection of grist mills and dry goods stores tucked in a curl of the Tuscarawas River—one of many villages that owed its existence to the Ohio & Erie Canal. The canal measured time in Navarre, and both Alfred Rider and William Siffert were reared on romanticized tales of the days before the “artificial river,” which exported bushels of wheat and delivered the fires of spiritual reform. Even decades after the war, local histories wrote elegiacally of Alfred’s father, Jacob, the “good pioneer” and strapping yeoman farmer who, axe in hand, helped to plant a new settlement in “the wilderness.” Similar notice was paid to William’s father, Joseph, a farmer and miller whose wagon first trun
dled to Stark County within a decade of Ohio’s statehood.13
The Riders were among the most prominent families in Navarre. Jacob made a comfortable living manufacturing harnesses and saddles; throughout the 1850s, the outspoken Democrat was also elected to several terms as a township trustee. In 1860, however, “Father Rider” laid aside partisan fidelities and cast his ballot for Abraham Lincoln and the Republican ticket. The demands of southern Democrats at the party’s convention in Charleston—including calls for a federal slave code, a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in perpetuity, and the reopening of the transatlantic slave trade—left him “thoroughly disgusted.” While his personal feelings about African-Americans are irretrievable—in the nineteenth century, opposition to slavery hardly implied a ready embrace of racial equality—he could not abide the thought that the Union might be sacrificed to the self-interest of “aristocratic” slaveholders.14
Rider was not unique among Ohio’s ethnically German population. Throughout the 1850s, violence, aggressiveness, and political discord prompted more than a few northerners to abandon the studied neglect with which they had regarded slavery during the age of the early republic. Rejecting the old consensus view that chattel slavery was a “necessary evil,” white southern slaveholders—reaping the boggling windfalls of the cotton boom, and alarmed by a new, more vocal abolitionism—demonstrated that they had enough vigor, creativity, and determination to plant their prized institution anywhere. Slave renditions and gag rules, ballot box swindles and activist court decisions conspired to persuade many northerners that the “Slave Power” posed a real threat—not only to the Union, but to the very idea of self-government. The new Republican Party quickly tallied support from Whig and Democratic voters whose old parties collapsed under the weight of events. “Between 1856 and 1860,” one historian contends, many “German working people” rallied to the Republican banner. Appeals to the promise of “free labor” and republican liberty were persuasive enough to overcome both the new party’s nativism and the “distance” some wary immigrants kept from antislavery crusaders. In Cleveland, for instance, “nearly half” of the city’s German population cast ballots for Lincoln. The returns were still more impressive in Cincinnati, where the ethnic wards cushioned Republican margins at the polls.15
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