A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  To fill in the gaps, Smith mined the 128 volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, published by the War Department, and made ample use of wartime letters and diaries, copies of which his comrades dutifully supplied. Sifting through conflicting testimony was no simple chore. “In writing a history of this kind,” Smith explained, “there is a material difference in many respects, between the movements and work accomplished by a troop or regiment of soldiers, [and] that of a single individual belonging to that organization.”35

  The enormous intellectual challenge aside, Smith relished the opportunity “to wander back through the mazes of memory.” He understood implicitly the importance of his work. The war had passed into history not as a wrenching, liminal experience, but instead as a confident, hushed epic. Cloying romances, brawny monuments, and misty-eyed reunions effaced the confusion and doubt of lived realities. He knew that his efforts would ensure that “something about the toils, dangers, labor and hardships” endured by his comrades would find its way into print.36

  This book shares Smith’s aim. Tracking a single regiment shifts our angle of vision, allowing us to measure the Civil War on a more intimate, human scale. By getting onto the ground, we can distinguish more clearly just what the conflict demanded of the generation that fought it. What follows is a messy tale of pride and pain, courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal, life and death—a narrative that embraces the war’s complexities, ponders its contingencies, and challenges its chronologies. It provides, in the end, a more inclusive and unflinching account of how the Union was saved—and by whom.

  CHAPTER 1

  “WE FEEL IT OUR DUTY”

  August and September 1862

  THE REPORT of a cannon interrupted an otherwise quiet summer evening in Cleveland’s Public Square on July 31, 1862. The blast heralded not another battle, but rather the commencement of a recruitment rally for a new, three-year infantry regiment to be raised from the Buckeye State. That evening, just off the spacious, amply shaded square, hundreds crowded into National Hall, the handsome four-story building where, almost a decade before, Phineas Taylor Barnum, “as attractive as his circus,” rehearsed “the evils of intemperance.” More recently, in the frenzied wake of the rebel attack on Fort Sumter, “the colored people of Cleveland” had thronged the civic forum, determining to “organize military companies to assist in putting down the rebellion.” Ohio’s then-governor, William Dennison, had rejected their offer before really considering it, and so it was with no small irony that this latest assembly gaveled to order. Earlier that day, the telegraphs at the offices of the Daily Cleveland Leader impatiently clicked with reports that the rebels were reinforcing the maze of works they had coiled around Richmond—news that raised concerns about federal manpower levels. “Only by active and rapid enlistments” could a dreaded draft be avoided. “The ranks must be filled,” the paper insisted, “and that speedily.”1

  The editorial hardly meant to imply that Ohioans wanted for voluntarism. Already, the nation’s third most populous state (only New York and neighboring Pennsylvania boasted more residents) had outfitted some one hundred infantry regiments, thirteen independent batteries, and six cavalry outfits for Lincoln’s armies. The state had exceeded its quota in each of the five calls for troops made since the war began—meeting the first demand within days. By July 1862, it had supplied nearly 155,000 able-bodied men to the Union war effort. But Ohio’s supply of manpower was not limitless. Indeed, in some respects, it was a marvel that Ohio had placed itself on a war footing at all. The state’s antebellum militia had existed only on paper, and though Columbus boasted a handsome new arsenal building with thick, masonry walls, its prized holdings amounted to “a few boxes of smooth-bore muskets” and “a few brass six-pounder fieldpieces, worn out from firing salutes.”2

  Recruitment was further complicated by Ohio’s schizophrenic politics. Tucked in the state’s northeastern corner and anchored by Cleveland, the Western Reserve—a neat grid of steepled town greens that paid homage to New England—was a citadel of abolitionism and reliably Republican. The abolitionist John Brown, whose raid on the federal armory and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, had pushed the nation to the precipice of war, passed his formative years there. Not surprisingly, Republicans also performed well in areas where the Whigs, their ideological forebears, had promoted industrial growth and commercial development. The canals that gouged into the earth, together with the web of macadamized roads that spiraled in every direction, endured as monuments to the promise of “free labor.” But elsewhere—especially in the state’s rural counties and along the Ohio River—the Democrats were carried to victory by the votes of racist whites and native-born southerners.3

  When the war broke out, many Ohioans set aside their political differences and rallied to the flag; that accord, however, failed to survive the war’s first trying summer. When the quick victory that some Ohioans anticipated proved stubbornly elusive, doubt yielded to despair, and despair to outright defeatism. Then, in the spring of 1862, Ohio regiments suffered devastating losses in the Shenandoah Valley and—as Augustus Vignos could attest—at Shiloh. “Thousands of our people now regard with dampened spirit and sad silence the condition of our country,” lamented Ohio congressman Samuel Sullivan Cox, an outspoken critic of President Lincoln, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Across the state, Democratic newspapers sighed as they tallied the war’s multiplying costs.4

  The most intractable opponents of the war, like Cox, became known as Copperheads. Republicans felt the name of a venomous snake fitting for men treacherous and disloyal, but the Copperheads—in a display of their brazen effrontery—literally wore the label as a badge of honor, taunting their detractors by fixing copper cents to their lapels. True to their old Jacksonian moorings, the Copperheads were jealously protective of local self-rule and adhered to a strict constructionism. As the war for the Union demanded ever more of men, the federal treasury, and the Constitution, they sharpened their initial skepticism about the conflict into a barbed critique of the Lincoln administration. The confiscation acts and a steady drumbeat of emancipation measures enacted by the Republican Congress in the early months of the war, however, lent a real coherence and new sense of urgency to their arguments. After all, the tips of the Copperheads’ arrows were poisoned with a virulent white supremacism. “If slavery is bad,” Cox supposed, “an unrestrained black population, only double what we now have, partly subservient, partly slothful, partly criminal, and all disadvantageous and ruinous, will be far worse.” Such rhetoric threatened to sabotage enlistment efforts. In Canton, a bespectacled former congressman named Edson Baldwin Olds did his best to discourage would-be volunteers.5

  Not all Democrats were Copperheads, though Republicans often made it seem that way, distinguishing between treason and loyalty in a blizzard of broadsides and editorials. (“When you compromise with treason,” one Republican explained to a Cleveland assembly in late July, “you become traitors.”) In fact, William Dennison’s successor as governor, the newly inaugurated David Tod, a portly Youngstown railroad executive and coal industry attorney who had served three presidents as the U.S. minister to Brazil, was a War Democrat. Like others of his political stripe, Tod attempted to track between Republican radicalism and Democratic defeatism. He emerged as an early if unlikely advocate of prosecuting the war as vigorously as possible, buoyed by the expectation that a “hard” war might crush out the southern rebellion before northern radicals turned it into a revolution.6

  Such a vision of the war demanded well-stocked armies, and this work fell squarely on the governor’s shoulders. During the Civil War, the federal government left to individual states the task of raising and recruiting, arming and provisioning, drilling and coordinating regiments. Once readied for the front, these locally harvested outfits were packed, three to five at a time, into larger bodies called brigades. Brigades were then collected into divisions, with the divisions assembled into army corps. Commanded b
y a colonel and comprising one thousand men (ten companies of one hundred men each), the regiment was the essential element of a Civil War army. Men developed fanatical loyalty to their units; indeed, the bonds of comradeship were “almost mystical,” sustaining the rank and file through trials and hardships on and off the battlefield. “More than any other unit,” writes one historian, the regiment “was a self-aware community.”7

  Ethnic regiments, or outfits that derived more than half their strength from non-native volunteers, were especially self-aware. By the summer of 1862, Ohio had already fielded four ethnically German units. In fact, the 9th Ohio Volunteers, a German outfit that sprang from Cincinnati’s ethnic wards, was the state’s very first three-year infantry regiment. Rallying at the Turner Hall, it mustered into service within days of Fort Sumter. “Although the blessings of our free institutions have been enjoyed longer by native-born than by adopted citizens,” the men declared in an index of their steely resolve, “the adopted shall rise all in a body, united to defend the Union and protect the Star-Spangled Banner.” Motivated by the success of the 9th, three more ethnically German regiments from the Buckeye State—the 28th, 37th, and 106th Ohio—soon slung cartridge boxes over their shoulders and trudged dutifully to the front.8

  Shared language, heritage, and culture proved a powerful adhesive for German regiments. Each of Ohio’s German regiments likewise brimmed with recruits who were eager to fight mit Franz Sigel, the revolutionary émigré turned Union major general. Revered for his “passionate devotion” to the democratic revolutions that pulsed through Europe in 1848—the failed crusade that drove him into exile, first in Switzerland, later in England, and ultimately in the United States—Sigel commanded the almost fanatical devotion of German immigrants. Sigel kept the promise of radical social equality alive. His very presence persuaded German-Americans that even in these turbulent times, the United States was the “last best hope of Earth.” That men continued to find him inspiring was a tribute to their idealism, for apart from his able choreography of the federal artillery at Pea Ridge that March, Sigel’s record on the battlefield was exceptionally bleak.9

  A veteran of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848, Franz Sigel inspired legions of German immigrants—including some volunteers for the 107th Ohio—to shoulder muskets in defense of the Union. Library of Congress

  Hoping to harness some of that idealism, Tod authorized the formation of still another ethnically German unit in the summer of 1862. Ohio adjutant general Charles Hill affixed his looping signature to “General Order No. 21,” which called for the new unit to be stocked with men from “that part of the state lying north of the National Road.” Headquartered in Cleveland, the “German Citizens’ Military Committee” would coordinate the ambitious recruiting effort, canvassing ten northeastern counties for volunteers. In a circular widely reprinted in local newspapers, the committee’s secretary, Charles Arnold, saluted the honor and bravery of Germans who had already donned Union blue, electrifying memories of their wartime exploits—from the streets of St. Louis, where immigrant soldiers twisted through riotous mobs after bagging a secessionist militia, to the Shenandoah Valley, where they confronted the legend of “Stonewall” Jackson. “Your country again calls upon you,” Arnold implored, “to rush to the rescue of your gallant comrades and countrymen already in the field.” To this patriotic appeal, the committee added the temptation of “one month’s pay in advance,” promising the first wave of enlistees an additional $100 bounty.10

  NATIONAL HALL was already jammed when fifty-one-year-old Edward Hessenmueller took the stage at the recruitment rally. Stocky, short-statured, and fringed with a gnome-like beard, the immigrant served as Cleveland’s justice of the peace and published its first German-language newspaper. Though “an ardent, consistent Democrat in politics,” he had rallied to the Union cause. Hessenmueller had perhaps hinted at that stance before the war when, only a few months into his term as federal commissioner for northern Ohio, he abruptly resigned, citing his belief that the Fugitive Slave Act was “morally wrong.”11

  Hessenmueller called the meeting to order and introduced Seraphim Meyer, the man Governor Tod had tapped to lead the new regiment. Flooded with emotion and possessing a freshly inked colonel’s commission, Meyer was exhausted, having delivered a twilight lecture to a war meeting in Canton—some sixty miles south of Cleveland—the previous evening. Still, his “short and patriotic” remarks had an electric effect on the crowd. No one recorded his words that evening, but the once dutiful Democrat likely touted his willingness to sunder “all party ties” and take a “stand for the Union.” It was that resolve—not any previous military experience—that recommended him for the colonelcy.

  Born in 1815 in Bourbach-le-Bas, a steepled hamlet tucked in the rugged folds of northeastern France, the eighth and final child of Jacob and Maria Anna Meyer immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of twelve. They settled in the unassuming village of Kendal, Ohio, in 1828, the same year that mule teams began tugging barges along the nearby Ohio & Erie Canal. The Meyers quickly relocated to Canton, then a mostly uninspiring town about a dozen miles east of the canal bed (not until Cornelius Aultman opened his reaper manufactory within its limits on the eve of the war would the city even hint at its later eminence).12

  A diligent student fluent in three languages, Meyer was admitted to the bar and began practicing law at twenty-three. Soon the gifted attorney began using the oratorical skills he had honed before juries on the political stump. In 1844, at a German “mass meeting” in Massillon, Meyer enthralled the crowd with his roast of the perennial Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay—a “powerful address” that exceeded an hour. Four years later, in a telling measure of his effectiveness, the Ohio Repository fashioned him “the demagogue stumper,” chiding Meyer for peddling “falsehoods” in an effort to rally immigrants behind Lewis Cass. (Although the rotund Michigander lost the election, he edged Zachary Taylor in Ohio.) Meyer’s political star only continued to climb. As early as the mid-1850s, Democrats included him on lists of “aspirants for the Senate.” And with top billing on the Ohio Democratic ticket, Meyer stood ready, in the event of a Douglas win, to cast one of the state’s twenty-three electoral votes for the “Little Giant” in 1860.13

  Meyer, of course, would not have the opportunity to cast that vote. Republican Abraham Lincoln carried Ohio (together with seventeen other states) and triumphed over a crowded general election field to win the presidency. Predicting that the election of a “Black Republican” would yield to race war, and further persuaded of the political impotence they long dreaded, southerners ratified secession ordnances and commenced a treasonous rebellion on behalf of chattel slavery and white supremacy. Hostilities, however, did not begin until the wee hours of April 12, 1861, when more than forty rebel mortars trained their fire on Fort Sumter, the squat pentagon of brick and stone that stood sentinel over Charleston harbor. If at first many clung to the forlorn hope that the news from South Carolina was a hoax, its confirmation sent an epidemic of war fever throughout the northern states. Volunteers rushed to respond to the president’s call for seventy-five thousand troops. “Where is the paltry scoundrel who dares to talk of party when our flag is insulted?” one speaker demanded to know at a pro-Union demonstration in Canton.14

  It was with the zealotry of a convert that Seraphim Meyer asked the same question. Following the lead of Stephen A. Douglas, he rallied to the cause of the Union: “the duty that we owe to ourselves, to our posterity, and to the friends of constitutional liberty and self-government throughout the world.” In mid-May, Meyer took the stage at a war meeting in Stark County, professing with trademark vim his “undisguised love of Union, hatred of traitors,” and “hope and longing for speedy and ample retribution.” He said nothing about slavery but, encouraged by an earsplitting ovation from his old political foes, censured ex-president James Buchanan for failing to respond decisively when an impetuous troop of Citadel cadets opened fire on the Star of
the West, the civilian steamer that made an attempt to resupply the Charleston garrison in January.

  While the oration earned predictably glowing reviews from Republicans, the scorned Stark County Democrat did its best to defang Meyer. Recalling his support for a “peaceable separation” of states, as well as his advice to fellow Democrats, who needed “to organize and arm themselves for self defence against abolition tyranny and mobocracy,” the paper regarded Meyer as a craven political opportunist. “In this country it is every man’s right to change his mind,” the Democrat’s editor Archibald McGregor irreverently concluded. “We sincerely hope Mr. Meyer . . . is happy in the embrace of those who have always heretofore denounced him as ‘a heartless Jesuit.’ ”15

  Meyer was remarkably unfazed. Throughout the spring, as a member of the Military Committee of Stark County, he crisscrossed Ohio’s Seventeenth Congressional District to recruit fresh volunteers. Among those who responded to Meyer’s patriotic appeals were three of his sons, Turenne, Marcus, and Edward, as well as a son-in-law, John Lang. “We doubt if the State of Ohio contains a man who has placed upon the altar of his country an offering of such profound significance,” the Stark County Republican hyped. A month before the armies engaged each other in a major battle, with some local Democrats insisting piously that the war promised only “ruin and bankruptcy,” the prosecutor who temporarily set aside his Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Block law practice had understandably earned the affection of the Republican. In late June, the paper yielded several columns to a letter from Turenne, who offered a stirring account of his activities in western Virginia. Near Philippi, several companies of his 14th Ohio Volunteers exchanged fire with the enemy, chased the rebels through the woods, and then plundered their wagons and supply trains. “They broke and ran in every conceivable direction,” the regiment’s historian exulted decades later.16