Back at home, however, Ohioans expressed no such assurance. In the fall midterms, the Democrats picked up six Ohio seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, ensuring that the party would control fourteen of the state’s nineteen seats during the Thirty-Eighth Congress. The victors were anything but discreet. One editorial pronounced the election the first shot in a “revolution” that would spare the nation from the scourge of “abolitionism.” For his part, Samuel Sullivan Cox, who beat back a strong Republican challenger even after the state legislature gerrymandered his district, mocked his baffled opponents in verse:
Oh! Shade of the fallen; Oh! Genius sublime;
Great friend of the Negro from Africa’s clime
Alas! How low he lies;
Night suddenly came, and his day was done,
His sun was set, and another sun
Illumes the dusky skies.
Ohio’s Newark Advocate immodestly reported that the recent election results were not only “unprecedented,” but also a “hopeful sign” that the people were at last ready to wrest control of the government from “the madmen now in power.”13
Republicans refused to take stock of their humiliating defeat, dismissing the results as the predictable consequence of election laws that denied active-duty soldiers access to the ballot. In 1862, just four northern states—Ohio not among them—allowed enlisted men to exercise their suffrage rights on the front. “The elections,” the Daily Cleveland Herald pointedly objected, “would have shown a different and more desirable result had the volunteers . . . been permitted to vote.” As if to confirm the paper’s conclusion, more than a few regiments dashed off prickly editorials from the front lines. “While we are absent from our homes and from our most loyal State,” one company of Ohio infantrymen protested from their camp near Nashville, “a set of most traitorous thieves, who would rob our country of her glorious principles, have agreed to meet in our county, and almost upon our own doorsteps, to cry, ‘Vallandigham, amen,’ over the success of their black-hearted, traitorous peace and compromise ticket.” The troops swore vengeance if “peace propositions” or “compromise measures” ended the war short of Union victory. “We didn’t take an oath to fight against traitors in the South alone,” sniffed a Buckeye eyeing the works around Vicksburg in a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial. “And we will willingly shoot down traitors in the North whenever they go too far in their wicked schemes.” Drawn up in a wintry, snow-bound camp near Romney, Virginia, the soldiers of the 116th Ohio pledged that they “would cause to be remembered those cowardly grumblers and traitors, craven spirits, who, instead of aiding us in our noble purpose by their presence in the ranks, are at home aiding and abetting rebels by keeping up a fire in our rear.”14
By early December, northern overtures to the rebels disquieted even a regiment amply manned with Democrats. “We do not know what to make of the present affairs,” George Billow conceded. “Sometimes we have the prospect of being led forward to meet the foes of our country on the field of battle,” he explained, but “again we hear propositions made for a compromise and peace.” Though encouraged that the Army of the Potomac would move more aggressively under its new commander, the memorably whiskered Rhode Islander Ambrose Burnside, one Stark County soldier lamented that northerners would make a “political martyr” of Burnside’s predecessor George B. McClellan, the outspoken conservative who had moored the men in place for months. It was time, the soldier insisted, for the “lordly slaveholder” to reap the “fruits of secessionism.” “Let every city, village and hamlet be . . . brought to ruins,” he pledged, lest “the Union . . . be destroyed and our Government broken up.”15
HISTORIANS HAVE described the “seasoning” of Civil War soldiers as the acquisition of the physical immunities and psychological coping strategies necessary to negotiate both “army life and the environment of war.” But as the soldier who fretted about McClellan’s pending martyrdom made clear, “seasoning” also entailed the development of a more capacious and sophisticated understanding of war itself—one that grasped something of the conflict’s scope and complexity. The men of the 107th Ohio began to experience this noiseless though unmistakable transformation in the fall of 1862, as they swung their “picks and spades” and muscled logs onto corduroy roads. Although they had not yet fired a volley in anger, they had seen, felt, and experienced enough of the conflict to abandon their “belief that the war was but a small matter and would soon be over.” “From the face of things as they presented themselves to us,” Jacob Smith later explained of those fatiguing first weeks in Virginia, “everything seemed to indicate a long and dreadful struggle . . . Now we began to realize that it required minds stored with vast personal experience and study to form anything like definite conclusions” about the course of events. “The nearer we approached the scene of conflict,” he noted, “the darker the scene before us became.”16
While “seasoning” prepared men to endure the ordeal of war, it also amplified the chasm between the home front and the battlefield. Soldiers now spoke with an authority bestowed by their inimitable experiences, sometimes taunting civilians who, they insisted, could never really understand. “The hard life of a soldier in active service,” an observant editorial writer explained, “wears away timid conservation.” From the 107th’s new camp near Fairfax, Billow confessed his urgent desire to escort those pleading for peace “to within 20 rods of Fairfax Seminary,” where they could “overlook more than 800 graves of Union soldiers, who have laid down their lives, their all, for the liberty and freedom of their country.” “If they wish to see more,” he continued, “let them go to the Seminary itself.” Planted atop a spiny ridge only a few miles from Alexandria, the federal army had transformed the Episcopal seminary into a general hospital early in the war. Its three handsomely trimmed red brick buildings teemed with more than two thousand convalescing soldiers “of every shape and form.” “Is this all to be a sacrifice to slavery?” Billow asked bluntly. “Shall the free North yield, and the Slave-holding South triumph?17
These questions doubtless preoccupied the regiment as the number of men listed on the sick rolls soared. Chronic illness, disease, and other bacteria-related maladies menaced filthy, overcrowded, and poorly sited camps. Worse, as Augustus Vignos explained, the troops “were very much exposed,” as their tents had not yet arrived and the regiment was “scarce of fuel.” After just weeks in Virginia, the number of soldiers “sent sick” in Company C almost doubled; in Company D, the increase was nearly fivefold. Chronic diarrhea delivered Alfred Rider to a hospital near Fairfax. Surgeons nursed a fatigued Fritz Nussbaum back to health at Washington’s Carver Hospital, still thronged with soldiers badly maimed in the battle at Second Manassas that August.
Yet the sick wards might have been even more crowded had it not been for regimental surgeon Charles Hartman, who admonished “all men without exceptions” to wash their feet “before and after any march.” Those with “sore or swelled feet” were instructed to protect the skin with “a small piece of Linen or Cotton smoothly covered whit lard.” Hartman, a beloved medical doctor who had lectured in anatomy at Cleveland Medical College and served as Cuyahoga County’s coroner in the years before the war, preached the gospel of good hygiene. “A good whash of the whole upper part of the body with the coldest water obtainable,” he insisted, would thwart “many” of the respiratory ailments afflicting the regiment.18
Still, to tramp by day in remorseless rain and snow, only to shiver by night on the cold, muddy ground, billeted in a crude, canvas tent, “was anything but enviable.” Fearing they might betray their position to prowling enemy pickets, the men could not build large campfires, the oldest remedy of shivering soldiers; worse, the yowling winds snuffed out smaller fires. It was little wonder that Christian Rieker, scribbling on patriotic letterhead emblazoned with bald eagles and an arrow-studded shield of the Union, appealed to his sister for “a pair of gloves and a pair of underpants,” adding that others among the Zoar recruits were in nee
d of shirts, “stockings,” and “mittens.” Often, keeping warm and dry proved a task as demanding as any fatigue duty.19
ON DECEMBER 9, the regiment folded up its camp near Fairfax and set out for Stafford Court House, a distance of almost forty miles. “To give an adequate description of the hardships and difficulties attendant upon this march,” Jacob Smith later declared, “would be simply impossible.” Roads caked in thick muck not only arrested their progress—no more than six or eight wearisome miles per day—but equipped them with a convenient metaphor for the war itself. Hungry, bleary-eyed, and footsore, the regiment tracked through muddy woods and splashed across Wolf Run Shoals, enduring biting squalls of “hail, sleet, and snow.” George Billow’s feet became swollen with frostbite, prompting the soldier to cut away his brogans so as to apply a salve of beeswax, rosin, and tallow. Still, the men remained tethered to the threadbare hope that this march, despite its miseries, would at last deliver them to “a campaign of importance,” if not “an engagement with the enemy.”20
Pledged to the Army of the Potomac’s Eleventh Corps, the 107th Ohio had some cause for cautious optimism. Only days before, the men stood shoulder to shoulder as Franz Sigel, the stout, thirty-eight-year-old major general now in command of the so-called German Corps, inspected the regiment in a formal military review. “You’d better believe that to see Gen Seigel [sic] and his staff, followed by his body guards in full uniform & parade, is one imposing sight worth seeing,” Jacob Lichty assured his brother. “It is then that you are apt to repeat the oft repeated line, ‘I fights mit Sigel.’ ” The general, whose sense of urgency contributed to his repute as an orator, addressed the troops in his native tongue, announcing his earnest desire “to aid General Burnside in his campaign to cross the Rappahannock and defeat Lee’s army.” Though he had hardly distinguished himself on the battlefield, Burnside held him in esteem—keenly aware of his peerless popularity among German-Americans. And so the men plodded along, an orphan regiment bringing up the rear of a corps held in reserve. 21
Yet by the time the Buckeyes reached their new camp at Stafford Court House, Burnside’s ambitious plans for a winter campaign had already unraveled. Under enormous political pressure to notch a victory—and thereby quiet the growing chorus of war opponents in the North before Lincoln inked the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863—the general ordered an ill-considered frontal assault on the Confederate troops. The rebels were planted atop a sharp ridge known as Marye’s Heights, just south of Fredericksburg’s spires. It was an impregnable position. Beginning in the late morning and continuing well into the afternoon on December 13, 1862, sheets of Confederate musketry and artillery fire shredded blue-coated regiment after blue-coated regiment, littering the fields with dead and wounded men. “Column after column,” one Irishman explained, moved forward “under the murderous fire . . . in [a] vain attempt to carry those impregnable heights.” “It was a terable slaughterpen to take troops into,” one New Jerseyan shuddered. “And when I saw it, I never expected to get out alive.”22
As they approached Dumfries, the mud-daubed men first detected the sounds of battle in the distance. Fredericksburg’s fearsome echoes, together with subsequent newspaper columns—choked with the names of more than thirteen thousand killed, wounded, or missing federal soldiers—confirmed that it had been the regiment’s good fortune to miss the lopsided fight with the Army of Northern Virginia. Ohioan William Southerton shuddered as he recalled wagons “filled with the wounded” and soldiers “hobbling” to the rear. “It was sickening,” he remarked. News of the calamity was quickly translated into “every European language.”
Rather than shore up flagging morale on the northern home front, Fredericksburg instead inspired another wave of recrimination and disbelief. “Our regiments were simply butchered,” one editor grieved. The tragedy was “not simply or chiefly the loss of life,” he continued, “but the worst of it is that the sacrifice is . . . worse than in vain.” The Stark County Democrat bluntly asked how much longer the “useless, ruinous, debt-piling” war had to continue. ““If there is a worse place than Hell,” Lincoln declared as he sized up the battle’s political wreckage, “I am in it.”23
The thrashing left a considerable number of Burnside’s soldiers restless and discouraged. “When are we going to take Richmond?” an exceptionally irritable Ohio soldier asked ten days after the battle. “I want to see this infernal rebellion subdued, but it is sad to see so much suffering and loss of life and nothing accomplished.” Many other troops, however, remained hopeful; the Army of the Potomac, as one of its most discerning historians has noted, hardly “lay supine in Stafford County.” “The battle was severe,” one Massachusetts colonel conceded before insisting, “we’ll try them again.” Indeed, a surprising number of soldiers supposed the battle not a humiliating defeat, but rather a remarkable display of their own gritty resolve. “It was indeed trying on our boys,” one brigade commander mused, “but they stood it like men.” Reflecting on the recent campaign, some men trusted that elusive victories were finally around the corner. “It is said the darkest time is just before day,” one Ohioan remarked. “This is indeed a horrible war,” confessed one Union soldier on the Rappahannock front, “and my heart almost bleeds to think of aiming the deadly blow at my fellow man.” “But,” he went on, “then I think of the ‘Star of Liberty’ that is hovering just above the Horizon, almost ready to ‘sink into oblivion’ . . . and I feel it my duty to endeavor to sustain a free Government.” There was a fine line between abject gloom and renewed determination. “The spirits of a raw volunteer army are very easily depressed, especially after a reverse,” the New York Times confirmed, “and they are very easily raised.”24
WHILE AT Stafford Court House, the 107th Ohio formally joined the 25th, 55th, and 75th Ohio—along with the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry—in Nathaniel Collins McLean’s Eleventh Corps brigade. The Ohio-born McLean, not quite forty-eight years old and a newly minted brigadier general, wore an epic beard and looked every bit his part. A Harvard-educated lawyer, McLean hailed from real antislavery stock; his father, John, who sat for more than three decades on the United States Supreme Court, was best known for his eloquent dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case—the ugly decision that declared black men had no rights a white man was bound to respect. In May 1860 Nathaniel traveled to the Republican nominating convention in Chicago, where he hoped that his father might emerge as the nominee. Elbowing his way through the crowds of influence peddlers (“it is almost impossible to move about in the hall, without tearing off the buttons from your coat”), McLean impatiently tracked the proceedings. “The friends of Seward are moving heaven and earth for his nomination,” he sighed, despairing at the senator’s prospects in a general election. Nor did he deem Lincoln a worthwhile alternative. “Lincoln is I believe entirely honest and a very clever fellow,” McLean confided, “with talent enough for many places, yet totally unfit in administrative capacity for President.” The convention goers, of course, thought otherwise. Even though his father would not ride a dark horse to the Executive Mansion, McLean at least remained hopeful that the Republicans would prevent another slaveholder from taking up residence there.25
When the war broke out, Nathaniel believed that he was waging an abolition crusade. McLean received a colonel’s commission in September 1861; the following summer, he led the 75th Ohio Volunteers into battle at Cross Keys in the Shenandoah Valley. While sometimes overly prudent, he proved a capable officer. Promoted to command a brigade in the Army of Virginia just weeks later, his men made an impressive stand atop Chinn Ridge during the battle of Second Bull Run. To a man, the 107th professed their faith in his leadership.26
Though the 25th, 55th, and 75th Ohio had “seen the elephant” in western Virginia, the men of the 17th Connecticut—like those of the 107th—eagerly awaited their first rendezvous with the enemy. Brimming with frustration, the sons of Bridgeport and New Canaan, Newtown and Danbury passed the first weeks of their enlistment
s marking time at Fort Marshall, “just east of Baltimore.” After a successful petition from their colonel, the elegant New Englanders, trimmed with “white gloves” and “collars,” received instructions to join Sigel in November. Happy to leave the tedious and tiresome duties of trench life behind, the men set out for Stafford Court House. Their euphoria, however, would be short-lived. Tramping over the old Bull Run battlefields, littered with discarded canteens, disabled cannon, and human debris, the Nutmeggers gaped at the “marks of a hard fought battle.” “One sight that made a lasting impression on me,” one lieutenant wrote, “was a man’s leg hanging in a bush, all withered and black.” One soldier tripped over a skull, still bearing “a fine set of teeth,” upon which a passerby mounted the ghoulish taunt: “ ‘Ruling Passion Strong in Death.’ ” “Manassas,” still another veteran reflected, “was a revelation to us.”27
In late December, after being advised that the Army of the Potomac would more than likely remain moored in place “for some time,” the troops threw up temporary quarters. “In the course of a day,” Jacob Smith claimed, the regiment erected structures that would afford partial shelter from the biting winds that squalled across Virginia. Here they would remain for the next five weeks. “Every encampment has been transformed from a dreary, fever breeding collection of shelter-less tents, into a mud walled village,” one writer crowed, “and the curling smoke leaps and twists and wriggles from countless chimneys into a pillar of cloud, beckoning to the cheery fires that glow beneath.”28
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