A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  A PANICKED PACK of deer bounded from the woods just before six o’clock. It proved a sort of peculiar omen, for soon thereafter, “like a crash of thunder from the clear sky,” a perfect storm of lead raked the Eleventh Corps line. “Fall in!” men screamed, their voices competing with the deadly trill of bullets. “Fall in!” For many decades, the men of the 107th Ohio would look back and point to this single, surreal second as the moment their lives changed forever.17

  Barnet Steiner was prowling along the picket line when the rebels opened fire. With “wild shrieks and demonic yells,” the gray-clad soldiers, advancing in their “thick, close columns,” rushed “headlong” toward the federal position: a “perfect avalanche of men.” Instinctively, the federal pickets scrambled for the rear. Whatever warnings were sent up that afternoon, nothing could have prepared the Eleventh Corps for the brute force of the attack. “The first note of warning that the shock had come,” one Ohioan remarked, “was the shock itself.” In reserve with his comrades in the 25th Ohio, Thomas Evans was warming a ration of beef when, “all at once,” a “terrible musketry opened.” “We were ordered in line of battle in a minute,” he remembered. “Imagine our dilemma.”18

  Ensconced in their field works, the men of the 107th Ohio “could not see the enemy” at first. Bewildered, they necessarily held their fire as they dodged both “fleeing” pickets and the eager artillery shells exploding among them. The so-called “trenches,” Adjutant Peter F. Young scowled, “were no protection” at all. These were among the longest and most anxious minutes of their lives. “Believe me when I tell you that I kept my eyes peeled,” assured Lieutenant Fernando Suhrer, the twenty-three-year-old who assumed command of Company B just weeks before. He ducked at least three rebel projectiles that “would have caused [him] to bite the dust if [he] remained firm.”19

  As the rebels advanced “nearer and nearer,” the “noise” of battle “grew truly terrific.” Just to the west, the Confederates made relatively quick work of turning Colonel Leopold von Gilsa’s line. “I had no regiment to cover my right flank,” the Prussian army veteran protested in his official report, nor “reserves to drive back the enemy with the bayonet.” Still, his New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians held on long enough to squeeze their triggers three times; even the two artillery pieces that supported von Gilsa’s men from their perch on the Orange Turnpike belched several rounds into the rebel lines before limbering up and breaking for the rear, scrambling “in full flight.” As one of the battle’s earliest chroniclers concluded, those men “could not have fought or attempted to fight much longer than [they] did.”20

  The collapse of von Gilsa’s regiments, however, subjected the Ohioans to an even more intense flanking fire. “The bullets,” Christian Rieker marveled, “just whistled by my head like a real hailstorm.” “Many fell on my right and on my left,” the Zoar native added, “yet [the battle] did not harm me in the least.” That anyone survived the storm of leaden slugs the rebels sent “whizzing through the ranks” was, in the estimation of First Lieutenant Hamilton Starkweather, a “miracle” exceeding “the limits of human comprehension.” It seemed “as if the population of the lower regions were turned loose to devour [our men] upon the spot,” he gasped.

  The Battle for the Orange Turnpike at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863

  The 107th Ohio frantically “attempted to change front,” but without success. On their right, the 55th Ohio “held for two volleys” before folding up like a jackknife; one of its soldiers conceded that the episode at the Hatch House “was the most trying experience the command ever endured.” “We were completely and scientifically flanked,” one emotional private poured out in a letter to his hometown newspaper. “To have longer held our position would have been suicidal madness, and we were compelled to give way.”

  Now totally exposed to the enemy, the 107th Ohio “stood . . . as long as a stand could be made.” So eager were some soldiers to fire one more round into the enemy that, at great personal risk—their own supplies of ammunition dwindling—they knelt down to scavenge the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded. “The 107th Ohio and 17th Connecticut made a brave stand,” assured one of Thomas Evans’s comrades in the 25th Ohio (as if to confirm the emphatic accounts later handed down by those regiments). “I am sure no Brigade ever stood more faithfully in the very jaws of death.” Yet even this stubborn display could not overcome the enemy’s superior numbers; the battle quickly “assumed the character and appearance of a massacre.” Within “ten minutes,” reported one Ohioan, “the ground was literally covered with the dead and dying.” “Every inch of space,” Justin Keeler shuddered, “was crowded with wounded.” McLean’s line stampeded for the rear, quickly disintegrating. Christian Rieker “sprang through” the storm “like a rabbit.” James Middlebrook of the 17th Connecticut rued the retreat in a poignant letter to his wife. “We were obliged to run,” he explained. “If we had remained [five] minutes longer, we should [all] have been killed or taken prisoners.”21

  Possibly, but as it was, the losses were overwhelming. In their first major combat action—their “baptism of fire”—the 107th Ohio reported at least 220 men killed, wounded, missing, or captured. “Flesh wound in right leg,” “wound in the left arm,” “fracture in right side,” “wound in head,” “wound in right foot,” “right shoulder, critical,” “wounded in the thigh,” “arm off,” hit “by musket ball in the right hand and also in the upper part of the right arm”—the newspapers back home read like a ghastly index of human destruction: a sundry catalogue of the ways battle could mangle and maim. The seemingly endless litany of injuries occupied column inches and front pages, even as the fate of individual men remained uncertain.

  For “want of space,” the Tuscarawas Advocate could not print the casualty rolls. This was little consolation, of course, for anxious wives, mothers, and sweethearts who, fearing the worst, ached for information from the front. “Since the battle,” one soldier reported, “a great many letters have been received by Co. D 107th O.V.I. soliciting information.” Indeed, the first week of May demonstrated few things better than the way that the war could—at any moment—intrude on the routines of ordinary people back home. The news that a hometown regiment had engaged in a major battle could arrest all thought and action. “We have awfull news as far as losing life is concerned,” reported Martha French from her home in Fairfield, Connecticut. “You cannot think with what fear and trembling I read the names of the killed and wounded.” “I looked for a letter last night and went down to the office,” she wrote, “but came home disappointed.” Whipsawing between uncertainty and dread, she was unable to sleep, to eat, or to attend religious services. Private prayer became her only refuge. “It has been a week of much anxiety with me on account of you, my dear husband . . . I am in such suspence all the time.”22

  But, in truth, men were in no less disarray at the front. Owing to the haste of the retreat, information about those missing or left behind was not readily available. “About the results of the last battle at Fredericksburg,” Ernst Damkoehler supposed in a letter home, “you probably will have better information than we.” Individual companies staggered about in want of organization. Christian Rieker deemed his comrades in Company I comparatively fortunate; “we still have 52 men,” he reported, explaining that “only two companies” in the entire regiment “remain larger.” “There are some,” he shuddered in disbelief, “who have only 24 men.” The battle had exacted an especially heavy toll among commissioned and noncommissioned officers, leaving the unit in a state of confusion and uncertainty, wanting for leadership in its most critical hour. Captain A. J. Dewaldt, the Mexican War veteran who commanded Company B, was “severely wounded” in the groin—his pledge that he would “soon be ready to give the rebs another turn” notwithstanding. Second Lieutenant John Winkler of Company C was “wounded in the right ankle”; just five weeks later, he succumbed to that injury in a makeshift hospital at Brooke’s Station. “Shot through the abdomen,” the regiment’
s beloved surgeon, Dr. Charles Hartman, was among at least one dozen Eleventh Corps surgeons mortally wounded. Enduring his last earthly moments in enemy captivity, he managed to address a heartbreaking letter to his wife, Anna, in which he explained how to secure his back pay and make an application for pension money.23

  While attempting to rally the regiment, a bullet struck the neck of Colonel Meyer’s mount. The animal bucked, spilling its rider on the ground. The Confederates instantly seized on this as an opportunity to bag another prisoner, stabbing the colonel’s right wrist with a bayonet. As the rebels’ prized captive was whisked to the rear, other gray-clad men eagerly swarmed the last, dazed remnants of the 107th Ohio. Not a moment later, a leaden slug smacked into the lower jaw of the colonel’s son Edward, fracturing the bone in three places and ejecting the same number of teeth. The captain of Company C was left for dead on the field. Indeed, the Defiance Democrat lamented Edward’s unfortunate demise on May 16—unaware that just days before, he had been discovered alive, in urgent need of medical care.24

  Decades later, Edward Meyer claimed that while prostrated on the ground wounded he watched as the rebels conducted his father, together with a tiny knot of blue-coated prisoners, “away from the field.” Very likely, Colonel Meyer caught a glimpse of his son, too. Added to the humiliation of enemy captivity, then, was an almost overwhelming sense of helplessness. Because for all that Colonel Meyer knew as he readied for the wearisome journey to Richmond, his youngest son—the boy with the deep, gray eyes and the shock of dark brown hair—was dead.25

  IT SEEMED AS THOUGH the world had stopped on the Orange Turnpike that afternoon. Men routinely confessed their inability to translate the battle into lucid or linear prose. “I cannot, will not, tell you the horrors I have seen as the effect of this last battle,” a soldier from the 17th Connecticut wrote his parents. “The scene on the plank road,” still another Nutmeg volunteer remembered, “was indescribable.” “Oh, war! War!” exclaimed Thomas Evans. “Pen cannot describe nor tongue declaim half, nor will I attempt to say more on what I have seen.” “If I were to write it all,” Christian Rieker explained to his sister, “I would need almost a week in which to write.” Frantic minds lurched between scenes hastily recorded and half remembered, the rush of events mocking any sense of chronology and scale. One regimental surgeon in McLean’s brigade begged forgiveness, supposing that his letters would be “a poor return.” “I have had so much on my mind that I could hardly direct my thoughts from pressing matters of business long enough to write a connected epistle.” Jesse Spooner of the 55th Ohio commenced a narrative of the battle for his cousin, but ended rather abruptly. “I suppose you have heard all about it,” he explained, “so I will not proceed to tell you anymore.” For one volunteer in the 75th Ohio, the battle endured in memory not as an event with a discrete chronology, but rather as a jarring soundscape: “a fiendish yell,” the “crackling hell of musketry,” the “bellowing of mules,” the “agonized shrieks of wounded horses.” The events of that afternoon had rushed along at a furious, even dizzying pace. “There’s no such thing as time on a battlefield,” the enlisted man gasped.26

  Beyond its stunning physical losses, the regiment also suffered great psychological damage. Almost immediately after the battle, Godfrey Kappel of Company I began to manifest symptoms of what some soldiers would call “nervous fever,” an ailment that quickly became an “epidemic.” “He is unaware of what is happening,” Rieker reported in late May. “Often he wants to leave, and when one asks him to where, he says to [his home in] Zoar.” Only weeks after the battle, Sergeant Charles Wimar was “reduced to the ranks,” being “incapacitated by insanity.” A most telling affliction—“nervous deafness”—placed at least one soldier from Company G on the sick rolls. Citing his “feeble state of health,” the “perilous condition of his company,” as well as the “recent trials and hardships to which the regiment was subjected in the late battles of Chancellorsville,” First Lieutenant Hamilton Starkweather resigned his commission on the spot. Corporal Franklin Bow returned to his home in Canton, where he joined the swelling ranks of army deserters. Not unlike Bow, still other soldiers wondered if their initial zeal for the war had been naïve or misguided. “If we are asked what was gained by our brave loss of men,” regimental musician John Roedel insisted plainly, “the answer is no gain at all.” At first, in the raw immediacy of the fight’s aftermath, even those soldiers able to squint through the haze of grief saw only a fog of uncertainty. “I never believed,” a still incredulous Peter F. Young later observed, “that men would fight as well for a miserable cause as the rebels did there for theirs.”27

  THOUGH HARROWING, the costly rout of the Eleventh Corps hardly spelled defeat for the Army of the Potomac. The damage inflicted by Jackson’s flank march had been fairly contained, and elsewhere along the Union line, “confidence” remained the watchword. Before dawn on May 3, Hooker’s line coiled about the Chancellorsville crossroads; newly reinforced, its flanks now rested on the Rappahannock. More important, the Third Corps line stabbed from the Union position so as to command the key high ground at a place called Hazel Grove.

  Lee’s army, on the other hand, remained divided. Even worse, it had been visited by a calamity of its own on the evening of May 2. Unwilling to yield any of his hard-won momentum to the enemy, “Stonewall” Jackson and a tiny knot of his staff officers rode out to reconnoiter another attack under the veil of darkness. Edgy rebel pickets mistook his movements for those of enemy scouts. Instinctively, their muskets rang out. Dismissing the frantic screams of Jackson’s party, the rebel pickets squeezed their triggers once more. Three slugs smacked into Jackson—including one that necessitated the amputation of his left arm. To make matters worse, a “slight” wound removed Jackson’s senior division commander from the fight. Command of his corps thus devolved upon J. E. B. Stuart, the cavalryman who, despite having ridden circles around the federals, lacked any experience leading long lines of infantrymen into battle.28

  His significant advantages notwithstanding, “Fighting Joe” recoiled in fear on May 3. Sensing its “protruding line” was endangered, the army commander ordered the Third Corps to abandon its perch atop Hazel Grove. Astounded by their unexpected good fortune, the rebels eagerly unlimbered artillery atop the crown of the hill. The duel that ensued can only be described as “some of the most ferocious fighting of the war.” McLean’s brigade was held in reserve, but one of its soldiers noted how truly “wicked” it was to look on as men “marched up” to be “murdered.” Before noon, the Army of Northern Virginia had folded up the federal line; though costly, it was a crowning achievement for Robert E. Lee. Wreathed in a thick beard, Sacramento Daily Union correspondent Noah Brooks vividly recalled the scene at the Executive Mansion when President Lincoln received the doleful dispatch from Joe Hooker’s army. “Never, as long as I knew him,” Brooks wrote, “did he seem to be so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike.” Hooker had suffered seventeen thousand casualties in three days. “My God! My God!” the president gasped as he paced the room. “What will the country say?”29

  FLUSH WITH AN improbable victory, the Confederates divided their many thousands of Chancellorsville prisoners (“this time,” Christian Rieker quipped, “they really filled their sack”) into “squads,” placing each under the watchful eye of a guard. Before long, the men, among them Colonel Meyer, set out for Richmond. “Our column,” one of the captives later mused, “must have seemed more like a doleful gang of condemned criminals than a body of honorably defeated soldiers.” Assailed by thirst and ravaged by hunger—issued just “one pint of meal” and “eight ounces of salt beef for three days”—the men demanded water and food, only to be informed by their imperious captors that “none” was available. The march was taxing enough, but when made on an empty stomach, it sent minds into “a sort of torpor.” Uncertain of his fate and worried that he would never again see his home and family, one prisoner “went to sleep under a miserable depression of brain and he
art.” “I verily gave up to perish ere morning came,” Thomas Evans echoed, adding he did not “expect to see half the men able to rise in the morning.”

  Despite their “extreme suffering,” Evans and his fellow prisoners survived the night; the next day, under the eye of rebel guards, the captives resumed their grueling march. Civilians added insult to injury with their hisses and jeers. They “tantalized” us along the way, Evans recalled, “wishing us all the bad luck possible.” “Kill ’em all, colonel!” one woman screeched with rage, shaking her fists defiantly. “Kill ’em all right here for me!” So it was that after many decades, one prisoner confessed his inability “to forget or to ever forgive the men whose acts had brought about [such] suffering and humiliation.”

  Housed in an old tobacco warehouse perched on the James River, Richmond’s Libby Prison earned its reputation as a den of misery. Seraphim Meyer spent six weeks within its walls following his capture at Chancellorsville. Library of Congress

  At last, on May 7, “famished, filthy, and many of us ragged,” the prisoners entered the city of Richmond; ironically, after such a trying journey, the captives regarded the “once dreaded” rebel capital as a “welcome place of refuge.” But here too hisses and taunts greeted the men. As the “wretched looking set” wound through the steepled streets and paraded beyond the Confederate Capitol, one captive spotted Jefferson Davis, who had apparently joined a delegation of yowling spectators. Several blocks more and the men formed up before an imposing, three-story brick warehouse perched on the James; gray-clad soldiers with muskets slung over their shoulders stood sentinel outside the building. A hand-lettered sign identified the imposing structure as “Libby & Son, Ship Chandlers and Grocers,” but the men would come to know it as Libby Prison.30