A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Judge Advocate Giddings was hardly persuaded. In his charge to the court, he urged careful consideration of “the circumstances under which the witnesses for the defence” supplied their statements. “A line officer testifying concerning the courage or the reverse of his Colonel is confessedly in a very embarrassing position,” he reasoned. “I submit that by the force of circumstances, their judgment would be as charitable [and] favorable as possible to the defendant.” The judge advocate then pointed to a more fundamental flaw in Meyer’s trial strategy: the colonel had hinged his case on the testimony of line officers. Yet it was nearly impossible “for line officers to be cognizant of all the order[s] received by a colonel.” How could they affirm that Meyer executed his orders when they were not privy to those orders in the first place? “The preponderance of the evidence,” Giddings concluded, sustained the damning charges against Meyer.40

  The court left no record of its deliberations, apart from reporting that it “considered” the evidence “maturely.” But with its members hailing exclusively from Eleventh Corps regiments, Colonel Meyer’s acquittal was probably preordained. Still howling with indignation over their treatment after Chancellorsville, the jurors were not about to supply the press with extra copy. As such, the verdict was hardly vindication; all knew that another court would have reached a different conclusion. Even as they exhaled, then, the colonel and his bone-tired men shuddered at their brush with “lasting shame and infamy.”41

  ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, at the invitation of the president, the nation paused for a day of prayer and thanksgiving. The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, “so signal and so effective,” required nothing less. From pulpits around the country, preachers exhaled that God “was on the side of the pious” after all. The feast doubtless assumed special meaning for the Ohioans, arriving as many men marked the first anniversary of their enlistment—and just one day after the general court-martial returned its verdict in Colonel Meyer’s case. The next evening, “a sleepy, depressed column of troops” tramped out to Catlett’s Station, a march that brought them full circle to the site of their first bivouac on the Gettysburg campaign.

  But the men quickly abandoned any hope that providence might finally shine upon them. At their now familiar depot on the Orange & Alexandria, the soldiers learned that “as soon as transportation could be obtained,” they would be whisked to the war’s margins—transferred to the Department of the South in a humiliating move that would deny them the opportunity to demonstrate their mettle in another major eastern theater battle. On the orders of General Meade, the Eleventh Corps would no longer exist as a fighting unit in the Army of the Potomac.

  Within twenty-four hours, the dazed troops obediently piled into forage and cattle cars. Their means of conveyance must have seemed all too appropriate. As the whistling locomotive lurched toward Alexandria, Virginia, the once bustling slave port where they would board “river boats” bound for Fortress Monroe, the men of the 107th Ohio could not help but wonder if misfortune was their fate as a regiment.42

  The Department of the South in the Civil War, 1863–1865

  CHAPTER 7

  “WE ARE NOT COWARDS”

  August 1863 to February 1864

  THE QUARTERMASTER’S DEPARTMENT supplied the overcrowded boats that, one by one, thumped ashore on August 8, delivering the men of the 107th Ohio to Fortress Monroe. A squat pentagon of stone and masonry completed in 1834, the fort stood at the head of the historic Virginia peninsula that reaches into the Chesapeake Bay between the York and James Rivers. In May 1861, Fortress Monroe became famous as the place where three freedom-seeking slaves named Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James Townshend sought sanctuary behind Union lines, months before any federal policy on emancipation. Acting on his own clever accord, Union General Benjamin F. Butler declared them “contraband of war.” Whatever Butler lacked in military acuity, he made up for with his wordsmithing; his ingenious turn of phrase, together with the determined strides of enslaved men, women, and children, placed the question of emancipation urgently and undeniably on the nation’s agenda before the rebellion was even a month old.1

  Rounding the peninsula, the troops entered the James River and sailed as far as Newport News, where they would wait for sturdier vessels to convey them to Charleston. Lone chimneys, shell-pocked walls, and heaps of rubble pointed their way. The “picturesque ruins” of Hampton, Virginia—torched by the rebels in 1861, lest it fall into the hands of the enemy—supplied an evocative tribute to the war’s capacity for ruin and destruction. Later that evening, together with the seven other Eleventh Corps outfits shipped south, the 107th Ohio bivouacked along the river. That night and the ones that followed proved restive, for the ravenous mosquitoes were “so thick as to make sleep almost impossible.”2

  Three days later, a strapping fleet of side-wheeled ocean steamers—the S.R. Spaulding, Empire City, New York, America, United States, Constitution, and Nelly Pentz—collected the troops and set sail for South Carolina. The outline of Fortress Monroe “grew fainter and fainter” until it finally slid behind the horizon. Uncertainty about the future preyed upon the men as choppy waters tossed the vessels from side to side. Jacob Smith reported “the great majority of boys” experienced “nausea and sickness.” Before long, however, the “tall masts” of the blockading squadron ringing Charleston harbor came into view. Bulging knapsacks and heavy muskets slung on their backs, the men wriggled down narrow rope ladders, leaping from the steamers into smaller boats able to pilot the warren of rivers and tiny inlets that shield the Low Country mainland from the sea.3

  The line of boats navigated the shoals of Stono Inlet—a passage between two barrier islands “about two leagues from the south channel of Charleston”—and then steamed “up the Folly River.” The men came ashore at Pawnee Landing on Folly Island, a narrow spit of sand choked by palmettos and shaded with live oaks and thick stands of pine. Six miles long but only half a mile wide, the island was, in John Brunny’s initial survey, “loaded with sand hills and swamps.” Because choleric passengers aboard Charleston-bound ships were routinely “quarantined” on its low-lying dunes, eighteenth-century maps sometimes labeled the island “Coffin Land.” For many of the soldiers about to anchor their tents on Folly’s windswept beaches, this seemed a fitting appellation indeed. The island was “one of the most dreary and worthless collection of sand hills we ever saw,” one New Englander recollected. One enlisted man marveled that anyone “could live on such a baron place.” Still another volunteer supposed that Folly Island assumed its name because “some fool landed here a long time ago.”4

  AS THE CRADLE of secession and the Confederacy’s second largest city, Charleston, South Carolina, had been an object of federal military operations since the first rebel shells arched toward Fort Sumter during the wee morning hours of April 12, 1861. Still, apart from a few luckless attempts to seize the steepled peninsula by land and sea, Union forces did not mount a major campaign against Charleston until the summer of 1863. Choreographed by General Quincy Adams Gillmore, the Ohioan whose place at the head of his West Point class of 1849 earned him a commission in the Corps of Engineers, the joint army-navy effort twice stalled on the parapets of Battery Wagner in mid-July. The 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, an all-black regiment whose recruits were drawn from several northern states, famously spearheaded the second, failed attack on the fort’s palmetto-log barricades.5

  But Charleston was far “too important to be lost when so nearly won.” Impatient for victory and persuaded that success would require at least eight thousand additional troops, on July 26 Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles urged President Lincoln to forward “a few regiments to Charleston.” The memorably whiskered Major General John Gray Foster lent two divisions of his North Carolina–based Eighteenth Corps to the cause, including the men of General Edward Wild’s African Brigade. Then, on the morning of August 7, General in Chief Henry W. Halleck instructed eight regiments from the Eleventh Corps to set out for the Palmetto Sta
te—but not before upbraiding Gillmore, whose “urgent but unexpected application” for more men Halleck deemed “seriously embarrassing.” This was the order that sent the 107th Ohio packing for the Department of the South.6

  Despite the welcome arrival of these reinforcements, Quincy Adams Gillmore opted to dig in for a long siege. Notwithstanding the blistering summer heat, men heaped the loamy soil into miles of trenches and burrowed out ordnance magazines and bombproofs. Those who did not swing spades or fell trees laced “wire entanglements” along the zigzagging defenses, studded with mortars and masked batteries. On nearby Morris Island, federal troops constructed a platform for an enormous Parrott gun they wryly dubbed the “Swamp Angel.” Beginning in late August, dozens of shells from the “coal-black” rifle screamed across the harbor toward Fort Sumter.

  Occupying Union forces had turned palmetto-shaded Folly Island into a canvas city by the summer of 1863. Library of Congress

  Bit by bit, the men adjusted to the “strange and often harsh environment” of the Sea Islands. “We have made quite a change of front,” George Billow explained to his friend Lane. John Brunny thought exotic and otherworldly the sprawling, moss-laureled branches of the live oaks, the “climbing plants,” and the dense underbrush carpeting the island. The 107th Ohio pitched its new camp on the south end of Folly Island, now blanketed in white canvas that stretched as far as the eye could see. The sand, however, was “poor anchorage,” and the “frail” shelter tents were especially unsuited for the fierce gales that howled across the island. “Our tents, which had proved fairly good shelter in Virginia,” griped one enlisted man, “hardly met the requirements of our new location.” One soldier swore that “if you fell asleep . . . on waking your face would be covered” in sand. Quarters were cramped, with three (and sometimes four) men packed into each A-framed tent. “Order is Heaven’s first law,” one officer remarked, “but not that of Folly Island—there was not room enough for order.”7

  On the island, it often seemed as though the men had exchanged their gray-clad enemies for a host of natural ones—fiddler crabs, sand fleas, wood ticks, gnats, scorpions, snakes, and giant “loud-mouthed locusts.” After dark, the pests waged a relentless “campaign,” gnawing, pinching, buzzing, and burrowing under the skin. “Wherever you went,” Jacob Smith remarked, “the air was filled with mosquitoes, and no choir of singers or band of music ever rendered such an amount of melody as we had here.” The muggy tropical climes also took some getting used to—especially for men accustomed to the crisp breezes of a northeastern Ohio autumn. “The weather is very warm [here],” one Stark County enlisted man exhaled. “One can go in his shirt sleeves any time.” Though night afforded reprieve from the blistering sun, Jacob Lichty seemed to manage with just “one blanket.” “We have fine weather,” he commented.8

  After the harried pace of the last few months, the most significant adjustment was to the languor of life on picket. Years later, when Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain tallied the most trying aspects of soldier life beyond combat, he gave pride of place to the picket line. In South Carolina, the war settled into dreary stretches of inactivity, interrupted only by the distant roar of siege guns or the occasional crack of a rebel picket’s rifle. Men prowled through the palmettos, poised between duty and irrelevance. “Everything is very quiet here,” Fritz Nussbaum explained. “Once a while some little firing can be heard in the front.” One of his comrades confessed that, “we have not as much duty to perform here as we had.” Even drill was “limited to squads.” Nighttime not infrequently found the men of the regiment lost in reverie, visited by painful memories and lamenting departed comrades.

  Indeed, the doleful drip of reports from the hospital wards and hometowns where men tended Gettysburg wounds persisted that fall—each one an unnecessary reminder that the pain of a battle never ended. Not long after their arrival on the island, the men of Company D learned that Captain Barnet Steiner, who had returned to Stark County in mid-July to nurse the ugly gunshot wound he received atop Blocher’s Knoll, succumbed to his injury. The news came as a shock, for “until the last,” the twenty-four-year-old anticipated a full recovery and “longed” to rejoin the regiment. “That for which he died,” one of his men noted, “was the very same for which he most longed to live and labor and suffer.” In camp that evening, Steiner’s men penned “resolutions of respect” for their fallen commander. “While . . . now in humble submission to the will of Divine Providence,” they resolved, “we deeply lament the death of our fellow soldier and deplore that in his death, our country has lost a patriotic, brave, and magnanimous defender, his comrades a warm and noble-hearted companion.” Together with a preamble, the men forwarded their resolves (“but a faint expression of the feelings of the remaining fragment of heroes of the Captain’s company”) to the Stark County Republican. The captain, they wrote its editor, “cannot be erased from the tablet of our memories.”9

  Indeed, in the days that followed, Steiner’s closest chum Jacob Lichty labored under an enormous burden of grief and despair. One night, lost in one of memory’s labyrinths, he stared vacantly across the moonlit ocean, “for some time listening” to the waves as they crashed, one after the other, against the sandbars. “How often I wish for some good old friend, with whom I could sit down on the top of some sand hill & look out upon the mighty waters & talk of many good things,” he confided in a letter to his brother. “In that way Capt. Steiner & I passed many a pleasant hour, but now he is dead, & I cannot get over my loneliness.” Doubting that he would ever find another friend so full of mirth and piety, so able to stimulate his mind, Lichty wondered how he would endure the war without him.10

  It was a question to be repeated many times over. Now under the command of General Alexander Schimmelfennig, the brigade had been “reduced to a mere handful,” with one Ohioan doubting that “the four regiments now composing it could muster one hundred and fifty men for duty a piece.” To make matters worse, the sick rolls only continued to swell. Dysentery and diarrhea ravaged the ranks, the all too predictable consequences of the island’s foul-smelling water. “The only drinking water,” one enlisted man objected, “was obtained by digging about three feet in the sand, and this was so brackish that the thirsty were satisfied with a small quantity.” Wincing with acute abdominal pain, twenty-seven of the fifty men in Company C were “sent sick” in August. Exhaustion finally caught up with others. Levied with “excessive and enormous duties” after Gettysburg, the sleep-deprived George Billow “was a mere wreck” by the time he arrived on Folly Island. When he fell “violently” ill, comrades carted his nearly “unconscious” body to the camp hospital, where he was diagnosed with a bout of typhoid fever “so malignant that his recovery was very doubtful.” So it was that William Siffert, together with several of his comrades, was packed off to Ohio that autumn, assigned the daunting chore of recruiting new men.11

  THE WEEKS OF numbing inactivity wore on, each one testing the regiment’s resolve. Battle was no doubt taxing, but passivity made its own ironic demands. “Everything is so quiet here,” one soldier explained, “that it is quite lonesome.” Moored on an exotic barrier island far from home, subjected to mindless drill and monotonous fatigue duties, the men betrayed their feelings of dejection and gloom. “We looked every hour upon the same naked beaches of sand,” another enlisted man explained, “the same drooping palmettos.” Unable to escape the thought that they had been consigned to irrelevance, the troops no longer snapped to attention, shined their shoes, folded their gum blankets, or polished their muskets. Increasingly, they snubbed military conventions that now seemed but empty ceremony. In late September, an inspector from army headquarters groused that “little, if any attention is paid to the requirements of Army Regulations in regard to saluting.” When General Gillmore asked the men to collect for a “grand review,” Jacob Lichty supposed that the officer merely wished “to see if we noticed his new shoulder straps & the two stars.”12

  Indeed, throughout the regim
ent’s time in South Carolina, officers struggled both to curb absenteeism and to maintain good order and discipline. “Too much which should be required by the officers is left to habit and violation of the men,” one brigade inspector observed. Nineteen-year-old Private Joseph Hasenboeller abandoned the picket post he was ordered to guard for a lazy afternoon of fishing. When confronted by the corporal in charge of the post about his brazen neglect of duty, he replied that “he cared neither for the General or any one else” on the island. Days later, Hasenboeller’s twin brother David, who had only recently returned to the regiment after recuperating from a minor injury at Gettysburg, displayed a similar contempt for authority. Ordered to help tidy camp, the self-assured private informed his first sergeant that, “he had nothing to command”—a retort that invited “much tumult” among the men. Directed to detail one man from his company for fatigue duty that same week, Sergeant Anthony Mainzer “cursed and swore and said he would be damned if he would do so.”13

  Of course, there was no greater or more ubiquitous threat to order and discipline than alcohol, many soldiers’ preferred remedy for melancholy and listlessness. Enterprising sutlers kept soldiers plied with spirits until September, when a sharply worded circular from headquarters forbade them from keeping “grog shops” on Folly Island. But the ingenuity of the enlisted men knew few limits when it came to procuring intoxicating liquors. The brigade surgeon’s effort to fortify the troops against malaria—thrice weekly rations of whiskey “mixed with sulphate of quinoa”—hardly satisfied the thirsty soldiers. Private Joseph Greiner of Company A, for example, secured a gallon of whiskey by presenting a “forged” certificate to the post commissary. That night, he and his comrades on picket became so “drunk and intoxicated” that they were entirely “unable to discharge their duty.”14