Such debauchery fairly scandalized teetotalers like Jacob Lichty. “I prefer spending my time & money in writing letters & receiving letters to buying whiskey,” the soldier explained to his brother. The act of writing no doubt remedied long stretches of boredom and could help soldiers like Lichty maintain a sense of connection with loved ones, but the slothful pace of the mails merely reinforced their physical and emotional distance from home. “It takes letters so long to go & return that I get impatient sometimes,” he confessed. “I must take it cool.”15
MAKING A miraculous recovery after the amputation of his right arm—something he eagerly attributed to the tender care of nurse Rebecca Lane Price—Augustus Vignos rejoined the regiment in October. Upon his return, the major found his comrades especially anxious for the latest pickings from the political grapevine. In June, Ohio Republicans gathered in Columbus to nominate former state auditor John Brough for governor. Wreathed in a thick, white beard, the portly fifty-one-year-old railroad executive from Marietta looked every bit his part. Though a lifelong Democrat who had not supported President Lincoln in 1860, Brough quickly emerged as a vigorous supporter of the Union war effort. In the conflict’s early months, he choreographed transportation to the front for thousands of soldiers on his Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Cleveland Railroad. “Rigidly just and plain, even to bluntness,” scandalized by the act of secession, Brough lent his stentorian voice to the cause of the republic. “How do you expect to get peace?” he asked an audience of fellow Democrats that summer. “Do you expect it by trammeling and binding the hands of the nation? Do you expect to get it by refusing men and money to carry on the war, or by putting in power an Administration opposed to the further prosecution of it?” He assured them that “sustaining the Government in the great work of suppressing this most wicked rebellion” was his only object.
Brough’s broadmindedness and pledge to set aside partisanship appealed to leading Republicans throughout the state. So too did his embrace of emancipation. The peculiar institution, Brough believed, had afflicted the nation like a “leprous disease.” “Either slavery must be torn out, root and branch,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in Cleveland, “or our government will exist no longer.” Testing the strategy that national party leaders would use in President Lincoln’s reelection bid the following year, Ohio Republicans opted to nominate their slate of candidates on the “Union” ticket, discarding party labels in a nimble effort to persuade voters that “treason” and “loyalty” were the only true choices on the ballot. A “broad” party platform dodged old divisions and appealed to unity.16
Emboldened by their successes in the midterm elections, however, the Peace Democrats took precisely the opposite course—nominating Dayton’s polarizing Clement Laird Vallandigham for the state’s highest office. The most venomous of the Copperheads, Vallandigham had become a “martyr” in antiwar circles. That May, in one of his routine rehearsals of the war’s affronts at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Vallandigham defied General Ambrose Burnside’s recently issued General Order No. 38, which barred public expressions of “sympathy for the enemy” within his military department. Convicted by a military tribunal and then banished by President Lincoln to the enemy’s lines, the sly former congressman fled to Bermuda on a blockade-running steamer before ultimately landing in Canada. There he resumed his bid for the Ohio governor’s mansion from a hotel room in Windsor, turning what might have been a sleepy race into a marquee contest that commanded the nation’s attention.17
Surrogates for the candidates barnstormed the state, drawing crowds that exceeded even the fabled turnouts for Old Tippecanoe in the celebrated “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign of 1840. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, Hoosier congressman George Julian, Illinois governor Richard Yates, and General Franz Sigel took to the stump for Brough, while the Copperhead newspaper editor Samuel Medary of Columbus, former United States senator William Allen, and Ohio congressmen George Hunt Pendleton and Samuel Sullivan Cox crisscrossed the state to boost Vallandigham. “Political excitement,” Governor Tod observed, “runs high in Ohio.” On several occasions, “heated discussions” and torchlit rallies threatened to devolve into open violence; in August, a military company was required to restore order in Wooster after an exchange of sharp words between Copperheads and Union men resulted in “a serious riot.”18
Nor was electioneering confined within the borders of the Buckeye State. In April, the Ohio state legislature passed a bill enfranchising soldiers in the field. For the first time, Ohioans away from home on active military duty could cast absentee ballots in local, state, and federal elections. Brough dispatched his old friend Edwin B. Olmstead to canvass the men of Ohio on Folly Island that autumn. The one-time Akron High School principal had served eighteen months as a captain in the Fourth Ohio before assuming a clerkship in the Treasury Department in Washington. In “short and meagre” remarks, he urged the men to remember “who it was that refused to vote them even food and clothing, while mocking their misfortunes and calamities.” Vallandigham had “done everything within his power to arrest our progress and cripple the Administration and authorities.” Only a few weeks before the election, “an Abolition agent” appeared on Folly Island and “labored faithfully for Brough,” blanketing the camps with Union Party “tickets, circulars, and books.” “Give him a gun,” one Democratic soldier hissed, while another echoed, “Give him a cartridge box!”19
Officers also canvassed the regiment on behalf of the Republican cause. Captain Samuel Surburg ordered his company to cast their ballots for Brough, lest Ohio be plunged “into civil strife.” In an emotional appeal, he warned that Vallandigham’s election would “[turn] the tide in favor of Rebellion” and “crush” that “which has already cost the lives of many of our brethren of the regiment, whose bones are bleaching on the plains of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.” Surburg, of course, did not need to persuade obedient Republicans like George Billow. “Just give us soldiers of Ohio a chance to vote,” the captain from Akron explained, “and we will show them in October next, who will carry the day—men that are really fighting for the freedom and liberty of their country, or those who are continually grumbling against their Government.”
Still, more than a few soldiers either supported Vallandigham or at least seriously entertained his candidacy, supposing that his election might “offer relief for the suffering and inconveniences they faced at the front.” Through “an incessant flood of newspapers,” one captain lamented, the men “had been made to believe that with the election of [Vallandigham] would come speedily reconciliation, reunion, and peace, and that they would, without further struggles be restored to the bosoms of their families, &c.” Beyond the usual electioneering, officers subjected these troops to threats, violence, and intimidation. Captain John Lutz promised to “punish” any man in his company who voted for Vallandigham, while his fellow officers “preached up the doctrine of rebellion” and “told us, that if we voted Vallandigham we would break our oaths.” Other regimental leaders warned that “they would put [their men] in front of battle if [they] wouldn’t vote for Brough.” Men’s faces puckered in anger at these taunts. “At Chancellorsville, we were in the front—at Gettysburg, we were in the front,” one volunteer protested. “The next place you hear of us we will be in the front. That is where we always are and want to be,” he continued. “We are no cowards.”20
Leaving nothing to chance, General Schimmelfennig took matters into his own hands. A few days before election, he ordered “nearly the entire regiment” to Kiowa Island on another fatigue duty. “Soldiers,” he smugly remarked, “had no business to vote.” The move invited no small protest from the rank and file. “We were fairly cheated,” one indignant Wayne County soldier objected in a tart letter that was widely reprinted in the press. “They kept us from voting because we would not vote the abolition ticket, as our officers wanted us to do.” With no small irony, the Democratic press back home—including some of the same organs
that decried Republican efforts to enfranchise soldiers in the field—wailed with outrage. “Here is a whole regiment, nearly cut off from the ‘sacred rights’ of voting, simply because they are Democrats!” frothed the McArthur Democrat.
The one hundred or so men left behind on Folly Island “insisted on exercising the elective franchise,” but only those who had pledged support for Brough were permitted to cast ballots. Two dozen enlisted men voted for Brough. According to one account, a black quartermaster’s cook likewise cast a ballot, bringing the final vote tally in the regiment twenty-five. “It is true,” one soldier later reflected, “that by talking and voting we incurred the displeasure of our commanding officers; but our motto was and is, that nothing is worth fighting for that we would not vote for and advocate everywhere and at all times.”
Enlisted men cast forty-four thousand ballots from the field that fall, and the Union Party nominee won ninety-four percent of them. Among the nearly two hundred Ohioans confined in Richmond’s Libby Prison, Vallandigham earned not a single vote. Nor did the Dayton congressman find any supporters among the soldiers convalescing in Washington’s Douglas Hospital. Ballot suppression was widespread, however, and we may never know how many soldiers were denied the franchise. Samuel Surburg supposed that “four-fifths of those [who] did not vote” in the 107th Ohio “were for Bough and the Union,” but the taunts and threats suggest that the Democratic nominee may have easily triumphed on Folly Island. Surburg’s need to reassure men and women back home of the unit’s political convictions merely suggests the degree to which loyalty had become a question of partisan allegiance by the war’s third autumn. Keenly aware that the regiment’s political preferences would merely renew old questions about its mettle and conviction, Surburg simply declared that his comrades were loyal and true Republicans. In reality, their political allegiances proved malleable, responding to events at the front and functioning as a reliable index of morale.
As it turned out, Ohioans handed John Brough a margin of victory that exceeded a hundred thousand votes—an impressive showing considering the state’s quarrelsome debates over the meaning of the war. President Lincoln wired the governor-elect once the last returns had been tabulated. “Glory to God in the highest,” he exclaimed. “Ohio has saved the nation.”21
ON NOVEMBER 28, a boat ferried the men of the 107th Ohio across the Folly River to Cole’s Island, where the crumbling ruins of Fort Palmetto, an old War of 1812 garrison, still stood watch over Stono Inlet. No sooner had they established a camp than the skies released a thrashing rain. “The night was not a cold one,” Jacob Smith remembered, “or we would certainly have suffered from the effects of our soaking.” The men would pass the next six weeks on the island, keeping a watchful eye on the “very gay and happy” rebel pickets who were posted across the river in a belt of woods. “They are singing and dancing from morning till night,” Fritz Nussbaum commented, “but I hope that their dancing and singing will soon be stopped.”
The unit’s new post afforded unobstructed views of Charleston and the fortifications that ringed its harbor. John Brunny was rather unimpressed at the sight of the garrison where the war began (“Sumter, to me, resembles a pile of stone and dirt,” he informed a friend), but he was absolutely entranced by the shells that made it their target. “When one of Gilmore’s 300-pound defensive artillery pieces hits it, a cloud of sand, rocks, and mortar will sometimes fly 40 feet in the air.” At night, the men would survey the unremitting bombardment: “something that is dreadful to watch,” Brunny confessed, “yet at the same time uncommonly beautiful.” Cole’s Island likewise remedied some of Folly’s most notorious deficiencies. Here, the water was at least potable, and the sprawling oyster beds supplemented the soldiers’ lifeless diets of salt pork and stale hardtack. Once the temperatures plummeted (December “came in quite rough and cold”), the pioneer corps could harvest the island’s generous stands of pitch pine for fuel and firewood. In the evenings, huddled around the dancing sparks of “small fires,” the men did their best to keep warm.
To be sure, life on Cole’s Island was often numbing and disagreeable. Just days before Christmas, a private from Company G, pushed to the limits of endurance, fell asleep at his post on the picket line. “I had been on duty six days,” he explained, “and been wet through twice . . . [I] felt almost too weak to stand my tour of duty.” And yet even in the depths of despair, a faint hope flickered. Enemy deserters trickled into Union lines throughout the winter as Confederate morale flagged. “They say that many [more] would come over to us if they did not have families in Charleston,” related Private John Geissler of Company I. “Even they believe that they will need to give up soon.” Likewise, the shells that screamed across the harbor each night persuaded the men that Union victory was, if not inevitable, at least within reach. “We believe the war will come to an end this year, if it is God’s will,” Geissler told a friend shortly after New Year’s Day.22
The new year also yielded up another reminder of the war’s purpose. Notwithstanding the bitterly cold winds that whipped across nearby Morris Island, African-American soldiers solemnized the first anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with a day of speeches and celebration—beginning a tradition that would continue well into the twentieth century. On the parade ground of the 54th Massachusetts, men fashioned a “speaker’s stand” by draping a rubber blanket over an empty dry goods crate. When the makeshift rostrum collapsed midway through his “impassioned” oration, Sergeant Joseph Barquet quipped, “Gentlemen, I admire your principles, but damn your platform!”
While the day was freighted with special meaning on the windswept sea islands of South Carolina, whose rice marshes and cotton fields had been harvested by the toil of enslaved persons for generations, soldiers and civilians took note of the occasion far beyond Charleston. Not far from “Freedom’s Fortress,” black soldiers in blue uniforms paraded through the streets of Norfolk. In Boston, veterans of the abolition movement gathered at Tremont Temple—the place where they had waited so anxiously for the news to arrive from Washington the year before—to observe “the new national anniversary.”23
Weeks later, the 107th Ohio received orders to return to Folly Island. The seemingly interminable blizzard of circulars and general orders proscribing their movements made no more sense than they had in Virginia, and it was with no small frustration that the men acknowledged the latest dispatch. Supposing they would not tarry long, the men took little care in establishing a new camp, pitching tents over a hastily strewn carpet of grass, brush, and palmetto branches.24
Their intuition proved prescient. In December, with the war around Charleston fixed in a “holding pattern,” General Gillmore began drawing up plans for a military expedition to Florida—an operation that would, at once, “recover all the most valuable portion of that State, cut off a rich source of the enemy’s supplies, and increase the number of my colored troops.” Gillmore knew that Florida’s sizeable herds “kept a considerable number of Confederate soldiers fed.” The rebels likewise harvested the state’s bounteous stands of timber to corduroy roads, fortify battle lines, and feed campfires. Starved for new recruits and impatient for forward movement, the War Department quickly authorized the general’s proposal. For his part, President Lincoln—his faith in southern Unionism abiding—hoped that Gillmore’s expedition would midwife a loyal government in Florida, where there were whispers about “worthy gentlemen” desiring the state’s return to the Union. In January, in a cocksure signal of his enthusiasm, the president dispatched his personal secretary John Hay, bearing a freshly inked major’s commission, “to aid in the reconstruction.”25
Led by thirty-nine-year-old, West Point–trained Brigadier General Truman Seymour, a detachment of some seven thousand federal troops—among them three African-American regiments—set sail for Jacksonville the first week of February, packed onto “twenty armed transports.” Such a “large number of Union vessels headed out to sea from Port Royal,” however, invited
the curiosity of the Confederate sentinels perched at nearby Foot Point. Hoping to “distract the enemy’s attention from the expedition to Jacksonville,” Gillmore ordered Schimmelfennig’s troops on Folly Island—among them the 107th Ohio—to stage a clever “demonstration.”
On February 7, as General Seymour’s contingent piloted its way up the St. John’s River, “through the marshy lowlands” and beyond “the white bluffs and forests of pine and cedar,” the Ohioans extinguished their campfires, stowed some stale bread and “cooked meat” in their knapsacks, and waited anxiously to move. “In the evening,” one enlisted man later recalled, “we fell into line, and marched down the beach to the steamboat landing.” At midnight, a boat collected the men and carried them across Stono Inlet to palmetto-choked Kiawah Island. The men tramped all night at a breakneck pace—all the more impressive when one contemplates their “difficult” route, which hooked through the stands of pine and tangled underbrush. At dawn they stopped to catch their breath in the shadow of the Vanderhorst Plantation, a dazzling three-story mansion whose stately, symmetrical façade and “broad, straight, amply shaded avenue” impressed even those who resented symbols of the slaveholder’s abundance.26
That evening, the men forded the brackish, “waist deep” estuary that separated Kiawah and Seabrook Islands. Pausing a moment to wring the water from their “stockings and pantaloon legs,” the column plodded on, marching until dawn. The soldiers struggled to see through the thick haze obscuring the island, but soon made out a large sugar plantation with its “negro quarters scattered around.” The men had no more than identified those “foreign shapes” as a “cluster of buildings” when, all of the sudden, “a hundred or so” muskets released a “brisk” sheet of fire. Rebel skirmishers emerged from the woods and, after planting themselves behind a stout hedgerow, kept up their deadly work, squeezing their triggers just as quickly as they could reload. “The bullets,” Mahlon Slutz remembered, “came thick and fast.” Another of his regimental comrades marveled at the bullets “whizzing over our heads.”
A Thousand May Fall Page 17
