A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  ON THE MORNING OF Wednesday, May 25, General Gordon roused the 107th Ohio with orders to reconnoiter the enemy’s works. Spearheading a short column of white and black infantrymen led by Colonel James Shaw Jr., the thirty-three-year-old Rhode Islander who had recently assumed command of the Seventh United States Colored Troops, the men crossed Cedar Creek and felt their way through the thick timber toward Camp Finegan. Six guns trundled behind in support. At twilight, skirmishers exchanged “a brisk fire” with the enemy; unable to see, they aimed their muskets not at men, but at muzzle flashes. With the rebels ready to mount a counterattack, however, Shaw ordered his column to fall back to Jacksonville; he had “not men enough to spare any.” As it was, the sortie through the swamps claimed the life of one Union soldier, blasted to death “by the premature explosion of a shell fired from one of our guns”; it was only some consolation that the affray was rumored to have been costlier for the rebels, whom one of the regiment’s volunteers spied excavating fresh graves in the ensuing days.10

  The “skirmish near Camp Finegan,” as the events of the day came to be recorded in the war’s official records, confirmed that the Confederates continued to export men and artillery from Florida. These tidings encouraged Gordon to attempt an ambush of the enemy’s forces at Camp Milton, no more than a dozen miles west of Jacksonville, only six days later. Named for the archrebel who had occupied the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee since October 1861, the bastion anchored a brawny system of log breastworks and revetments (“the labor of many thousands of men for many weeks”) that twisted through the woods along the steep banks of McGirt’s Creek.11

  Gordon proposed a classic two-pronged assault. One column would press west and attack the Confederates head-on, while a second, slightly larger column would splash across McGirt’s Creek, wing north, and gain the enemy’s rear. The 107th Ohio was packed into the second column with remnants of the 157th New York and 17th Connecticut, two veteran Eleventh Corps outfits that had shared in the misfortunes of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and a pair of battle-tested African-American regiments, the 3rd and 335th United States Colored Troops, the latter led by the half-brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. An arduous trudge through the “almost impassable swamps and sloughs” delivered the soldiers to a point behind the enemy’s lines just after three o’clock on the morning of June 1. But the promise of a fight proved as empty as the enemy’s works. By the time the blue-coated columns converged on Camp Milton, the rebels had slipped away, leaving plenty of “stores and forage” behind to evidence their sudden “flight.”

  Denied still another opportunity to prove their mettle in battle, the Ohioans obediently “fired and completely demolished” the rebel works before tromping back to their camp. In his after-action report, Gordon saluted their performance as “praiseworthy in the highest degree.” Even so, decades later, regimental historian Jacob Smith was desperate to detect something of significance in this stretch of the unit’s service. “Considering the number of men engaged in these movements,” he concluded, “as much relatively was achieved by them as by the grander operations of large bodies of troops.”12

  TWO WEEKS LATER, orders arrived from headquarters that divided the companies of the 107th Ohio for the first time. Four companies would tarry in Jacksonville on provost guard and occupation duty—mostly “town police work”—while four others, under the command of Major Vignos, would garrison Fort Clinch, the brick bastion on nearby Amelia Island whose seventy-seven batteries watched over Cumberland Sound. Until August, the remaining two companies would patrol the railroad bridge that spanned the Amelia River four miles south of the fort.13

  At Fort Clinch, the men became prison guards and provost-marshals, commissaries and quartermasters. By the summer of 1864, the heavily armored fort had, like most other federal military installations in the Confederate South, become a destination for hundreds of freedom-seeking enslaved persons and starving refugees. The army acknowledged this steady movement of people across borders and boundaries—and their demands for shelter and subsistence—in the unusually exacting orders it prepared for Major Vignos upon the regiment’s move to Fort Clinch. “You will see to it that refugees, contrabands, and all civilians whatsoever, asking subsistence from the Government, shall be forwarded to Jacksonville,” Vignos was instructed. “You will furnish subsistence to them only for the time necessary to forward them to this point, except in cases of sickness or other cases of extreme necessity, of all which you will make immediate report to these headquarters.”14

  Throughout that long and drizzly summer, punctuated by company and heavy artillery drills, the demands of prison records and “tri-monthly” reports, the 107th Ohio ached for the latest news. Grumbling about the brutal delays between newspaper deliveries and mail calls, they subsisted mostly on rumor. “Rebel sourses” plied them with everything from premature accounts of Petersburg’s fall to a spurious report that General Grant had been blown to bits by a torpedo. A deficit of reliable information was nothing new, of course, but in Florida it offered the men another, gnawing reminder of their remove from the war’s primary front. The Fourth of July supplied still another, inviting the veterans of Gettysburg to measure how much had changed in the space of a year. As gunboats on the St. John’s heralded the nation’s eighty-eighth birthday with a cannon-fired salute, one soldier reflected that the year before, it was all that “we could do to keep from having our heads knocked off.” Now, he marveled, “we have to be careful or we get our head eat[en] off by mosquitoes.”15

  Those ravenous pests carried the maladies that delivered scores of men to the United States General Hospital in St. Augustine, headquartered in an old ship captain’s sprawling mansion at the edge of town. Late that summer, Jacob Smith was detailed to the hospital as a clerk, tasked with the huge chore of “keeping the books” and completing morning reports documenting the care and condition of soldiers taken with swamp fever, malaria, and exhaustion. Florida’s oppressive climate thwarted speedy recoveries. “When a person gets down a little,” one convalescing soldier explained, “it is almost impossible to get strength again.”16

  THAT FALL, with a token enemy doing but little to distract them, the men of the 107th Ohio turned their attention to Lincoln’s bid for a second term. In August the Democrats gathered in Chicago to nominate General George B. McClellan for the presidency, selecting as his running mate George Hunt Pendleton, the Copperhead congressman from Cincinnati. The Democratic platform pledged “unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution,” reproving the Lincoln administration’s “shameful” disregard of civil and military law. But it also pronounced the “experiment of war” a failure, and demanded that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” The platform recommended that a “convention of the states” might restore peace “on the basis of the Federal Union,” but it was short on specifics—and evaded the question of emancipation. One final plank expressed the “sympathy of the Democratic party” for the “soldiery of our army and the sailors of our navy,” promising them all the “care, protection, and regard” they had earned.17

  Well into autumn, the race was tight—so tight, in fact, that nearby rebel pickets took to taunting the troops with “white rags” and cheers for McClellan, confident that recognition of Confederate independence was imminent. Back home, the antiwar factions once again stirred, reenergized by the lengthening casualty registers, dismal reports from the field, and the intuition that the war was eroding the national character. “We don’t want a cold-blooded joker at Washington who, while the District of Columbia is infested with hospitals, and the atmosphere burdened by the groans and sighs of our mangled countrymen, when he can spare a minute from Joe Miller’s Jest Book looks out upon the acres of hospitals and inquires ‘What houses are those?’ ” snapped William Allen, who had represented Ohio in the United States Senate during the 1840s. Young men registered their opposition to the war by resisting Lincoln’s July call for conscripts; a throng assembled in Canton for a �
��peace meeting” the next month. “As the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib,” one War Democrat scorned, “so do these mild and gentle souls yearn for their rightful proprietors, the rebels, to retake possession of, and to rule over them.”18

  The view from the ranks reflected the rancor back home. William Siffert delighted that Company A was “in for old Abraham to the hilt,” adding that he and his comrades refused to offer the rebels “any other terms than” an unconditional surrender. Jacob Smith, too, hoped that Lincoln would “remain at the helm”; he believed that after steadying the ship of state through the perilous waters of war, the president deserved to pilot the nation into the peace. “There should be prompt and immediate action on the part of every true patriot at this stage of our national peril,” one of the Stark County volunteers echoed in advocating the president’s reelection. “No Compromise. No measures of adjustment with traitors in arms, but total submission to the Constitution and Laws of the United States.” But these were hardly universal sentiments among the men, many of whom rejected national parties and politics—and the notion that the election was a contest between loyalty and lily-livered treason. By the fall, wearied of the war and its many slights, the men resolved to cast their votes “for the candidate they believed would end the war.” Already derided as fainthearted and cowardly, after all, the men had no reason to fear that their votes for McClellan might out them as disloyal.19

  On election eve, with his typical “earnest zeal and tenacity of purpose,” Edward Meyer stumped for the president. Private Justus Silliman of the 17th Connecticut listened intently to Meyer’s speech and gave it good marks; still, he had little confidence it would persuade the 107th Ohio’s demoralized ranks. “It is strange,” Silliman pondered, “that men who have endured so many hardships and periled so much for their country should be so blind & ignorant as to try to support that which is working to destroy all the good they have ever accomplished.” The regimental returns confirmed the Nutmegger’s prediction. Of the three hundred men who voted, 188 marked their ballots for McClellan. The results were unmistakable; more than sixty percent of the regiment had rejected the war and President Lincoln.

  Back home, the Copperheads made “considerable ado” about the 107th Ohio—the only Buckeye regiment to deliver a majority for the Democrats and George B. McClellan. For the war’s opponents, however, it proved little consolation. Buoyed by a string of Union victories in the Shenandoah Valley and the fall of Atlanta, loyal northern voters returned Lincoln to the Executive Mansion by a comfortable margin. Despite many pockets of support in the Midwest, McClellan carried just three states—his adopted home state of New Jersey and the slaveholding border states of Delaware and Kentucky. In Ohio, the election would not be close; Lincoln carried the Buckeye State by nearly thirteen percentage points, while Republican congressional candidates notched victories in all but two of Ohio’s nineteen districts. “It took some nerve at that time to be a Democrat,” one Union veteran concluded years later.20

  Lincoln’s triumph at the polls and the progress of the Union armies and navies that fall invited despair in many quarters of the Confederacy. Before long, however, that resignation gave way to a newfound resolve. In November, Jefferson Davis informed the rebel legislature in Richmond that “no military success of the enemy” could destroy the Confederacy. “There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends,” he daringly asserted, pledging that the rebel armies would not capitulate even if Richmond, Wilmington, Savannah, Charleston, and Mobile—as seemed increasingly likely—fell into the enemy’s hands. The “exhaustive drain of blood and treasure” would persist until southerners were secure in the recognition of their “indefeasible rights.” Fittingly, the war’s deadliest year drew to a close with the promise of even more killing.21

  IT WAS William Tecumseh Sherman who first tested Davis’s sincerity. Having captured Atlanta, Grant’s red-haired, square-jawed lieutenant stepped off on his “March to the Sea” in mid-November, his armies spiritedly tramping to the evocative strains of “John Brown’s Body.” Sherman drove toward the Georgia coast virtually unopposed—pulling up bridges, twisting railroad tracks, torching foundries, and otherwise “living off the land” in country the war had scarcely visited. “Our men,” one Illinois soldier marveled, “are foraging on the country with the greatest liberality.”

  Before setting out on the march, Sherman solicited a body of Union troops to slice the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. Severing those tracks would prevent the rebels from shuttling any reinforcements into the defensive works ringing Savannah. In late November, a fleet of steamers cut through “heavy fog” to transport five thousand blue-coated men from Hilton Head, Morris, and Folly Islands to Boyd’s Neck, South Carolina. But once on land, the limited visibility prevented “Coastal Division” from exploiting their superior numbers; on the morning of November 30, the men blundered into a clumsy but fierce battle at Honey Hill, where the Confederates—mostly Georgia infantrymen—had filed hastily into a maze of old breastworks and wheeled several pieces of artillery into position. Fortified, the rebels staggered several determined enemy assaults. Union troops limped away from a battlefield littered with bodies, many “horribly mutilated by shells.”22

  Though the victorious rebels expected that the enemy would renew their efforts the next day, those attacks never came; instead, both armies simply spied on one another, swinging their spades and preparing new miles of works. In response to the steady buildup of enemy troops after Honey Hill—and with Sherman inching closer to Savannah—Army chief of staff Henry Halleck moved to reinforce the coastal division. On December 8, packed aboard the side-wheel steam gunboat USS Sonoma, the 107th Ohio finally bade farewell to Jacksonville. They would make this journey under the watchful eye of a new colonel. Nine long months after Colonel Meyer’s departure, John Snider Cooper, a twenty-three-year-old native of Mount Gilead, Ohio, who had battled in the Shenandoah Valley, extended pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock before Fredericksburg, and more recently led a regiment of United States Colored Troops, assumed permanent leadership of the regiment. His reception was more than likely an icy one, given that none of the men made even the slightest mention of it.23

  DROPPING ANCHOR at Gregorie’s Point, the men ferried out to Deveaux’s Neck, a slender, swampy, and thickly wooded peninsula that extends between the Tulifinny and Coosawatchie Rivers. The object of their expedition—the Charleston & Savannah Railroad—stretched nearby, still in possession of the rebels. For the next few weeks, the Ohioans laced Deveaux’s Neck with earthworks, an errand made all the more disagreeable by the raw, bone-chilling winds that whipped across the island. Several companies mounded the loamy earth into a delicate perch for the guns of the Third New York Light Artillery.24

  The weeks they passed in the knots of timber on Deveaux’s Neck were among the most demanding the men would endure during the war and required renewed vigilance. “We expected an attack in force at any moment,” one soldier recalled, “night or day.” The rebels launched one of those attacks on the afternoon of December 26. “Our artillery had been firing up to the noon hour, but the enemy did not return the fire,” Alfred Garner recalled. “Shortly after noon they let us have it.” The “first shell” screamed into the regiment’s camp with deadly accuracy, decapitating Joseph Stadelbauer. With his twin brother Edward, the twenty-year-old Austrian-born immigrant had enlisted in Tiffin in the late summer of 1862. Stadelbauer’s war had unfolded as a sequence of misfortunes. Not long after arriving in Washington, D.C., in November 1862, he took ill and was packed off to the U.S. Army General Hospital in Philadelphia. Making only a partial recovery, he returned to the front in time to freeze at Brooke’s Station, fight at Chancellorsville, and brawl at Gettysburg, where he was bagged as a rebel prisoner on the battle’s first day. Stadelbauer passed the next three months as a prisoner of war. Shortly after his exchange, his brother, who had likely contracted disease while detailed to t
he corps hospital in Gettysburg, was transferred to the Invalid Corps. Joseph passed the last, lonely year of his service as the company cook, addled with aches and tormented by painful memories of captivity. He was serving coffee to a comrade when the shell severed his head. Clots of brain matter and blood sprayed the men standing on either side of him.25

  The rebels enjoyed an “enviable” range—within five hundred yards—and it was perhaps nothing short of miraculous that their steady torrent of shells produced just three casualties in the 107th Ohio that afternoon. The “sandy and soft” soil that had furnished such a poor platform for their own batteries, one veteran supposed, probably spared many men. While plenty of enemy missiles arced into and behind their lines, one soldier estimated that “not more than” half of them exploded upon striking the sand. The unremitting fire kept the Ohioans shivering in their rifle pits for several more weeks; still, with uncharacteristic confidence, they believed that it was only a matter of time before Sherman captured Savannah and Charleston. Deserters who surrendered to the enemy “almost every night,” provided an index of enemy morale. “Both cities must fall ere long,” Peter Young forecasted, “and this rebellion will soon be a thing of the past.”26