A Thousand May Fall
Page 21
AT DUSK, THE MEN strutted into Sumter, belting out the verses of “Rally ’Round the Flag” and “John Brown’s Body.” They would occupy the handsome town for the next two days, emptying its tobacco sheds and stores. Not to be outdone, the printers who issued the Clarendon Banner—Of Freedom gleefully went to work on a “loyal edition” of the Sumter Watchman. They had a ready-made headline when the news finally reached Sumter that Richmond and Petersburg had fallen into federal hands (the news about Lee’s surrender would not arrive for a few more days). That evening, “wild with gladness,” the men fired a thirteen-gun salute from one of the howitzers they had captured at Dingle’s Mill.43
Notwithstanding the “hardships and sufferings” they had endured in the swamps of South Carolina, it was “the prospect of soon encountering the last of the armed foe,” Jacob Smith later observed, that “cheered” the men in the spring of 1865. They sensed that the rebellion was at long last drawing to a close. Plantation slavery, for one, was unraveling before their eyes; with each mile, the number of refugees from slavery tramping behind them swelled. On April 16, one officer estimated that “as many as 3,000” men, women, and children of all “conditions” struggled to keep pace with Potter’s winded columns. He gaped in awe at the “crippled men and women, little boys and girls just able to toddle, [and] women in the very agonies of child birth all moving along.” The 107th Ohio could also measure progress in the miles of railroad track and trestle work they had twisted—and in the number of locomotive and train cars they had destroyed.44
Onward they marched into “one of the fairest portions of South Carolina,” the roads now canopied by the interlocking limbs of sturdy live oaks. “There were Cotton Gins & Presses, horses, wagons & etc. at every house,” one soldier marveled. “The women and children all sit on the Piazzas as we pass.” Through this country, the columns encountered only a token opposition; as one lieutenant remarked, “not an able-bodied man was seen.” Fixing their bayonets, the men rushed into line and charged some skirmishers entrenched near Statesburg on the evening of April 15. In a slashing rain after dark, the 107th Ohio drove in the enemy’s right flank. Two days later, the men pressed into Camden, where Cornwallis notched an important victory during the Revolution. But the men would tarry just long enough to visit the marble obelisk marking the resting place of Baron de Kalb (Colonel Cooper recorded its elegant inscription in his diary). Learning that the rolling stock they had expected to find there had been whisked eight miles south to Boykin’s Mill, they obediently reversed course and, before dawn, set out on the road to Statesburg.45
The enemy waited for them at Boykin’s, ensconced in the rifle pits they planted along the commanding ridge overlooking Swift Creek. Their “strong force” was supported by two artillery pieces. Leaving nothing to chance, the rebels yanked up the bridge that spanned the creek and broke the mill dam, “flooding the road.” As a result, Potter’s men would be forced to wade through impossible ponds and breast-high swamps, practically moored in place under a spirited and well-trained fire.46
Linking hands with the 54th Massachusetts, the 107th Ohio attempted unsuccessfully to turn the enemy’s right flank, but soon came to the support of the 25th Ohio which, in a stroke of remarkable fortune, discovered some “trestle work” that reached across the creek. After a fight that one veteran of the 54th Massachusetts deemed a “plucky affair,” the outnumbered rebels yielded their position. Potter’s men nipped at their heels, exchanging a few volleys with the enemy near Dinkin’s Mill on April 19. Meanwhile, following the course of the railroad, the 107th Ohio wreaked havoc on every “bridge, culvert, box car, and steam locomotive” they could find. “Completely routed,” the rebels sent up a flag of truce, conceding that further resistance was futile.
Early the next morning, Potter’s men turned down the Santee River Road and started on the march to Georgetown, their work finally finished. In the space of only seventeen days, they had razed one hundred cotton gins, torched five thousand bales of cotton, collected more than five thousand contrabands, wrecked thirty-two locomotives, captured sixty-five prisoners, and destroyed nearly all of the railroad infrastructure between Sumter and Camden. For its part, the 107th Ohio had met the enemy no fewer than four times and marched more than five hundred miles. Unlike nearly every other episode of its service, the regiment looked back on its participation in Potter’s expedition self-assuredly. If they felt any remorse for the ruin they exacted on South Carolina, it was just as quickly quelled. “Circumstances uncontrollable,” one of its enlisted men concluded years later, “had made it necessary to bring this last visitation on the state, guilty beyond all others, of the sin of rebellion.”47
ONLY A FEW HOURS into the march, halted on the grounds of a stately old Greek Revival plantation, the troops learned that Generals Sherman and Johnston had agreed to a truce in North Carolina. “Cheer on cheer went up from the troops,” one soldier remembered. “The joy that filled our hearts was supreme.” Inspired by the report, a sprightly gait delivered the men to Georgetown—one hundred miles away—just four nights later.
For two weeks, the men caught their breath in Georgetown, inventorying their supplies, ordnance, and equipment amid the blizzard of bulletins and dispatches attending the end of the war. But not all of the news was heartening. At ten o’clock on the morning of May 4, the regiment snapped to attention. Standing before them, clutching a War Department circular trimmed with a thick, black border, Colonel Cooper started to read. “The distressing duty has devolved upon the Secretary of War,” he began, “to announce to the Armies of the United States that at twenty-two minutes after seven o’clock, on the morning of Saturday, the fifteenth day of April, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, died of a mortal wound inflicted upon him by an assassin.” The “soul that had taken all the people into its care,” Alfred Rider reflected, “had gone to its reward.” The shocking news was sufficient to suspend all activities for the balance of the day. Even in a regiment that had voted for George McClellan, “strong men,” as Jacob Smith recalled, “were bowed in grief.” Some even thirsted for revenge; as was the case elsewhere throughout the South, Union officers moved to prevent enraged enlisted men from visiting violence on innocent rebel civilians. Their ardor cooled, however, the next afternoon, when a steamer from Charleston arrived with the report that John Wilkes Booth—one of the men pronounced the president’s assassin a “deep dyed and consummate villain”—had been killed after a twelve-day manhunt.48
The Holy City, as it turned out, would be the regiment’s next destination. In early May, the men climbed aboard the steamer Island City for the short but turbulent voyage down the Carolina coast to the birthplace of secession. After the vessel dropped anchor, the 107th Ohio walked the streets of the “once proud” city, now reduced to ruins and heaps of rubble. “The splendid houses were all deserted, the glass in the windows broken, the walls dilapidated, the columns toppled over,” one observer gaped. “Desolation and ruin sit monarchs of the place,” he remarked. Men inventoried the “ploughed” pavements and “shivered” cornices, the “ghastly holes” in roofs and walls, the “fragments of brick and stone”—all damage visited upon Charleston by Gillmore’s shells. The city’s rough cobblestone streets, once alive with haughty secessionists, now teemed with newly freed slaves. The slave pens and markets were closed, no more to traffic in human flesh, but the Stars and Stripes once more fluttered over Fort Sumter. For his part, Jacob Smith took in the monument raised in honor of John C. Calhoun, the godfather of secession. “The marble bust of the senator upon the top of the shaft was without a head,” he wrote with satisfaction, “that part of it having been shot off by the first shell fired into the city by our forces stationed upon Folly Island.”49
The troops filed into the entrenchments ringing Charleston, now under the command of Colonel Hallowell. The day must have seemed interminably long to the troops standing sentinel over the lifeless city. Nor did the blistering sun (“It is insupportably hot,” one
soldier groused) contribute much to their immediate comfort. Impatient for discharge papers, the troops grew anxious—especially once telegraphs began clicking feverishly with the news that Sherman’s armies had started toward the nation’s capital to strut down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the Army of the Potomac in a final, military review. Not unlike other “off duty officers,” Surgeon Knaus remedied his boredom one evening by procuring a pass to enter the city. He rode directly to General Gillmore’s headquarters for a night of heavy drinking.
One by one, Union regiments received orders to withdraw from the Charleston defenses. In late May, the 107th Ohio pitched a new camp in “a small rice swamp” near Magnolia Cemetery, the sprawling, oak-shaded maze of marble and granite on the banks of the Cooper River. But here they grew even more restive. “Local farmers” registered “numerous complaints” about crops trampled and property damaged by wayward troops. In early June, twenty-one-year-old John Conrady confessed to desecrating a grave in Magnolia. He was ordered to march “along the line of the regiment at dress parade,” displaying “a placard on his back naming his crime.” Though the troops were “clean and well supplied,” many refused to polish their muskets, maintain company records, or tend to the demands of drill. An inspector from army headquarters regarded discipline as “fair” or “middling” in eight of the regiment’s ten companies.50
Charleston, South Carolina, the cradle of secession, had been reduced to shell-pocked columns and heaps of rubble by the time the 107th Ohio strutted into the city in the spring of 1865. Library of Congress
For weeks, locomotives and paddle-wheel steamers crowded with demobilized soldiers had been lurching north. From Washington, D.C., Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs had expertly choreographed the disbanding of the armies—some eight hundred thousand men had returned to their homes by June—but from the perspective of men on the ground, demobilization made little sense. “We don’t know anything of going home,” an impatient Peter Zurbrugg grumbled in a letter to his father. Colonel Cooper implored headquarters to discharge his men, only to learn that they were being moored in place for want of blank muster rolls. “We are at a dead stand still in regard to them,” he lamented in mid-June.
The maddening delay meant that the men would spend the Fourth of July in Charleston, parading through its streets as the harbor “resounded” with the tributes “fired from Sumter, Moultrie, Bee, Wagner, and Gregg.” But these “national salutes,” together with public readings of the Declaration of Independence and Emancipation Proclamation, contrasted sharply with the “perfectly outrageous” sentiments expressed by the locals. “Were I in command, I should put a bridle in the mouths of some of these men,” the colonel confided to his diary, forecasting further turmoil once “the Yankees” abandoned the peninsula. Before long, Cooper’s somber prophecy became a reality.51
Six days after celebrating the nation’s birthday, the fatiguing work of making out its muster rolls completed, the men of the 107th Ohio finally received their coveted discharge papers. They had packed a lifetime into two years and ten months. Now they were going home.
CHAPTER 9
“THE FEELINGS OF A SOLDIER”
July 1865 and Beyond
THE MEN WERE RESTLESS as the passenger cars clacked along the Lake Shore, Cleveland & Erie Railroad that morning. It was July 18, and it had been nearly a week since the troops climbed aboard the Salvor in Charleston, the sturdy, square-rigged steamer whose enormous canvas masts “towered above its wooden decks.” The four-day voyage to New York City—followed immediately by a two-day rail journey across the Empire State to the shores of Lake Erie—had afforded the men ample time to reflect on the war and their participation in it. Mourning the absence of slain comrades and carrying with them the enormous burden of the past, they tried to imagine the future. For nearly three years they had dreamt about this moment. But now that it had arrived, uncertainty and misgivings conspired to overwhelm them. Not surprisingly, as the cars slowed to a crawl, the city felt different. Cleveland’s population had ballooned by an astounding fifty percent over the course of the war—demographic growth far exceeding that experienced by “any other northern city.”
The locomotive sputtered into the old depot just after dawn, but Jack Leland’s Band was there to greet it. The celebrated musicians—many of them veterans—escorted the men for the short march up Bank Street to Public Square, where Mayor Herman M. Chapin and a tiny knot of civilians had assembled to welcome them home. Anticipating its return, local newspapers heaped superlatives upon the regiment. Just a day after publishing a thumbnail sketch of the unit’s service, the Cleveland Daily Leader declared that Ohio had recruited “no pluckier regiment,” while the Daily Cleveland Herald noted that the outfit “was and is of the very best material.” Another article applauded the men in turn as “healthy,” “enterprising,” and “brave”—descriptions that belied the physical condition of the 412 men who stepped off the train. Wracked by typhoid at Brooke’s Station and afflicted with ague while in Florida—to say nothing of the spent rebel bullet that struck his right leg at Gettysburg—William Siffert was “so much depleted” upon his arrival in Cleveland that comrades Peter Gnau and Daniel Biddle carried him from the depot directly to a bed in the Marine Hospital.1
From the temporary rostrum erected in the square, the mayor introduced William Jarvis Boardman, who delivered prepared remarks. While the thirty-three-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer had not yet lived a decade in Cleveland, in that time he had emerged as an industrious civic leader, assuming the directorship of the city’s Commercial National Bank, the presidency of the Cleveland Library Association, and a seat on the Adelbert College Board of Trustees. “The people of this county are able to say Old Cuyahoga has done her share, and nobly too, in the great work of crushing out this wicked rebellion,” Boardman proclaimed. The soldiers had not only restored the Union; they had cleansed it of slavery, that “foul blot” upon the republic. The “pernicious doctrine of state’s rights” had been laid bare. What was more, Billy Yank had reassured “the Union-loving masses of Europe” that democracy could be saved from itself. “You have shown to the world that our institutions make perfect soldiers of its civilians,” he declared.2
The crowd looked to Colonel Cooper for a response. “No one who has not experienced the feelings of a soldier,” he began, “can appreciate our feelings upon such an occasion as this.” Cooper thanked the mayor for his “kind” reception, but he hastened to add that “it is not your provisions that we care about, nor the rest of the outward display.” In polite yet measured remarks, he explained that only the loyalty of men and women back home could ever repay the regiment’s great sacrifices. “There have been some who have not always sustained us,” he alleged, “but you of the Western Reserve have always been true in our darkest days, and we have indeed had dark days.”3
After a bounteous breakfast, the regiment paraded up Superior Avenue to the Weddell House, the regal, five-story brick-and-sandstone hotel whose two hundred guest rooms, appointed “with every attainable luxury,” satisfied even the refined tastes of New Yorkers, among them the pinstriped politico Thurlow Weed. From its flag-festooned corner portico, General John Schofield reviewed the regiment, which had obediently filed onto Bank Street below. Not wishing to detain the troops very long, the general simply congratulated the men on “the termination of the war, and the inauguration of peace.” Then they trudged out to Camp Cleveland, where they would be “paid off” and disbanded. As the veterans parted ways and the 107th Ohio passed into history, they expressed the “greatest good feeling for each other.” Even if they could not yet articulate how, the men knew that the war had transformed their lives—and the life of their nation—forever. They would spend the next decades sorting out the meaning of the war and its unprecedented violence. “We are entering upon a new stage of being,” one Cleveland newspaper nodded, “and will not be the same people hereafter, that we have been heretofore.”4
“I WAS VERY ANXIOUS to get h
ome,” Jacob Smith remembered. From Cleveland, a train delivered him to Alliance, where he switched cars for the shorter trip into Canton. “One or two of the citizens of Canton detained me for some time in relating parts of my experience in the service,” he noted with regret, “so that it was past nine o’clock before I got out of town.” Smith pressed on anyway, stopping several miles short of his home five hours later. Leaning against a “pile of wood alongside the road,” the footsore veteran stole several hours of rest. Cresting the “large hill east of our house” early the next morning, he locked eyes with his parents, brothers, and sisters for the first time in three years. The reunion was a “very happy one,” but Smith was most grateful for the chance to “rest and look back over the scenes passed through.”5
The men were physically and emotionally exhausted. Like Smith, Colonel Cooper required a period of rest upon his return home. After a brief visit to Oberlin, a hotbed of abolitionism and his alma mater, he hastened to his family’s home in rural Morrow County, eager to “enjoy a month’s relaxation” after “years of life in the camp.” For those flagging under the effects of painful infirmities and chronic diseases, rest was not a choice so much as it was a necessity. Christian Rieker returned to Zoar subject to severe bouts of diarrhea, which before long yielded to a constipation so extreme as to scorn every remedy. Wrenching cramps kept him prostrated in bed for days. Philip Seltzer “came home feeble and emaciated,” laboring under a “hard,” rasping cough that from time to time expelled blood. By the time George Billow reached his home in Akron, he had been “reduced to a physical wreck,” the consequence of “protracted hardships and exposures.”6