A Thousand May Fall
Page 22
The condition of these young men, all of whom had marched off to war healthy and spry, doubtless startled friends and family members. Tom Hoagland returned from the war “a broken down man.” His neighbors attested that “he suffered from general ill health and a broken constitution,” describing his jaundiced complexion and recurring bouts of “constipation” and “indigestion.” Casper Bohrer, Daniel Biddle, Frederick Tonsing, and Daniel Whitmer each lost a leg at Gettysburg; they returned home requiring the “constant aid and attendance of another person.” Biddle journeyed more than two hundred miles to Cincinnati to be fitted with a wooden leg, but the prosthetic invited considerable frustration. “He would put it on,” a friend recalled, “and after wearing it a short time the stump would get sore, and he would have to lay it aside.” Moored in bed for at least two weeks on one of these occasions, he called upon his cousin to tend the “little grocery” he operated in Navarre. He soon resolved that he “would get around better on his crutches.” Tonsing tried two prosthetics manufactured by Benjamin Franklin Palmer, the New Hampshire physician who held the patent for the artificial leg, before opting to lean into crutches for the rest of his life on Cleveland’s West Side.7
No less distressing was the sight of so many young men mangled and disfigured. Joseph Kieffer, a musician in the regimental band, had suffered a gunshot wound atop Blocher’s Knoll that destroyed the muscle tissue in his face; consequently, he could not open his left eye, which was “continuously inflamed” and constantly oozing. Ugly wounds prevented Frank Rothermel from opening his mouth more than a third of an inch, Theobald Hasman from raising his hands above his head, and Peter Schieb from extending his arm. A shell wound not only deafened Lanson McKinney but left his face badly disfigured. Together, these men bore witness to the war’s violence; their furrowed brows and unsteady gaits supplied compelling testimony about all they had seen and experienced. The war was something indelibly inscribed on their bodies—something they were never again able to escape.8
Feeling the almost magnetic pull of the war, not every soldier was eager to return home. While awaiting their discharge papers at Camp Cleveland, more than a score of the regiment’s veterans organized an “Emigration Society.” Aiming to plant a soldier’s colony in the “genial climate” of Florida, they deputized an “executive committee” to open negotiations with the government for “aid and assistance” acquiring land. The Cleveland Daily Herald cheered the proposal’s promise of a “true” and thorough reconstruction of the South, but failed to consider how the project betrayed these veterans’ not insignificant doubts about returning to civilian life.9
For their part, the Zoar volunteers wondered how—or even if—a community that had opposed the war would greet them. In 1875, Constance Fenimore Woolson, the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, published “Wilhelmina,” a short story that dramatized the return of the 107th Ohio to the separatist society on the “tranquil Tuscarawas.” The eponymous character, a slender maiden who wears both a “stiff, short-waisted gown” and a “far-off dreamy expression,” awaits Gustav, to whom she was betrothed before the war. Her “heavy lidded” eyes well with tears when she learns that the regiment will be paid off the following week—that the men “cannot be later than ten days from now.” Wilhelmina claims to be elated, but she quietly dreads the reunion. Her father, the society’s gardener, desires that his daughter marry Jacob, the thirty-year-old widower who, in refusing to go off to the war, remained true to the Separatists’ principles.
An “unusual excitement” rouses Zoar as the veterans’ arrival looms. When the men tramp “down the station road,” still encumbered by their “knapsacks, guns, and military accoutrements,” a large crowd is there to greet them, and their laughter and tears compete with the “drowsy, long-drawn chant” of a summer evening. Among Zoar’s conscientious objectors, curiosity wins out over condemnation, and following “a half hour of general rejoicing,” the townsfolk disperse. In the ensuing days, however, while some of the soldiers settle into “the old routine,” Gustav, together with Karl, another of his comrades, opts to leave the “pleasant little village” of his youth behind. “I feel all cramped up here, with these rules and bells,” he confesses. Wilhelmina, he adds, was “too quiet” for him. With no small “satisfaction,” the Zoarites bid him farewell.
No more than a few miles beyond town, Wilhelmina catches up with Gustav, the color drained from her face. “Gustav, mein Gustav!” she shrieks, collapsing at his feet. A whisper of remorse compels the veteran to linger, but just a moment longer. “She looks bad,” he says, “very bad.” The veteran quickly quiets his conscience and kisses Wilhelmina goodbye, “impatient” to rejoin Karl on the road to Cleveland. Her worst fears confirmed, the young maiden wails with the grief that, despite her marriage to Jacob four weeks later, will place her in an early grave. Though fictional, Woolson’s story nonetheless captured the knot of conflicting emotions that the regiment’s veterans and their families worked to untangle that summer.10
THE VETERANS’ first few weeks and months back home were nothing if not disorienting. In Akron, George Billow tried his hand as a grocer, but discovered a “once splendid” memory greatly diminished and his “mental faculties . . . alarmingly effected.” The captain attributed both maladies to “leaving his accustomed routine of military service.” After nearly three years of constant activity, he could not abide the thought of a stationary life. The “outlook,” it seemed, was “dreary.” Abandoning the grocery business, Billow next took up work as a traveling salesman, hawking Akron-manufactured stoneware throughout northeast Ohio. But his feeble frame could not endure the Western Reserve’s numbing winters. In 1870, Billow decided to move to Huntsville, Alabama, hoping its “milder climate” might restore his delicate health.11
Some men seemed unfazed by their wounds. With a business partner, Peter F. Young, still nursing the gunshot wound he received in the left arm at Gettysburg, bought up the stock of a Painesville cashmere dealer. The duo advertised their custom, heavily discounted wares throughout the summer, with Young proudly billing himself as “formerly of the 107th Ohio Vol. Inf.” But hardly all were so fortunate. Injuries and chronic ailments made it especially difficult for many of the regiment’s veterans to find work. Philip May landed a job replacing track on the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati & St. Louis Railway the second summer after the war, but a rheumatic attack, which he attributed to the gunshot wound he received at Gettysburg, obliged him to quit. Not long after returning home, Arnold Streum began laboring at a “coal bank,” but the musket ball lodged in his leg caused him such “great and continued pain” that he found it difficult to remain on his feet more than a few hours. “I work sometimes one day in a week, sometimes three and sometimes only half a day,” he complained, “when I am forced to quit and go home.” Adam Berghofer attempted to make ends meet as a “day laborer” on the abundant farms near his home in Sandusky, but crippling headaches and dizzy spells prevented him from working “more than one third of the time.” Down in Zoar, Christian Rieker tried to pick up his blacksmithing hammer on several occasions, but his “greatly reduced” condition would not permit it. For Rieker, as for “many” of his comrades, “it seemed that ambitions cherished from boyhood would have to be given up.”12
Men who were physically “broken down” depended on spouses, children, and even their former comrades for aid and assistance. Harrison Flora would lose the “entire use” of his right arm and hand “for days.” The musket ball that struck his shoulder at Gettysburg remained burrowed beneath the skin for eighteen months—a painful souvenir of the battle. Confined to his home “three fourths of the time,” he had “to be waited on as a child.” Nicholas Lopendahl’s wife and sister-in-law routinely washed, dressed, and fed him; the veteran’s shattered right arm, first treated at a Gettysburg field hospital, rendered him “perfectly helpless.” Alfred Rider’s wife, Mary Ann, “use[d] to rub his knees every night before going to bed with ‘nerve and bone liniment.’ ”
Perha
ps the most dependent on assistance was Henry Feldkamp, who was no longer able to ply his trade as a carpenter. A matron made daily calls on the young sergeant, who rented a room in a boardinghouse on Cleveland’s Oregon Street. During the fight for Blocher’s Knoll, a rebel slug lodged in the sergeant’s left thigh, “just above the knee.” The ball festered there for more than a decade, despite several heroic attempts at extraction. “Quite stiff,” the irascible Feldkamp could not stand, could not sleep, and could “scarcely get about.” His sore-pocked knee would swell to more than twice its natural circumference before discharging fluid and tiny fragments of bone.13
Survivors without a caretaker—or who lost one to death or divorce—sometimes sought sanctuary in a local, state, or federal soldiers’ home. When John Hemmerling’s wife passed away in 1885, the rheumatic veteran, still nursing the effects of a gunshot wound, moved from his home in Cleveland to the leafy Milwaukee campus of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Yet suffering from an injury to his left shoulder, Frederick Jungling responded to his last roll call at the Ohio State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, which domiciled some one thousand veterans on a ninety-eight-acre site in Sandusky, near the shores of Lake Erie. Still others who sought admission to these homes craved “the companionship of other soldiers.” “Very eas[ily] excited,” Henry Klingaman supposed that “he would be better contented at the Soldiers’ Home,” where military discipline would once more structure his days.14
Mental and emotional health issues delivered quite a few veterans to these facilities, too. Emlen Landon, who suffered a severe gunshot wound to his head at Gettysburg, entered the Sandusky home in March 1894, “subject to sudden attacks of violent pain” and “spells of dizziness” during which he became “almost completely blind.” The twenty-year-old brickmaker from Stark County simply never got over his injury. “His friends claim there has been an entire change in his disposition since receiving his wound,” one pension examiner reported. “[He] complains of being very nervous at times.” After three years at the Ohio Home, administrators discharged Landon for “violating the rules”—more than likely the result of his whiskey habit. Somehow, he found his way to the Danville, Illinois, branch of the National Home in January 1899, but from it, too, he was “dishonorably discharged” after five years. Fortunately for Landon, the administrators back in Sandusky were willing to overlook his previous debauchery and readmitted him. But while absent without leave on the fourteenth anniversary of his first admission to a soldiers’ home, Landon was found dead, a victim of “acute alcoholism.”15
Frederick Bross’s injury “eventually [a]ffected his mind to such an extent” that family members deposited him not at the soldiers’ home but at Columbus’s Central Ohio Insane Asylum. The musket ball that tore through his body had obliged the former blacksmith to “quit his business.” The loss of his trade, remorseless pain, and the “large” exit wound that disfigured his body were simply too much. Charles Cordier continued to work in his butcher’s shop after he returned home from the war, but the shell that struck his head at Gettysburg likewise continued to trouble him. The veteran suffered “fits every two or three weeks,” during which he would “lose control of his mind” and experience lapses in memory. Perhaps trusting that a warmer clime might improve his condition, Cordier moved to Jacksonville, not terribly far from where the regiment had twisted through the woods behind McGirt’s Creek. Still, his health continued to wane. On the morning of August 10, 1889, his wife awoke to an empty house. Hours later, a police captain discovered her husband’s body bobbing “in the St. John’s River at the foot of Liberty Street.” Considering that “for the past two weeks” he had “suffered much from an abscess on his cheek, and from wounds in the head received in the late war,” the jury of inquest reckoned Cordier on “the verge of insanity” and deemed his death a suicide. For this veteran of the 107th Ohio, twenty-six years later and eight hundred miles away, the battle for Blocher’s Knoll—and all of the pain it prompted—was finally over.16
GRIEVOUSLY WOUNDED veterans depended on federally funded pensions to make ends meet. So too did widowed mothers like Eliza Whisler, whose son, Laban, killed in the fight at Deveaux’s Neck, had sustained her financially before the war. Yet the army of pension clerks in Washington was, within a year of Appomattox, “busy enough to be considered overworked and underpaid.” The staggering volume of claims—more than 125,000 disabled veterans and widows appeared on the pension rolls by 1866—slowed processing times to a crawl. Just as the nation had been unprepared for the war, so too was it unprepared for the peace.17
For needy claimants, these delays could be devastating. Joseph Kieffer had been home no more than a week when he visited Dr. Lorenzo Whiting, the pension examining surgeon who maintained a medical practice in Canton. A native of Connecticut, Whiting earned his medical degree at Williams College in 1835 before relocating to Canton the following year. Though a staunch abolitionist, the genial scholar quickly earned the esteem of his neighbors. Whiting conducted a careful examination of the young musician’s ghastly wound and then completed the required surgeon’s certificate. Kieffer filed his claim three weeks later, but waited until January 1871 before he was added to the pension rolls. Amputees seemed to fare somewhat better, though they too met with maddening delays. David Sarbach, who could no longer elevate his left arm after a rebel musket ball ripped through his shoulder, waited just over a year for a pension certificate. Henry Feldkamp anticipated his first pension disbursement for seven agonizing months. Misfortune seemed to hound Theodore Blocher, the Stark County wagoner who was “slightly wounded” at Chancellorsville and then bagged as a prisoner at Gettysburg; he waited some nine years before the Pension Bureau took up his claim. Frustration with the application process (or perhaps an unjustly “low” rating) may have prompted Adam Berghofer to shred his pension certificate, the pieces of which were discovered littering a Dayton alley in 1885.18
Securing a pension claim obliged veterans to submit to a battery of invasive medical examinations. During annual or biennial visits, examining surgeons evaluated the “degree of disability” so as to determine the “appropriate” amount of compensation. Not surprisingly, veterans resented these exams. John Leffler, who endured recurring spells of numbness in his right leg, insisted frankly in the fall of 1883 that he was “entitled to a higher rate,” his pension being “graded too low for degree of disability.” Daniel Whitmer demanded an increase in the pension he received for the loss of his left leg, amputated in a Gettysburg field hospital after the fight for Blocher’s Knoll. Disposed to falls and irritated by his government-issued artificial limb, which chafed his stump, the septuagenarian appealed for a higher rating in March 1905. This prompted the Pension Bureau to dispatch a medical investigator to his Canton home with precise instructions: measure and trace the stump, “determine definitely the point of amputation of claimant’s left leg,” and “describe the condition of the knee joint, stump, and cicatrix.”19
Securing a pension also required veterans to navigate a thicket of rules, statutes, and federal legislation. Though veterans’ newspapers dispensed routine advice about preparing pension applications, the process was so confounding that men frequently engaged pension claims attorneys to represent them. In Cleveland, many veterans and their families turned to Milo B. Stevens & Company, the Washington, D.C.–based firm that maintained a humming satellite office downtown on Superior Street—along with branches in Detroit and Chicago. The attorneys blanketed the city in handsomely printed circulars hawking their services. So too did William E. Preston, whose Cleveland-based “Soldiers’ National War Claim Agency” pledged to “exact justice” for all pension-seekers. George Zuern, still suffering from the effects of captivity on Richmond’s Belle Isle, retained George Lemon, a wounded New York veteran, to handle his claim, while Arnold Streum trusted George Hildt, who had commanded the 30th Ohio at Antietam, to prepare his application.20
Challenges unique to their wartime service rendered the vete
rans of the 107th Ohio especially labor-intensive clients. The Pension Bureau required applicants to establish the wartime origins of their disabilities by supplying notarized statements from both a regimental surgeon and a commissioned officer. But Surgeon Hartman was dead, and Surgeon Knaus relocated to New Alsace, Indiana, before reenlisting in the postwar army. For the next two decades, Knaus toiled as a hospital steward at far-flung military outposts in Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakota Territory. A yellowed envelope wedged in the surgeon’s personal papers at the National Archives bulges with letters from anxious veterans desperate to find him. Some wrote to Knaus several times without so much as a reply. “I think it is impossible to get his affidavit,” Albert Beck regretted, “for this is the second time I wrote to him and never received no answer.” An impatient John Lutz scribbled out a plea directly to the Surgeon General. “As I require his certificate to complete certain pension papers,” he explained, “I should be greatly obliged for an answer as soon as practicable.” The regiment’s notoriously poor record keeping also held up quite a few pensions. Henry Finkenbiner’s claim stalled when the veteran could not produce a “hospital record” documenting his Gettysburg wound. His heroics at Dingle’s Mill, which would earn for him the Medal of Honor, seem to have been insufficient evidence of his trustworthiness and character.21
Still, Finkenbiner was more fortunate than many of his comrades who suffered less conspicuous injuries. Those who froze at Brooke’s Station or endured the tropical climes of Florida were often afflicted with rheumatism, chills, aches, ague, chronic diarrhea, and fever. But they struggled to establish the wartime origins of their swollen joints and halting limps with the exacting precision demanded by the Pension Bureau. Albert Beck had no doubt about the source of the rheumatic pains that besieged his limbs: “sleeping in the snow,” he wrote, “with no protection but an oil cloth on the march Washington to Camp Fairfax.” Several comrades even supplied testimony to that effect, noting how “very much exposed” the men were on this “very severe march.” Still, pension examiners greeted his application with considered skepticism. “I think it is a sin and a shame to our government,” Beck fumed.22