A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  That mutely tell us the story of the bloodiest of wars

  Just gaze on the flags they are bearing, all riddled with shot and shell

  The flags they carried undaunted right into the gateway of hell

  See the bodies bent and disabled, made so in the battle’s fierce blast;

  Are these the weeds of the army at whom these insults are cast?40

  By the summer of 1929, only twenty-six survivors of the 107th Ohio remained. That August, eight of them gathered in Navarre to reelect Augustus Vignos president of the regimental association. Five years later, with but a handful of survivors living, eighty-seven-year-old James M. Corl was the only veteran able to attend the regiment’s annual reunion. On the appointed day, at the Navarre YMCA, Corl delivered a poignant address to a room lined with empty chairs, dutifully rehearsing the “many experiences of the regiment.” Two summers later he was interred beneath a family headstone that was ordinary in every way, save the careful etching on its face: “Co. A, 107th Regt., OVI.”41

  TO THE VERY END, the men of the 107th Ohio believed that their many months of suffering—something symbolized by their tattered battle flags, pinned-up coat sleeves, and rotting wounds—had granted them a singular authority over the war and its legacies. During the conflict itself, they asserted that authority by resisting numbing fatigue duties and registering their distaste for discipline. As veterans, they drew on that authority to demand new and more capacious definitions of duty, sacrifice, and patriotism. More than extraordinary deeds, they seemed to insist, Union victory demanded everyday mettle—of the sort put on display in disease-choked camps and overcrowded hospital wards, on protracted marches and remote picket lines, as men impatiently marked time and suffered from self-doubt. Empty sleeves were “honorable scars,” but so too, they maintained, were frostbitten toes and crooked fingers, raspy coughs and labored breaths.42

  Neither convinced that they had climbed to the “snowy heights of honor” once described in elegy by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., nor entirely ready to concede that the war had been some irredeemable folly, the men of the regiment instead fused pain and pride into a single interpretation of the war. Loss and anguish were, even for the most sentimental among veterans, fundamental to the conflict’s meaning. Celebrations of the war’s results always implied a reckoning with its costs. As one scholar recently observed, veterans “revisited” the “terror of combat that had marked their service” after the war, “if only to take greater satisfaction in the comforts of a hard-won peace.” Their sacrifices, they believed, bespoke their loyalty. While the legacy of emancipation divided the men in peace as it had divided them at war, no one could deny that they stood by the flag in the face of a treasonous rebellion.43

  The nation, however, preferred to move on. So it was that in the twilight of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman could declare that the “fervid atmosphere” and “typical events” of the war were “in danger of being totally forgotten.” Not a few of the regiment’s veterans sensed that their unique war had not gotten “in the books.” In 1906, Martin Boyer appealed directly to the editor of the nation’s leading periodical for Union veterans. “Please publish a short history of the 107th Ohio,” he implored. “I am a reader of The National Tribune, but I have never seen anything in the paper concerning the 107th Ohio.” The intuition that the regiment’s experiences had not been adequately recorded similarly inspired Jacob Smith to put pen to paper on a unit history. The regiment’s veterans were “fast growing feeble,” after all, and “the gaps in the picket line” were “daily growing wider.” Before long, the last of their number would be “mustered out of life’s service.” One cold winter’s evening, Smith opened a tablet and began to write. Two years later, he had produced some five hundred manuscript pages, densely lined with his raw, unembellished prose.44

  Work on Camps and Campaigns obliged Smith “to wander back through the mazes of memory,” where the past presented itself again with “startling reality and vividness.” He shouldn’t have been surprised. Like so many of his comrades, he had never really been able to leave the war behind. Too many emotions and too many losses had crowded into those years. He belonged to a community of shared suffering—ordinary men welded together by their extraordinary circumstances. “I have never in thought or word regretted what little I had done for my country in the way of duty,” Smith concluded at the end of his book, “but have always been proud that I had taken some humble part in the great strife.” Confident but self-conscious, acknowledging the yawning void between the war he waged and the war the nation preferred to imagine, the old soldier had penned a fitting epitaph for his regiment.45

  EPILOGUE

  TWENTY-FOUR YEARS after they first rushed Blocher’s Knoll, they did it again. This time, however, there was no unabated rush; they gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets. No longer laureled with corps badges, the men donned bronze reunion medals and brightly colored ribbons. One pinned up an empty coat sleeve. The passage of nearly a quarter-century had furrowed and creased youthful faces; once vibrant beards and well-manicured chin fringe had faded into snow. Not all of the old boys made it, of course. Christian Rieker had been dead for a decade; he was just thirty-five years old when Zoar’s elders laid him to rest, the young soldier having never recovered from the effects of exposure and rebel captivity. Still, some forty survivors of the 107th Ohio would assemble in Gettysburg on September 14, 1887—and those who made the journey wouldn’t have missed it for the world. George Billow, Augustus Vignos, Alfred Rider, and William Siffert were all there, undeterred by the trials of the long railroad journey across Pennsylvania. Only John Brunny, who had moved to eastern Kansas very soon after the war, and Colonel Meyer, whose failing health prompted a physician-recommended move to Santa Cruz, where he passed away in April 1894, failed to make the trip.1

  That morning, the men assembled at Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street. Shortly after noon they paraded through the flag-festooned borough to the slopes of Blocher’s Knoll, where “a goodly number of Ohioans and citizens” awaited their arrival. Along their old lines, just beyond the lichened stones of the almshouse cemetery, they would dedicate their regimental monument. That once unremarkable rise was now laced with a tour road, conveying hacks and carriages over the wide, flat plain that in so many ways, they had never really left.2

  BY THE TIME the veterans arrived, Gettysburg was already a maze of granite, marble, and bronze. In the 1870s and 1880s, in response to the relentless lobbying of Union veterans, northern state legislatures appropriated monies to adorn the field with tiny flank markers, tablets, and monuments. Ohio was no exception, approving funds to erect monuments saluting the two cavalry outfits, four artillery batteries, and thirteen infantry regiments from the Buckeye State that saw service at Gettysburg. In the summer of 1885, Vignos and Rider, together with Captain John Lutz, accompanied Ohio’s adjutant general Ebenezer Finley to the battlefield to select a fitting and proper location for “Ohio’s Token of Gratitude.” The men were pleased that the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association had not only connected important locations on the battlefield with a network of tour roads, but that care had been taken to “protect the natural and artificial defenses” used during the fight.3

  Back in Columbus, the trio reviewed more than six hundred proposed designs for their regimental monument. After three days, they settled on Design No. 54 from the Smith Granite Works of Boston, one of two dozen contractors vying for the job. The handsome, somewhat understated block of Blue Westerly granite would be mounted atop Blocher’s Knoll. Though planting a monument on East Cemetery Hill would have recalled the fight with the Louisiana Tigers—the regiment’s most distinguished service at Gettysburg—the men opted to commemorate a trying episode that entailed much suffering and sacrifice. “This Memorial,” they proposed to etch, “is dedicated by the surviving members of the Regiment to their Fallen Comrades.”4

  Forty survivors returned to Gettysburg in September 1887 to dedicate a regim
ental monument along the battle line on the slopes of Blocher’s Knoll. Camps and Campaigns of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Huntington Library

  Standing atop Blocher’s Knoll, their minds flooded with painful memories, the men could not help but reflect back and take the measure of their lives. After returning home from the war, Augustus Vignos married his sweetheart, a twenty-seven-year-old Louisville girl named Phoebe DeVinney. For three years, they made a home in Marengo, Iowa, a steepled county seat located midway between Davenport and Des Moines, just south of the state’s namesake river. What sent the young couple abruptly packing for the “sparsely settled” frontier is not entirely clear—perhaps the void at home created by the death of Augustus’s father was too overwhelming—but before long, they were back in Canton. Even in familiar surroundings, however, Vignos struggled to find steady employment. He took on odd jobs to supplement his paltry earnings as a night watchman at a local lumber yard, a post the one-armed major left upon assuming new duties as janitor of the Stark County Court House.5

  Vignos worked long hours to support his growing family—his son Henry Joseph was born in 1866, and seven more children followed over the next twelve years—but, as one descendant noted, “he never lost interest in his comrades of the war.” Even in Iowa, he sought to “renew the acquaintance of those who had together shared the hardships of the camp, the march and the field,” helping to stage a “sham battle” at a colossal reunion that invited the participation of some fifteen hundred veterans. Back in Canton, he became an outspoken Republican and, together with nearly three dozen former regimental comrades, an active member of Grand Army of the Republic Post No. 25, which met in a large hall stocked with complete sets of the Official Records and the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. These volumes were especially useful for Vignos, who was frequently called upon to support his comrades’ pension claims.6

  George Billow was one comrade who relied upon the major’s aid. After five years of planting cotton in Alabama, Billow returned to Akron in 1875 with his wife, Anna, and their eight children—five sons and three daughters. Once back home, he converted his old wagons into horse-drawn hearses, establishing himself as an undertaker. By the time he traveled to Gettysburg, the captain was recognized as a leader in the budding funeral industry. (He would later serve as president of the Western Reserve Funeral Directors’ Association and, in the early twentieth century, earned a seat on the state board tasked with examining embalmers.) Billow’s success in family, business, and civic pursuits meant that friends and neighbors counted him among the war’s self-assured heroes; in the public eye, he seemed the perfect picture of a veteran who had easily triumphed over the hardships of war. “There was no officer nor soldier in the whole command physically better constituted to endure the hardships & privations incident to a soldier’s life than George Billow,” one of his comrades asserted. “He served his country faithfully from the beginning to the ending of the struggle,” another echoed.7

  But if the public image was useful—even something that Billow curated from time to time—it nonetheless consigned him to the legions of veterans who were left to suffer in silence. Many months of “camping under shelter tents in wet shoes and clothes, without fire” finally caught up with him. His feet, swollen and pocked with sores—stubborn reminders of those punishing winter marches in Virginia—continued to “break open” and ooze pus with painful regularity. Worse, he suffered from severe headaches, spells of dizziness, and “nervous prostration.” Billow explained that very often he experienced the “sensation of flashes of heat” surging through his frame. Not surprisingly, in 1876, a pension examiner found him “irritable,” wracked with “apprehension of coming misfortune.”8

  Though a successful entrepreneur and esteemed civic leader, George Billow quietly struggled with his Civil War past. Cleveland: Plain Dealer Press, 1906, 260

  Hoping that he might “out grow” his ailments, and unable to afford the services of a pension attorney, Billow waited a dozen years before filing a pension claim. Still more remarkably, after receiving an unjustly “low” rating, he held off any petition for an increase for two dozen years. Not only was the appeals process both daunting and “disheartening”—especially so for someone without a battle scar, but there was “considerable political feeling” gathering against pensions for Civil War veterans. Sensitive to his conspicuous place in local Republican politics and to his role in the Grand Army of the Republic, an order whose members were popularly derided as “pension beggars,” Billow once more subordinated his needs to a greater cause—more concerned about needier comrades, whose own claims he frequently endorsed. Indeed, when Billow prepared his biography for inclusion in the enormous volume of “Personal War Sketches” maintained by the GAR’s Colonel Lewis Buckley Post in Akron—a post Billow commanded for three years—it was characteristically modest. Beyond supplying his rank, company, and regiment, and the dates of his enlistment and discharge, the captain penned just a single sentence: “His Military Experience in the Civil War covered a period of 34 months.”9

  Perhaps more than most veterans, Billow cherished the opportunity to spend time with his old comrades. They affirmed his experiences and empathized with his anguish, all without demanding some sturdy, handsomely mustached hero. “I met him after the war at Akron,” Vignos once recalled, but “he was not by any means a well man.” In his work with the Buckley Post and with the regimental reunion association, he kept tabs on the old boys. Just down the road in Navarre, so too did Alfred Rider and William Siffert, both of whom attended, swapped stories, and munched hardtack at the Captain Samuel Miller Post of the GAR. Upon their return home, both veterans turned quickly to new business pursuits. Siffert tried his hand at the “milling business” with his old friend and regimental comrade James Corl, whose sister, Hettie, he married in 1867. Meanwhile, the “synonym for integrity” who always voted “the straight Republican ticket” prepared for the ministry; he earned his license to preach in the United Brethren Church in 1875 and was ordained a few years later. Rider went to work with his younger brother, Daniel, manufacturing harnesses and saddles in the “old stand” where their father had scraped out a living before the war. In 1872, the citizens of Navarre elected Rider as the village clerk; three years later he became the justice of the peace. His fidelity to the Republican Party would be further rewarded with his appointment as the “assistant superintendent” of the U.S. Post Office in Washington, D.C., where, appropriately enough, the old regimental postmaster served as the official government “inspector of mail bags.”10

  Like Billow, Rider suffered quietly after the war, depending on his wife, Mary Ann, for almost constant aid and assistance. He struggled with a lame foot, writhed with the chronic pain of rheumatism, and complained of frequent dizzy spells that prevented him from enjoying the evening newspaper. Attacks of vertigo could leave him prostrated for “days,” and seized him abruptly. A neighbor with whom he shared a boardinghouse in Washington, for instance, sprang from bed one night after hearing a “heavy fall” in Rider’s room. He found the veteran “very sick laying on the floor.” Still another tenant observed that Rider’s “nervous system” was “all torn to pieces.”11

  The war was something that Rider, stalked by these ailments, could never truly escape. Yet in a very real sense, like so many veterans, he did not want to. By remembering the war and acknowledging its pain and suffering, Rider resisted closure. He preserved his wartime letters (a “small hand truck full,” as he explained to one comrade), both as a powerful material artifact of the war and as a rich archive to be mined. In October 1885, Rider agreed to assist the mutton-chopped John Badger Bachelder, recently appointed as the federal government’s official historian of the battle of Gettysburg, in the daunting task of preparing a full and faithful chronicle of the war’s bloodiest clash. Rider plied Bachelder with a few reminiscences, but pledged to rummage his letters that winter for still more details. “I may be able to find other interesting matter am
ong those old letters,” he assured, that might “enable me to do you some good.” During these years, he became a real student of the battle, swapping stories with old comrades, exchanging copies of official reports, and even maintaining a small library of books and articles related to the fight—among them Pennsylvania College professor Michael Jacobs’s Notes on the Rebel Invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania (1864), the first contribution to the genre. Though he had wandered the fields “half a dozen times” after the battle, Rider confessed on the eve of the monument unveiling that he “had just begun to learn my ABCs of this fight.”12

  THE DEDICATION EXERCISES began “promptly at two o’clock,” when the regiment posted its tattered colors, on loan from the Flag Room at the Ohio State House, atop Blocher’s Knoll. Siffert invited his comrades to bow their heads in prayer before Vignos’s young daughter, Blanche, led the audience in a stirring rendition of “America.” After the handsome monument was unveiled, Captain Lutz introduced Rider, who had been tasked with delivering the keynote address.13

  “Before we die,” Rider declared, “we dedicate this monument to our fallen comrades, the cause of liberty and the Union, and charge the living to preserve that Constitution they died to defend.” He trusted that the monument, recording the unit’s grisly record of killed, wounded, missing, and captured, would prove an object of “unremitting study” among future generations. This “appropriate memento,” he reflected, was not unlike the elegant obelisk marking the grave of Baron DeKalb, which the men had spied in Camden, South Carolina, at the climax of Potter’s Raid. “The people of future days may read of the generous stranger, who came from a distant land, to fight their battles, and to water with his blood, the tree of their liberties.”14

  Standing in the National Cemetery where at least a dozen of the regiment’s men had been interred earlier that morning, Ohio’s walrus-mustached governor, Joseph Benson Foraker, delivered an address that alternated between appeals for sectional reconciliation and the best “bloody shirt” waving. “Gettysburg,” he announced, “was more than a mere battle. It was more than the turning point of a great war. It was an epoch in the history of the world—a crowning triumph for the human race”: