A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  22.Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–8.

  23.Christian Rieker to dear sister, October 19, 1862, Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, Ohio History Connection, Columbus; Christian Rieker to dear sister, November 13, 1862, Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, Ohio History Connection; Declaration of Conscientious Objection, July 10, 1863, Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 2, Ohio History Connection, Columbus. For a superb analysis of the links forged by homespun, see James J. Broomall, Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 36.

  24.Brian Matthew Jordan, “The Unfortunate Colonel,” The Civil War Monitor 6, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 62; George L. Kilmer, “First Actions of Wounded Soldiers,” Popular Science Monthly (June 1892): 155–58.

  25.Jordan, “The Unfortunate Colonel,” 54–63, 74–76; Christian Rieker Pension File, National Archives Building.

  26.David Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), c.v. 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

  27.On the experience of disability among Civil War soldiers, see Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).

  28.For accounts that emphasize the strength of ideological convictions, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Michael Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981); Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); and Chandra M. Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). For accounts that emphasize disillusionment, see Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), and Michael C. C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

  29.Beyond a renewed focus on the natural, physical, and material environments of war, recent scholars have applied the tools of sensory history and the history of emotions to the Civil War era. The result is a more textured understanding of the war as a lived human experience. In addition to James J. Broomall, Private Confederacies, see Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Joan Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Evan A. Kutzler, Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feelings of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); and Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Connecticut soldier, as quoted in Danbury Times, January 1, 1863.

  30.Honeck, “Men of Principle”: 39, 42–43.

  31.Engle, “Yankee Dutchmen,” 16, 32; Doyle, Cause of All Nations, 160; “Adopted Citizens and Slavery,” Douglass’ Monthly (August 1859); Kenneth Barkin, “Ordinary Germans, Slavery, and the U.S. Civil War,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 70–79; Andreas Dorpalen, “The German Element and the Issues of the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 29, no. 1 (June 1942): 55–76; Illinois Staats-Zeitung, July 26, 1861, as quoted in Eric Benjaminson, “A Regiment of Immigrants: The 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the Letters of Captain Rudolph Mueller,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 142–43.

  32.Perrin, History of Stark County, 264; Alfred J. Rider, “Memorial Address,” Gettysburg [PA] Star and Sentinel, November 1, 1887; Leonard Weinstein, “The Relationship of Battle Damage to Unit Combat Performance,” Institute for Defense Analysis Paper P–1903 (April 1986): 3–5.

  33.Herrmann Nachtigall to Augustus Choate Hamlin, January 28, 1893, in Military Order of the Loyal Legion Papers, Ms 1084, Folder 1040, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. On veteranhood in the 107th Ohio, see Brian Matthew Jordan, “The Hour That Lasted Fifty Years: The 107th Ohio and the Human Longitude of Gettysburg,” in Andrew F. Lang and Andrew S. Bledsoe, eds., Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Civil War’s Military History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 252–70. On the importance of regimental communities to “waging peace,” see Susannah Ural, ed., Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), and Barbara A. Gannon, “ ‘She Is a Member of the 23rd’: Lucy Nichols and the Community of the Civil War Regiment,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions About the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 184–200. On the culture of veterans and sectional reunion, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  34.Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 6; Brigade Inspector’s Report, December 24, 1863, in Company Order Books, 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Companies A–E, vol. 5, RG 94, National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

  35.Jacob Smith, Camps and Campaigns of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865 (Reprint ed., Navarre, Ohio: Indian River Graphics, 2000), 3–8.

  36.Ibid.

  CHAPTER 1: “WE FEEL IT OUR DUTY”

  1.“War Meeting at National Hall,” Cleveland Morning Leader, August 1, 1862; William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City, 315, 262; Sharon Gregor, Rockefeller’s Cleveland, 22; John Malvin, “Incidents in the Racial History of Ohio, 1840–1860,” in Robert Wheeler, ed., Visions of the Western Reserve, 359; Daily Cleveland Herald, July 31, 1862.

  2.Eugene H. Roseboom, The History of the State of Ohio (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1944), 4:323–83; Jacob Dolson Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1865), 1:20.

  3.On Ohio politics in this period, see Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), and George Knepper, Ohio and Its People (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989).

  4.Samuel S. Cox, Eight Years in Congress (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1865), 235; Knepper, Ohio and Its People.

  5.Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim; Cox, Eight Years in Congress, 246; Stephen D. Engle, Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union’s War Governors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 207.

  6.“War Meeting,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 24, 1862. Until Governor Tod scores a modern biographer, the best treatment of his political trajectory is Delmer John Trester, “The Political Career of David Tod” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1950). See also David Tod to Abraham Lincoln, July 28, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.

  7.Gerald J. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4–5, 27–3.

/>   8.Constantine Grebner, We Were the Ninth: A History of the Ninth Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry: April 17, 1861 to June 7, 1864 (Reprint ed. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 5–8; William Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1988).

  9.Stephen D. Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), xiv–xv.

  10.“One Hundred and Seventh The German Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 25, 1862; “New German Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 14, 1862; Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 2, 1862; “New Appointments—S. Meyers, Esq.,” Cleveland Morning Leader, August 1, 1862; Stark County Republican [Canton, Ohio], August 7, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 9; “City Council Doings,” Ohio Repository [Canton, Ohio], May 29, 1861; “A New Mayor,” Stark County Democrat, August 27, 1862; Stark County Republican, October 16, 1862; Seraphim Meyer to Theodore A. Meysenburg, July 18, 1863, in Seraphim Meyer Court Martial Records, RG 153, National Archives, Washington, DC; Meyer to Meysenburg, July 14, 1863, in Seraphim Meyer Compiled Service Record, RG 94, National Archives; Richard F. Miller, ed., States at War, Vol. 5: A Reference Guide for Ohio in the Civil War (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2015), 167–68. On Hill, see Reid, Ohio in the War, 1:811–15. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 95, 93; Engle, Gathering to Save a Nation, 150.

  11.“War Meeting at National Hall,” Cleveland Morning Leader, August 1, 1862; Daily Cleveland Herald, July 25, 1862; Rose, Cleveland, 203; James Harrison Kennedy and Wilson M. Day, The Bench and Bar of Cleveland (Cleveland: Cleveland Printing and Publishing Co., 1889), 66; Annals of Cleveland, 46:146; The Biographical Cyclopedia and Portrait Gallery with an Historical Sketch of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati: Western Biographical Publishing Company, 1887), 4:933–34; see also David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 501–2.

  12.Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal: A Brief History of the Ohio & Erie Canal (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008), 17; Perrin, History of Stark County, 264, 320–21; William Neff, Bench and Bar of Northern Ohio: History and Biography (Cleveland: Historical Publishing Co., 1921), 121; Tuscarawas Advocate [New Philadelphia, Ohio], August 22, 1862.

  13.“Hickory Club,” Weekly Ohio Statesman [Columbus, Ohio], March 10, 1840; “Great German Mass Meeting,” Weekly Ohio Statesman, August 7, 1844; “Gen. Taylor and Nativism,” Ohio Repository, November 1, 1848; “General Taylor and Nativism,” Ohio Repository, December 6, 1848; Daily [Columbus] Ohio Statesman, August 19, 1860; Allen County Democrat [Lima, Ohio], February 19, 1862; Defiance Democrat, August 9, 1862; Revised Ordinances of the City of Canton, 535; “Douglas & Johnson, Democratic Ticket,” Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, Rare Book & Special Collections Division, LC.

  14.New York Herald, April 17, 1861; “The Union Meeting,” Stark County Republican [Canton, Ohio], May 16, 1861; The Crisis [Columbus, Ohio], April 18, 1861; William Kepler, History of the Three Months’ and Three Years’ Service from April 16th, 1861 to June 22nd, 1864 of the Fourth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union (Cleveland: Cleveland Leader Printing Company, 1886), 14.

  15.Stephen Douglas, as quoted in Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 867; “The Union Meeting,” Stark County Republican, May 16, 1861; Stark County Democrat, October 2, 1861.

  16.“The Union Meeting,” Stark County Republican, May 16, 1861; Stark County Democrat, May 8, 1861, and May 15, 1861; “Army Correspondence,” Stark County Republican, June 20, 1861; [Canton] Ohio Repository, August 28, 1861; Col. J. A. Chase, History of the Fourteenth Ohio Regiment, O.V.V.I. (Toledo: St. John Printing House, 1881), 8. On the war in western Virginia, see W. Hunter Lesser, Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004). Edward S. Meyer, who later transferred to the 107th Ohio, served in the western theater with the 19th Ohio Volunteers. See William S. S. Erb, Extract from “The Battles of the 19th Ohio” (Washington, DC: Judd & Detweiler, Printers, 1893), 47.

  17.Stark County Republican, July 18, 1861; OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 215; Chase, History of the Fourteenth Ohio, 7–11; “Mr. Meyer’s Speech,” Stark County Republican, August 1, 1861. On the evolution of federal policy with respect to rebel civilians, property, and enslaved persons, see Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  18.“Mr. Meyer’s Speech,” Stark County Republican, August 1, 1861; “Falsehood Exposed,” Stark County Republican, August 22, 1861.

  19.“Discouraging Enlistments,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 7, 1862; Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 2, 1862, Stark County Republican, August 7, 1862; Stark County Democrat, August 6, 1862, and July 23, 1862; Mahlon Slutz Reminiscences, Indiana State Library; Samuel Alanson Lane, Fifty Years and Over of Akron and Summit County (Akron, Ohio: Beacon Job Department, 1892), 387–88.

  20.“An Appeal to the People of Northern Ohio,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 2, 1862; “New German Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 14, 1862; Stark County Republican, August 14, 1862; George G. Lyon, “To the 107th Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 14, 1862; Stark County Republican, August 7, 1862; Daily Cleveland Herald, August 7, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 9–10; Tuscarawas Advocate, August 22, 1862; “A Card of Thanks,” Cleveland Morning Leader, September 10, 1862; Annals of Cleveland, 45:225; Jacob Lichty to Daniel Lichty, December 28, 1862, copy in Thomas J. Edwards Papers, Box 2, Folder 3, BGSU; Biographical Record of Civil War Veterans Tuscarawas County, Ohio (Reprint ed., New Philadelphia, Ohio: Tuscarawas County Genealogical Society, 1990), 581. Deeming it “wiser to depend upon loyalty and liberality of the people” than upon a bounty, Governor Tod “squelched” talk of a state-issued bounty in the summer of 1862. See Trester, “Political Career of David Tod,” 134. Summit County Beacon, August 14, 1862; Huron Reflector, August 26, 1862.

  21.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 10; George Billow Pension File, RG 15, NA; Annals of Cleveland, 39:299, 43:317, 43:333; “Brief History of the 107th Reg’t, O.V.I., Read By Colonel S. Meyer,” Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; Charles A. Hartman to the Surgeon General, September 11, 1862, in RG 94, entry 561, box 250, NA. While the vast majority of its foreign-born soldiers hailed from Germany, the muster rolls of the 107th Ohio included men who hailed from Canada, Switzerland, and Ireland. See Regimental Descriptive Books, RG 94, NA.

  22.Hartmann, as quoted in Jacob Mueller, Memories of a Forty-Eighter: Sketches from the German-American Period of Storm and Stress in the 1850s (Cleveland, OH: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1996), 218–21.

  23.Mahlon Slutz Reminiscences, Indiana State Library; Annals of Cleveland, 45:226; Daily Cleveland Herald, August 20, 1862; Cleveland Evening Leader, August 21, 1862; “Special Order from Governor Tod, August 22, 1862,” Stark County Democrat, August 27, 1862; “Our Soldiers Need Blankets,” Cleveland Morning Leader, August 27, 1862; “The 107th Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 25, 1862; Rieker to his sister and brother-in-law, September 8, 1862 [typescript translation], in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC; The Civil War Diary of Private John Flory, Co. C, 107th Ohio, August 1862–July 1865, 1–9, copy in Wayne County Public Library, Wooster, Ohio; Fritz Nussbaum to Friend Cary [Kauke], September 9, 1862, in George Shane Phillips Papers, Box 2, Huntington Library; Charles T. Clark to dear Tom, September 16, 1862, in Clark, Opdycke Tigers, 125th O.V.I.: A History of the Regiment and of the Campaigns and Battles of the Army of the Cumberland, 4; Annals of Cleveland, 45:225. For a compelling analysis of sleep (or the lack thereof) in the Civil War, see Jonathan W. White, Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1–26.

  24.“First Ward Meeting,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August
25, 1862; “Soldiers Need Blankets,” Cleveland Morning Leader, August 27, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 14; “To Our Branch Societies,” Daily Cleveland Herald, September 8, 1862; Daily Cleveland Herald, September 1, 1862; Cleveland Morning Leader, September 10, 1862; Charles A. Hartman to the Surgeon General, September 11, 1862, in RG 94, entry 561, box 250, NA. On civilian presentations to the officers of the 107th, see also the Norwalk [Ohio] Reflector, September 23, 1862.

  25.“Camp Cleveland,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 23, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 5, 14; “Picnics at Camp Cleveland,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 29, 1862; “The Temperance Cause,” Daily Cleveland Herald, September 3, 1862; G. W. Lewis, The Campaigns of the 124th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Akron, OH: Werner Company, 1894), 14; “The 107th Capture a Rebel Flag,” Cleveland Morning Leader, September 9, 1862; Rose, Cleveland, 293; Kenneth E. Davison, Cleveland during the Civil War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press for The Ohio Historical Society, 1962), 18; “Cleveland’s Interest in the State Fair,” Daily Cleveland Herald, September 11, 1862; Annals of Cleveland, 45:340–42; Seventeenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture (Columbus: Richard Nevins, State Printer, 1863), xliii and passim. Fair administrators were reportedly “disappointed” by a greatly diminished attendance, which one editor attributed to anxieties about the war. Annals of Cleveland, 45:341–42.

  26.“No More Camp Picnics,” Daily Cleveland Herald, August 30, 1862; Annals of Cleveland, 45:225.

  27.Roger K. Spickelmier, “Training of the American Soldier During World War I and World War II” (Master’s thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1987), passim; E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Random House 1981); Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (New York: Routledge, 2015), 38–39, 64–66; Earl Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2015), 61; Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 105; Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 20, 1862; “107th Regiment,” Cleveland Morning Leader, September 10, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 14; Annals of Cleveland 45:235; Lewis, The Campaigns of the 124th Regiment, 14; Summary Statements of Quarterly Returns of Ordnance and Ordnance Stores on Hand in Regular and Volunteer Army Organizations, microfilm M1281, reel 4, NA. Soldiers from the 33rd Illinois reported that their Austrian longarms “would often fire when held at parade rest.” See Victor Hicken, Illinois in the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 14. The poor quality of the weapons must have especially enraged Valentine Kissel, the thirty-nine-year-old gunsmith who went to war with Company B.