A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  33.OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1028, 1033; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 291–92; Samuel Wildman, as quoted in Tom J. Edwards, ed., Raising the Banner of Freedom: The 25th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union by Bvt. Col. Edward C. Culp (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2003), 128; John Snider Cooper Diary, April 6, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Barlow, Company G, 218; Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 121–22.

  34.Emma Holmes, diary, April 7, 1865, as quoted in The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, ed. John F. Marszalek (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 432–33; Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1906), 387; Watchman and Southron, November 16, 1886.

  35.Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 122; John Snider Cooper Diary, April 7–8, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 292; Barlow, Company G, 218–19; Moore, “The Last Officer,” 4–6. Employing new, digital tools, scholars have demonstrated that the proximity of Union armies was the single most reliable predictor of “emancipation events.” See “Visualizing Emancipation,” dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation.

  36.Moore, “The Last Officer,” 6; Cooper Diary, April 8, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; W. H. Garland, “The Battle of Dingles’s Mill, Fla.,” Confederate Veteran 24, no. 12 (December 1916): 549; Watchman and Southron [Sumter, South Carolina], May 15, 1901. Garland was a native of Fernandina, Florida; the Confederate Veteran editorial team—in a testament to the battle’s obscurity among contemporaries—mistakenly identified the South Carolina clash’s location. William C. Davis, The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn’t Go Home (New York: Doubleday, 1980); Edwin Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade (Louisville, KY: Lewis N. Thompson, 1868), 436–37; “Dingle’s Mill Battle Site Is Marked,” Watchman and Southron, April 12, 1913.

  37.Edwards, Raising the Banner of Freedom, 151; Cooper Diary, April 8, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Robert W. Andrews, The Life and Adventures of Robert W. Andrews, of Sumter, South Carolina (Boston: Printed for the Author by E. P. Whitcomb, 1887), 54; https://repository.duke.edu/dc/broadsides/bdssc022682. On the Clarendon Banner, see https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042899/. On the role of southern newspapers in the coming of the war, see Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).

  38.The literature is vast, but see Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and William Marvel, Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

  39.John S. Cooper to H. B. Shively, November 16, 1897, Henry S. Finkenbiner Medal of Honor File, RG 94, File 501,443, Box No. 747, NA; “Don’t Let Them Get Me,” in W. F. Beyer and O. F. Keydel, eds., Deeds of Valor: How America’s Civil War Heroes Won the Congressional Medal of Honor (Reprint ed., Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1994), 494–96; Henry S. Finkenbiner Pension File, RG 94, NA; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 188–89; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, 438; “The Battle of Dingle’s Mill,” New Orleans Daily Democrat, July 21, 1878.

  40.Beyer and Keydel, Deeds of Valor, 496; P. Brown to 107th Ohio, April 12, 1865, in Henry S. Finkenbiner Medal of Honor File, RG 94, NA; “A Daring Passage,” National Tribune, April 28, 1898.

  41.Moore, “The Last Officer,” 6; Cooper Diary, April 9, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Garland, “The Battle of Dingles’s Mill, Fla.,” 549; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 188; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 293–94; John S. Cooper to H. B. Shively, November 16, 1897, Henry S. Finkenbiner Medal of Honor File, RG 94, NA; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1028, 1033, 1036–37; Barlow, Company G, 220; Columbia [South Carolina] Phoenix, April 12, 1865.

  42.Garland, “The Battle of Dingle’s Mill, Fla.,” 549; Barlow, Company G, 221; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1026, 1028–29, 1033–34; “The Affair at Dingles’s Mill,” National Tribune, July 7, 1910; Moore, “The Last Officer,” 7–8.

  43.Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 125; Garland, “The Battle of Dingle’s Mill, Fla.,” 549; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 190; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 295; Moore, “The Last Officer,” 7; Alfred J. Rider, “Memorial Address,” Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, November 1, 1887.

  44.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 195; Cooper Diary, April 11 and 16, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 126; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1033–34.

  45.Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 126–29; Moore, “The Last Officer,” 6; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1034–35; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 299–300; Cooper Diary, April 15–18, 1865, and endpapers, Rubenstein Library, Duke.

  46.Cooper Diary, April 18, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1029–30, 1034–35; “Boykin’s Mill,” in The Union Army: Cyclopedia of Battles (Wisconsin: Federal Publishing Co., 1908), 5:155.

  47.Cooper Diary, April 18, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1029–10, 1034–35; “Boykin’s Mill,” in The Union Army: Cyclopedia of Battles (Wisconsin: Federal Publishing Co., 1908), 5:155; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, pp. 1036–37; Barlow, Company G, 229; “The Fight at Boykin’s & DeSaussure’s,” Journal and Confederate [Camden, South Carolina], April 24, 1865, as quoted in Thigpen, Illustrated Recollections of Potter’s Raid, 549–55; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 195; OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1031; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 304.

  48.OR, vol. 47, pt. 1, p. 1031; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 195–96, 205–6; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 305–8; Barlow, Company G, 232; Cooper Diary, May 4, 5, and 8, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; General Orders No. 66, April 16, 1865, Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, LC; Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry, 133; Orders of May 3, 1865, 107th Ohio Regimental Books, vol. 5, RG 94, NA; Alfred J. Rider, “Memorial Address,” Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, November 1, 1887; Hodes, Mourning Lincoln, 122.

  49.Cooper Diary, May 9, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Edward Cary, The Trip of the Steamer Oceanus to Fort Sumter and Charleston, S.C., April 14, 1865 (New York: “The Union” Steam Printing House, 1865), 21, 34, 38, 94–95; John Worrell Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons in 1864 (Wichita: Published by the Author, 1904), 187; Peter Zurbrugg to dear Father, May 19, 1865, www.excelsiorbrigade.com/products/details/LTR–5220; John Townsend Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, 514; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 310–12; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 211; Nelson, Ruin Nation.

  50.Orders of June 6, 1865, 107th Ohio Regimental Books, vol. 5, RG 94, NA; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 310–11; Cooper Diary, May 10, 1865, and June 2, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 210; General Orders No. 34, June 22, 1865, 107th Ohio Regimental Books, vol. 5, RG 94, NA. On Magnolia Cemetery, see Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

  51.Jordan, Marching Home; Cooper Diary, June 15–20, 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; Emilio, History of the Fifty-fourth, 314; Peter Zurbrugg to his father, May 19, 1865.

  CHAPTER 9: “THE FEELINGS OF A SOLDIER”

  1.Portions of this chapter were previously published as “The 107th Ohio and the Human Longitude of Gettysburg,” in Lang and Bledsoe, Upon the Fields of Battle, 252–70. Kenneth E. Davison, Cleveland during the Civil War, 24; New York Herald, July 17, 1865; “Arrival of Ohio Troops,” Cleveland Daily Leader, July 19, 1865; “Arrival of Battery ‘B’ and the 107th Ohio Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 18, 1865; “Roster of Company A, 107th O.V.I.,” Stark County Republican, August 3, 1865; Samuel Peter Orth, A History of Cleveland, Ohio (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1910), 1:455; Boston Daily Advertiser, July 17, 1865; North American and United States Gazette [Philadelphia], July 17, 1865; “Marine Intelligence,” North American and United States Gazette, July 18, 1865; Daily Cleveland
Herald, July 29, 1865; Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; William O. Siffert Pension File, RG 15, NA; William O. Siffert Carded Medical File, RG 94, entry 534, Box 2845. Bank Street was the regiment’s likeliest route from the Union train depot down to Public Square. See the 1869 Cleveland Directory Map, http://usgenwebsites.org/OHCuyahoga/Maps/1869%20Map.jpg.

  2.“Arrival of Ohio Troops,” Cleveland Daily Leader, July 19, 1865; Van Tassel and Grabowski, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, c.v. William Jarvis Boardman, https://case.edu/ech/articles/b/boardman-william-jarvis.

  3.Cleveland Leader, July 19, 1865; Daily Cleveland Herald, July 18, 1865.

  4.Cleveland Leader, July 19, 1865; Daily Cleveland Herald, July 18, 1865; Orth, A History of Cleveland, 1:431; Cleveland Daily Leader, July 25, 1865; Cooper Diary, July 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; “Local Matters,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 25, 1865; “Local Notices,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 29, 1865; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, c.v. Weddell House, https://case.edu/ech/articles/w/weddell-house; Annals of Cleveland 47 (1864): 289.

  5.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 215.

  6.Ibid.; Cooper Diary, July 1865, Rubenstein Library, Duke; John Cooper Pension File, RG 15, NA; Christian Rieker Pension File, RG 15, NA; Jacob Thumm Pension File, RG 15, NA; Philip Seltzer Pension File, RG 15, NA; George Billow Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  7.Tom Hoagland Pension File, RG 15, NA; Daniel Biddle Pension File, RG 15, NA; Frederick Tonsing Pension File, RG 15, NA. On amputation in the Civil War, see Nelson, Ruin Nation; Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); and Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue.

  8.Joseph Kieffer Pension File, RG 15, NA; Casper Bohrer Pension File, RG 15, NA; Daniel Biddle Pension File, RG 15, NA; Daniel Whitmer Pension File, RG 15, NA; Frederick Tonsing Pension File, RG 15, NA; Theobald Hasman Pension File, RG 15, NA; Peter Schieb Pension File, RG 15, NA; Frank Rothermel Pension File, RG 15, NA; Tom Hoagland Pension File, RG 15, NA. Other scholars have explored the notion that traumatic memories can be inscribed on the body. For one example, see Edward Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69.

  9.“A Landable Enterprise,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 25, 1865. While Union veterans established a number of “colonies” after the war, this is the earliest such project I have been able to document. On Civil War veterans’ colonies, see Kurt Hackemer, “Civil War Veteran Colonies in the Western Frontier,” in Jordan and Rothera, eds., The War Went On.

  10.No more than a week after the battle of Gettysburg, two dozen Zoar men registered their conscientious objection to the war. See Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 2, Ohio History Connection. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “Wilhelmina,” in Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875), 270–303. The story was also published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Tuscarawas Advocate [New Philadelphia, Ohio]. “Wilhelmina” errs in identifying the 107th Ohio as a western-theater unit, referencing its service at Lookout Mountain. On Woolson, see Anne Boyd Rioux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of A Lady Novelist (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Kathleen Diffley, To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), and Kathleen M. Fernandez, “The Happy Valley: Constance F. Woolson’s View of Zoar” [unpublished paper in author’s possession].

  11.George Billow Pension File, RG 15, NA; Akron Daily Beacon, July 5, 1870.

  12.Norine S. Hendricks, “An Illustrated Lecture: The Civil War Paintings of William Siffert,” Timeline 16, no. 3 (May-June 1999): 46; Jeffersonian Democrat [Chardon, Ohio], September 8, 1865; Philip May Pension File, RG 15, NA; Arnold Streum Pension File, RG 15, NA; Adam Berghofer Pension File, RG, NA; Akron Daily Beacon, July 5, 1870.

  13.Harrison Flora Pension File, RG 15, NA; Nicholas Lopendahl Pension File, RG 15, NA; Henry Feldkamp Pension File, RG 15, NA; Alfred J. Rider Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  14.John Hemmerling Pension File, RG 15, NA; The Ohio Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 477. For recent scholarship on life in local, state, and federal soldiers’ homes, see Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); James A. Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jordan, Marching Home.

  15.Emlen Morgan Landon Pension File, RG 15, NA; Admissions Records for Emlen Landon, Ohio State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, Microfilm 3399, Ohio History Connection; Historical Register of National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866–1938, Microfilm M1749, 282 rolls, RG 15, NA.

  16.Frederick Bross Pension File, RG 15, NA; Charles Cordier Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  17.Claire Prechtel Kluskens, “ ‘A Reasonable Degree of Promptitude’: Civil War Pension Claim Application Processing, 1861–1865,” Prologue 42, no. 1 (2010): 1–26; Eliza Whisler Widow’s Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  18.Linda Leigh Geary, Balanced in the Wind: A Biography of Betsey Mix Cowles (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 67–68; Perrin, History of Stark County, 275; Joseph Kieffer Pension File, RG 15, NA; David Sarbach Pension File, RG 15, NA; Henry Feldkamp Pension File, RG 15, NA; Biographical Record of Civil War Veterans Tuscarawas County, Ohio, 571; Dayton Herald, March 30, 1885.

  19.John Leffler Pension File, RG 15, NA; Daniel Whitmer Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  20.Jordan, “The Hour That Lasted Fifty Years,” in Lang and Bledsoe, Upon the Fields of Battle, 258–59; William Heiss Pension File, RG 15, NA; Cleveland Directory for the Year Ending July, 1897, 995; Arnold Streum Pension File, RG 15, NA; George Zuern Pension File, RG 15, NA; Army Herald [Cleveland, Ohio], May 1865. George Lemon became the editor of the National Tribune, the largest Union veterans’ newspaper, which became an important hub of information about the pension application process. See Steven R. Sodergren, “ ‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of The National Tribune,” in Jordan and Rothera, The War Went On. On Milo B. Stevens & Company and its circulars, see Marten, Sing Not War, 210.

  21.John Lutz to the Surgeon General, U.S. Army, March 12, 1879, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, Entry 561, Records Relating to Medical Officers and Physicians, Box 321, NA; Albert Beck Pension File, RG 15, NA; Gotlieb Buettinger to Surgeon General, U.S. Army, March 23, 1883; H. Hines to Surgeon General, U.S. Army, December 3, 1883; and G. Schrieber to Surgeon General, n.d., RG 94, Entry 561, Box 321, NA; John S. Cooper to H.B. Shively, November 16, 1897, Henry S. Finkenbiner Medal of Honor File, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, Box No. 747, File No. 501,443, NA; Biographical Record of Civil War Veterans Tuscarawas County, Ohio, 571.

  22.Albert Beck Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  23.Alfred Rider Pension File, RG 15, NA; Philip Wang Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  24.Daily Cleveland Herald, September 16, 1869; David Dirck Van Tassel and John Vacha, “Behind Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 61; Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 16, 1869; “The 107th O.V.I.,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 16, 1869; Wooster Republican, September 26, 1872; The Republic [Cincinnati, Ohio], October 1, 1868.

  25.“Re-Union of the 107th,” Wooster Republican, September 28, 1871; “Third Annual Re-Union of the 107th Regiment, Ohio Vol. Inf.,” Canton Repository, September 15, 1871; Lane, Fifty Years and Over of Akron and Summit County, 445; Akron Daily Beacon, July 5, 1870; Democratic Press [Ravenna, Ohio], July 7, 1870; Daily Cleveland Herald, June 13, 1870, and July 6, 1870; Annals of Cleveland, 53:802.

  26.“Re-Union of the 107th,” Wooster Republican, September 28, 1871; “The 107th Regiment,” Wooster Republican, September 26, 1872; “The 107th Regiment,” Canton Repository, October 4, 1872; Canton Repository, September 20, 1872.

  27.Brian Matthew Jordan, “ ‘Our Work Is Not Yet Finished’: Union V
eterans and Their Unending Civil War, 1865–1872,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 4 (December 2015): 484–503; Silber, The Romance of Reunion; Blight, Race and Reunion; Wooster Republican, September 26, 1872; The Republic [Cincinnati, Ohio], October 1, 1868; Annals of Cleveland, 52:594; “Resolutions of Sympathy,” Stark County Democrat, September 22, 1881; Annals of Cleveland, 50:751.

  28.Walt Whitman, “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” in Complete Prose Works (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 74; Jordan and Rothera, “The Hour That Lasted Fifty Years,” in Lang and Bledsoe, Upon the Fields of Battle, 265. My thinking here has benefited from many stimulating conversations with John J. Hennessy.

  29.Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; Alfred J. Rider to John B. Bachelder, October 3, 1885, Bachelder Papers, 2:1129.

  30.Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; J. S. Robinson to Augustus Choate Hamlin, November 12, 1890, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1046, Houghton Library; James Wood to Augustus Choate Hamlin, June 11, 1891, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1050, Houghton Library; I. S. Bangs to Augustus Choate Hamlin, December 29, 1896, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1010, Houghton Library.

  31.Thomas Prentice Kettell, History of the Great Rebellion (Hartford: L. Stebbins, 1865), 1:446; Moore, Complete History of the Great Rebellion, 348; John S. C. Abbott, The History of the Civil War in America (New York: Henry Bill, 1866), 2:384; Benson J. Lossing, Pictoral History of the Civil War in the United States of America (Hartford: Thomas Belknap, 1877), 3:30; Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans.

  32.Dana King to Augustus Choate Hamlin, January 15, 1897, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1033, Houghton Library; J. C. Hall to Augustus Choate Hamlin, November 5, 1891, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1028, Houghton Library; I. F. Huntington to Francis Irsch [1891], Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, MS 1084, folder 1032, Houghton Library.