A Thousand May Fall
Page 2
Jacob Rider thus expressed few if any reservations when his twenty-three-year-old son Alfred enlisted in the 107th Ohio in July 1862. A few weeks later, Alfred’s boyhood “chum,” eighteen-year-old William O. Siffert, joined him. As one of the youngest soldiers in Company A, William, with his coal-black eyes and mane of matching hair, quickly “won his way into the hearts of the officers and privates,” one comrade recalled. Since casualty reports regularly crowded newspaper columns by the war’s second summer, the boys had some indication of what they could expect. They could also rely on a firsthand account from the front: earlier that year, William’s older brother, Alfred, suspended his studies at Otterbein College and mustered into the ranks of the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. That spring, Alfred would have plied his family with tales of what he saw at Shiloh—the same fight in which Vignos experienced his baptism by fire. Even so, as Alfred and William reached for their cartridge boxes atop the knoll, that rude schoolhouse at Navarre’s edge must have seemed a world away.16
GIVEN THEIR newfound political allegiances, it was hardly surprising that Rider and Siffert were among the regiment’s first and most enthusiastic volunteers. But hardly anyone would have expected Christian Rieker and John Brunny to respond to the steady drumbeats beckoning young men to war. Rieker and Brunny were both sons of Zoar, a pacifist, communitarian society nestled in the chestnut- and hickory-shaded Tuscarawas Valley, no more than fifteen miles south and just slightly east of Navarre. Almost a half-century before, a quest for religious freedom and spiritual “re-birth” delivered an earnest band of Württemberg Separatists to northeastern Ohio. Adhering to Radical Pietism, these men and women had chafed under the eighteenth-century “rationalism” of the Lutheran Church. Embracing the Holy Scriptures as the only true “measure and guide” of their lives, the Separatists withdrew from all “ecclesiastical connections and constitutions,” refusing to doff their hats, bend their knees, or uncover their heads for anyone. “True Christian life,” they held, demanded neither ceremony nor sectarianism. Anticipating Christ’s return, the Separatists withheld their children from the “schools of Babylon” and rejected the military service required by the state. “We cannot serve the state as soldiers,” they explained, “because a Christian cannot murder his enemy, much less his friend.”17
The Separatists became the object of taunts that quickly devolved into tyranny. The state levied steep fines on parents who refused to send their children to the state-run school. Those who could not pay were “imprisoned indefinitely, suffering the ill effects of bad food, vermin, stench, hard labor, and lack of heat.” The children of those jailed were packed off to orphanages. Ironically, these humiliations merely reinforced the unique bond that welded the Separatist community together.18
Unable to find any refuge from oppression in the Fatherland, the Separatists set sail for America. In August 1817, just three months after their crammed ship nudged its way into the English Channel, the Separatists offloaded onto the docks of Philadelphia. There they met a German Moravian land broker whose bargain price on a 5,500-acre tract in northeastern Ohio proved irresistible. That autumn, they zagged their way through spinneys of forest and over chains of hills, arriving just before Christmas at the “little place” they called Zoar. While one of the earliest arrivals recalled planting “a wretched settlement of log huts” in a “trackless wilderness,” his reminiscence (not unlike the cloying boosterism of local histories) rendered invisible the Delaware people who had long seeded the soil.19
Zoar quickly grew beyond a collection of log huts and into a bustling community. In April 1819, having survived the vicissitudes of an Ohio winter, the refugees inked Articles of Association for the Society of Separatists of Zoar. Disclaiming all ownership in property, the Zoarites joined the host of communitarian experiments and “backwoods utopias” that dotted the landscape of mid-nineteenth-century America. Even so, the Zoarites tracked national political developments with some interest and readily identified slavery as the source of the deepening sectional rift. Sympathies with the cause of emancipation—one of the Separatists regarded slavery as “a blot of shame” that “cannot be allowed to stay”—collided with their pacifism, especially as the shock and violence of the war moved the conflict in new, more revolutionary directions. Bloodletting on such a massive scale demanded deeper meaning, which at least some Civil War Americans divined in slavery’s fitful demise. Still, most Zoarites proved stubbornly resistant to war fever as it romped across the nation. In fact, after considering the war’s means and ends, many renewed their commitment to pacifism.20
Master tinner John Brunny and his friend the blacksmith Christian Rieker, however, would not be among them. In late August 1862, the duo of twenty-year-olds, together with ten of their neighbors, announced that they would enlist in the 107th Ohio. The eldest of the seven children born to Zoar’s shoemaker, Brunny would join the regiment’s band—a natural fit, considering how music dominated the Zoar soundscape (the village boasted an orchestra, chorus, and brass ensemble). Rieker, whose hazel eyes and auburn hair were offset by a thick mustache, set aside his hammer and anvil and attached himself to Company I. “We know that it is contrary to the Principles of the Separatists to go to war,” they declared, “but now, in this present crisis, in order to contend for freedom and human rights, we feel it our duty to unite our forces with those who, at the first call, sacrifice all . . . in order to contend on behalf of those who cannot fight for posterity and for a free home.” While society elders resolved that even a crusade against slavery could not justify a resort to arms, these men clearly perceived something of their own struggles in the war. Slavery was simply a more extreme variety of the tyranny that their ancestors had escaped a generation before. Southern planters denied enslaved men, women, and children their freedom, but they also menaced white liberty—making a mockery of democratic institutions and promising to plant slavery even where the founders had declared “free soil” for “free men.” For lads like Brunny and Rieker who believed in the dignity of labor and subscribed to a millennial vision of personal, social, and societal reform, slavery was a curse.21
Still, their clear-eyed statement of purpose concealed gnawing doubts. Initiation into military service is an agonizing transition for anyone, but the bawdiness and debauchery of army life must have seemed especially far removed from their spiritual haven on the Tuscarawas.22 The duo wondered how—or even if—those back home would sustain and remember them through the war. Could those who opposed war support those who waged it? Rieker’s anxieties on this question were especially pronounced. He kept up a constant correspondence with his sister, Mary: “Don’t forget me,” he implored, “and I’ll not forget you. Thus we’ll be good siblings.” Appeals for homespun shirts, stockings, and mittens were frequent, for these items would supply material evidence that the connection between the battlefield and the home front was not yet broken. Zoarites devotedly forwarded crates brimming with supplies and provisions to the front. The connection must have seemed tenuous, though, when just a week after the 107th Ohio rushed out to Blocher’s Knoll, two dozen Zoarites declared themselves to be “conscientious objectors.” Among them was John Rieker, Christian’s half-brother.23
IN ALL LIKELIHOOD the men spent little more than an hour atop Blocher’s Knoll, but it felt like a lifetime. The rebel skirmish line appeared first, probably about two o’clock. Then, a gray and butternut line “charged through” Rock Creek, which coiled its way around the base of the knoll. The rebels surged up and over the lazy creek’s steep banks to overwhelm the Ohioans. As they choked on the fumes of the musketry smoke that now enveloped the field, the heat became almost unbearable. Enemy bullets began to tally casualties. Years later, one meticulous Union veteran endeavored to catalogue the range of sensations experienced by soldiers when wounded. “When felt at all,” he concluded, “bullets through the flesh usually produce a burning sensation more or less acute.”
When bones are broken, stinging accompanies the burning. When bone
s are hit but not broken, there is a numbing sensation in the whole region involved in the shock, followed very soon by severe and sometimes intense pain. When muscles and tendons are involved there is a tugging sensation, sometimes very slight, and shell-wounds produce feelings similar to those by bullets, more or less exaggerated, according to the size of the missile and the degree of velocity.
More than a few injured men “alternated between a desire either cry like a baby or swear like a pirate.” Among them were Siffert and Vignos. A spent Minié ball clipped the former’s right leg, while an enemy shell struck the latter’s right arm. Two days later, a foul-smelling discharge from Vignos’s wound signaled gangrene, necessitating amputation.24
Though the Ohioans stubbornly held their ground, they could not withstand the “terrible” enfilading fire forever. Their line buckled and then collapsed as men broke for the rear, the yowling rebels extending an already lengthy casualty list by bagging knots of prisoners. Among them was Christian Rieker, who would be packed off to a dank Richmond prison pen for the next four months. The chaotic retreat surged through the congested streets of Gettysburg, delivering the regiment to its new perch behind a squat stone fence at the base of Cemetery Hill. There, the next day, George Billow, Alfred Rider, and John Brunny—who by some minor miracle eluded capture and survived the fight unscathed—would have another chance to prove their mettle. But for now, at least, it seemed that providence was once more smiling on the cause of the Confederacy—and that misfortune was their lot as a regiment.25
VIGNOS, BILLOW, Rider, Siffert, Rieker, and Brunny—like the rest of the men in the 107th Ohio, and like most of the troops who shouldered government-issued muskets between 1861 and 1865—were volunteers, not professional soldiers. They were ordinary men who took part in an extraordinary war. Although they fought alongside a few of the Civil War’s most renowned units and in several of its most studied battles, today their graves are weeded over and their sacrifices long forgotten. Although Private Henry Finkenbiner of the 107th earned the Medal of Honor for his daring performance in a late war skirmish, few others achieved any lasting distinction. Even in northeastern Ohio, few remember the regiment. Its entry in the otherwise exacting Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, for example, misreports both the unit’s battle record and casualty statistics.26
But therein lies their significance: mocking all pretenses and resisting empty generalizations, the men of the 107th Ohio allow us to retrieve something of the war as it was actually lived, felt, and experienced. Throughout the nation’s bloodiest conflict, they whipsawed between hope and heartbreak, duty and dereliction, cynicism and conviction. With little fanfare, they shivered in squalls of snow at Brooke’s Station and flagged under the fevers of Folly Island. They swatted at gluttonous mosquitoes in camp and navigated treacherous roads on the march. They battled treasonous rebels at the front and then exchanged taunts with contemptuous civilians back home. They knew the taste of victory, but more often felt the ache of defeat. When they returned north, they tended to the errands of memory—and to the noiseless agonies of the many sick, wounded, and disabled men among them. They did not wage the Civil War; rather, they endured it.27
For generations, scholars have drawn two very different portraits of Billy Yank. Some have depicted him as steel-jawed, sure-footed, and self-restrained, motivated by patriotism and a keen sense of what was at stake in the contest. The escalating demands of the war paid him remarkably little trouble; if anything, experiences under fire or in proximity to slavery only magnified his convictions. Even as these gilded histories exaggerated his courage, pluck, and determination, however, other writers foregrounded the Union soldier’s anguish, misery, and woe. In these accounts, the natural, physical, and psychological deprivations of war exhausted the youthful idealism that first inspired the Yankee soldier to enlist. On bloodstained battlefields he confronted the stark divide between the glittering war he imagined and the horrific war he fought.28
Both views have revealed some important truths about Civil War soldiers and their service. But in their rush to esteem or to pity, these divergent perspectives have effaced the raw, lived realities of the conflict: the murk and the muck of life in camp or on the march; the not insignificant demands of carrying on, standing guard, or putting one foot in front of the other; the satisfaction of having suffered, sacrificed, and somehow survived. Historians have dutifully mapped the war’s military campaigns, but they have only just begun to chart the war’s human topography. Historians are well acquainted with the conflict as an event, but they know much less about the conflict as an experience. Reassured by its results—the end of slavery in America and the preservation of the Union—it can be easy to forget that for the people who lived it and for the soldiers who fought it, the war’s outcome was never certain. “War is a curious affair,” one Connecticut volunteer who fought alongside the 107th Ohio at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg mused. “It has more crooks and turns than the City of Boston, with not half as sensible endings. War is a something we must put up with . . . we have got to face it point blank.”29
This book attempts that work. It rummages around snowy winter camps, trundles along dusty roads on thirst-inducing marches, and prowls along distant picket lines in palmetto-choked swamps. It follows Vignos, Billow, Rider, Siffert, Rieker, Brunny, and their comrades as they attempted to do what they understood to be their duty. Confronted with impossible circumstances, they sometimes faltered, often struggled to maintain order, and not infrequently wondered whether the war was worth it after all. They gained hope before misplacing it again, living within the war’s juxtapositions. Eager to attest that they had battled no less manfully than native-born regiments, they drew meaning from their misfortunes and refined their understanding of manhood, duty, and service—drawing on lessons learned during the failed democratic revolutions of 1848.30
Indeed, some fathomed the war as a new theater in that old struggle. Secession had dismembered the Union—the shield of the democratic liberties they had crossed an ocean to enjoy. Among those who connected the rebellion in the United States to the revolutions back home, many identified slavery as the source of discord: a cancer on the republic that mocked the principle of self-government and needed to be rooted out. “A German has only to be a German,” Frederick Douglass famously quipped months before John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, “to be utterly opposed to slavery.” Yet the 107th Ohio in no way teemed with abolitionists, reflecting instead the sharp political divisions that fractured the German-American population. The Democratic Party, with its earnest appeals to popular sovereignty and local rule, remained popular among the Auswanderung. The many Democrats who stocked the regiment’s ranks fought primarily to preserve the Union as a province for white men. These men believed that nativism, not slavery, posed the real threat to their liberty. While some soldiers embraced a more capacious understanding of the war, many Democrats maintained their dutiful skepticism about the necessity of emancipation.31
In the late nineteenth century, the local booster and historian William Henry Perrin succinctly captured the Janus-faced nature of the 107th Ohio’s service. “No Ohio regiment,” he declared, “furnishes a more terrible record of its slaughter, or one of more distinguished gallantry.” There was substance to his claim. The men could point to an intrepid performance in a little-known raid through the heart of South Carolina—a campaign that, in the conflict’s waning days, finally brought the war to the cradle of secession. And yet throughout nearly three years of service, 589 of the regiment’s 1,080 men were killed, wounded, or reported missing. Some analysts contend that a unit becomes “combat ineffective” when it suffers losses in excess of thirty percent of its strength. Astoundingly, the 107th Ohio was decimated five times over; even those fortunate enough to survive returned home to tend to an imposing litany of ailments, including chronic diarrhea, ague, fever, chills, gangrene, consumption, constipation, dysentery, liver trouble, deafness, blindness, shortness of breath, fluttering of the hea
rt, nervousness, and insanity.32
Importantly, the regiment’s veterans also counted among their maladies the bitter sting of nativism. The raw memories of Chancellorsville endured. “Although numerous essays have since been written about that terrible conflict and disaster, exonerating the 11th Corps,” one ethnically German veteran bemoaned at the century’s end, “yet the stigma still remains and very frequently the phrase is heard, ‘I fights mit Sigel and runs mit Howard.” This old soldier lamented nothing more than having to “hear slurs thrown even by men who call themselves Comrades—and Comrades too of the G.A.R.” Importantly, while survivors of the 107th Ohio joined Grand Army of the Republic posts, marched in parades, and even attended soldiers’ reunions, their experiences would prevent them from full participation in the hypermasculine veteran culture that sentimentalized the war.33
ONE VETERAN of the 107th Ohio was Jacob Smith. Throughout the war, as an ambulance wagon driver, he twisted through knots of woods and navigated rutted roads to deliver scores of wounded comrades to makeshift hospitals. The physically exhausting and emotionally demanding labor exacted a heavy toll. By the early twentieth century, he was prematurely grizzled and crooked with rheumatism. Still, he took up his pen and began to compose a regimental history. The labor-intensive project was made more difficult by the 107th Ohio’s shoddy record keeping. Eight brittle volumes—several missing their leather covers, each caked in ruddy grime—only sporadically documented special orders and communications. Following their rout at the battle of Chancellorsville, several dazed companies did not file morning reports for many months. “The Regimental Books and Papers of the 107th Ohio,” one brigade inspector scolded that December, “are very incomplete and badly kept . . . in some cases the[y] are blotted and defaced and exhibit so many manifest errors that new ones should be required . . . and records and accounts commenced anew.”34