A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Just weeks later, eager to see his son—as well as something of the war—Seraphim Meyer set out for the hills of western Virginia. Promising news from the front lines kept alive—at least for the moment—delusions of a short war. On July 11, 1861, blue-coated Hoosiers and Ohioans, paying little heed to a cold, intermittent rain, twisted through knots of spruce and climbed the rugged spine of Rich Mountain, an eminence just west of Beverly that commanded the dramatic Tygart Valley River. Perched on the mountain’s summit, Brigadier General William Starke Rosecrans’s soggy troops waged a brisk battle that resulted in a Confederate defeat. Only two days later, the retreating rebels again met with misfortune at a curl in the Cheat River, where their commander, Brigadier General Robert Selden Garnett, was killed.

  Upon his return to Ohio, before an applauding crowd of some two thousand Cantonites, Meyer narrated, with “vivid description,” as well as “anecdote, mournful and mirthful,” his excursion to the seat of the war. In a speech of two hours, he reassured his neighbors that the Union soldiers were conducting the war within strict limits; he saluted the reverence for “personal rights and private property” that pervaded the federal ranks. “It is said we have among us those who call this a war of abolition, of extermination,” he roared. “None but traitors can cherish such sentiments!”17

  Indeed, the address was as much an indictment of “foul plotters” and “domestic traitors” as it was a tribute to the patriotism of Union volunteers. “Whilst rebellion is boldly raising its head, and its armed cohorts are threatening the very capital of the union,” Turenne echoed in a letter published in the Stark County Republican a few weeks later: “there are traitors . . . who are making every effort, no matter how base, to thwart and paralyze the measures of the Government, no matter how necessary or appropriate.” Already, Seraphim Meyer was learning that the war demanded vigilance on the home front no less than on the battlefield.18

  THROUGHOUT AUGUST, men widely known and well regarded in their communities recruited troops for the 107th Ohio. War opponents, meanwhile, did their best to dampen new enlistments. One “sympathizer with treason,” reproving the war effort “in the most unmeasured terms,” posted himself outside of the unit’s recruitment depot on Cleveland’s East Side. Farther south, where Augustus Vignos and his fellow recruiters Peter Sisterhen, Samuel Surburg, and Jacob Hose canvassed Louisville, Navarre, and Massillon, the Staats Zeitung, a Democratic weekly serving the German population, did its best to discourage new recruits. In nearby East Liberty, three Copperheads attempted to disband a recruitment meeting. Rather remarkably, after spending a night in the local lockup, they “concluded the quickest and safest way out of the dilemma” was to enlist. They fought “side by side” until Gettysburg, where two fell dead and one was mortally wounded.19

  Such provocations aside, the Daily Cleveland Herald could report in early August that the 107th Ohio was “filling up more rapidly than the most sanguine anticipated.” In Akron, George Billow stocked Company I, which soon included Christian Rieker, John Brunny, and the Zoar delegation. Barnet Steiner rummaged neighboring Stark County for recruits. He found an enthusiastic young volunteer in Mahlon Slutz, his old Sunday School pupil. Not yet eighteen, Slutz could not enlist without first obtaining his father’s consent, which was given only reluctantly. “If nothing will do you but go to the army,” he sighed, “I want you to go with Barry Steiner.” Four-score miles away in Sandusky, on the shores of Lake Erie, August Dewaldt crowed that his Company B had reached “its maximum number” in record time.

  The volunteers tallied many reasons for marching off to war—so many, in fact, that their motivations mock any neat categorization. Reports that the regiment would “reinforce” Sigel “acted like a charm, and aroused great enthusiasm.” Jacob Lichty was one enlistee who spoiled for a fight with the enemy. “If they want to try Gen. Sigel’s Bully Dutch,” he taunted, “let ’em pitch in.” Some men desired to follow in the martial footsteps of revered ancestors. James Ellwood’s maternal grandfather had shouldered a musket in both the Revolution and the War of 1812; now, the thirty-two-year-old Tuscarawas County farmer joined his brother and two brothers-in-law in the service of his country. For others, pecuniary incentives appealed more powerfully than patriotism. Debt-saddled farmers and day laborers could hardly resist the promise of steady pay. Fritz Nussbaum, a twenty-year-old, sandy-haired farmer who mustered into Company C, recalled that some men refused to take the oath until they received their bounties. Among them was Rieker. “If we do not receive what was promised us,” he explained to his sister back in Zoar, “we shall not go forth.” Many more could not clearly articulate what it was that compelled them to enlist; instead, with a sense of adventure and no small uncertainty, they assembled in Cleveland for instruction and drill.20

  The Civil War was fought by volunteers, not professional soldiers. Only many tedious hours of drill could ready these citizen-warriors for the battlefield. National Archives

  IT WAS AT Camp Cleveland, a bustling new training complex situated on some thirty acres immediately south of the city, where Colonel Meyer first beheld the regiment. The 994 men who assembled there represented virtually every walk of life. Among the recruits were stonecutters and shoemakers, butchers and blacksmiths, tailors and tinsmiths, carpenters and clockmakers, porters and peddlers, masons and millers, weavers and watchmakers. Ranging in age from fifteen to fifty, nearly seven in ten were foreign-born. Alongside Vignos, Billow, Rider, Siffert, Rieker, and Brunny were men like Jacob Bise, the Prussian bookbinder from Tiffin; Arnold Streum, the sandy-haired laborer from New Philadelphia; and Philip Wang, the Baden harness maker who enlisted as a first sergeant in Louisville. They hailed from a dozen Ohio counties, from the shores of Lake Erie to the banks of the Tuscarawas, from the docks of Cleveland to the farms of Wooster.

  Newly commissioned as the regimental surgeon, Charles Hartman conducted perhaps the most careful survey of the new enlistees, assessing the fitness of each volunteer for the demands of military service. Exiled after the defeat of the democratic revolutions he had embraced with “zeal” as a medical student in Cologne, Hartman settled in Cleveland and began to practice medicine. Though a capable physician who maintained a general practice, he was best known as a talented orator who had relinquished nothing of his youthful idealism. Throughout the 1850s he dazzled audiences by connecting the struggles of his youth to the ongoing battle against slavery. Hartman’s was one of the most energetic voices in the new Republican Party, addressing a gathering of the Fifth Ward Frémont Club at Cleveland’s Turner’s Hall in September 1856. The doctor’s speeches were “so involving and exciting,” one observer remarked, “that it was thought that each spoken word must be escorted with a droplet of blood from the heart.”21

  Just as he linked his own revolutionary past with America’s stormy present, so too did Hartman connect physical might and intellectual vigor. Though it was sure to visit “human distress” upon the men, Hartman relished the war as a chance to “seal with deeds what we have praised with words.” Whatever his assessment of the new recruits, he believed that the impending weeks of drill and training in the ways of army discipline could only have a salubrious effect.22

  REVEILLE SOUNDED before dawn each morning at Camp Cleveland. The men bounded from their barracks and onto the dress parade for an hour of drill before breakfast. After roll call, they drilled from seven o’clock to ten o’clock. The volunteers enjoyed free time until four o’clock in the afternoon, when they commenced three more hours of drill. Only many hours of practice could ready these raw recruits for the battlefield. While tedious tactical manuals needed to be studied and committed to memory, training in the Civil War depended on physical conditioning above all else. Officers incessantly drilled their men and then drilled them some more, aiming to program soldiers to move, march, and maneuver as mechanically as possible. A tempest of commands—halt, right dress, forward, steady there—could be heard each day as the various regiments took to the parade grounds. Slowly, men
acquired new definitions for words like line, column, wheel, and square. Though “acquiring the trade of a soldier” was, as one Union veteran later put it, “prodigious labor,” Fritz Nussbaum appeared not to mind. “I like soldiering very well,” he explained.

  If Nussbaum and his new comrades did not object to the monotony of drill, however, they did gripe about living conditions in the camp, whose thirty barracks were still under construction when the regiment arrived for its mustering in. “Constructed with unplaned pine boards,” the long, narrow, low-slung buildings—three for each company—were anything but commodious. A volunteer from a neighboring regiment who used his knapsack as a pillow compared the camp’s tower of bunks to “apple bins in a cellar.” “By day we are cheerful,” Christian Rieker advised his sister Mary. “By night,” he added, dripping with contempt, “we lie down on our feather beds.” Private John Flory remembered that he “slept very well” his first night in camp, though the eighteen-year-old farmer from Wooster “thought in the morning that Uncle Sam had purdy hard [beds].” After passing several restive nights on “hard” planks, Nussbaum took matters into his own hands. The resourceful soldier “slipt through the [guard]” and “went after some straw.” “I got a very good bed now,” he boasted. But the crude accommodations continued to elicit complaints from many of his exhausted comrades.

  Nor did the cuisine earn positive reviews from the nearly 2,900 Ohioans who had filed into the camp by the end of August. “Meat, vegetables and soup are brought in from the cook shanty in the large camp kettle in which they are cooked and laded out upon the plates,” explained Charles Clark of the 125th Ohio, another regiment that mustered in at the camp. “Coffee comes in the same kind of a kettle, and we dip in with our tin cups. So much for the government fare.” Private Flory offered a characteristically polite evaluation of the camp coffee in his diary: “We had sugar to put in it,” he wrote. Happily, hungry recruits could maintain a steady diet of “pies, cakes, fruit, and delicacies,” which were offered up by the many local women who visited the camp. “We think we are fortune’s favorites,” confessed one young artillerist when asked about the donated fare.23

  While weeks spent in Camp Cleveland tutored new soldiers in the inadequacies and improvisations of army life, they also imparted some important lessons about the support of loyal citizens, whose patriotic hymns would be too often drowned out by the clamor of the Copperheads in the coming months. When word leaked that officials had made no provision to provide the men of the 107th with blankets upon their arrival at the barracks (tens of thousands of newly mustering troops easily overwhelmed government resources), leaders in Cleveland’s First Ward “appointed a committee to call upon the citizens” for donations of “blankets or old quilts.” “It is proposed that our patriotic housewives make a little sacrifice, and each send one or two blankets,” one of their appeals commenced, “for our gallant fellows have all left comfortable beds at home and they are beginning to feel the effects of the cool nights.” Headquartered in a simple storefront at No. 95 Bank Street, the Soldiers’ Aid Society forwarded the donated bedding, in addition to several crates of medical supplies requested by Surgeon Hartman. Patriotic civilians likewise hosted picnics for the troops, presented Captain Dewaldt “with a beautiful revolver, sash and shoulder straps,” and supplied ministers to conduct religious services, including several in the German language, within the camp.24

  Despite its discomforts, most veterans remembered Camp Cleveland rather fondly. The place brimmed with activity; in myriad ways, the training complex blended seamlessly into the rhythms of the city. Each day, scores of local men, women, and children prowled about the camp’s tree-studded, barracks-lined thoroughfares, inspecting the boys and their new quarters. “Calls were constantly being made by the relatives of volunteers,” a soldier in the newly arrived 124th Ohio recalled, “and visits were constantly being solicited and made to the old homes.” Temperance crusaders extracted pledges from the volunteers and local merchants hawked their discounted wares. Jacob Smith, who maintained a daily “outline diary” of his service, recalled that his comrades in the 107th “had considerable sport” with these enterprising “Wusht peddlers.” Such gaiety seemed to overshadow the “school of the soldier.”

  Two examples of mirth making loomed large in later memory. In early September, while still adjusting to life in the camp, the regiment seized its first rebel flag. A mischievous pupil at the Cleveland Institute, a nearby preparatory school administered by Ransom Humiston, decided to taunt the troops with the rag of secession. The Stars and Bars had been used in a “tableau” staged at the Institute the previous term. Before long, a company from the 107th summoned the priggish Humiston who, before disciplining his charge, demanded the offending banner and “delivered it over to the soldiers . . . as their first trophy.”

  A few days later, the jocund troops paraded downtown to the thirteenth annual Ohio State Fair. There they inspected the goats, pigs, cattle, horses, and sheep (“Rob Roy,” an eighteen- hundred-pound Clydesdale, earned “top prize”) as well as the many “examples of sign painting, marble works, wood graining, hair work” and “ornamental penmanship” exhibited in Fine Arts Hall. Most likely they also took time to gape at the “mechanical implements,” among them the New York firm Mallory & Sanford’s premium-winning “flax dressing machine.” One prescient local newspaper editor forecasted a terrific demand for such devices after the war, once soldiers impeded by “disabling wounds” and “constitutions broken and enfeebled by disease” returned home.25

  Before long, finding it difficult to maintain good health and order within the camp, exasperated officers implored the basket brigades and civilian interlopers to suspend their visits. These “good intentions,” the camp officials intoned, “are mistaken kindnesses.” “If the friends of the troops in Camp Cleveland wish to see the men become good soldiers and retain their health, they will forbear for the future visiting them.”26

  ON THE EVE of the First World War, American infantrymen submitted to sixteen weeks of training designed to tutor them in the ways of modern trench warfare. Training programs involved weapons demonstrations, combat simulations, and illustrated lectures during the Second World War; nonetheless, the chronic demand for fresh troops halved their length. Marine Eugene Sledge received two months of infantry training at California’s Camp Elliott before shipping off to Peleliu and Okinawa. The average grunt who went to war in the jungles of Vietnam submitted to twenty punishing weeks of training that reinforced his new identity as a soldier. In the Civil War, however, Billy Yank wanted for a sustained, “standardized system of training” that could prepare him for the rigors of war. The 107th Ohio trained for no more than three weeks—and much of that time without weapons. Even once the men were outfitted with rifled muskets, they found their Austrian-manufactured, muzzle-loading weapons inconsistent or inoperable. “Broken” tubes, jammed locks, and crooked ramrods invited no little protest.27

  Indeed, it seemed to Jacob Smith as though they had “scarcely entered the school of military instruction” when, on September 21, the men received orders to “proceed at once” to Covington, Kentucky—a bustling collection of saw, iron, and steel mills on the Ohio River that anchored the makeshift defense of Cincinnati. It was no matter that many of the troops could not yet load or discharge their weapons; they were needed at the front. As the 107th filed out of Camp Cleveland for the last time, the gunners of Captain Joseph Shields’s 19th Ohio Battery tugged the lanyards of their twelve-pounder Napoleons and fired a salute.28

  BY THE FALL of 1862, the Queen City resembled a large barracks. “All day,” the Cincinnati Commercial rasped in September, “the city resounded with the measured tread of armed men and fatigue parties. The din of the drum and the piercing notes of the fife were constantly heard, far and near, and at some points there was hardly an intermission in the solemn tramp of regiments and companies.” For the second time in as many months, Ohio’s largest city—an important rail hub and thriving river to
wn that also hosted a key supply depot for the Union armies—was bracing for a Confederate invasion. In July, the dreaded General John Hunt Morgan looped through Kentucky on a pounding raid that carried his mounted rebels within sixty miles of Cincinnati. Now, Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith’s Army of East Tennessee pounded through the Bluegrass State. After notching a newsworthy victory at Richmond, Kentucky, on August 30 and securing Lexington on September 2, Smith aimed a detail commanded by General Henry Heth toward the Ohio River.29

  With only a thin ribbon of troops on hand to defend the city, Governor Tod “urged all men of military age who had guns to go at once to Cincinnati.” For nearly two weeks, tens of thousands of citizen conscripts restlessly awaited the rebels, mounding spades of earth into a maze of fortifications. The governor, fretting about the “unsettled State of Affairs,” also had defenses prepared farther east, at Ironton, Portsmouth, Gallipolis, and Marietta. The crisis came to an abrupt and anticlimactic end on September 11, however, when the invaders, both overconfident and underprepared, curled back into central Kentucky. Tod announced the news in a statement to the press, exhaling as he applauded the “gallant conduct” that had shielded Cincinnati from a “dissolute and desperate army.” Yet the governor’s eloquent proclamation was unable to quiet the city’s misgivings. Accordingly, Tod directed the state’s newest regiments to file into the vacant works coiled around Covington. Following a brief stop in Columbus (including a formal review by the governor, who described the 107th as the “best looking regiment . . . yet”), the troops enjoyed a “sumptuous supper” at the Soldier’s Rest in Cincinnati. After their repast, the men received orders to tramp across the lone pontoon bridge that spanned the Ohio.30