A Thousand May Fall
Page 5
Colonel Meyer erupted in anger. Wanting essential supplies, functional weapons, and adequate training, his regiment was in no condition for the frontlines. The colonel marched determinedly down Third Street to the Burnet House—the sprawling and stately, dome-crowned hotel that housed the headquarters of Major General Horatio Wright’s Department of the Ohio—to register his objection to any forward movement. Major Nathaniel McLean, the Cincinnati native and West Point graduate who now served as Wright’s chief of staff, received the indignant colonel. Meyer asked to see the commanding general at once. Refusing to communicate his grievances through McLean as protocol demanded, he instead nudged his way beyond the chief of staff and stormed brazenly into Wright’s office, veiled in a thick fog of cigar smoke.31
The startled general, who just one month before had earned the second star on his shoulder boards, demanded to know the reason for the officer’s audacity. Meyer responded by reciting his grievances in “highly disrespectful” and “insubordinate” tones. Until his troops possessed everything they needed, the impudent colonel asserted, they would “not go into the field.” His patience all but expended, Wright ordered Meyer placed under arrest. Further betraying the levity with which he regarded military order and discipline, Meyer mocked his fate.
“All right, general, its all right, I’m under arrest general,” he began, promising that he would “report his being arrested to his particular friends, the Secretary of War and the Governor of Ohio.” “I report myself to you now under arrest, do what you please; I’m under arrest General, its all right.” So utterly bizarre was the exchange that more than a few officers at department headquarters supposed Meyer to be “under the influence of intoxicating liquors”—an allegation that Meyer steadfastly denied. “If I am psychologist enough to judge the matter,” the colonel protested, “I would say . . . it was the fruit of two sleeping nights, full of anxiety, passed on board rail cars . . . combined with the effects of constantly recurring disappointments, added to the discontent [and] increasing clamors of the regiment.” Whatever the case, it would not be the last time that charges of drunkenness dogged him.32
THE 107TH OHIO pressed into Kentucky later that evening. Notwithstanding Colonel Meyer’s protests, many were eager to experience their baptism of fire. In Camps and Campaigns, regimental historian Jacob Smith noted that the 107th spent their first night beyond Ohio’s borders “in a yard surrounding a nice residence.” This seemingly trivial detail assumes significance only when one considers the orders issued to the regiment that week by their new division commander, Brigadier General Henry Moses Judah. “Soldiers must be kept in their camps,” the West Pointer and brevetted Mexican War veteran instructed, “and upon no pretense whatsoever, permitted to visit the houses of citizens in their vicinity. Any Officers or Soldiers who shall hereafter interfere with, take, or injure any property of any private citizen . . . shall be punished to the extent of the law.”
Among the rank and file, the urge to pillage and plunder was born of the hardships and material inadequacies of army life. Deprivations real and imagined could threaten morale; disillusionment spread like an epidemic when expectations failed to align with realities.33
Having anticipated a war of drums and bugles, John Brunny succumbed first. Shortly after his arrival at Camp Cleveland, Colonel Meyer had tasked the Zoar bugler with organizing the regimental band—an assignment he undertook with great zeal. Dozens of new recruits either “proved to be or claimed to be musicians.” Among them was twenty-two-year-old William Huy, a German immigrant who lived in Brooklyn Township.34
But the martial airs would not survive the regiment’s first march. In the first letter he penned from the front, tucked in an envelope addressed to a chum in Zoar, a chastened John Brunny plumbed the depths of doubt and despair. “Because I have always valued you as a good friend,” he began, “I also consider it my duty to portray . . . the first significant march that we took.” Ordered to relinquish its position outside Covington and slide into the artillery-studded works to the southwest, the 107th Ohio moved out on the morning of September 23 for Camp Judah. “At first, things moved forward,” Brunny explained, “accompanied by song.” But before long, as the men pressed along a bone-dry road, “a massive dust cloud” choked the air and obscured everything “not three steps” before them. “Thirst also set in, as we had no water with us,” he continued, “and the great heat caused by our heavy packs increased the weakness of our human powers to such an extent that after only three miles, dozens were looking to the fence corners from which they were immediately driven off by the officers.” Not a few among them, Brunny recalled, attempted in vain to quench their thirst by “scoop[ing] up water” from “dirty puddles.”35
Another mile delivered the men to the camp of the 102nd Ohio—and a brief reprieve from the thankless march. Once assured that their “intended destination” was merely a “quarter of a mile away, the soldiers “set out courageously again.” Yet another mile later, near-mutiny erupted in the ranks. “Despite the captain’s cursing,” Brunny remembered, “most lost courage and again broke.” Blinking between dismay and disbelief, he described the “whole rows [of men] lying exhausted along the road.” “Several fell down unconscious on the slope of the hill, overcome by sunstroke, from which one soon died,” he added. By the time Brunny finally reached the regiment’s new camp, sitting atop “a hill crowned by cannons and foals” and affording splendid views of Cincinnati, “scarcely half” of his new comrades had arrived. Only then did they realize that the entire day’s eight-mile march had been an object lesson in absurdity. “The place where we now are located is barely two miles away from our previous camp,” Brunny explained to his friend in Zoar, “and could have been reached in one hour.” It was, he tartly surmised, “an exemplary masterpiece of stupidity and inability on the part of our leaders.”36
John Brunny’s introduction to the war exposed the stark gap between the romance and reality of war. The soldier was no doubt pleased when the regiment received its instructions to report at once to Ohio’s Camp Delaware, “to be there more completely equipped, and receive more ample military instruction.” With the rebel enemy defeated in Maryland and stumbling in Kentucky, an attempt on the Cincinnati defenses now seemed improbable. And so the troops dutifully trundled back across the pontoon bridge, before long to board locomotives bound for their camp on the Olentangy. While they had yet to see an enemy soldier, many of the themes that would come to define their civil war were already in full view. Mustered from communities riven by the conflict, affronted by hostile environments, and afflicted by recurring spells of cynicism and doubt, the 107th Ohio would battle much more than the southern rebels during the next three years.37
CHAPTER 2
“TO CRUSH OUT THE . . . UNGODLY REBELLION”
October to December 1862
IN AN OCTOBER LETTER to a friend back at home in Akron, a shamefaced George Billow reported that the 107th had returned to Ohio “without seeing even a skirmish.” “When we left Cleveland [for Kentucky],” he protested, “we certainly expected to see an engagement quite soon.” Frustrated, Billow hastened to add that his regiment had been “twice ordered into our entrenchments, in anticipation” of an attempt on their position. “At one time there were 500 Cavalry within three miles of our camp,” he explained, “but they did not venture an attack.” The captain’s defensive note laid bare the dread of inadequacy and self-consciousness that already afflicted the young regiment. Impatient for action after only a few marches and deprived of a coveted opportunity to prove their mettle, the men were instead moored at Camp Delaware for three tedious weeks of drill. Not until the men snapped to attention “in apple pie order,” Adjutant General Charles Hill directed, would the 107th Ohio move on to their much-hyped appointment with General Sigel.1
Situated on “a fine piece of bottom land” a score of miles north of the state capital and a mile south of its namesake city, Camp Delaware was a new point of rendezvous for Ohio’s ever-len
gthening roster of volunteers. “Every accommodation necessary for the comfort and convenience of camp were to be had there,” explained one enlisted man from Company D, supposing that the camp was the finest such proving ground in the state. Skirted by meadows and ripe orchards, “cider presses and hen-roosts,” Camp Delaware’s location lent itself to frequent “foraging expeditions” (only partially in jest, locals “talked of forming a home guard” to spare the bounty of their fields). Not only did two natural springs babble up from the ground, but the Olentangy River meandered lazily through the camp, affording the troops “pure, cool, and sparkling” water “in abundance.” The availability of fresh, potable water made all the difference—especially for regimental comrades battling vexing spells of chronic diarrhea, fever, aches, or vertigo in the camp hospital. “Water,” the enlisted man advised, “is the first thing for comfort.”2
Still, proper hygiene and satisfied stomachs could only do so much to maintain good morale. Even as the men deloused and cleansed their dirt-begrimed skin, washed uniforms caked in dust, and enjoyed the sumptuous bounty of an Ohio harvest, stern reminders of the war’s stark realities would soon challenge their strength as a regiment.3
NOT LONG AFTER arriving at Camp Delaware, the men of the 107th Ohio received word of the major announcement that President Lincoln made on September 22. Five days after a grisly showdown at Sharpsburg flushed the rebels from the Maryland countryside, the president announced that he would issue an emancipation proclamation. On January 1, 1863, the more than three million persons enslaved in areas of open rebellion would be declared free. Enslaved persons held in bondage in the border states or in areas under federal military occupation, however, would be exempt from the proclamation. In this preliminary announcement, Lincoln offered no hint of outfitting black men in blue uniforms—what would prove to be the most far-reaching effect of his final proclamation.4
Predictably, in a regiment teeming with obedient Democrats, many men greeted news of the preliminary emancipation proclamation with scorn and derision. “Some of the officers and a good many of the troops condemned the president,” Jacob Smith recalled. At least a few of the troops may have refused to wage a crusade to end slavery. Daniel Cramer, Levi Lash, and James Parks deserted only days after the news from Washington, D.C., reached them at Camp Delaware. Dutiful sentinels returned the trio to the regiment one week later, although Lash absconded again before October’s end. Yet there were still plenty in the ranks who cheered the announcement. Smith, for instance, deemed the president’s action long overdue, while George Billow exclaimed that the time had arrived to tear slavery out by the root. “With few exceptions,” he insisted, “the boys and especially the Akron Company” shared his sentiments. Even so, many of the proclamation’s supporters embraced the measure not as a test of principle, but rather as a matter of pragmatism. Though they professed slavery to be “the real issue” underlying the conflict, emancipation seemed the most expedient way to finish off the wicked rebellion and “the work we had obliged ourselves to do.”5
Ending the conflict was likely fresh on their minds, as the war first revealed to the regiment its capacity for human death and suffering that week. Scores of convalescing soldiers crowded into Camp Delaware’s hospital, reeling from gastrointestinal ailments and illnesses they blamed on Kentucky’s “miserable water.” Two enlisted men succumbed to “camp fever” in short order. “Yesterday we buried a man,” Christian Rieker reported matter-of-factly in a letter to his sister. “He died in the hospital and his father came and got him.” On October 26, thirty-one-year-old First Lieutenant George Shambs, a private and unpretentious Mansfield tobacconist, left behind his young bride and their two children—including a five-year-old daughter and namesake son born just three weeks prior. Clara Shambs, alerted days before of her husband’s flagging condition, was dashing off to Delaware when the soldier expired. “While his loss is mourned by the regiment,” one comrade observed somberly, “only a mother as she beheld her two fatherless children could deeply feel the anguish of mind at the loss of her support and stay.” Indeed, the twenty-three-year-old widow was obliged to move eighty miles north to Cleveland, where her brother-in-law worked as the city’s police clerk and she would begin a new life “keeping house.”6
Even as it mourned and then buried its first casualties, negative press dogged the regiment. Rumors, after all, were the boon trade of nineteenth-century newspaper editors. With great satisfaction, Colonel Meyer’s arch nemesis, Archibald McGregor’s Stark County Democrat, passed along a report of the colonel’s arrest in Cincinnati. The next day, the Summit County Beacon, published in Akron, announced that it was in possession of a letter railing against the “drunkenness” that supposedly prevailed among “some” of the 107th’s officers. Clearly, the charges stung. Writing under the pseudonym “Billy Bell,” George Billow responded to the allegations in a forcefully argued message. “ ‘People who live in glass houses should never throw stones,’ ” he advised. “Could you hear the eulogies bestowed upon this regiment, and particularly the officers by the people of Delaware and vicinity, for its orderly, civil, and moral conduct,” he added, “you would certain deem such letters as you have received unjust and wholly without foundation.”7
But the reports did have “foundation,” despite embellished claims that a “majority” of the officer corps was habitually intoxicated. On October 17, only days before Billow’s retort appeared on the Beacon’s front page, Corporal Gerhard Schreiber from Company B was “reduced to the ranks” for “insubordination and intemperance.” It was little wonder that when the men of the regiment received instructions to fold up tents, they were keen to bid Camp Delaware farewell. “I would have never thought that I would spend a birthday, or this twenty first one under these circumstances,” Rieker marveled. “How long I shall still live or shall spend in this situation,” he added stoically, “is something that I do not know.”8
GOVERNOR TOD’S orders finally arrived around eight o’clock on Wednesday evening, October the 29th. The next morning, the men obediently stowed “three days rations in haversacks” and climbed aboard hissing locomotives bound for Washington. Because the train would make a brief stop in Canton, the Stark County companies delighted in the thought of a moment’s reunion with family and friends as the engine made its way north. The soldiers were crestfallen however, when they arrived at a mostly deserted depot. “The word of our passing through,” one enlisted man later lamented, had not arrived “in time.” Still others were undeterred; their proximity to home convinced them to take French leave. Privates Charles Kastner, Henry Klingaman, and Thomas Beck deserted Company H and made their way back to Louisville, about eight miles northwest of Canton. Directed to collect “stragglers” milling about the depot before their train pushed off, Private Joshua Budd opted to abandon the unit himself, having already collected his $27 bounty and one month’s pay. Though a penitent Budd returned to Company C some ten months later, he would be hauled before a court-martial jury for his offense.9
With a whistle, the train pulled away from Canton and lurched toward Pittsburgh, a humming collection of furnaces, factories, and mills nestled in the foothills of western Pennsylvania. At an Iron City depot, the soldiers would board another train for the remainder of their journey to Washington. Needless to say, when the men realized that rickety pine cattle cars “without windows” would deliver them to the nation’s capital, it served only to intensify their insecurities. “If we are human beings,” Billow insisted, “let them treat us as such.” For several hours, Colonel Meyer protested that his men were “not a drove of cattle or hogs,” but to no avail. Learning of his colonel’s unsuccessful appeal, the wagon maker reluctantly acquiesced. “If we are cattle,” he concluded, then “let them treat us as cattle.”10
The regiment’s miserly estimate of its own worth did not improve after brief stops in Altoona, a burgeoning city in the shadow of Brush Mountain, and Harrisburg, the state’s capital, crowded on the Susquehanna’s eastern ban
k. In neither city was the much touted “generosity and hospitality of the people of Penn” on active display. Months before the national press (in the aftermath of the Gettysburg campaign) invited a minor controversy by condemning Pennsylvanians for vending “whiskey, water and bread to Union troops at exorbitant prices,” Billow reported that Harrisburg merchants “generously charged double [the] value” of anything the troops “wished to purchase.” Indeed, the irony was hardly lost that the troops did not receive a warm reception until their arrival in Baltimore, the border-state city where, the previous April, seething secessionist mobs hurled stones, epithets, and lead as militiamen from Massachusetts nudged through on their way to Washington. “Although she is styled the ‘city of mobs’ and has grossly insulted—killed—union soldiers,” Billow considered, “she now knows how to appreciate them, feed them when hungry, and give them rest, when sick and weary.”11
The morning after their memorable repast in Baltimore, the troops tramped through the streets of the nation’s capital before marching across the aptly named Long Bridge, which delivered them to Arlington Heights. Though that commanding Virginia eminence afforded unrivaled views of the federal city, it was Arlington’s starkly militarized landscape that made a lasting impression on the men of the 107th Ohio. “As far as the eye can reach,” one of its soldiers remarked, “beautiful habitations have been leveled with the earth; oaks of the forest, felled to the ground, and fences which once environed the fertile fields, are no more to be seen.” “There was nothing visible to remind us of civil life,” Jacob Smith echoed, awe-inspired by the twisting miles of trenches and makeshift earthen forts. If Camp Delaware awakened the men to the war’s ugly realities, then Arlington Heights impressed upon them the conflict’s enormous scale. “Wherever the eyes was cast,” another volunteer noted, “forts, fortifications, and camps were to be seen.” The scene could not help but inspire confidence in their ability to crush the enemy. “The army of the Potomac,” one enlisted man concluded, “constitutes an immense force, which if hurled with its full strength upon the Rebel Capitol would without doubt make it yield.”12