A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Although the encamped soldiers occupied themselves by taking turns on the picket line, they ached for news from home. During their stay at Stafford, with the consent of their officers, enlisted men sometimes wandered down to the Potomac “boat landings,” where they snatched up “as many newspapers” as possible. Entrepreneurial spirits then hawked them to their comrades for “ten, fifteen and sometimes twenty cents a copy.” Others relied on the “regular” visits of a “newspaper merchant,” or received newspapers in care packages sent from home. F. A. Wildman maintained a steady diet of “the principal weeklies” and illustrated news magazines in camp. In addition to Harper’s Weekly and the Sandusky Register, he even caught up on the Norwalk Experiment, “that stinking organ of Jeff Davis and the Rebels.” William Siffert scanned the columns of Ohio papers, anxious for news from his brother, then nudging his way through Mississippi’s cypress-choked swamps with the 76th Ohio. Jacob Smith preferred the Washington Chronicle, a hard-to-find but reliable antidote for the “class of rebel sympathizing papers” that circulated through the camps.29

  Letters from home were even more important than newspapers. “Please write soon so I get some news from you before we leave this place,” Fritz Nussbaum instructed Cary Kauke, the young friend with whom he maintained a correspondence throughout the war, from Camp Cleveland. “Almost daily,” Christian Rieker explained, “I await letters with longing.” While a few lines from home temporarily satisfied a gnawing curiosity about the opinions and activities of loved ones and acquaintances, letters also reassured soldiers that they still occupied the thoughts and prayers of those behind the lines. “I was very glad to hear from you,” Nussbaum explained to his young friend in mid-November 1863, “and also glad to see that you had not forgotten me yet.” Desiring above all to maintain their imaginative connection with those back home, soldiers scratched out letters even when they had little “new” or interesting to report. “I doubt not, but that at least some of the readers of the Beacon would be pleased to hear from the 107th Ger. Reg’t occasionally,” George Billow wrote. Hunched over makeshift desks—sometimes just “a small piece of board” stretched across the knees—the men jealously seized free moments in camp and on the march as precious opportunities to write.30

  Not all correspondence from home was welcome, of course. “Letters home kept the men in touch with those they left behind,” one historian explains, “but they also revealed the immense distance that grew up between the worlds of civilians and soldiers.” By the spring of 1863, Christian Rieker doubted whether loved ones at home would even “recognize” him. While adverse news typically traveled from the battlefield to the home front, it could also move in the opposite direction. As Rieker nursed his doubts, fear and anxiety stalked eighteen-year-old Alvin Brown, a private in Company H, who had not heard from his father in three weeks. “I thought I would write another letter to you,” the soldier began. “I hope there is nothing wrong.”31

  Sometimes, letters from home initiated unwelcome political debates; to be sure, soldiers were always quick to detect the whiff of treachery or betrayal on the home front. “You may be Democrats,” one soldier in the 55th Ohio snapped, “but you act very much like traitors.” When another Buckeye volunteer learned that his wife attended a Democratic meeting in Uniontown, a village just north of Canton, he scolded her for keeping boorish company. “I don’t like any Vallandigham meeting in mime,” he explained. “I don’t wish any of my folks to mix in such stuff.” The warning must have gone unnoticed, for no more than two months later the soldier admonished her for “writing too much about Politics.” “Let us wait until this war is over,” he implored, “and then we can talk about Political affairs.”32

  Other letters bespoke the difficulties of tending romantic fires from a distance. Jacob Smith recalled the unfortunate tale of “a bright, intelligent” company cook who desired a vow of faithfulness from his sweetheart. When the soldier received what he interpreted to be a noncommittal reply, he became understandably disheartened. Shortly thereafter, he succumbed to typhoid in a Washington camp hospital. While Smith acknowledged that the disease “was working in his system prior to his receiving the letter,” the malevolent agency he attributed to the young woman’s missive reveals not only the importance of perceived support back home, but also the keen intuition—shared by very many soldiers—that their physical and emotional health were inextricably linked.33

  That intuition would prove essential in the days ahead. After weeks of blister-inducing marches and many fatiguing nights passed on the picket line, all were alive with anticipation for the New Year. Tinged with unease yet brimming with excitement, they sensed that the coming months would deliver them to the war in earnest at last.

  The Eastern Theater of the Civil War

  CHAPTER 3

  “STOP ALL FIRING IN THE REAR OF US”

  January to April 1863

  THE YEAR 1863 began ominously for the 107th Ohio. As antislavery activists in Boston and New York City celebrated the arrival of “jubilee,” the Buckeyes huddled around the fresh grave of Corporal Philip Oakleaf who, on New Year’s Day, succumbed to typhoid—one of many diseases that romped so destructively through the Army of the Potomac’s camps that winter. Captain Barnet Steiner delivered a short but eloquent funeral sermon, seizing the moment to impress upon all “the necessity of living right, discharging every duty to the best of our ability.” The war demanded physical and spiritual vigilance from its soldiers, Steiner reminded them, because death could issue its “summons” at any time. Even for a generation menaced by epidemics, communicable diseases, and deadly childhood ailments, mortality never seemed so imminent as it did during the Civil War. “Death is nothing here,” poet Walt Whitman observed as he threaded his way through Falmouth, piled high with corpses awaiting burial and choked by rows of crudely marked graves. “No one makes an ado.”1

  Yet as evidenced by Steiner’s simple eulogy, soldiers never became completely inured to death; nor could they brook the grim reaper’s contempt for individuality. The nature of death in the Civil War—sometimes violent, often bereft of meaning, and nearly always at a distance from loved ones back home—not only invited survivor guilt, sorrow and regret; it likewise renewed the soldier’s innate fear of being forgotten. Jakob Kuemmerle, one of the Zoar recruits, passed away just a few weeks later. “It was very hard for us to see him die,” Christian Rieker confessed, “so far removed from family and siblings, and in such a wild, rough, unfavorable area as it is here in Virginia.” Kuemmerle’s hasty burial greatly distressed his old friend. “He is just lying here, only one comrade at his side in the wide, broad field, perhaps an old cotton field,” Rieker protested. “I do not think it will make much difference to a dead man, but it looks quite uninhabited for those who behold it.” Other soldiers wept as they watched an African-American burial detail lower lifeless bodies into a long, narrow trench.2

  The death of a comrade tore at the fabric of a Civil War regiment, but often in a way that—however paradoxically—renewed its commitment to the struggle. Who, after all, could endure the thought that Philip Oakleaf and Jakob Kuemmerle might have died in vain? Urgently, the men needed to explain—to themselves and to their loved ones back home—the meaning of so much death and suffering. Unable to grasp anything of the relationship between death, suffering, and the progress of arms, and lacking any assurance about the war’s direction, they existed in the uneasy, angst-ridden space between the war’s battles. They faced each fated moment as it came. “The great question among us,” an enlisted man in the 107th revealed, “is when will this war end? And how will matters stand when it is ended?” Over the next five months, bad weather and even worse roads, ever-lengthening sick rolls, and disquieting new evidence of disloyalty back home would render those questions more difficult—and thus more imperative to answer.3

  PILLORIED BY THE PRESS, hauled before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, and irked by quarrelsome subordinates, Ambrose Burnside was eager to rous
e the Army of the Potomac from its post-Fredericksburg torpor. Defiantly, the burly general announced that the time was ripe “to gain that decisive victory” and, at last, “strike a great and mortal blow to the rebellion.” Burnside directed his main force to march upriver, splash across the Rappahannock at Bank’s Ford, and gain Lee’s left flank. He hoped that the swift movement would flush the rebels from their sturdy works behind Fredericksburg, invite a battle on more favorable ground, and wring from Lee the initiative the federals lost in the ill-fated attempts on Mayre’s Heights.4

  While many soldiers dismissed Burnside’s latest order out of hand (“I hope the army will go to Richmond this time or to hell, and I don’t care which,” one blunt Michigander growled), the rank and file of the 107th Ohio expressed a new and certain optimism. A correspondent embedded with the Eleventh Corps confessed that he could find no “evidence of demoralization,” even in regiments whose sick rolls seemed to multiply by the hour. The expectation of forward action could, as one soldier explained it, have “a magical effect.” “The weak grow suddenly strong, the disheartened courageous, and men who on one day would be ready to flee before an enemy, will on the next chase him with the bayonet,” the New York Times made clear. Some in the 107th deemed a visit from the paymaster a good omen. For his part, George Billow announced that the boys were both “ready” to meet the enemy in battle and “determined not to stop short of whipping ’em out this time.” “All were held in readiness to move at any notice,” another volunteer echoed.5

  Nobody predicted what happened next.

  On January 20, the day the army was to move, the temperatures plummeted as biting winds squalled across Virginia. Later that evening, a doleful drizzle thickened to sleet, plastering the region’s crude thoroughfares in mud. The viscous mire, which one soldier analogized to “stiff mortar,” swallowed up army mules, supply wagons, limber chests, and artillery pieces to their axles, jamming the roads with “an indescribable chaos of pontoons, vehicles, and artillery.” “Moving cannon and an army had to be abandoned—it was a thing impossible,” George Billow sighed. “Even the cavalry horses at times stuck fast and staggered like drunken men,” another soldier echoed. “The mud here in fact out-peninsulas the peninsula,” marveled one incredulous veteran of McClellan’s notoriously soggy campaign to capture the rebel capital. “The army, in fact, was embargoed: it was no longer a question of how to go forward—it was a question of how to get back.”6

  Burnside had regrettably equipped the press—and war opponents back home—with a devastating new metaphor for the army’s progress in the East. The chastened troops were not just in “dead-lock,” one editorial writer sneered; they were in “mud-lock.” The mocking headlines were all too predictable. Appropriating the jeers of the “secesh pickets,” the New York Herald announced that the Army of the Potomac was “stuck in the mud.” Even the reliably pro-Union Philadelphia Inquirer conceded that recent events were “more than ordinarily unfortunate,” as they had “given rise” to a traffic in “conflicting as well as false” rumors.” “Every day increases the anxiety universally felt for instant, vigorous and decisive action,” its editor acknowledged. “We can only hope and wait.”7

  Gnarled, waterlogged, and weather-beaten, the men of the Army of the Potomac limped mournfully to their campsites. Some of the 107th boys were so exhausted that they collapsed along the road and commenced a deep sleep. In the estimation of one New Yorker, the men were “about used up.” “My opinion is that the army of the Potomac is about played out,” advised a soldier from the 55th Ohio, who regarded the Mud March as “the greatest failure in the war.” Yet even the profound disappointment of the Mud March sent no great wave of disillusionment crashing through the ranks. “The demoralization of our army is a subject of which too much has, of late, been said and written,” a Maine correspondent wrote. “I don’t believe it, and if I did, I would not tell of it. The boys have been abused and neglected, but you had better believe they’ll fight . . . I should decidedly object to being one in any rebel force that meets that ‘demoralized army’ in a fair field.”8

  Overwhelmingly, the 107th Ohio’s rank and file would have agreed. One volunteer informed the Stark County Democrat that while he overheard plenty of “growling” among his comrades, it was chiefly the result of their being “cheated out of what they call a game of ball with the rebels.” While the impossibility of keeping warm and dry had “doubled” the unit’s presence at the field hospital, the soldier felt “confident that our boys are good for their number.” “Tired of laying around idle,” he thirsted for a fight. “Let us have it now, whip or get whipped,” he urged. “If rebel sympathizers in the North are basing their hopes on a speedy peace, thinking that the army will no longer fight, or are so demoralized as to be unfit and uncertain for duty,” another enlisted man advised, “their hopes are vain and founded on false rumor.”9

  Shivering in camp, men expressed their faith in an all-knowing providence. “I think I see the dawn of a brighter future,” one Bay State volunteer declared. “The soldiers all realize that there is a directing, commanding will now at the head of this army, with whom traitors cannot trifle. Despondency, disgust, and a deep intense feeling of homesickness are giving place in the army to confidence and a longing for the promised work.” As they pondered the relationship between their circumstances and human agency, a growing number of men held that the army’s fortunes depended on a higher power, not human blunder. “The fates had decreed the failure of the enterprise,” Jacob Smith professed. “The sluices of Heaven opened, as it were, to prostrate the General’s promising designs.” The army’s latest “enterprise,” another observer echoed, was “balked and brought to naught by causes which mortal kin could neither have foreseen nor prevented.” “Of course Gen. Burnside is not to blame for this failure,” surmised the Rhode Islander Elisha Hunt Rhodes. “He could not control natural forces notwithstanding the views of certain newspapers who seem to think he could.”10

  Still, not everyone was willing to pardon Ambrose Burnside for a winter of dashed hopes and false starts, “long delays and useless marches.” “All we desire is a good leader,” one of the 107th Ohio’s restless soldiers explained, “and we will show that the Army of the Potomac is worthy of noble deeds and that her rank and file are composed of men, true patriots, who more willingly yield their lives in defense of their rights than bow to slave aristocracy like [so many] cringing, mealy mouthed traitors at home.”11

  WITHIN A WEEK of the Mud March, that soldier got his wish. On January 26, 1863, the president removed Burnside from command and installed in his place forty-eight-year-old Joseph Hooker, an attractive man with piercing blue eyes and a sturdy jaw who carried an “erect soldierly bearing.” “Anybody would feel like cheering when he rode by at the head of his staff,” one of his new division commanders claimed. Born in November 1814 in Hadley, an old Puritan town perched on the Connecticut River and nestled in the hills of western Massachusetts, Hooker graduated near the middle of his West Point class of 1837. After battling through stands of cypress and Florida swamps during the Second Seminole War, he was packed off to Mexico, where he served on the staffs of five generals and fought with distinction at the battles of Monterrey and Chapultepec. Not long after personally assuring President Lincoln that he was superior to any Yankee general in the field, the pugnacious Hooker lived up to his intrepid claim—piloting a division up the Peninsula before ascending the slopes of South Mountain with the corps that would open the battle of Antietam. It was only with some hyperbole that the New York Times deemed Hooker “the most uniformly successful of all our officers.” “He does not believe in the charm of soft persuasion,” another newspaper assured. “He is not one to hang out the white rag.” So it was that “every officer and private is glad that [Burnside] is removed,” one enlisted man from Stark County explained.12

  The new commanding general demanded a steely resolve and a renewed sense of purpose from his soldiers. “In the record of your achievem
ents there is much to be proud of,” Hooker insisted, “and with the blessing of God, we will contribute something to the renown of our arms and the success of our cause.” As he anxiously waited for warmer weather (wisely heeding the president’s advice to “beware of rashness”), Hooker implemented a number of important new policies and reforms. To ensure the “ready recognition of corps and divisions,” the general directed his troops to affix corps badges to their hats. The men of the 107th Ohio pinned red felt crescents on their kepis, signaling their position in the First Division of the Eleventh Corps. Hooker upgraded the soldiers’ diets, calling for “flour or soft bread” to be issued four times per week; “fresh potatoes or onions, if practicable,” twice per week; and “desiccated mixed vegetables or potatoes” once per week. Hooker likewise permitted line officers to grant ten-day furloughs to men who maintained “the most excellent record for attention to all duties.” To accommodate the length of their trip, men from Ohio and points farther west were eligible for fifteen-day leaves.13

  Equally important, Hooker forbade the circulation of Democratic newspapers in the army camps. For months, the “treasonable” press had riled the men with their heavy-handed editorials. “It is manifestly impossible for the army to read these papers without feeling discouraged and homesick,” one Eleventh Corps soldier explained. Accordingly, provost marshals ordered merchants hawking issues of the New York World “back to Aquia Creek,” prohibiting the paper’s sale “along the road” and at Falmouth Station. “Now we get the Tribune and Post and the Washington Chronicle once more,” one enlisted man rejoiced, marveling at the “healthy and inspiring” effects of the loyal press on his comrades. In their letters home, soldiers appealed for “every copy of the Atlantic, Continental, Harper’s Monthly, and Christian Examiner” available, explaining that such reading would “help to fix patriotic men more firmly in their purpose.”14