In the ensuing weeks, the loyal press very likely braced the men of the 107th Ohio, as long marches and unhappy conditions once more tested their determination. No sooner had they established a winter camp (a neat row of “shanties” perched atop the “brow of a very steep bank”) than they were sent packing to a new site along the Accokeek Creek, about one mile west of Brooke’s Station, a tiny depot on the railroad that stretched “between Aquia and Falmouth.” The Ohioans trudged through stiff winds and muddy swamps and along rutted roads, only to be greeted by sheets of sleet and ice that before long turned to snow. Absent any shelter on a night that thermometers registered subzero temperatures, with the mud beneath them congealing into “a hard frozen mass,” the troops “suffered a great deal.” The bone-chilling weather impressed even hearty New Englanders, including one who declared this night, “the worst I have seen since I became a member of Uncle Sam’s family.” Regimental historian Jacob Smith was especially blunt: “This was one of the times that we did not wish to have repeated.”15
The Winter Encampments of the Army of the Potomac, 1862–1863
On February 4, their “fingers and faces” numb from the bite of the wind, men finally received orders to construct winter quarters. If welcome, these instructions—the third such in as many months—must have reinforced for many the absurdity and unpredictability of war. Forming up, heading out, falling back, digging in—the war had become a wearisome sequence of movements and motions, none of which could be readily assimilated into a larger narrative, and none of which—from the perspective of men on the ground—seemed to exert any influence on the course of the war. For some troops, bustle invited fresh skepticism about the efficacy of their leaders. It was not lost on Jacob Smith, for instance, that on the 107th Ohio’s freezing trek to Brooke’s Station, the regiment plodded along some of the same roads that, only weeks before, delivered them to bustling Belle Plain. “With all the marching we did, we have not done anything towards ending this war,” one of the Stark County volunteers rued. Even worse, Alvin Brown suspected that as soon as the men pitched their new camp, they would once again be ordered to move.16
Throwing up a winter camp was hard work that began by harvesting the surrounding stands of sturdy pine, laurel, and black jack oak. Axes quickly transformed the woods into a barren, other-worldly “landscape of stumps,” all the while supplying a steady tempo for the men who sawed felled trunks into logs and beams. “All the surrounding forests had disappeared,” one northern correspondent remembered, “built into huts, with chimneys of sticks and mud, or burned in the stone fireplaces constructed by the soldiers.” (By harvesting trees, which consume water from the soil, the men unwittingly contributed to the “mud” problem.) As he hoisted a heavy log into place on a winter hut, Anton Lang lost his balance and toppled to the ground, rupturing his right side. No longer fit for “military duties”—obliged to serve out his term as a company cook—Lang’s would be among the most eloquent voices after the war reminding that the battlefield maintained no monopoly on wounds and injuries.17
Soon, “good substantial log huts” that afforded a partial reprieve from the gusts of winter lined the parade ground. Unlike other units that tramped across that drill field—sometimes “five hours daily when not on other duty”—the 107th Ohio adopted no such routine. “Battalion drill cannot take place,” Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mueller plainly informed the regiment in late February, advising company commanders to instruct their troops in the manual of arms “whenever the weather will permit.” Even men assigned to the Ambulance Corps, faced with the daunting task of learning how to wind a stretcher bearing a wounded comrade to a field hospital, drilled no more than two hours on any given day. “We don’t drill any,” one soldier rejoiced, “only dress parade.”18
Consequently, the men had ample time to reflect on the war and their participation in it. They passed much of that time pondering the antiwar sentiments romping throughout much of the Midwest—especially in Ohio, where editor Edwin Cowles’s pro-Lincoln Cleveland Daily Leader declared an open “contest between military successes and peace opponents of the war.” The Copperhead movement’s influence tracked the fortunes of the federal war effort. By early 1863, it had swollen in personnel, tallying new grievances and offering a more vigorous critique of the Union war effort. Encouraged by their strong showing in the midterm elections, antiwar Ohio Democrats grew increasingly shrill. Only a few weeks before the 107th Ohio set out on its wintry march to Brooke’s Station, a Dayton congressman named Clement Laird Vallandigham took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and commenced a blistering, one-hour tirade against the abolition “fanatics and demagogues” and their needless, costly war.19
“You cannot abolish slavery by the sword,” Vallandigham snorted, and “still less by proclamations, though the President were to ‘proclaim’ every month.” Denying that there was an “ ‘irrepressible conflict’ between slave labor and free labor,” the brass-lunged second-term congressman denounced the war as a mad abolitionist “crusade.” “From the beginning,” he protested, “the war has been conducted like a political campaign, and it has been the folly of the party in power that they have assumed that numbers alone would win the field in a contest not with ballots but with musket and sword.” Vallandigham seemed almost to delight in the Union armies’ military reverses. “Victory,” he announced, “follows the standard of the foe.” “Ought this war to continue?” he asked. “I answer, no—not a day, not an hour.”20
The speech grabbed headlines and column inches on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. With keen interest, newspapers across the Confederate South tracked the proceedings in Washington, hopeful that the “peace party,” now “growing in strength and boldness,” offered a reliable index of northern resolve. Indeed, across Ohio, where Vallandigham made no secret of his gubernatorial ambitions, the speech reinvigorated pitched debates about the necessity of the war and the cause of emancipation. While cautious Ohio Democrats distanced themselves from Vallandigham’s “formal bid to lead the peace crusade,” plenty of the state’s Democratic newspapers piled acclaim on the congressman’s effort. The Newark Advocate, for example, esteemed Vallandigham’s “force of reasoning,” his “richness of historical illustration,” and his very “depth of patriotism.” From Columbus to Dayton to Cincinnati, obsequious editors paid undue tribute to the “words of wisdom” and “burning eloquence” of “the greatest living American statesman.” Inspired by Vallandigham, the editor of one western Ohio newspaper reached a remarkable conclusion that winter: “He who supports the war,” he announced, “is against the Union.”21
Dayton congressman Clement Laird Vallandigham, a Copperhead Democrat, emerged as the most vocal opponent of the war, earning the ire of soldiers in the field. Library of Congress
As the peace movement flowered throughout the Midwest, Republicans registered their irritation. “The man who recommends and circulates, such treason, as Vallandigham’s speech,” the Ripley Bee declaimed, “does more mischief to the Union cause, than he could, by fighting against the Government.” “If distrust prevails and Copperheads continue to vomit treason,” one Cleveland newspaper hastened to add, “if our soldiers are slandered and our honor outraged by false and heretic doctrines by northern Rebels, then only providence can save us from national ruin.” Some began to wonder what posed the greater threat to the Union—the Confederacy or Copperheadism. “Compared with Vallandigham,” declared George Templeton Strong, the Manhattan attorney who served as the treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, “the most barbarous, brutal Mississippian now in arms against us is a demigod.”22
Yet nowhere did opposition to Vallandigham blaze with more righteous indignation than along the north bank of the Rappahannock, in the winter quarters of the Army of the Potomac. “If they don’t want us to come down here and fight,” one of the regiment’s enlisted men recommended, “why let them keep their mouths shut and not disturb us.” “I will leave my bones to bleach on the
battle field of the sunny South,” he rejoined, “before I will say ‘Compromise’ or say ‘Enough.’ ” “All I ask,” one more Ohio volunteer echoed, unable to efface the sting of betrayal, “is for those who know nothing of war and its ravages to hold their mouths, and not discourage those who are risking their lives in an effort to restore a tottering government to its former position.” “The assertion that soldiers are so tired of the war that they care not upon what terms peace is made with the Rebels,” still another soldier from the Buckeye State confirmed, “is simply a notorious falsehood.”23
In camp near Falmouth, a pair of northeastern Ohio regiments endorsed a similarly urgent set of resolutions, making public their estimation of the war’s opponents back home. “While we are ready to lay down our lives in our just and holy cause,” the men began, “we ask of the people at home to lay aside all partizan feeling and to act as patriots.” “If men like Vallandigham . . . will join the rebel ranks and meet us face to face, on the field of battle,” they continued, “we will treat them as honorable foes.” “But if they continue to advocate compromises and dishonorable peace propositions, then in justice to the sacred memory of our brothers in arms . . . in vindication of all that is dear to us, we will brand them as infamous traitors.”24
Something more than resentment for stay-at-homes stirred in those bone-chilling winter camps. Animating the response of many soldiers to the Copperheads was the conviction, steeled by sacrifice and fortified by loss, that the war had to be won. It was a conviction that the hissing of the peace men back home gave an unlikely and ironic boost. With every pious declaration that Lincoln was a despot and emancipation unwise, the troops measured the distance between the battlefield and home front, temporarily setting aside their own sharp political differences. “The more the Copperheads rave,” Christian Schreiner insisted, “the more determined the men in the army get.”
“These Democratic traitors cannot humbug me with their talk about ‘habeas corpus,’ ‘false imprisonments,’ and their mourning about ‘niggers,’ ” insisted the Swiss-born Christian von Gunden, who shouldered a musket in Company I. “Every sane minded soldier can see that Slavery has kept the rebellion alive . . . If we can deprive the rebels of their slave labor, we take from them their commissary and quartermaster departments.” The soldier believed that on this point, there was “no difference of opinion among Ohio troops in the army of the Potomac.”
“Our cause is just and must prevail,” one Wooster volunteer declared, “and if slavery should thereby be sacrificed, all the better; have the cause of all this bloodshed removed, and then when we get peace, we will have a permanent peace.”25
With the weather affording a temporary respite from the rebels, many Union soldiers ached for an opportunity to confront the Copperheads back home. “Men [who] are down on the war,” one enlisted man asserted, who “would treat a soldier like a dog, they are the ones I would like to see.” One volunteer proposed “to send some of our weather-beaten soldiers” home, “armed with a gun and bayonet and sixty rounds of cartridges.” Though eager for one of Hooker’s furloughs, von Gunden vowed that he “would not take that furlough, or a discharge” if issued orders to confront the Copperheads. “Half way business is about played out,” Schreiner declared. “It would indeed be a deplorable thing if civil war should break out in the North, but if it cannot be avoided in any other way than by yielding to the Copperheads and mud sill rebels, I say, ‘let it come.’ ” Persuaded that a confrontation between furloughed soldiers and the peace men was eminent, one Stark County soldier concluded that it was “getting to be quite an exciting time.”26
Indeed, for much of the winter, the home front became something of a battlefront. On February 28, nearly eight hundred Cantonites choked Market Street’s sidewalks to hear an oration delivered by the Copperhead martyr Edson Baldwin Olds, who addressed the crowd from a rough-hewn platform erected on the grounds of Stark County’s handsome brick courthouse. Once described as a “shrewd, cunning man,” the bespectacled, fifty-nine-year-old former Ohio congressman possessed, in Governor Tod’s estimation, “a capacity for great mischief.” Just six months before, faced with allegations that his public speeches were dampening army recruitment, Olds was conducted to a holding cell within Fort Lafayette, a stout military installation perched at the entrance to New York harbor. Never charged with a crime, the Democrat secured his release and returned to Ohio, a new and most improbable political wind at his back.27
In Canton, Olds rehearsed many of the Copperheads’ objections to the struggle; yet the veteran stump speaker punctuated his remarks with questions inviting reflection on the war’s human costs. “What means that widow’s moan and that orphan’s wail?” he demanded to know. “Why is sadness depicted in every countenance?” When Olds concluded his oration (“adroitly sugared,” in the words of the Stark County Republican, “with a great many pleasant things about the Union”), an especially outspoken, antiwar state legislator from central Ohio took center stage. George Converse had scarcely begun his remarks, however, when the scene devolved into bedlam.28 Making his way through the tightly packed crowd that evening was Edward Meyer. Though at home on furlough, the young soldier was spoiling for a fight. Meyer combed the crowd for a deserter, making no secret of his object. When an on-duty deputy sheriff “refused” to aid him in the hunt, the captain offered a “fearless and emphatic expression of his opinion concerning the character of the meeting.” The loud rant provoked a few “Copperhead bullies,” who quickly surrounded him. Meyer attempted to ward off his attackers and was aided “by half a dozen discharged soldiers,” but not before the roughs landed several blows. Others joined in the affray. In the shadow of the St. Cloud Hotel, “a large number was knocked down and bruised.” “A still more vigorous engagement ensued” in front of the Stark County Treasurer’s Office, as men brandished pistols and even used them as whips. Amid hisses and jeers, a “cowardly miscreant” heaved a brick that collided with a captain from the 4th Ohio. The Stark County Republican dripped with disgust, but couldn’t resist mocking the self-proclaimed party of “law and order.”29
Elsewhere across the state, ordinary electioneering and partisanship threatened to devolve into violence. As they organized “township clubs,” Republicans and Democrats in Bucyrus suspected one another of sinister motives. “The day that sees one drop of Democratic blood [shed],” cautioned one local office holder, “that day will see your town in ashes and your streets running with blood.” Perhaps in preparation for the reckoning, one Copperhead hoarded “two kegs of powder and thirty pounds of lead.” In mid-March, the tiny village of Hoskinsville seized national headlines when its armed civilians foiled a deputy federal marshal’s attempt to apprehend a Union army deserter. “It must seem strange to a foreign observer, having witnessed . . . the uprising of the Northern people, at the outbreak of the Southern rebellion,” one correspondent remarked, “to witness the gradual change from loyalty to apathy, and from apathy to rampant treason, which the efforts of traitors in our midst have been only too successful in producing.”30
Brimming with resentment, soldiers regarded the fire in the rear as an affront to their self-respect. “It is a very common expression among the men after hearing the condition of affairs in the North,” reported an Ohio soldier who was brigaded with the 107th, “that they would like to be there for a while to poke some of the Butternuts with the same bayonet that they have used upon the enemy in the field.” More than a few soldiers noted the irony that peace men, in their efforts “to weaken the arm of the army,” were actually prolonging the war. “Stop all firing in the rear of us,” one 107th soldier implored, “and we will attend to the foe in front.”31
BY EARLY APRIL, Virginia had thawed and quiet army camps once more hummed with activity. The “wintry music” of wind gusts whistling “through the pine tops” gave way to the creaking of wagons and the steady tramping of men. Privates Conrad Metzler, Elias Ritz, and John Slutts returned to the regiment from their convalescenc
e in Washington, rejuvenated and eager to fight. Soldiers inspected weapons, stocked ammunition chests, filled wagons, and shod horses. “The weather is fine now-a-days,” one soldier announced, “and the roads are fast getting in good condition.” On April 21, the paymaster made another welcome visit, allowing the troops to express money to needy loved ones back home. That same day, upon the request of Adjutant Peter F. Young, the 107th Ohio received a bounteous supply of new forage caps, infantry trousers, and canteens. The men expected marching orders any day.32
Though the winter tested the men of the 107th Ohio, it also transformed them. New “sanitary measures” and improved nutrition restored the health of the unit, once ailing and sickly, wracked with dysentery, typhoid, and diarrhea. Even Jacob Smith, whose condition flagged throughout much of the winter, announced on Easter Sunday—his twenty-third birthday—that he was “slowly improving” and would “soon be able to do full duty.” It was little wonder so many of the men remembered the camp so fondly. “We had been there two months,” one soldier explained, “and the place had unconsciously grown dear to us.”33
Perhaps even more striking was the regiment’s psychic renewal. Once staggered by self-doubt and insecurities, an extended opportunity to reflect on the war—and the howls of war opponents back home—steeled the 107th Ohio with a renewed sense of purpose. “Col. Meyer,” one captain reported, “has by his tact, energy, and skill as an officer made the 107th one of the best regiments in the corps.” “There is an army pride growing up, even now in full existence . . . that will make it irresistible,” explained one enlisted man brigaded with the 107th, “and, what is very important, will place it entirely beyond the influence of Copperheadism at home.” Christian Rieker could not have agreed more. “I think if we go at it again,” he told his sister Mary back in Zoar, “they will get hell from us.”34
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