A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Seraphim Meyer passed a full week in that storied warehouse of misery, cramped in a “loathsome room” that one fellow inmate described as “long, low, dingy, gloomy, and suffocating.” Caked in grease, dirt, and grime, the prison gave off a most offensive odor. “At least four hundred stinking pipes,” one fellow inmate protested, “pollute the air most villainously.” So too did smells waft upstairs from Libby Prison’s ersatz morgue. As Meyer gasped for pure air, the scenes of Chancellorsville seized his mind. Grappling with the horror and anguish of that week—the toil of memory—was physically exhausting. That week, a fellow inmate and Hoosier regimental surgeon diagnosed the colonel with “prison fever.” The affliction, the surgeon wrote, left him “prostrated . . . completely.” After Meyer’s parole at City Point, Virginia, on May 23, one of the regiment’s men observed that the colonel “seemed greatly broken in health,” and “never afterwards recovered his former health and vigor.”31

  WHILE SERAPHIM MEYER endured the ordeal of enemy captivity, his men endeavored to make sense of the battle. On May 6, the troops obediently trudged back to Brooke’s Station, the unremitting rain a fitting accompaniment for their melancholy march. Back at the old camp north of the Rappahannock, now dotted with empty huts, the soggy men could not help but reflect on the last week’s events. Returning to the place that had figured so formatively in their identity as a regiment, the men instinctively measured the distance between innocence and experience, pondering the contradictory emotions that battle had shoehorned into the surreal space of several days. Suffering demanded meaning, and defeat required explanation. Searching for both—balancing the need to make sense with the need to move on—was especially onerous work. “For one who has not been through the mill it is difficult to realize the utter exhaustion of body and mind that follows an arduous campaign and participation in one or two pitched battles,” one veteran explained. Nothing was more wrenching than that first roll call after a battle, in which stretches of agonizing silence syncopated an anxious reading of names.32

  Two years later, human debris still littered the Chancellorsville battlefield—a haunting reminder of Jackson’s flank attack and the fight for the Orange Turnpike. Library of Congress

  On May 8, General McLean ordered his regimental commanders to “forward as soon as possible” a complete register of “killed, wounded, and missing . . . stating particularly whether the wounds are mortal, severe, or slight.” As this anguished inventory got underway, the men took up their pens and commenced to write; the next few days would be an occasion for urgent self-examination and reflection. Chancellorsville tested the confidence and convictions of a few men, but many more soldiers prevailed over cynicism and despair. “Do not think I have become despondent,” Christian Rieker instructed his sister. “Of course, I would rather see the war over, but not by our being beaten and the war ended in that manner.” He took comfort in the rumors that “even the rebels” believed the fight a demanding one—something that the gray-clad men littering the field (“whole piles,” Rieker wrote, “often five or six deep”) seemed to confirm. So too did the verses of Psalm 91 reassure the volunteer from Zoar: “Just as is written in the Psalm, even if a thousand fall on your left and a thousand fall on your right, it shall not strike you, for it is God who helps you, as I myself have now seen.”

  Equally encouraging was the unit’s performance under most trying circumstances. From now on, at least, the men would no longer have to wonder what it would be like to face the enemy. “Although the result . . . has not been what one would desire it to be,” Charles Mueller conceded in his after-action report, there was no denying that the men “behaved well” under fire. With no small pride, Mueller announced that he beheld “many a deed of coolness and bravery” that afternoon. So it was that Captain Dewaldt, at home on sick furlough, was “very anxious to be with his men,” whom he believed would “soon be ready to give the rebs another turn.”33

  Notwithstanding the thrashing at the Talley Farm, a watchful optimism animated the rest of the brigade, too. “I think this war will be settled before long,” Francis Foote of the 17th Connecticut forecasted. One soldier from the 55th Ohio scratched out a narrative of the battle on ornate letterhead adorned with the cheer, “Onward to Victory.” “We are not discouraged, although the battle did not secure the fruits which we expected,” reported one regimental surgeon. “We shall be off again in a few days.” Dutifully, the Hartford Evening Press echoed these sentiments, declaring that there was “no cause for depression in the repulse of Hooker.” “Considering the frightful storm,” its optimistic editor added, “we ought perhaps to congratulate ourselves that the army got back as well as it did.”34

  The northern press needed a scapegoat in the humiliating wake of Chancellorsville, and it found one in the German soldiers on the Union right. Harper’s Weekly illustrated its account of the battle with Alfred Waud’s sketch, “The Stampede of the Eleventh Corps.” Library of Congress

  Yet few other northern editors would advance this interpretation; in the disappointing wake of Chancellorsville, most preferred to pass out blame. Newspapers held the German immigrants of Howard’s command almost singularly responsible for still another embarrassing reverse. Schurz’s troops, they related, “almost instantly gave way.” Harper’s Weekly illustrated its account of the battle with the sketch artist Alfred Waud’s tellingly titled, “The Stampede of the Eleventh Corps,” while the New Hampshire Sentinel reported that, “The Germans fled past Gen. Hooker’s headquarters in a panic, many of the members of Hooker’s staff with pistols and sabres vainly endeavoring to stay their flight.”35

  For weeks, editorials questioning the courage and character of ethnic regiments consumed dozens of column inches. In Manhattan, where the news was heralded by a lashing “northeast storm,” attorney George Templeton Strong was aghast to read of “the dastardly defection of certain German regiments which broke and ran.” The press reports stung, but the ache grew worse when friends and loved ones at home began reciting the charges in letters to the front. “I saw a letter yesterday from home,” Lieutenant John Winkler reported, “stating a report that our Company left the battlefield and run at the appearance of the rebels without firing a shot.” In a tart epistle to the Wooster Republican, the Wayne County soldier explained that it was his “duty” to “inform our friends at home of the facts.” “We went forth to do battle for the Union and the Constitution,” Winkler wrote, “and we want to be used decently and not abused.”36

  Many of Winkler’s comrades made similarly resolute appeals. “We asked to be judged by the bloody roll of killed, wounded, and missing,” demanded one soldier from the 55th Ohio. “The memory of the noble men gone to their graves, and now languishing in hospitals,” one correspondent from the 107th echoed, “is entitled to this plain, unvarnished statement of facts.” An enlisted man from the 17th Connecticut cited not the lengthy casualty rolls, but rather the overwhelming odds faced by a brigade bereft of good leadership. “Some folks blame us for running, but what could about 11,000 men do against 30,000, and flanked at that?” he indignantly asked. “Our commanding general would not give us the order to change our line of battle.” Another Nutmeg volunteer emphasized the worse than hopeless position occupied by McLean’s troops. “We are called cowards and skedaddlers,” he fumed, but what soldiers similarly deployed would fail to run?37

  Still, any hope of solidarity among the men of the Eleventh Corps was dashed the day after the troops settled back into camp at Brooke’s Station. Officers from three of McLean’s regiments—the 25th, 55th, and 75th Ohio—appealed to General Hooker for assignment to another corps. “The unsoldierly character of the German troops” with whom their troops had been “compelled to serve,” they protested, had cloaked their outfits in “unmerited disgrace.” In a measure of their mettle, the petitioners even sought signatories among the native-born officers of the 107th Ohio.

  The document met with the swift and sharp rebuke of the regiment. Dripping with disgust, repres
entatives from each company—including George Billow and Augustus Vignos—met and unanimously adopted a set of resolutions, copies of which were forwarded to headquarters and transmitted to newspaper editors back home. “We consider ourselves grossly insulted,” they began, arraigning the appeal to Hooker as both “unjust” and “prejudicial to the interests of our bleeding country.” Such insults could only serve “to discourage these men, who have left home and its comforts to fight the battles of their adopted country, to fight for the maintenance of our Constitution and the honor of our flag.”

  Responding to the affront of their fellow soldiers just as they had responded to the calumny of the Copperheads back home—“we will never shrink from expressing our honest convictions,” they pledged—the men once more refined their ideas about loyalty, sacrifice, and military service. Even more, they renewed their determination to fight the war—and to win it.38

  CHAPTER 5

  “HEAPING UPON US . . . IGNOMINY AND SHAME”

  May to July 1863

  FOR THE ELEVENTH CORPS, the struggle to establish what happened along the Orange Turnpike would be as complicated as the battle itself. “If you would believe the malicious reports on the battle of Chancellorsville, the German soldiers, who were represented as forming the Eleventh Army Corps, would have fallen back on the first attack of the enemy,” instructed Hugo Wesendonck, the thickly bearded liberal reformer and one-time member of the Frankfurt National Assembly who, in 1849, dodged a treason indictment by emigrating to New York City. “They would have been thrown into a disgraceful flight without firing a gun. They would have thrown away their arms and would have fled several miles, until they reached the Rappahannock, where a limit could only be set to their running by General Sickles . . . Such were the reports which have been spread all over the country, and which were commented upon with many equally false additions, by a majority of the press, anxious to lay the blame for the defeat at Chancellorsville at the door of some despised foreigners.”1

  At forty-six, Wesendonck had let up nothing of his reformist zeal; throughout the 1850s he had found an outlet for his democratic yearnings within the antislavery community. Exactly one month after the fight at the Talley Farm, he stood before a restless crowd of several hundred in the basement of Manhattan’s Cooper Institute. In February 1860, a reed-thin and yet clean-shaven Illinois lawyer implored an audience gathered in that very hall to “have faith that right makes might.” “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us,” Abraham Lincoln urged the crowd of fellow Republicans, “nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government.” Three years later, at a “vindication” meeting convened by “indignant” German-Americans “of all classes,” Wesendonck conveyed that very message: “It is our duty to rebuke these calumniators,” he thundered, “and to hurl these slanders back into the teeth of their fabricators.”2

  The meeting began just after eight o’clock in the evening. Draped behind the platform was an oversized map of the Chancellorsville battlefield, illustrating the various plank roads and turnpikes that stabbed through the woods. “Has credit been given to them for the manifold sacrifices they have laid upon the altar of their adopted country, in lives, property and prosperity?” he asked. “Have they been treated by our leading journals and men, as they deserve?” He was followed by still another German refugee, Friedrich Kapp, an attorney who exhibited his literary faculty not only in sharply worded editorials, but also in biographical treatments of Baron von Steuben and Johann Kalb, two immigrants whose military aid to the Continental Army during the American Revolution had proven invaluable. Drawing substantially on his authority as an historian, Kapp denounced the defamation of the Eleventh Corps as harmful to the Union cause. “I never knew a soldier,” he explained, “who was willing to fight the enemy in front, when his comrades, or the people for whom he fights, stand ready to stab him from behind.”3

  Kapp’s new law partner, Charles Goepp, an unapologetic Republican who had served briefly in the army, wholeheartedly concurred. “The German troops on the Potomac have at all times suffered a double share of hardships, and a double portion of delay in the receipt of their hard-earned pittance,” he remonstrated. “Soldiers cannot fight under the conviction that they are predestined to be the scapegoat of the imbecility of their commanders.” Without meaningful remedy, the Eleventh Corps, he predicted, would “be betrayed, and slaughtered, and broken in engagement after engagement, until not a man of it will be left in arms to bear the designation of the ‘cowardly Dutchman.’ ” Goepp was prescient on at least one score: there would be even more misfortune ahead for the men of the 107th Ohio and the Eleventh Corps. What he mistook, however, was their remarkable ability to endure it.4

  EARLY ON THE afternoon of May 15, nearly fifty ambulances delivered Chancellorsville’s wounded to Brooke’s Station. “I saw wounded men in every form,” one private brigaded with the 107th explained. “Most every one that was wounded in the arms had no shirts on, and those wounded in the legs no pants on.” The rebels ghoulishly stripped the bodies of the wounded; at the Talley Farm, one officer lay “naked” and “unburried” for three days. The macabre traffic continued well into the next day, providing one more opportunity for the men to reflect on battle’s huge toll in human life and suffering. As the ambulance wagons navigated the rutted and corduroyed roads north of the Rappahannock, they jostled their human cargo; one enlisted man from the 17th Connecticut with a rebel ball lodged in his right shoulder reckoned that his wound “bled a pint” along the way.

  Among those who endured the uncomfortable ride was Edward Meyer, who would soon thread his way back to Ohio—and recovery—on sick furlough. There, the young captain made a surreal reunion with his father, recently released from Libby Prison. The colonel was exceedingly fortunate to have secured a parole, for a once well-oiled system of prisoner exchange would soon sputter to a halt, foundering on the shoals of race. Deeming the mobilization of black soldiers that summer as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man,” Jefferson Davis prescribed summary execution for any African-American his troops encountered on the field of battle. Lincoln’s threat of retaliation—and principled refusal to exchange prisoners until the southern policy was revoked—would produce the congested prison camps of the war’s final year.5

  For weeks after Chancellorsville, the doleful drip of reports from the field hospitals continued. The world seemed new after their baptism of fire; now, living among the wounded, the men struggled to make sense of it. National Archives

  A FLURRY OF movement animated the next few weeks, as the men marched, drilled, and prowled about on picket. A blizzard of special orders detailed men to guard mounting or various fatigue and police duties. They stood sentinel—at division headquarters, along the railroad that coiled behind their camp, and over the quartermaster stores. Another detail accompanied heaping baggage trains down to Aquia Landing. Each new request or assignment merely underscored the tremendous, daily work required to feed, equip, and maintain an army—so routine as to become invisible in wartime letters and postwar histories. Even John Brunny’s band was subject to these special requests, ordered at one point to “report at division headquarters” and, at another, to provide a “brigade bugler.”6

  Amid renewed rumors that Robert E. Lee was planning another drive north, Brooke’s Station also stirred with “speculation” about the fortunes of the regiment in another campaign. Most immediately, the troops wondered how they would perform under new leadership. On May 19th, the men bade farewell to their brigade commander, Nathaniel McLean, who had been detailed to Ambrose Burnside’s command in the green hills of East Tennessee. “All were sorry to see him leave,” one soldier reported, for “not a man in the division” disliked him. A Mainer named Adelbert Ames, who had graduated near the top of his West Point class, assumed command of the brigade. Ames, who sported an impressive walrus mustache and tuft of chin fringe, spent the early months of the war as an artillerist
. He sought and received command of an infantry regiment—the 20th Maine Volunteers—in August 1862. Before earning a place on Fifth Corps commander George Meade’s staff, he led the regiment later immortalized on Little Round Top into the fray at Fredericksburg.

  Division commander Charles Devens likewise took leave, but tellingly, his departure invited few laments. Into his place stepped Francis Channing Barlow, the bookish, clean-shaven son of a Unitarian minister from Brooklyn. “His men at first gazed at him,” Carl Schurz remarked, “wondering how such a boy could be put at the head of regiments of men.” Despite his youthful appearance, the Harvard valedictorian had packed plenty of fighting into his twenty-eight years—perhaps predisposed, one of his soldiers editorialized, “to carry his virtues to excess.” The previous fall—only months after an intrepid performance during the Seven Days battles around Richmond—he was wounded while threading a pair of New York regiments into the fight for Antietam’s Sunken Road. Still nursing his injury, the so-called boy general would lead the Buckeyes and Nutmeggers as they hooked north—sloshing through the Potomac and then beyond the Mason-Dixon Line, into Pennsylvania.7

  On June 12 the men broke camp at Brooke’s Station for the last time. A “lively gait” delivered them to an old churchyard a dozen miles away, where they bivouacked for the evening. The next morning, the 107th Ohio resumed its tiresome work, trudging as far north as Catlett’s Station on the Orange and Alexandria. Over the next two weeks, the men scarcely had an opportunity to catch their breath; they marched almost continuously, paying little heed to the blistering heat or claps of thunder. “The men cannot march much farther without at least 2 hours rest,” division commander Carl Schurz protested at one point. “They have marched 8 hours without refreshments.” From Catlett’s Station, it was a full day’s march to the old battlefields of Manassas, now one vast maze of graves; afterward, the men obediently pushed out to Centerville, a rather underwhelming collection of dwellings “marked” by the war’s “ruin and desolation.” Leaving Centerville, the columns started for Goose Creek, “a stream of some size” that laced its way through stands of sturdy Virginia timber ten miles south of Leesburg. Along its banks they raised a new camp. There they remained for a week before fording the mighty Potomac at Edward’s Ferry.8