A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  The blue-coated troops aimed their muzzles “in the direction from which the sounds of the firing came.” Then they shook out into a line of battle with the men of the 107th Ohio anchoring the Union left. The blue-coated soldiers rushed forward at the double quick, undeterred by the “peculiar” trill of the rebel yell. “Our fellows gave a long and loud cheer,” one Ohioan later reported, “and charged right over their rifle pits.” After flushing the 150 South Carolinians and Virginians from their works and bagging a few prisoners, they chased the rebels more than two miles “through woods and swamps.” Ultimately, however, the wheezing federals pulled back to trenches of their own, too depleted to keep up the pursuit in the face of swelling enemy numbers. In their freshly excavated rifle pits, they holed up for the better part of a day, awaiting an attack that never came. Finally, on the evening of February 12, with nearby federal gunboats supplying a lively covering fire, the soldiers evacuated their works and returned to their camp on Folly Island.

  Though grueling, the expedition did not exact a great cost in human life or suffering. For men who still heard the moans of Chancellorsville’s wounded and Gettysburg’s dying, “it seemed miraculous that so much shooting should do so little execution.” Slutz, in fact, was “the only one hit”; an enemy musket ball clipped and shattered his thumb. Augustus Vignos rushed to his side, inspected the injury, and then conveyed Slutz to a surgeon’s tent, where he underwent a minor operation the next morning. He never forgot Vignos’s act of kindness. More than a half century later, Slutz included the details in an elegant eulogy that he penned for the “capable” major.

  But nor did the expedition produce much in the way of results. Jacob Smith pronounced the trek a flat “failure.” Considering that the rebels quickly realized its true aim—as a “feint” for Seymour’s excursion to Florida—his assessment came very near the mark.27

  ONCE BACK IN their canvas city on Folly Island, the troops learned the fate of the Florida campaign. On February 8, after debarking in Jacksonville, Seymour’s column trudged west, pressing deep into the Florida interior. They aimed first for Baldwin, a modest map dot that possessed enormous strategic value as a vital rail junction. When the Union troops arrived, however, they found the town abandoned. Gleefully, they seized a stockpile of enemy supplies.

  Despite an impressive haul, Seymour had second thoughts about advancing farther. “What has been said of the desire of Florida to come back [into the Union] now is a delusion,” he informed Gillmore. To trudge farther into enemy territory would be to hazard “a sad termination to a project, brilliant thus far, but for which you could not answer, in case of mishap, to your military superiors.” Gillmore agreed. It would be far better, he wagered, for Seymour’s men to hold their “outposts” around Jacksonville than to move beyond their base of supply to Lake City, where Confederate general Joseph Finegan, the entrepreneurial Irishman who had served as delegate to Florida’s secession convention, was busy huddling his command behind defensive works.

  But then, abruptly and inexplicably, Seymour decided to reverse course. The general’s contemporaries and historians alike have puzzled over this about-face, which ended in complete disaster. Driving west, Seymour collided with Finegan’s command in an “open pine barren” at Olustee on February 20. “[We] had followed the rebels into the very jaws of death,” one veteran shuddered. “The carnage became frightful.” Indeed, the battle devolved into a racial massacre as rebel soldiers clubbed with muskets and furiously stabbed with bayonets. “Our men,” one Georgia rebel acknowledged, “killed some of them after they had fell in our hands wounded.” After a sharp fight, what remained of the federal column limped from the battlefield, “maimed, mangled and routed.” To prevent the rebels from further exploiting Seymour’s dazed troops, reinforcements—including the 107th Ohio—were summoned from Folly Island.28

  Though uncertain about what Florida held in store for them, Jacob Smith and his comrades were eager to leave South Carolina. “A change of surroundings,” he persuaded himself, “will be for the better.” Other changes were afoot, too. Most momentously, Colonel Meyer would be returning home to Canton after tendering his resignation on February 13. In the letter he addressed to Assistant Adjutant General Edward Smith, the colonel cited his “rapidly declining” health. “I feel that I am unable to continue to fill my position,” he explained. But while Meyer’s health was “greatly impaired”—indeed, he had never really recovered from his spell in Libby Prison—the colonel had other reasons to take leave from the service. Just a few months before, he had appeared before a Union army examining board tasked with evaluating the “capacity, qualifications, propriety of conduct, and efficiency of commissioned officers.” The officers found Meyer wanting in knowledge of tactics and administrative duties. He had been humiliated, but for the last time. “The good of the service and the welfare of his Regt.,” a staff officer noted upon receiving Meyer’s request, “demand the immediate acceptance of this resignation.” Until a replacement could be appointed, Major Vignos would lead the regiment.29

  As they bade farewell to that “island of desolation,” then, the men felt the familiar push and pull of conflicting emotions. “It would be strange indeed had I felt any regrets at leaving,” one veteran confessed decades later. “But I had passed seven long months with these surroundings, and somehow or other my own individuality took something from those familiar objects, despite the cares and vexations which had perplexed me.” Months spent marking time in South Carolina had marked the regiment no less indelibly than its battles. Exiled to the war’s margins, the men of the 107th Ohio once more had occasion to ponder the meaning of their sacrifices. But through their gloom and dejection, they resolved to stay the course. In early February, the Republican newspapers back home cheered the good news: all but a dozen of the regiment’s enlisted men reenlisted in the service of the Union. “From the present outlook,” Jacob Smith reasoned, “I felt confident that it would not add much to our time of service.”30

  CHAPTER 8

  “SO MANY HARDSHIPS”

  February 1864 to July 1865

  ON FEBRUARY 24, the men of the 107th Ohio climbed aboard the iron steamship Delaware and bobbed down the Georgia coast to the St. John’s River. Notwithstanding a thick curtain of fog and a “stiff cool breeze,” the weather was cooperative. At noon the next day, after a voyage of 225 miles, they dropped anchor at Jacksonville—a neat grid of water-oak and magnolia-lined streets that sprawled along the coffee-colored river’s west bank. Known to the French as Fort Caroline, to the Spanish as San Mateo, and later to the British as Cow Ford, the settlement in 1822 was named in honor of General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the First Seminole War. Four decades later, Jacksonville was the state’s third largest city, boasting a population of more than two thousand. While it exported more than a few bales of “white gold,” it was lumber—freshly hewn at one of six steam sawmills—that weighted down most of the port city’s outbound schooners. The surrounding stands of yellow pine also supplied the timber for a two-story courthouse, a post office, Odd Fellows Hall, and Jacksonville’s Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic churches.

  By early 1864 the Civil War—and occupying Union soldiers—had visited Jacksonville on three occasions. Two years before, flames consumed several private dwellings, a hotel, and “at least a third of Jacksonville’s main business area.” Amid the “ruined gas-works, burned saw-mills and warehouses,” the once “thriving, romantic town” now resembled “a devastated Northern city”; its streets were all but abandoned, save a stubborn collection of unapologetic rebels. “I believe myself that every citizen here,” one soldier remarked, “would cut our throats in a minute if they dared to do it.” One such holdout was attorney Rodney Dorman, who remonstrated against the federal war effort in general—and the sight of black men in blue uniforms in particular. “The use of [black troops] here,” Dorman angrily told his diary, “is an insult & disgrace.”

  The newly arrived soldiers tramped through Ja
cksonville’s deserted streets to “the edge of a pine forest.” Amid the pines, about a mile beyond the city, they were instructed “to keep a sharp lookout for spies, guard runners, and rebel guerrillas.” Though kept “under arms” in fresh rifle pits for three days, “all the noise I heard while on post,” Jacob Smith regretted, was the “familiar” trill “of the southern mosquito.”

  To say the least, Florida did not make a good first impression. As they pressed into the southernmost state—the third to ratify a secession ordinance—soldiers encountered not a tropical paradise, but a land blighted with “poverty, ignorance, filth, fleas, alligators, and rebellion.” One disenchanted volunteer, eager to find the healthful groves promoted prior to the war by Florida’s energetic boosters, objected that he could “see nothing but pine woods, marsh, and every five or ten miles a cluster of dilapidated, deserted huts.” A soldier from the 17th Connecticut offered a nearly identical assessment of the “very wild looking country of forest swamp and jungle.” Unable to conceal his sense of taste and refinement, the soldier marveled at the “lone-some little shanties” inhabited by “half civilized creatures who probably lived by hunting and fishing.”1

  When it became evident that the enemy had no interest in launching an attack, however, at least a few soldiers set aside their bleak, initial perceptions of Florida. “We now enjoy a season of quiet,” Isaac Loutzenheiser rejoiced, a “rest from previous hardships.” Behind fresh fortifications and within easy range of friendly gunboats, the regiment established a new camp. “Every company has a good cook shanty with a large brick fireplace and bake oven,” crowed one soldier. “The boys are faring sumptuously and growing fat.” Enhancing their fare with local grapes, oranges, huckleberries, lemons, cherries, and watermelons—a raid of one orange grove yielded more than six hundred bushels of fruit—the regiment attempted to fortify itself against fever and disease. Florida’s mild winter, which one soldier likened to “June in Ohio,” was likewise a welcome departure from the gray cold of Brooke’s Station. The camp’s proximity to the St. John’s River likewise promoted good hygiene, the crusade of the regiment’s newly appointed surgeon, John Knaus. “For comfort and beauty,” one Stark County volunteer concluded, “our camp cannot be excelled.”2

  But when the weeks wore on with little more to occupy their time than “tiresome” training exercises and interminable picket duties, the men grew restless. “Skirmish drill” invited particular ire from the ranks: “It is necessary that we understand the notes of the bugle in order to execute the proper movement required of us,” Jacob Smith groaned. “We are kept running almost the entire time while engaged in it.” The remonstrations from the ranks paled in comparison to the complaints many buglers registered about skirmish drill. “Since only two of us blow the lead part,” the Zoar native John Brunny explained, “you can understand that it is not so very easy, with uniform on, parading around, until the lips are sore . . . the skin becomes thick as leather.”3

  To be sure, picket duty and drill demanded great strength, discipline, and forbearance. But what rendered them so objectionable was the intuition—increasingly difficult to deny—that this taxing work was contributing but little to the federal war effort. Elsewhere that spring, a war long punctuated by stalemates and set-piece battles at last yielded to the ambiguities and maneuvers of complex campaigns. Determined to wage a war of exhaustion that would prohibit the enemy from concentrating his strength or exploiting his interior lines, Ulysses S. Grant, the newly installed general-in-chief of all Union armies, choreographed five synchronous strikes into the Confederate heartland. After months of wrenching inactivity, telegraph operators finally—and feverishly—clicked out dispatches and reports from multiple fronts.

  The news that spring was not entirely promising for those cheering the Union armies. In April, after driving up the Red River, Nathaniel Banks met with a humiliating defeat at Mansfield, in the pine barrens of northwestern Louisiana. Franz Sigel’s efforts to lay waste to the Shenandoah Valley met with grief in the guise of Confederate general John Breckenridge’s troops at New Market on May 15. The very next day, rebel soldiers stymied Major General Benjamin Butler, whose Army of the James crept along its namesake river, just south of Richmond at Drewry’s Bluff. Coordinating the efforts of three federal armies—one hundred thousand men all told—William Tecumseh Sherman drove into Georgia, meeting Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in costly clashes at Rocky Face Ridge and Resaca, along the bed of the Western & Atlantic Railroad.

  For its part, after splashing across the Rapidan at Ely’s Ford, the Army of the Potomac once more pressed into the knotted scrub of the Wilderness, yet littered with the bleached bones of the Chancellorsville dead. For two days, Grant and Lee exchanged blows in that forlorn wood, their contest so close and savagely fought that the incessant blare of muskets ignited the underbrush. The battle exacted an enormous human toll, with each army losing a staggering seventeen percent of its men. But when Grant refused to retreat and attempted to swing around Lee’s right flank instead, the northern press erupted in euphoric tones. “Bulletin after bulletin and extra after extra were eagerly read, and as every bit of news made the fact of Grant’s victory clearer there were frequent cheers and more frequent congratulations,” the New York Herald reported.4

  The exultant headlines proved premature, however, as the Wilderness proved only the first bloody meeting in a long, grinding campaign—one in which soldiers exchanged the heroism of a peach orchard for the misery of a trench, the gleaming bayonet for the dirt-begrimed spade. The armies next battled at Spotsylvania Court House, a crossroads nine miles south of the Wilderness soon choked with miles of labyrinthine trenches. The slaughter at Spotsylvania slayed whatever sentimentalism remained, leaving it to putrefy alongside the bullet-riddled bodies lining the works. The northern public grew ever more impatient for victory (“our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Horace Greeley editorialized in the New York Tribune, “shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood”). Still, many could sense that the war was marching to a promising new tempo. By June, with federal soldiers coiling breastworks around the rebels’ crucial rail and supply hub of Petersburg, Virginia, even Grant’s most exacting skeptics conceded that he had placed the armies on victory road.5

  From a distance, the regiment looked on at these developments with an odd blend of satisfaction and regret. Earlier that spring, both armies began emptying their breastworks in Florida. Almost daily throughout April, transports packed with rebel soldiers embarked from Jacksonville, bound for Savannah and other points north. By early May, one federal commander estimated that more than nine thousand enemy soldiers had been withdrawn from the state. Federal army commanders responded in kind, extracting all but about three thousand men. The 107th Ohio would be among the few, unlucky outfits selected to stay. “Were it not for the consciousness that we are doing our duty at our assigned post,” one of the volunteers confirmed, “we would certainly feel somewhat slighted for not having the privilege to share in the victories achieved by the larger armies.”6

  Yet clearly the men did feel slighted, and their sense of duty struggled to sustain them as the war in Florida faded into a “dismal series of forays,” moonlit watches, and “false” alarms. “These boys are so fond of firing at shadows,” one soldier explained, “that it keeps the officer of picket pretty nearly all the time running.” Even so, it wasn’t long before the men learned to ignore groaning limbs, creaking palms, and night winds howling through the reeds. In the barren swamps and stands of scrub pines, boredom became a rival as contemptible as any rebel—the source of renewed waywardness and misbehavior. Men began leaving their posts “without proper authority,” prompting the provost marshal to impound all civilian boats. One summer evening, a superior officer asked Sergeant Henry Feldkamp for the time. “Any god dam dog can ask me that,” he snapped in reply. “You are a humbugger, you have humbugged me long enough.” A court-martial
arraigned the riled soldier and reduced him to the rank of corporal.7

  Detailed to the pioneer corps, Private John Foell registered his displeasure with “loud and boisterous” chatter in camp after quiet hours; the Cleveland cooper’s “previous good conduct,” however, resulted in a “lenient” fine. Notwithstanding a strident defense (“I volunteered to serve my Country in the times of her needs, and nothing has ever been more distant from my intentions than to neglect my duty”), the court was less forgiving in the case of Adam Regula, the Bavarian immigrant who returned from patrol one evening in a state of intoxication. “He talked very loud[ly] and made a great deal of disturbance,” his sergeant recalled, “and after he was placed in the Guard House he vomited.” The court not only reduced Regula to the ranks, but ordered him to forfeit eight dollars of his pay each month for the next four months.8

  On at least one occasion, this mischief betrayed an ugly racism that thrived in the ranks—yet another reminder that even men who embraced emancipation as a war measure did so without abandoning old resentments. Private Michael Keichner was “making unnecessary noise” in camp one evening and defiantly refused repeated requests from the commander on guard—a white officer from the Third United States Colored Troops—that he return to his quarters. “You think more of a damned Nigger than you do of a white man,” Keichner informed the dumbfounded first lieutenant, who “sent for the guard.” Though the ensuing court-martial inquiry attributed the episode to drunkenness—comrades supplied ample testimony about the accused’s good “character,” even as they supposed that he “was under the influence of something stronger than water”—the utterance revealed the genuine resentment that some white soldiers felt for their new African-American comrades. While black men had labored as teamsters, cooks, and camp servants throughout the war, Florida would supply the Ohioans with an opportunity to fight alongside African-Americans for the first time.9