A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Betraying a keen understanding of the relationship between their bodies and unhygienic wartime environments, Alfred J. Rider marshaled evidence to support his claim that a winter of hard marching and exposure resulted in his “heart trouble,” lameness, and vertigo, just as Philip Wang identified Deveaux’s Neck as the location where he “ruined his health and contracted rheumatism and heart disease.” But not until President Benjamin Harrison signed the Dependent and Disability Pension Act into law in June 1890—a sweeping measure that entitled all disabled, honorably discharged Union veterans to pension money—did the federal government finally acknowledge swollen limbs and nagging coughs as legacies of the war. By then, of course, it was much too late for many of the war’s ailing and injured old soldiers. Still, that the government made these concessions at all was a tribute to the ordinary veterans who, in their urgent and unsteady appeals to the Pension Bureau, demanded a more sweeping definition of what constituted a wartime injury. For Union veterans, the struggle to secure pensions was merely a continuation of their struggle to wrest enduring recognition of their hardships and misfortunes.23

  FOR THE 107TH OHIO, that struggle entered a new phase on September 15, 1869, when sixty of its survivors assembled at National Hall on Cleveland’s Public Square—the very place where Colonel Meyer had appealed for recruits seven years before—to establish a permanent, regimental society. By adopting a constitution, electing officers—Captain Peter F. Young was appointed the first president—and pledging to meet once per year for the rest of their lives, the men validated the memories and shared suffering that united them. “Though our ranks were thinned by camp fever and the enemy’s shot and shell,” Young declared, “we will ever cherish the memory of our fallen comrades and brothers in arms.”24

  This they did. The men assembled faithfully each year, eager to rehearse the tale of their service and ready to revisit “the scenes through which the regiment passed.” Reunions provided the veterans with a forum for piecing together a coherent narrative of the war. Akron hosted the regiment’s second reunion on the Fourth of July, 1870. An early morning train delivered a contingent of the regiment’s veterans from Cleveland. Led by a color bearer gripping their battle-worn standard and accompanied by Dustin Marble’s renowned brass band, the men strutted down Market Street to Phoenix Hall, where they enjoyed a day of oratory and ovations. Following a “sumptuous banquet,” they retired to the city rink for a “grand ball” in the regiment’s honor.25

  Though “but a remnant” of the Wooster company survived, the 107th Ohio resolved to meet in the elegant Wayne County seat in September 1872. Determined to “eclipse the hospitality and kindness” shown to the veterans in previous years, Woosterites spared no expense readying for the reunion. The meeting hall was handsomely appointed, garlanded with cords of fresh evergreen and festooned with German and American flags. Placards emblazoned with the names of the regiment’s battles—Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Deveaux’s Neck, Pocotaligo Bridge, and Dingle’s Mill—adorned the walls, while the regimental colors, “bullet riddled, bloody and battle-worn,” were planted on stage. That evening, the seventy-five attendees enjoyed a “bountiful repast” prepared by the “ladies of Wooster.” Few who attended that gathering ever forgot it.26

  At their annual reunions, the regiment’s survivors remembered a past that the nation preferred to forget. As it turned out, the hymns of victory that greeted Billy Yank upon his return home had but few verses. Within years of Appomattox, the desire to “clasp hands across the bloody chasm” threatened to efface not just the cause of the war, but also crucial details about how it was fought. As the nation ambled down the “road to reunion,” many veterans deemed it all the more urgent to reflect on the war and its charge. Union veterans’ periodicals brimmed with reports of the ugly white supremacist terrorism that gripped the South in the early days of Reconstruction. “That a system of wholesale murdering, whipping, and assaulting of the most brutal character has been inaugurated all over the south,” one Ohio GAR newspaper shuddered, “cannot be longer questioned.” In the face of presidential pardons for former rebels, repressive black codes, and rumors of another, even bloodier rebellion on the horizon, many indignant veterans refused to yield any authority over their past. “The same spirit of patriotism” that “actuated us in 1862,” one veteran proclaimed, yet “pervades our hearts and thrills our souls.” As one Cleveland newspaper predicted, “Men who fought to preserve the Union will vote to preserve the consequences of their victory.”27

  If the fate of Union victory remained unresolved, so too were many niggling details about their service. Most soldiers did not tramp home with a fixed, logical, or coherent narrative of events; they had experienced the conflict as a kaleidoscope of “countless minor scenes and interiors,” each one demanding a larger context. Owing to the raw and inchoate nature of their memories, old soldiers sometimes found it difficult to partition time or propose turning points. Alfred Rider made this clear when he reflected on the regiment’s participation in the battle of Gettysburg: “Just like every thing else concerning the fight,” he bemoaned, “there is a great diversity of opinion . . . a grand admixture of conflicting testimony.” The irksome questions only multiplied as the years accumulated into decades. What did that stand at the Talley place actually mean? What had those months in Florida contributed to the Union war effort? Was all the suffering and the loss worth it in the end?28

  As self-appointed custodians of the war’s history, veterans worked through these questions with zeal. In 1871, Seraphim Meyer attempted a short, narrative history of the regiment. That autumn, the colonel read his account to thunderous applause at the unit’s third annual reunion, held at Schaefer’s Opera House in Canton. Framing the war as a contest between treason and loyalty, his account emphasized the unit’s selfless devotion amid trying circumstances. Lamenting the “very meagre” attention paid the regiment, he likewise hastened to point out that the 107th Ohio “lost more men in the Department of the South” than it had while serving in the Army of the Potomac—its bloody stands at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg notwithstanding.29

  That the colonel struck a defensive chord was hardly a surprise, for the postwar years witnessed renewed attacks on the courage and battlefield performance of the Union army’s ethnically German soldiers. Among ethnic soldiers, responding to these allegations became far more urgent than discussing slavery, debating the war’s causes, or even spurning the Lost Cause—pursuits that preoccupied many other Union veterans. “We have had so much controversy over the misfortunes of the 11th corps,” sighed a wearied old soldier, wracked with chronic diarrhea. “Bad conduct on the part of the Dutch has been so strongly impressed upon the native soldiers that fought the battles of the war of the rebellion, and upon the public outside of the army,” another veteran supposed, “that I doubt if it [will] ever be eradicated and its character restored.”30

  The conflict’s earliest chroniclers heaped more scorn and ridicule upon the men. “With wild yells the Confederates rushed on in overwhelming numbers, and the Germans, overborne, broke and fled in helpless confusion,” the political economist Thomas Kettell wrote of the battle of Chancellorsville in his narrative history of the war, published just one year after Appomattox. “In vain officers stormed and entreated; the men sullenly made their way to the river.” A decade later, the former army surgeon James Moore echoed Kettell’s cruel assessment in his Complete History of the Great Rebellion. The “noblest effort of the brave Howard and his officers,” he remarked, “could not arrest the panic, or stem the tide of fugitives rolling over the field.” John Stevens Abbott likewise pitied his fellow Maine native Oliver Howard, “as heroic a commander and brave a man as ever stood upon a battlefield.” The general’s only misfortune, Abbott maintained, was his assignment to a corps “composed mainly of Germans,” many of whom “could not speak English.” Even more imaginative was the account of Chancellorsville produced by Benson J. Lossing, widely regarded for his illustrated history of th
e American Revolution. “In a few minutes,” the historian sneered, “almost the entire Eleventh Corps was seen pouring out of the woods in the deepening twilight, and sweeping over the dusty clearing around Chancellorsville in the wildest confusion, in the direction of the Rappahannock, strewing and blockading the roads with the implements and accouterments of war.”31

  “Lies, lies, lies,” one old soldier indignantly fumed. His sentiment was shared by a survivor of the 75th Ohio, who modestly declared, “We would all like to have the truth appear.” “No occurrence of the war,” still another veteran remonstrated, “has been more utterly and persistently misrepresented, to use a mild term, than has the behavior of the 11th Corps on the right” at Chancellorsville. Nearly three decades after the costly stand at the Talley Farm, this old soldier reckoned that “it is easier to fight battles than it is to dig out lies about them after they have become fairly embedded in history.”32

  After five years of hunching over maps and after-action reports—not to mention three extended visits to the battlefield—Augustus Choate Hamlin doubtless agreed. In the 1890s, the Harvard Medical School graduate who served as medical director of the Army of the Potomac resolved to conduct an “inquiry into the events of the battle of Chancellorsville,” hoping to set the record straight about its many controversies. “The task has been entirely voluntary,” he noted, “and of exceeding difficulty, mingled with much unpleasantness.” Veterans of both armies plied him with a blizzard of personal reminiscences. “When the facts are told I do not think any man need ever apologize for the conduct of the rank and file of the command that wore the crescent,” one veteran of the 55th Ohio affirmed.33

  Hamlin’s informants furnished meticulous accounts of what they had seen, felt, and experienced that fateful May afternoon. “My memory retains the events of that day very vividly,” explained Charles T. Furlow, an old Georgia rebel who served on General George Doles’s staff. “I think the men who were there,” echoed one Union veteran who lost an arm in the fight, “can write the best kind of war history.” For his part, Jacob Gano seized the opportunity to challenge the received wisdom about Jackson’s flank attack. The former adjutant of the 75th Ohio felt that it was his duty to remedy the historical record. “It is stated by General Schimmelfennig in his official report that McLean’s brigade stampeded without firing a shot,” he began, “a statement so manifestly unjust that I feel impelled to deny it in the most emphatic manner.” The hardware and cutlery wholesaler from Cincinnati dashed off several lengthy missives to Hamlin, describing the brigade’s fraught stand at the Talley place. “You will pardon me for intruding upon your time,” Gano implored, “but justice to McLean’s Ohio Brigade demands the contradiction of such statements.”34

  Albert Peck was no less earnest in his letter to Hamlin. His forlorn company of the 17th Connecticut had suffered nearly seventy-five percent losses that afternoon—itself a powerful testament to the stand the Ohio brigade made before breaking for the rear. “There was no possible chance of holding our position, as we were surprised and most of our division were facing the wrong way,” he held. “I have always thought, and still think that General Devens was more to blame for that disaster than any one else.” While unable to agree on who was most responsible—Devens, McLean, or Howard—the veterans conceded almost in unison that they had fallen prey to inept leadership. “No men, caught in such a damnable trap, could stand,” one New York veteran resolved. “For Howard (+ somewhat for Devens, who might have caught the infection from Howard) a thorough scathing must come out.”35

  Even so, not a few native-born veterans assigned blame to the ethnically German soldiers who had battled alongside them in the Eleventh Corps. In an 1892 letter to Hamlin, Colonel William H. Noble amplified a claim advanced by the captain who commanded the 17th Connecticut’s picket line on May 2. “Wilson French saw apparently a full stack of arms back of rifle pits and no men behind them,” he wrote. “They were those of the 107th Ohio . . . That Regt. had no commander.” Hamlin investigated the allegation at once. “I am quite sure it will prove to be a mistake,” Captain Elias Riggs Monfort of the 75th Ohio assured him, pointing out that McLean’s pickets “did not reach their regiments until dark after the fight.” Monfort believed it impossible for French “to have reached the point where the 107 was located” without risking capture. “I am told the 107 were fully armed when rallied at night after the fight,” he remarked, adding, “I have no interest in the 107th Ohio except to see them set right.”36

  OLD SOLDIERS like Henry Finkenbiner waited impatiently for Hamlin’s history. A devoted reader of the largest newspaper for Union veterans, the hero of Dingle’s Mill took seriously his role as a custodian of the war’s history. When one New York captain maligned the record of the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville, Finkenbiner responded in kind with a letter to the editor of the National Tribune. “Allow me to say the comrade is a little off,” he wrote. “I was a member of that Corps, and took part in the battle of May 2, 1863, when we were flanked and repulsed.” After receiving an Eleventh Army Corps Association circular announcing the book’s impending publication, one veteran of the 55th Ohio, domiciled at the National Home for the Disabled Volunteer Soldier in Dayton, begged for an advance copy. “I was on picket the afternoon when Jackson made his attack,” he explained. “I am anxious to have the history.”37

  In the estimate of most veterans, the handsome tome was well worth the wait. “I have written to you twenty times in my imagination,” the Brooklynite Horatio King explained to Hamlin. “I want to tell you how delighted I am with your book, and how completely you have answered the misinformed and clamorous critics of the Eleventh Corps.” While Adelbert Ames worried that Hamlin had been “a little over indulgent with the Eleventh Corps,” he nonetheless found the author’s arguments reasoned and persuasive. “It is all very sad,” the general mused, “and at the same time not a little ludicrous.” Veterans devoured the text. “I took up the book the evening after it came and did not lay it down until I had again read every page and studied each map,” one explained. Even former rebels extolled Hamlin’s effort. “It is the only impartial history of the battle I have ever seen,” affirmed one Georgian, “and as such I prize it very highly.”38

  SADLY, BY THE TIME Hamlin’s book appeared in 1896, the last reveille had already sounded for many of the most grievously wounded and injured veterans. Time had not been kind to the regiment, nor would that change. New struggles loomed—fluttering of the heart and shortness of breath, rheumatic pain and paralysis, constipation and gout. Death claimed dozens of the regiment’s veterans in the first decade of the new century—among them the Bavarian-born Andrew Backer, who succumbed to the effects of chronic dysentery at his home in Michigan, and Samuel Pfister, “a quiet, but very firm man,” who lost his battle with consumption at his mother’s home in Akron. By 1903, the pale horse visited the veterans with such frequency that the regimental association named a “condolences committee” at its annual reunion. This was hardly an encouraging development for John Geissler, who ached to attend the “Peace Jubilee” marking the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. The Zoar veteran would not get his wish. Geissler passed away just days before he was to set out for Pennsylvania. Heartbreakingly, his transportation to the reunion—provided free of charge by the state of Ohio—had already arrived.39

  One by one, the men of the regiment went to their graves—many still believing that their sacrifices and sufferings had not been adequately recognized by the nation at large. The forty-eight survivors who gathered for the regiment’s nineteenth annual reunion, for example, applauded the melancholy stanzas of a popular poem, “The Weeds of the Army”:

  Some of the papers tell us that the boys of the G.A.R.

  Never smelt smoke in battle, nor went to the front in war

  They brazenly tell us our roster bears only the names of those

  Who paused at the roar of conflict and northward pointed their toes

  They say that the
true, brave soldiers have never entered our ranks

  That we never were known to muster but a lot of political cranks

  As one of the papers put it, we are but the weeds of the crop

  But loafers and shirks and cowards, who never heard muskets pop.

  Who are these traitorous writers who are casting their venomous slime

  O’er men who gave all to their country at that trying, terrible time?

  They are the cringing cowards who never dared go to the front

  And stand with our fearless soldiers and help bear the battle’s brunt

  They clung to the skirts of women, and soon as our backs were turned,

  Our flag, our cause and our country the cowardly miscreants spurned.

  Go seek them wherever they loiter, from the gulf to the northern lakes

  And you’ll find them but treacherous, venomous, hideous copperhead snakes.

  Let us pause on a shaded corner and see a procession pass

  At a great Grand Army reunion, when the veterans form in mass

  Just note the dismembered bodies, the crutches and canes and scars