A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Almost a quarter of a century has passed. The moving columns, glittering bayonets, flashing sabers and charging squadrons of that fearful time are gone forever. The rattling musketry and roaring cannon of the mighty struggle are hushed. Where was the carnage of war is now only peace.15

  The governor’s remarks were of a piece with the image of Civil War soldiering popular in the late nineteenth century. Granite soldiers gripping muskets began occupying northern town squares and village greens, standing quiet sentinel over the beguiling transformations of the Gilded Age. “Built around the idea of duty,” one recent historian contends, these statues “created a new model of the citizen-soldier for the nation.” Local and county histories, meanwhile, celebrated courage, patriotism, and bravery as the innate qualities of ordinary soldiers. In his history of Stark County, for instance, William Henry Perrin noted that the 107th Ohio’s history was “written in the blood of the gallant men of whom it was composed.” Meanwhile, the historian of neighboring Wayne County distinguished the 107th as a “fine regiment,” acclaiming the “earnest patriotism and heroic valor” that its soldiers manifested on “many occasions.”16

  Over time, esteem of this sort served to obscure rather than preserve the memory of the regiment. In their conviction that the war’s outcome was inevitable, popular narratives lost sight of the human and emotional realities of combat—the doubt, fear, grief, exhaustion, guilt, and sense of betrayal that animated the rank and file during and long after the Civil War. In a rush to deem every soldier a hero, many chroniclers wrung irony, ambiguity, and adversity from their narratives. Rather than engage with the lived immediacy of a struggle that did not always move in logical, rational, or easy-to-apprehend ways, Civil War histories brimmed with the quiet reassurance that the nation had been preserved. The struggle became an annealing fire that confirmed America’s exceptionalism—a test of wills that celebrated the mettle of white, native-born men. Just as the war’s history became segregated, so too did it become sanitized.

  This emerging narrative vexed many veterans, but perhaps none more than William Siffert. Though the monument dedication exercises afforded him a welcome opportunity to once more grip the hands of old comrades, he returned from Gettysburg daunted by the thought that a “true” and complete history of the battle would never be recorded. The battle, he realized, was not a discrete event, but rather a dizzying mosaic of human experiences—each as unique as the regiments that endured them. That autumn, believing the artist’s brush superior to the historian’s pen, he outstretched large sheets of muslin and began to paint. By 1888, he had produced four oversized oil paintings illustrating the campaign and battle of Gettysburg. The largest painting crowded “the events of the three days of fighting” into a single panorama. All too predictably, Blocher’s Knoll and the fields where the Eleventh Corps battled on July 1 commanded the canvas.17

  William Siffert rode the war lecture circuit in the 1890s, regaling audiences throughout his native state with a stirring account of his participation in the war’s bloodiest battle.

  In his Gettysburg series, Siffert did not reach for the realism or authenticity sought by artists like Paul Philippoteaux, whose cyclorama of Pickett’s Charge—then on display in Boston—moved veterans to tears with its “life-like” fidelity to detail. Dominated instead by distinct ensembles of men, Siffert rendered a vision of the battle that foregrounded human will, agency, and individuality. The veteran artist sought to critique—not to craft—a coherent narrative of the battle. His paintings resisted grandeur and gore with the same, steadfast resolve; they exposed the eccentricities of war. The four paintings would become Siffert’s visual aids over the next decade as he crisscrossed Ohio, delivering the “war lecture” that he advertised on a stout, handsomely printed business card: “My Experience as a Soldier.”18

  WILLIAM SIFFERT INSISTED that the human face of war could be obscured, but never truly effaced. Today, one does not need to roam in search of the regiment very long to grasp his point. Sturdy woods once again populate the banks of Accokeek Creek. In the stands of timber, subtle depressions pock the ground. These odd gouges in the earth evocatively mark the locations where tiny log huts once sheltered soldiers. Together with abandoned stretches of corduroy road and the occasional pile of stone, they bear eloquent witness to the winter camps where men shivered, suffered, and resolved to preserve the United States. South of the Rappahannock, vehicles navigate a curve along congested Route 3, the name the Virginia State Highway Commission bestowed upon the old Orange Turnpike in the early twentieth century. The weather-boarded Talley farmhouse no longer stands (after falling into disrepair, it was razed in 1926), but a local battlefield preservation organization owns the surrounding acres—knotted with thick brambles and briars—upon which the men of the 107th Ohio made their fated stand on the second day at Chancellorsville.19

  Up the road in Gettysburg, a rusty cyclone fence weaves along much of the line the regiment held on the second day of July, among the least visited sites on the nation’s most visited battlefield. The few who take the time or trouble to reach the site—a tiny patch of grass obscured by an enormous green water tank—will find granite markers denoting the flanks of the 107th Ohio, resolute reminders of the fight for East Cemetery Hill. The markers, just scores of feet apart, also testify eloquently to the devastating toll of the battle for Blocher’s Knoll.20

  Much farther south, Folly Island’s city of canvas has been replaced by swarms of beach-goers, many of whom would be surprised to learn that their beloved spit of sand once played host to armies of occupying soldiers. Recent archeological work, however, has done much to unearth Folly’s Civil War history. Down the coast in Jacksonville, prescient Florida officials spared a 124-acre tract of Camp Milton from its proposed fate as a sludge dump. A plank boardwalk lined with sun-bleached interpretive markers conveys park visitors to the remnants of the rebel works. A short drive away, the masonry walls of Fort Clinch still stand, the crown jewel of a state park where, as a glossy, color brochure boasts, “history, beauty, and nature meet in an experience like no other.”21

  In Sumter County, South Carolina, weather-beaten road signs point earnest Civil War buffs along the route of Potter’s Raid, a campaign that scarcely scores a mention in most modern histories of the war. A cast-iron state historical marker informs the motorists who hurry along Route 521 that the clearing along Turkey Creek played host to “one of the last battles” of the war. With great fidelity to the Lost Cause, the sign relates that the fight was one against the overwhelming might of federal numbers. “A Confederate home guard of old men, boys, and convalescents here made a gallant stand in an effort to halt Potter’s Raid,” the sign boasts, claiming an historical authority it does not deserve. For the Medal of Honor won by Henry Finkenbiner, however, the marker has no words.22

  IN NORTHEAST OHIO, a hunt for the 107th Ohio yields similar results. In Louisville, the Vignos tavern, recently fitted with a new copper roof, still stands—anchoring not a quiet village green, but the corner of a busy intersection. Cars hurry beyond the Town Tavern, almost certainly unaware of the Civil War history in their midst. Eight miles away, in a quaint Catholic cemetery at Canton’s edge, Augustus rests in the grave where his four pallbearers—regimental comrades Alfred Garner, James Corl, Lanson McKinney, and Mahlon Slutz—lowered his casket in July 1926.23

  Population booms and urban renewal projects have so reconfigured the streets of Akron that the regiment’s veterans would scarcely know them. Only Glendale Cemetery, perched on the “high bluffs” immediately south of town, might be recognizable to the old boys. Established a generation before the war by city leaders seeking to fasten Akron to the rural cemetery movement, Glendale became a locus of Civil War commemorative activity in the late nineteenth century. In 1876, the Grand Army of the Republic dedicated a memorial chapel—a striking tribute in sandstone and slate, flanked by two brass cannon—at the cemetery gates. Its interior walls are ornamented with handsome plaques that are lined by the n
ames of local veterans, including George Billow. The captain rests beneath a simple monolith at the top of the hill, the stone crooked and gnarled by a century’s worth of Akron winters.24

  In Cleveland, National Hall was razed long ago, and a wrecking ball demolished the Weddell House to create room for a seventeen-story office tower. But in the quiet Tremont neighborhood, at the intersection of West 7th Street and University Road, a bronze Ohio state historical marker recalls the heady days of Camp Cleveland. A year before that Buckeye laureled plaque went up, the state erected a similar sign at the corner of South Sandusky Street and Olentangy Avenue in Delaware—the site of Camp Delaware and the regiment’s first fatalities.

  The village of Zoar is now a National Historic Landmark. Five days per week between June and September, its well-manicured buildings and gardens—maintained by the private, not-for-profit Zoar Community Association—bustle with tourists eager to learn about the German separatist community from costumed interpreters. Only a few of those visitors will drive down Seventh Street to the Zoar Cemetery—the quiet oasis known to the settlers as “God’s Acre.” The decades have not been kind to the headstones, many leaning and lichened. The ground has swallowed up some of the markers, while others will soon be ready for the piles of broken or toppled stones that line the cemetery’s zagging rows. Christian Rieker’s simple military headstone stands along the edge of a gravel road—still erect, but so weathered that its words are just ghostly impressions. But if one squints, the words, “107th Ohio Inf.” can yet be made out. John Brunny’s father, who died within a decade of the war, is buried here, too. His son, however, is interred nearly nine hundred miles away; the young bugler as far from Zoar in death as he was in life.25

  Just up the road in Navarre, Union Lawn Cemetery consumes the better part of a city block. The graveyard contains the town’s brawny Civil War monument, dedicated in the first decade of the twentieth century. Affixed to the striking granite boulder is a bronze tablet bearing the names of Navarre’s Union soldiers—including fifty-two men from the 107th Ohio. Buried nearby are William O. Siffert and Alfred Rider, along with James M. Corl and other survivors of Company A. In cemeteries elsewhere throughout Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Massillon, New Philadelphia, and Elyria, the men of the 107th Ohio rest together in family plots, pauper’s graves, and Grand Army of the Republic lots. Even in death, they never really demobilized.26

  MORE THAN A century and a half later, genealogists are the most dutiful custodians of the regiment’s history, sharing an urgent need to make sense of the great loss and tragedy that befell their forebears. Jim Finkenbiner conducted research on his grandfather, requesting copies of his pension records after touring the Chancellorsville battlefield in the late 1980s. Philip Scherag’s great-grandson, a long-time high-school history teacher in Massillon, traveled to Germany in search of his ancestor. “The Germans were not real popular,” he observed. “They were kind of like a sacrificial lamb.” Chris Nelson, the great-great-grandson of John Flory, wrote an eight-page narrative history of the regiment—until this book, the only modern history of the 107th Ohio. “Not many regiments in the Union Army served all the way from Ohio to Florida and back,” he concluded, “and not many fought in two of the most important battles of the war.” While skeptics might be quick to dismiss Nelson’s claim, it is no idle boast. Throughout its almost three years in the field, the men of the regiment whipsawed between the war’s extremes. They trudged through snowbanks and sand bars, sampling victory and defeat. They learned about courage and cowardice, purpose and futility, resolve and despair. They took pride in their pain and solace from their suffering, keenly aware that emerging national narratives about the war captured nothing of their experiences.

  More recently still, Andrew Suhrer, a direct descendant of Lieutenant Fernando Suhrer and a “lifelong history buff,” self-published The Flying Dutchmen, a novel of “love, separation, friendship and tragedy” based on the unit’s experiences. The book’s imaginative scenes draw on years of original research, as well as the author’s correspondence with descendants of Augustus Vignos and George Billow, who still live in northeastern Ohio. The bonds of regimental comradeship, it seems, are powerful enough to persist across several generations. “It is impossible to look back at our ancestors and not feel awe,” Suhrer explained, “as well as thankfulness that we never had to endure such severe hardships and mortality.”27

  And so the men of the 107th Ohio endure still—urgent voices telling stories about who we are, how our country was saved, and what it means to go to war.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOT LONG AFTER RETURNING from a macabre expedition to inventory the graves of Union soldiers scattered throughout Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee, Colonel Edmund B. Whitman made a startling confession. “Called as I have been to spend three years and more among the dead,” he explained, “it is not strange that I come to feel as though their dead were all my friends.” After spending the last few years with the men of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, I empathize with Whitman’s sentiment. As I chased the tracks they left in the archives, wandered around their camps and battlefields, and visited their graves, the soldiers of the 107th Ohio became my trusted companions. Though at times frustratingly elusive, I feel as though they have lived with me.

  The journey of the last three years would not have been possible without the talented troop of librarians, archivists, and colleagues who helped me along the way. I salute here the fine folks at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus; the South Carolina Historical Society; the University of South Carolina; the Houghton Library at Harvard; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Library of Virginia; the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke; Sterling Memorial Library at Yale; the Connecticut State Library; the Connecticut Historical Society; the Wayne County Public Library; the Akron-Summit County Public Library Special Collections; the William McKinley Presidential Library; the Stark County Public Library; and last but certainly not least, the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I logged more hours at the National Archives than I did at any other repository. Will the thrill of cracking open dirt-begrimed volumes in the Central Reading Room ever get old?

  More importantly, this book would not have come to fruition without the support, encouragement, and assistance of many dear friends and colleagues. Lesley J. Gordon’s work has inspired me; I am grateful for her friendship. John J. Hennessy graciously provided reams of material on the Eleventh Corps from his personal research files and gave me unfettered access to the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park Library. Barbara Gannon, Jonathan W. White, and Adam H. Domby are talented historians but even better friends. Fellow Ohio native Daniel Welch shared valuable information about the care and treatment of the regiment’s wounded at the George Spangler Farm, a site that he was instrumental in researching and interpreting for the public. Ronald Szudy of Parma, Ohio, sent me some valuable material on Peter F. Young. Lisa Tendrich Frank offered comments when I presented a portion of this book at the Society of Civil War Historians Biennial Meeting in Pittsburgh, and Mary Louise Roberts did the same when I presented at the American Historical Association Meeting in Chicago. Evan Rothera was, as always, a patient sounding board for ideas new and old. In record time, my friend and the talented historical cartographer Edward Alexander produced the splendid maps that illustrate this book.

  My thanks to Terry Johnston of The Civil War Monitor for permission to reprint portions of an article that I published in his magazine about Seraphim Meyer’s episode at Gettysburg. Andy Lang and Drew Bledsoe gave me the chance to try out some material on veteranhood in their fine anthology, Upon the Fields of Battle. My mentors Allen Guelzo, Gabor Boritt, Matthew Norman, Bruno Cabanes, Joanne Freeman, and David Blight can no doubt detect their influence. It goes without saying that I have been unusually fortunate to work with such an august group of historians. I am a better historian—and a better person—for having worked with them.

  It was a ple
asure to once again publish with Liveright/W. W. Norton. Katie Adams, who edited my last book, believed in this project when it was still a shapeless proposal. Daniel Gerstle proved to be a smart and gifted editor. Dan’s keen eye and discerning comments have made this a much better work of history than it might have been otherwise. Nancy Green was a careful copy editor, and Haley Bracken shepherded this book with great skill. I thank Bob Weil and the entire editorial, production, and marketing team at Liveright. They are truly the best in the business.

  A few months before I began this project, Sam Houston State University became my academic home. Since then, it has become my family. Above all, I wish to thank Pinar Emiralioglu for her tireless support and friendship. Benjamin Park and I share many things—an editor, a publisher, and an office wall—but most important is our friendship, which sustained me in ways big and small through the writing of this book. Not many academicians can imagine spending eighteen days on the road in a rumbling bus with one of their departmental colleagues, but Willis Oyugi and I would do it again, so long as we had each other’s company and conversation. Steve Rapp and his partner, Julie Nelson, have supplied many wonderful hours of food, conversation, and laughter. Jeremiah Dancy, now of the U.S. Naval War College, was a constant companion and loyal friend during the three years we spent together at Sam Houston State. CHSS Dean Abbey Zink deserves my thanks for her tireless support of my scholarly endeavors.