A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  Carlotta Ford and Kellie Lawson have not only made my life easier, allowing me to spend precious hours at the keyboard, but have supplied plenty of good cheer over the years. Carlotta’s friendship has seen me through difficult times. I likewise thank Haylee Furlow and Ashley Nell, who provided able administrative support in the History Department office during the writing of this book.

  I offer sincere thanks to my students, who challenge, teach, and inspire me every day. They’ve all known something of adversity, but never privilege. Their courage, work ethic, and genuine excitement for the study of history give me hope for the future. The world will be a better place when they are in charge of it. Here, I need to single out the two cohorts of undergraduates who have participated in Sam Houston State’s Civil War Study Away program. I’ll never forget those students contemplating the surreal savagery of the attack at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle, or delivering my last lecture on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Thanks as well to my talented graduate students, past and present, and to the veterans of the “common soldier” seminar, in which parts of this book took shape.

  More than anything else, tramping the battlefields of the American Civil War allowed me to write this book. I have been fortunate enough to walk the fields with some of the finest minds in the profession. Hours spent on the battlefield with John Hennessy, Frank O’Reilly, Greg Mertz, and Will Greene, in particular, have informed my thinking about the war and paid many dividends. John and I spent a wonderful afternoon poking around Stafford County in search of the 107th Ohio’s winter campsites. Chapter 3 took shape in the car that afternoon. Thanks also to Roy Niedermayer, Johnson Fluker, and the participants in the six summer seminars I have led for Yale. I tested and refined many of the ideas in this book with them.

  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again—my parents, Ralph and Terri Jordan, are the best parents a son could ever ask for. Not only did they read most of this book in draft, but they carted me back and forth to the Ohio History Connection in Columbus, tolerated their fair share of 107th Ohio stories, and even cranked a few reels of microfilm at my request. They tramped cemeteries with me, tiptoed through the remnants of Fort Milton, and even made an ill-fated attempt to find the South Carolina plantation where the 107th Ohio learned of the Lincoln assassination. At last, I can admit that I chose an Ohio topic so I could spend more time with them.

  I can’t spend any more time with Dick Klar, nor with Willard and Pat Jordan, but their memories burn on. So too does the memory of my friend Gary Dillon, who passed away as I labored over the first draft. Like the regiment at the heart of this book, you are not forgotten.

  Brian Matthew Jordan

  Willis, Texas

  May 2020

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

  PENNING THE HISTORY of a Civil War regiment is a difficult task, but the men of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry posed unique challenges. While scholars of the nation’s bloodiest conflict usually enjoy an embarrassing bounty of manuscript sources, only a few letters penned by the regiment’s enlisted men survive in archival collections today. Three letters from Fritz Nussbaum found their way into the George Shane Phillips Papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Dispatches penned by John Brunny and Christian Rieker are preserved among the records of the Society of Separatists of Zoar at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus. Stray correspondence from Alvin Brown and Jacob Boroway is held by the Library of Virginia in Richmond and University of South Carolina. And thanks to the diligent spadework of Thomas J. Edwards, who toiled for many years on the 25th Ohio Volunteers, a folder’s worth of material from the 107th made its way into the Center for Archival Collections at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. While all indispensable to this project, none of these sources provided a sustained look at life in the regiment, but captured snapshots of individual experiences at a particular moment in time.

  Local newspapers provided richer fodder. Most historians have yet to mine these sources systematically for material from Civil War soldiers. Given the number of soldier letters that filled their columns—epistles from the front were more economical than dispatches from war correspondents—this is somewhat astonishing. Among other papers, the Stark County Republican, Stark County Democrat, Summit County Beacon, Daily Cleveland Herald, and Elyria Independent Democrat, all available on microfilm at the Ohio History Connection, were deep wells of source material. But here too, methodological problems abounded. Many Civil War soldiers penned letters keenly aware that they were writing for audiences beyond their addressees, but those who wrote to newspaper editors had no doubt. They attempted to shape the narrative of their service, turning back false-hearted allegations while seeking to present their sacrifices in the best possible light.

  Though fully aware of the hazards of reminiscent testimony, I relied heavily on Jacob Smith’s Camps and Campaigns, published in 1910. The regimental history was the first real “genre” of Civil War writing, and scholars have paid it too little notice. A surprising number of historians have regarded regimentals as unseemly exercises in self-promotion, serving “more a memorial purpose than a historical one.” To be sure, unit histories served a commemorative function; they likewise brimmed with a level of detail that not infrequently arrested their narrative momentum. Disclaiming any “mercenary motives,” their inexperienced writers cared little about achieving a readership or literary fame beyond the “small, closed world” of the regimental community. Yet regimental histories were also capable of advancing measured interpretations about the war’s cause, conduct, and consequences. In many respects, they were ideal vessels for capturing the war in all of its complexities: it was incumbent upon them to explain how their experiences resounded beyond the regimental camp, but they could never lose sight of their own stubborn individuality. Unflinching and inclusive, they thrived somewhere between national histories and personal narratives.1

  The records preserved in the National Archives afforded perhaps the most unvarnished look at the regiment. Regimental order books preserve muster rolls, general orders, records of disciplinary actions, and detailed information about the work of feeding, supplying, moving, and maneuvering Civil War regiments. I believe that no one can truly understand the huge logistical challenges posed by the war without reading these invaluable records. But here, too, the 107th Ohio posed challenges. Wartime inspectors noted the wretched state of the regiment’s bookkeeping. Nor did the situation improve when some of the regiment’s most fastidious clerks were detailed to brigade or division headquarters. Still, there is much to be gleaned about the regiment in these yellowed pages.

  In an effort to capture something of the war as the 107th Ohio might have experienced it—to supply essential details about the weather, sensory experiences, the environment, and general sentiments in camp and on the march—it was necessary to rely on neighboring units. Each fighting regiment, of course, was a world of its own; nonetheless, units packed together in the same brigade or division made telling observations about one other—and very often supplied a more complete picture of events. Fortunately, the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, brigaded with the 107th Ohio throughout much of the war, left behind an enormous record of contemporaneous and reminiscent testimony. While less prolific, the soldiers of the 25th Ohio, 55th Ohio, and 75th Ohio were no less profound. When I did not have direct testimony from a soldier in the 107th Ohio, I relied on the words of men from neighboring units when their observations seemed plausible. Many of the volunteers quoted in the book did not fight in the 107th Ohio, but it is my belief that their expressions faithfully represent whatever slice of the war they shared with the regiment. Manuscript sources and published reminiscences supplied much fodder.

  Ironically, owing to the rigorous evidentiary demands of the U.S. Pension Bureau, there is a much richer, more textured archival record of the 107th Ohio after the war. Pension files, which document in wrenching detail veterans’ domestic situations, medical histories, daily struggles, and Civil War memories, we
re a logical place to begin. As Claire Prechtel Kluskens has pointed out, pension files are “underappreciated” sources that yield plenty of “untapped material for unit histories.”2 But my narrative benefited by reaching well beyond these records. Records of pension fraud investigations netted the stories of widows and veterans alike who became the prey of shark-like pension claim attorneys. By combing the seldom-used papers of Civil War volunteer surgeons at the National Archives, I uncovered many letters from veterans who, in their efforts to locate Surgeon Knaus, poignantly betrayed something of their desperation. Extant registers of the National Home for the Disabled Volunteer Soldier provided important information, as did the voluminous records of the Department of the Ohio, Grand Army of the Republic.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1.On the battle of Chancellorsville, see Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

  2.Daily National Intelligencer, May 6, 1863; Union captain, as quoted in Wolfgang Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization’,” in Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective (Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), 297. On tensions within the Union army, see Mark H. Dunkelman, “Hardtack and Sauerkraut Stew: Ethnic Tensions in the 154th New York Volunteers, Eleventh Corps, during the Civil War,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 36 (2001): 69–90.

  3.Henry Lee Scott, Military Dictionary (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), 400; Wilhelm Stängel in the Louisville Anzeiger, January 9, 1862, as quoted in A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry, ed. Joseph R. Reinhart (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 202; Roberts Bartholow, A Manual of Instructions of Enlisting and Discharging Soldiers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), 94; Mischa Honeck, “Men of Principle: Gender and the German-American War for the Union,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 38–67.

  4.Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War: Her Statesmen, Generals, and Soldiers (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke Company, 1895), 2:135–36; Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio: An Encyclopedia of the State (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel & Co., Printers and Binders, 1902), 2:624; William Henry Perrin, ed., History of Stark County, with an Outline Sketch of Ohio (Chicago: Baskin & Battey, 1881), 639–40; Charles Vignos, “Biography of Augustus Vignos,” Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/31357887/person/12448279419/media/04f4e235–7812–4270-b3f8-c44537516f86?_phsrc=VlU146&usePUBJs=true [accessed March 15, 2020]; Cindy Vignos, “The Novelty Cutlery Company,” Oregon Knife Collectors Newsletter (October 2002), posted to Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/31357887/person/12448279419/media/6f9f6158-c8cf–4be7-bfe8–5e5da261cc38?_phsrc=VlU146&usePUBJs=true [accessed March 15, 2020].

  5.OR, vol. 10, pt. 1, pp. 310, 354–55, 357–58; Smith, Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 241, 336–38.

  6.Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization’,” in Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, 306; Cindy Vignos, “The Novelty Cutlery Company,”: 1; Mahlon J. Slutz, Tribute to Major Augustus Vignos (Kent, OH: n.p., 1926), 1.

  7.Samuel Alanson Lane, Fifty Years of Summit County; Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 47, 69; Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States. 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), 1:511–13; Christina Bearden-White, “Illinois Germans and the Coming of the Civil War: Reshaping Ethnic Identity,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 109, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 231–51; Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also Gunter Moltmann, “The Pattern of German Emigration to the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:14–24.

  8.Stephen D. Engle, “Yankee Dutchmen: Germans, the Union, and the Construction of a Wartime Identity,” in Susannah J. Ural, ed., Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 14–15; Dean B. Mahin, The Blessed Place of Freedom: Europeans in Civil War America (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002), 2; “When the Old School Wagon Maker was in Flower,” Carriage Monthly 38, no. 1 (April 1902): 21–22. On the development of the carriage manufacturing industry in northeastern Ohio, see Thomas A. Kinney, “From Shop to Factory in the Industrial Heartland: The Industrialization of Horse-Drawn Vehicle Manufacture in the City of Cleveland” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1998).

  9.George Billow Pension File, RG 15, NA; Summit County Beacon, August 14, 1862.

  10.Helbich, “German-Born Union Soldiers,” 305; Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 7–9, 20–34. On the Midwest, see Zachary Stuart Garrison, German Americans on the Middle Border: From Antislavery to Reconciliation, 1830–1877 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019).

  11.William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988); Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 20. On the population of ethnically German soldiers in the Union armies, see also Engle, “Yankee Dutchmen,” 11–56, and Mahin, Blessed Place of Freedom, 15.

  12.Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 20–21, 26; Don Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 160; James M. Bergquist, “German Communities in American Cities: An Interpretation of the Nineteenth-Century Experience,” Journal of American Ethnic History 4, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 9–30; Annette R. Hofmann, “One Hundred Fifty Years of Loyalty: The Turner Movement in the United States,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 34 (1999): 63–82; Honeck, “Men of Principle.” Recent scholars have done a much better job of recovering the hemispheric vision of Civil War Americans and understanding the “Civil War the world made.” In addition to Doyle, see Evan C. Rothera, “ ‘The Men Are Understood to Have Been Generally Americans, in the Employ of the Liberal Government’: Civil War Veterans and Mexico, 1865–1867,” in Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera, eds., The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 37–60, and Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). For a view of immigrant soldiers that aligns with the one posited by Kamphoefner and Helbich, see Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 58, 111, 227.

  13.Perrin, History of Stark County, 555; Bryan S. Baker, “Biography of Alfred J. Rider,” last updated January 2013 and posted by Robin Law, Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/11298984/person/–382004049/media/336e1424–281e–4d43-a8a2-fed9cc207dd5?_phsrc=VlU143&usePUBJs=true [accessed March 15, 2020]; Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Portrait and Biographical Record of Stark County, Ohio, 443; Robert Swierenga, “The Settlement of the Old Northwest,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 83; Faust, The German Element in the United States, 1:422.

  14.Perrin, History of Stark County, 555; Portrait and Biographical Record of Stark County, Ohio, 443; Baker, “Biography of Alfred J. Rider.”

  15.Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 148: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 250–52; Andre Fleche, The Revolutio
n of 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 54; Kamphoefner and Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War, 3. See also John L. Brooke, “There Is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  16.Portrait and Biographical Record of Stark County, Ohio, 443–44.

  17.According to historians Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfang Helbich, “Republican immigrants enlisted more eagerly in the Union army than did Democrats.” Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 7. Kathleen Fernandez, Zoar: The Story of an Intentional Community (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2019), 1–29, 227, 233–34; Elizabeth Siber White, “The Wiedergeburt in the Religion of the Zoarites” (MA thesis, Western Michigan University, 1985), 1–9; and George Landis, “The Society of Separatists of Zoar, Ohio,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1899): 169, 171. On Zoar, see also Philip E. Webber, Zoar in the Civil War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007).

  18.White, “The Wiedergeburt in the Religion of the Zoarites,” 1–9.

  19.Ibid.; Fernandez, Zoar, 1–29; Landis, “The Society of Separatists of Zoar,” 172.

  20.Fernandez, Zoar, 29, 68–69, 72, 233–34; see also R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 305; Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006); Fernandez, Zoar, 150–54.

  21.Fernandez, Zoar, 29, 68–69, 72, 130–31, 150–54, 233–34; Landis, “The Society of Separatists of Zoar,” 187.