A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  28.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 15; Annals of Cleveland, 45:236; Morning Reports, Company C, vol. 7, RG 94, National Archives; Matthew Elrod, “The Impact of the Civil War on Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati, 1861–1865” (Master’s thesis, Northern Kentucky University, 2006), 4–5. The threat of Confederate invasion in the late summer and fall of 1862 ensured that a number of newly mustered volunteers would be hurried to the front, woefully unprepared for combat. See also Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics, 63.

  29.Cincinnati Commercial, as quoted in Trester, “Political Career of David Tod,” 145; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 513–14, 517; OR, ser. I, vol. 16, pt. 1, pp. 931–33; Trester, “Political Career of David Tod,” 143–44; Edison H. Thomas, John Hunt Morgan and His Raiders (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 34–45. On Cincinnati as a supply depot, see Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

  30.Trester, “Political Career of David Tod,” 144–45; Nelson Edwards Jones, M.D., The Squirrel Hunters, or Glimpses of Pioneer Life (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke Co., 1898), 335–36, 339–41, 342; David Tod to George B. Wright, September 9, 1862, in David Tod Papers, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, LC; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 15; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862; John Heyard Pension File, RG 15, NA; “Brief History of the 107th Reg’t,” Canton Repository, September 22, 1871.

  31.Richard Kesterman, “The Burnet House: A Grand Cincinnati Hotel,” Ohio Valley History 12, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 60–68.

  32.“Charges and Specifications Prepared Against Colonel Seraphim Meyer 107th Regiment Ohio Vols.,” in Seraphim Meyer Compiled Service Record, RG 94, NA.

  33.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 15; General Orders No. 32, September 27, 1862, Regimental Order Book, vol. 4, RG 94, NA; Lewis, Campaigns of the 124th Regiment, 14; “The Bitter and the Sweet,” The Bivouac 3, no. 9 (September 1885): 342.

  34.John Brunny, entry in Descriptive Book for Company I, RG 94, National Archives; 1860 census; Fort Scott [Kansas] Tribune, June 12, 1909; Stark County Republican, October 16, 1862; The Civil War Diary of Private John Flory, Co. C, 107th Ohio, August 1862—July 1865, 10; William Huy Pension File, RG 15, NA.

  35.John Brunny to esteemed friend, September 25, 1862 [typescript translation], in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862. Robert E. Bonner emphasizes the candor of Civil War soldiers’ letters—and a desire among the soldiers to accurately document their experiences in real time—in The Soldiers’ Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).

  36.John Brunny to esteemed friend, September 25, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 17; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862.

  37.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 19.

  CHAPTER 2: “TO CRUSH OUT THE . . . UNGODLY REBELLION”

  1.“From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862; “The 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 16, 1862.

  2.“From the 107th” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862; “The 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 16, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 20; Stark County Republican, November 20, 1862; affidavit of William O. Siffert, October 6, 1893, in Alfred J. Rider Pension File, RG 15, NA; Christian Rieker to sister, October 19, 1862, in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC. On pillage and plunder of foodstuff and crops, see Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  3.Steps taken to maintain good physical health and hygiene both in camp and on the march have been termed soldier “self-care” by historian Kathryn Shively Meier. See Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  4.Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 171; see also Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign & The Necessity of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery & the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); and Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

  5.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 20; 107th Ohio Volunteers Regimental Descriptive Books, RG 94, NA; Summit County Beacon, December 18, 1862.

  6.“From the 107th Regiment,” Stark County Republican, November 20, 1862; Daily Cleveland Herald, November 6, 1862; Christian Rieker to his sister, October 22, 1862, in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC; Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army for The Years 1861–1865—Part V, Ohio and Michigan, 204; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 21; George Shambs Pension File, Civil War Widows’ Pensions, WC14820, Fold3.com.

  7.Stark County Democrat, October 8, 1862; “The 107th Reg’t,” Summit County Beacon, October 9, 1862; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862.

  8.“From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862; Special Orders No. 1, October 17, 1862, in 107th Ohio Volunteers Regimental Descriptive Books, RG 94, NA; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 23; Stark County Republican, October 16, 1862; Rieker to his sister, October 22, 1862, in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC.

  9.Summit County Beacon, November 27, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 23; 107th Ohio Volunteers Regimental Descriptive Books, RG 94, NA; Joshua Budd Court Martial Records, RG 153, Case # OO–32, NA.

  10.Joshua Budd Court Martial Records, RG 153, Case # OO–32, NA; “Letter from Virginia,” Stark County Republican, December 18, 1862; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 23; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, November 27, 1862.

  11.“From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, November 27, 1862; on the controversy, see Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 26.

  12.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 25, 29; Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; Summit County Beacon, November 27, 1862; “Letter from Virginia,” Stark County Republican, December 18, 1862; Fritz Nussbaum to Friend Cary [Kauke], November 6, 1862, George Shane Phillips Papers, Box 2, Huntington Library. On deforestation, see Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

  13.“The Elections,” The Liberator [Boston, Mass.], October 24, 1862; “The Late Elections,” Newark Advocate, October 24, 1862; “The Revolution in Ohio!” Newark Advocate, October 17, 1862; “The Popular Revolution at the Polls,” The Crisis [Columbus, Ohio], October 29, 1862; “Celebrations,” The Crisis, October 22, 1862; “The Hon. S.S. Cox on the Ohio Election,” Daily Cleveland Herald, December 19, 1862; “An Unprecedented Vote,” Newark Advocate, October 31, 1862; see also Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 37–38.

  14.“Vote of the Volunteers,” Daily Cleveland Herald, October 20, 1862; “A Raid in the Rear,” Morning Oregonian [Portland, Oregon], October 25, 1862. On the soldier vote, see Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), and Donald S. Inbody, The Soldier Vote: War, Politics, and the Ballot in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 19; “What the Soldiers Think of the Butternut Jubilee,” Scioto Gazette [Chillicothe, Ohio], December 2, 1862; “Soldiers of the Fifteenth Corps” to the Cincinnati Commercial, as quoted in The Echo from the Army: What Our Soldiers Say About the Copperheads (New York: William C. Bryant and Co., Printers, 1863), 4–5; “Another Soldier’s Opinion of Copperheads,” Stark County Republican, March 26, 1863. Mark E. Neely, Jr., suggests that the Republicans were not prepared for the fervor with which the Democrats opted to engage in partisan combat during the war. T
he midterm elections perhaps stung even more as a result.

  15.“From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, December 18, 1862; “Letter from Virginia,” Stark County Republican, December 18, 1862.

  16.Meier, Nature’s Civil War, 7; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 29–30; Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; on corduroy roads, see Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 33, William Warren memoir, Bound Volume 391, FSNMP, and Leonard Mesnard [55th Ohio] Sketch, Civil War Collection, Box 20, Folder 3, Emory University Special Collections, Atlanta. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), contends that early in the war, Union soldiers “developed into emancipation advocates who expected their views to influence the prosecution of the war.” Although she does not use the term “seasoning,” Manning identified a transformation similar to the one described here.

  17.Annals of Cleveland, 45:216; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, December 18, 1862; Julia S. Wheelock, The Boys in White: The Experience of a Hospital Agent In and Around Washington, 33; R. W. Rock, History of the Eleventh Regiment, Rhode Island Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion (Providence: Providence Press Company, Printers, 1881), 120; Christian Rieker to sister, November 13, 1862, in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC; “Letter from Virginia,” Stark County Republican, December 18, 1862. Scholars continue to debate how wide the chasm between the home front and the battlefield was, as well as the extent to which soldiers bridged it both during and after the war. Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), and Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), remain the two poles of the debate, with Linderman portraying the wartime experience as disillusioning and Mitchell arguing that blue-coated soldiers remained tethered to their home communities and visions of domesticity. While the community no doubt wielded much influence over enlisted men throughout the war, and while volunteers yearned for home, I argue that a cognitive divide did increasingly separate soldiers and civilians.

  18.Canton Repository, September 22, 1871; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 30; Stark County Republican, January 1, 1863; Augustus Vignos, affidavit dated September 10, 1884, in Albert Beck Pension File, RG 15, NA; morning reports for Company C and Company D, 107th Ohio Regimental Descriptive Books, RG 94, NA; Charles Hartman to the 107th Ohio, November 18, 1862, in Regimental Order Book, vol. 4, RG 94, NA; Alfred J. Rider Pension File, RG 15, NA; Fritz Nussbaum to Friend Cary [Kauke], November 6, 1862, George Shane Phillips Papers, Box 2, Huntington Library; Fritz Nussbaum Carded Medical Records, RG 94, entry 534, Box 2844, NA; “A Man Killed in Euclid,” Daily Cleveland Herald, July 22, 1858; “Dead Body Found,” Daily Cleveland Herald, June 7, 1858, and “A Case of Infanticide,” Daily Cleveland Herald, November 29, 1858; Annals of Cleveland, 43:192. Hartman’s credentials are a reminder that Civil War regimental surgeons were often trained professionals, not “hacks” ignorant of surgical manuals and medical literature. For an important corrective to popular misperceptions about Civil War medicine and medical personnel, see Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). See also Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 16–21.

  19.Stark County Republican, January 1, 1863; Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 30–31; Jonathan W. White, Midnight in America, 13; Christian Rieker to dear sister, November 13, 1862, in Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC.

  20.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 35; Seraphim Meyer Pension File, RG 15, NA. For a compelling argument about the significance of mud in soldiers’ representations of their experiences at war, see Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 34; Stark County Republican, January 1, 1863; George Billow and Daniel Umstaetler affidavits [circa 1890], in Seraphim Meyer Pension File, RG 15, NA; The Civil War Diary of Private John Flory, 11.

  21.Engle, Yankee Dutchman, 152; Stark County Republican, January 1, 1863; The Civil War Diary of Private John Flory, 11; Jacob Lichty to Daniel Lichty, December 28, 1862, copy in Thomas J. Edwards Papers, Box 2, Folder 1, Center for Archival Collections, Jerome Library, BGSU.

  22.George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35; Daniel E. Sutherland, Fredericksburg & Chancellorsville: The Dare Mark Campaign (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Thomas Francis Gawley, The Valiant Hours: An Irishman in the Civil War (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Company, 1961), 63; James I. Robertson, Jr., ed., The Civil War Letters of General Robert McAllister (Reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 244.

  23.Stark County Republican, January 1, 1863; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, February 12, 1863; “Opening of the Great Battle at Fredericksburg,” Daily Cleveland Herald, December 12, 1862; Thomas Evans Diary and Memoir, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, LC; “The Great Disaster,” [San Francisco] Daily Evening Bulletin, December 19, 1862; Henry J. Blakeman to dear father, December 18, 1862, Bound Volume 105, FSNMP; William B. Southerton, “What We Did There, Or, Swamp Angel,” typescript manuscript, VFM 3177, OHC; New York Herald, January 15, 1863; “How Long Must the War Last?” Stark County Democrat, December 24, 1862; “From the 75th Ohio Regiment,” Athens [Ohio] Messenger, January 22, 1863; Lincoln, as quoted in Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 105.

  24.F. A. Wildman to dear wife, December 22, 1862, Wildman Family Papers, OHC; A. Wilson Greene, “Morale, Maneuver, and Mud: The Army of the Potomac, December 16, 1862—January 26, 1863,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 179; Patrick R. Guiney to My Dear Jennie, December 15, 1862, in Christian G. Samito, ed., Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 155; Robertson, Jr., ed., Civil War Letters of General Robert McAllister, 247; Wildman to dear wife, December 22, 1862, Wildman Family Papers, OHC; Don Stewart to dear friend Lettie, January 18, 1863, Bonnifield Collection, Duke; New York Times, January 24, 1863. Ever self-aggrandizing, Joe Hooker did much to contribute to the narrative of a depleted and demoralized Army of the Potomac in a report he submitted to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. See Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, vol. 4 (Reprint ed., Wilmington, North Carolina: Broadfoot’s Publishing Company, 1999), xli.

  25.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 40–41; Edward C. Culp, The 25th Ohio Vet. Vol. Infantry in the War for the Union (Topeka: Geo. W. Crane & Co., 1885), 58; Nathaniel Collins McLean to Louise McLean, May 15, 16, and 17, 1860, in Nathaniel McLean Correspondence, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, Manuscript Division, LC.

  26.Reid, Ohio in the War, 1:921–922; John H. Matsui, The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2016), 5; Scott C. Patchan, Second Manassas: Longstreet’s Attack and the Struggle for Chinn Ridge (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), 12–13; “From the 107th Regiment,” Daily Cleveland Herald, January 19, 1863; Augustus Choate Hamlin, The Battle of Chancellorsville: The Attack of Stonewall Jackson and His Army Upon the Right Flank of the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville, Virginia, on Saturday Afternoon, May 2, 1863 (Published by the author, 1896), 44–45; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, February 12, 1863.

  27.William H. Noble, The Seventeenth Regiment Connecticut Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1862–1865 (Hartford: Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1889), 1; “William Noble’s Regimental History,” http://seventeenthcvi.org/blog/history-index/william-nobles-regimental-history (accessed July 8, 2017); Thomas Evans Diary, June 8, 1862, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, Manuscript D
ivision, LC; Warren, “On To Washington,” http://seventeenthcvi.org/blog/history-index/william-warren-history/articles–5–8/ [accessed July 15, 2017]; Southerton, “What We Did There,” Ohio History Connection; Luther Mesnard Memoir, Bound Volume 45, FSNMP; Noah Stump to Dear Cousin, February 26, 1863, in Thomas J. Edwards Collection, Box 1, Folder 3, BGSU; William Noble to my darling wife, November 21, 1862, Lewis Leigh Collection, Box 24, Folder 1, United States Army Heritage & Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

  28.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 46; “The Present Condition of the Army,” New York Herald, January 11, 1863. For a narrative account of the Army of the Potomac’s winter encampment, see Albert Z. Conner, Jr., and Chris Mackowski, Seizing Destiny: The Army of the Potomac’s “Valley Forge” and the Civil War Winter that Saved the Union (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2016).

  29.Smith, Camps and Campaigns, 47, 53; F. A. Wildman to dear Sam, December 31, 1862, Wildman Family Papers, OHC; Stark County Republican, March 5, 1863.

  30.Christian Rieker to sister and all, February 17, 1863, [typescript translation], Society of Separatists of Zoar Records, Box 96, Folder 1, OHC; Fritz Nussbaum to Friend Cary [Kauke], September 9, 1862, and November 14, 1863, George Shane Phillips Papers, Box 2, Huntington Library; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, October 23, 1862; “From the 107th,” Summit County Beacon, February 12, 1863; Richard Magee Diary, May 6, 1863, RG 69:163, Connecticut State Library.