American Civil War, German Participants in
When Wilhelm Kaufmann claimed, in his 1911 volume Die Deutschen im Amerikani- schen Burgerkriege (The Germans in the American Civil War), that the Union side could not have won the war without the Germans, he was clearly exaggerating.
However, at more than 180,000 German- born soldiers, the ethnic German element provided a slightly overproportional percentage of the Union force. Most of those soldiers were volunteers who joined up during the first six months of the war.The Northern German Federation strongly supported the Union war effort politically, and the liberal press then described the refugees of the revolutions of 1848-1849 as German heroes. Officially, Union efforts at recruiting German nationals were discouraged, though some 20,000 emigrants went to the war from German states. A few more joined the crews of U.S. warships in European ports. In 1863, the wife of Illinois vice governor Gustav Korner initiated a nationwide series of advertisements in newspapers, addressing particularly relatives of German Union soldiers and offering to transport medical and other supplies to Union hospitals. The public opinion in most of the German states was strongly pro-Union; only some of the Junkers in the Prussian officer corps sympathized with the secessionists.
Arguably the most important contribution Germans made to the Union war effort came early on in the war in Missouri, where pro-secessionist governor Claiborne Jackson attempted a coup d’etat. In return, Unionists organized forces in excess of the regiments President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation had called for and on May 10 marched against the encampment of the state militia. More than 80 percent of the volunteer force that saved the city of St. Louis and the state for the Union were Germans, and throughout the war, they supplied about one-third of the Missouri soldiers fighting for the Union.
Most of the officers and men in the Missouri volunteer infantry regiments 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 15, 17, and 31 were Germans or of German descent, as were most of the members of several batteries. Other states contributed similar numbers and even entire units: the 9th Ohio; the 32nd Indiana; the 7th, 9th, 20th, 29th, 41st, 43rd, 45th, and 52nd New York; the 27th and 74th Pennsylvania; and the 9th Wisconsin were other famous all-German units, at least during the early stages of the war. After the summer of1862, few regiments maintained their original ethnic formats, and only two new units—the “2nd Hecker” (named for the commanding officer, 1848 revolutionist Friedrich Hecker) 82nd Illinois and the 26th Wisconsin—were formed as German regiments.
The artillery was the one arm of the army where the presence of trained and skilled veterans of the various German armies, including the revolutionary forces of 1848-1849, was most strongly felt. German cannoneers turned the tide at Pea Ridge and helped to save the day on July 2 at Gettysburg. Clemens Landgraber’s Missouri battery was known as the “Flying Dutchmen.” Captain Hubert “Leather Breeches” Dilger won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his retreat-by-recoil support of the remnants of Adolph Buschbeck’s brigade at Chancellorsville (May 1863); among the German soldiers his name was legendary.
Particularly this battle and the rout of the 11th Corps by Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson’s veterans were used by newspapers and politicians in the East to denigrate the effort and importance of the “foreign” element, despite the fact that the commander of the ill-fated corps, General Oliver Otis Howard, had been notified repeatedly of ominous movements in front of his badly deployed troops. He tried to exculpate himself by blaming the responsibility for the defeat on the Germans among his soldiers.
They were easy targets: exaggerated expectations and incompetence had, by
1863, resulted in a rather checkered record for the ethnic German units with the Army of the Potomac, which was eagerly exploited by the nativist press.
At First Bull Run, General Ludwig Blenker’s division had covered the retreat to Washington, but the same units had fared badly during John Fremont’s Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1862. Out west, ethnic German units performed well at Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, and Vicksburg and in the Tullahoma campaign, but the public focus was on the eastern theater. The Chancellorsville disaster was followed by similar accusations and blame when the 11th Corps was forced to withdraw again during the first day at Gettysburg.Reorganized as the 20th Corps, many of the German veterans of the Army of the Potomac were sent west after Chickamauga. The German units from East and West more than redeemed themselves when they stormed Missionary Ridge (November 1863). The next year, the same units participated in the advance on Atlanta, where many of the regiments formed early in the war were mustered out after the fall of the city in September 1864.
Ethnic Germans account for 5 major generals (August Willich, Franz Sigel, Carl Schurz, Edward S. Salomon, and Peter Os- terhaus, all of them Forty-Eighters), about 25 brigadiers, and more than 100 colonels. Since ethnic officers were not as easily promoted as native-borns, let alone graduates of West Point, some of these colonels might have deserved a brigadier’s star—like Adolph Buschbeck of the 27 th Pennsylvania, whose brigade covered the retreat at Chancellorsville, or like Bernhard Laiboldt of the 2nd Missouri, who commanded brigades at Perryville and Stones River and successfully defended posts at Wauhatchie, Tennessee, and Dalton, Georgia, in 1863 and 1864. The most successful German Union general, Peter Osterhaus (18241917), fought in thirty-four engagements and lost none of the seventeen, where he was in command of the Union forces he himself led.
Of course, not all German officers were paragons of virtue and loved by their men: General Henry Bohlen was shot by his own soldiers, Generals Blenker, Stahel, Schurz, and of course Franz Sigel were all at some point accused of incompetence.
Not all German Union soldiers were volunteers; nor did all Germans support the Union effort. There were pockets of archconservative Catholics in Wisconsin who were reluctant to fight and served poorly when they did. Some prewar supporters of the Democrats never switched their allegiance. Poorer immigrants from the most recent waves of immigration often let themselves be hired as substitutes. Cases of “crimping” Germans occurred: in one case some 1,000 immigrants had been promised work contracts by agents operating for the state of Massachusetts but upon arrival found themselves sold to serve in state regiments.Most German immigrants and second- and third-generation Germans in the loyal states, however, supported the idea of the Union, and many were also in favor of abolition. Pronounced the “nigger-loving Dutch,” surrendering German soldiers were sometimes mistreated or murdered because of their supposed or real association with African Americans. Ethnic Germans provided a considerable percentage of the officers in the U.S. Colored Troops. Several German officers, such as General Wilhelm Peter Heine, and Colonels Joseph Weydemeyer and Adolph Dengler, supported the formation of U.S. colored regi
ments; General Osterhaus’s old German Brigade sponsored the 1st Mississippi (African Descent [A.D.]) in 1863.
In the secession states, the situation of the German element was more various and ambiguous. Emigration societies and associations organizing immigration to the states before the war had often screened potential immigrants and directed only those with a positive attitude toward slavery to southern ports. Strong pro-slavery and pro-secession pockets existed in South Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, where one of the richest slaveholders was the former Prussian consul in New Orleans. In Texas, the situation was mixed: many Germans tried to evade the draft, hiding or fleeing the country. In 1862, Texas militia overtook a column of refugees trying to escape to Mexico on the Rio Nueces and killed many of the men.
An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 native- born Germans fought in the Confederate forces, about half of this number volunteers in the early days of the war, often members of all-German militia companies like Company K, 1st Virginia Infantry. There were no ethnic German units larger than company size on the Confederate side. Later in the war, Germans in Confederate units were often draftees, and many soldiers defected to the Union side.
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment; Forty-Eighters; Hecker, Friedrich; Koerner, Gustave Philipp; Nueces, Battle of the; Osterhaus, Peter J.; Salomon, Edward S.; Schurz, Carl; Sigel, Franz; Willich, August (von)
References and Further Reading
Kaufmann, Wilhelm. Die Deutschen im amerikanischen Burgerkriege. Munchen/Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1911.
Loeffler, Michael. Preuβens und Sachsens Beziehungen zu den USA wahrend des
Sezessionskrieges, 1860—1865, Munster: LIT, 1999.
Lonn, Ella. Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy. New York: Greenwood, 1969.
Mehrlander, Andrea. ‘“Ist daβ nicht reiner Sclavenhandel?’ Die illegale Rekrutierung deutscher Auswanderer fur die Unionsarmee im amerikanischen Burgerkrieg.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 44, no. 1 (1999) 65—93.