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Donald Allendorf - Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army : the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry

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Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army : the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry
Author:
Donald Allendorf
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Kent State University Press
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Books / Politics
Year:
2006
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Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army : the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry: summary, description and annotation

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One of the Fightingest Three Hundred regiments of the Civil War

Missouri, torn by divided loyalties between supporting the North or the South, had 39 infantry regiments serving in the Union army. Of these, the 15th Missouri, comprised primarily of German immigrants, served the longest and suffered the highest percentage of battlefield casualties of all the Union regiments from Missouri. Yet very little source material is available about the 15th Missouri. German immigrants seldom wrote of their wartime experiences, and those who did wrote almost exclusively in German. A veteran of the regiment, Maurice Marcoot wrote the only known firsthand account of the 15th. Written years after the war, Marcoots detailed chronicle of life in the 15th Missouri is the framework of Long Road to Liberty. Also using letters and diaries of Germans with other regiments, author Donald Allendorf expands on the experiences of the immigrant-soldiers--how they felt about slavery and race and why they chose to fight.

Long Road to Liberty traces the mens immigrant roots and their involvement in events leading up to the war, including breaking up the last slave auction in St. Louis and efforts to keep Missouri in the Union, and continues with their army lives as the states first volunteers. It details the 15ths actions in crucial battles in Tennessee and Georgia: their desperate stand at Stones River and near annihilation at Chickamauga; their charge without orders up Missionary Ridge; the campaign for Atlanta; and their role at Spring Hill and the killing field a day later at Franklin, Tennessee.

They served almost five years, most of that time in daily contact with their Southern adversaries in Tennessee and Georgia. When the war was finally over, more than half of the 904 officers and men who had ever served with the 15th regiment had been wounded or killed, while another 107 died of disease.

Historians and Civil War buff s alike will find Long Road to Liberty a welcome addition to the literature of the war in the western theater.

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Long Road to Liberty

The Odyssey of a German Regiment
in the Yankee Army

THE 15TH MISSOURI VOLUNTEER INFANTRY

Donald Allendorf

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO

2006 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2006011513

ISBN-10: 0-87338-871-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-87338-871-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Allendorf, Donald, 1934-

Long road to liberty : the odyssey of a German regiment in the Yankee army :

the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry / Donald Allendorf.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87338-871-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-87338-871-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. United States. Army. Missouri Infantry Regiment, 15th (18611865)

2. MissouriHistoryCivil War, 18611865Regimental histories.

3. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Regimental histories.

4. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Participation, German American.

5. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Participation, Immigrant.

6. German American soldiersMissouriHistory19th century.

7. ImmigrantsMissouriHistory19th century.

I. Title.

E517.515TH .A45 2006

973.7'47808931DC22 2006011513

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

For Thomas and Christopher,

Elizabeth, David, and Emily,

that they may know of one

who went before.

Contents

Illustrations and Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1 The 15th Missouri Odyssey, 18611866

Preface and Acknowledgments

A century and a half ago, a family member, a German immigrant, was among the first volunteers to join the Union army. Why, one might ask, would a foreignerwith a wife and two childrenchoose to go to war for a nation whose language he could barely speak, if at all?

The answer is hard to come by. German immigrant soldiers held to an almost stoic silence compared to their native-born counterparts, writing almost nothing of their motives or their soldiering experiences during the Civil War. The paucity of firsthand material from these volunteers has been a perplexing problem for historians. It certainly has been so for this writer.

James McPherson notes the virtual absence of immigrant soldier papers in his Civil War study For Cause and Comrades, when compared to the letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the American-born soldier. The Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, the states largest repository for Civil War papers, lists more than a thousand collections of letters, diaries, and personal manuscripts. Some five hundred of these are by Missourians. Yet just fifteen of these are by German immigrant soldiersarchived now in a city that was predominantly German during the Civil War and whose Union volunteers were also predominantly German.

Another large repository, the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-Columbia, lists 155 individual letters and diaries by Missourians who fought in the Civil War. Only four are by Germans from Missouri, two letters and two diaries, less than 3 percent of the totalwhen about 20 percent of the hundred thousand or so Missourians who fought for the North were German or of German-born parents.

All told, we have to date the personal letters or diaries of no more than two dozen of these German men from Missouri. Just two letters, one only a brief note requesting leave, are by soldiers of the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry.

The scarcity seems to have had an effect even on the public press of the time: except for a couple of clippings, one appearing long after the war had ended, St. Louis newspapers of the period have revealed almost nothing about the 15th Missouri.

There does exist, fortunately, a single firsthand account of the 15th, an almost day-by-day chronicle of life in this regiment, written years after the war by one of its survivors. A regional historian has referred to it as a rare find. Without it, writing this book would have been far more difficult. At the least, this odyssey of a German regiment in the Civil War would have taken on a wholly different character.

The lone firsthand account, of course, is not the only primary source. The regiments official recordscorrespondence files particularlyare rich with substantive and anecdotal information. I have scoured the National Archives Compiled Service Records of the 15ths more than nine hundred officers and men and the regiments correspondence folders at the Missouri State Information Center, the states archives. The findings are augmented with after-action reports, telegrams, dispatches, and correspondence from the Official Records of the Rebellion. They are combined here to bring the regiment and many of its volunteers into focus. Other primary sources, of those who fought with and against them have added to the picture.

Their odyssey began with Lincolns first call for volunteers. It would take them more than 800 miles from their home state, but they would travel on foot, by steamboat, and by rail, all told, more than 10,100 miles. Four and a half years later they would arrive home again. Of the six hundred or so German boys of 1861 who first set out to save the Union, their new fatherland, there would be fewer than a hundred who would return. Except for a marker or a monument here and there in Tennessee and Georgia, they left little for their descendants or their adopted country to remember them by. This book is an effort to rectify that.

Maurice Marcoot wrote the only known firsthand account of the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry more than a century ago. If the construction of this book were like the building of a ship, his manuscript would be the keel.

Marcoot all but ran away to join the Union army at the age of sixteen. With Adolph Faess, his bunkie, as Marcoot referred to his friend and comrade in arms, he began a log of their wartime travels with the 15th Missouri. It became a diary of sorts that would span the beginning of the Civil War to almost nine months after the end of the war, when the regiment was finally allowed to pass into history. Except for six months when he was away because of illness (probably due to typhoid fever from drinking from swampy waters along the march), Marcoot was both participant and eyewitness in one of the Unions fightingest regiments according to a massive study by a U.S. Army authority after the war. Unfortunately, because of his illnesses, Marcoot missed four of the regiments battles in which the 15th fought so desperately at Stones River, Spring Hill, and Franklin, Tennessee, and finally at Nashville.

Even so, when he was away from his boys recuperating, his bunkie took on the job maintaining the log. In more than twenty other battles, Marcoot was the primary log keeper. Among his entries are accounts of both his personal and the 15ths near annihilation at Chickamauga and, two months later, his sharp-eyed report as a participant in the Unions dramatic charge without orders up Missionary Ridge.

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