Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (review)

In this handsome but expensive volume, the author pursues two main objectives:establish a credible defense of the Eleventh Corps' performance at Chancellorsvilleand analyze the anti-German propaganda campaign in the wake of that battle as well as the German American reaction to it. His findings are based on a huge array of sources, military records from the National Archives and elsewhere, dozens of collections of personal papers, hundreds of soldiers' letters, and almost fifty newspapers, primarily German American.

This abundance of sources allows drawing a comprehensive yet highly nuanced picture of the two opposing propaganda campaigns. Within days after the May 2, 1863, battle, the "skedaddling Dutch," running for their lives in panic at the sound of the first Confederate shots had become a ubiquitous cliché all over the northern states, with newspaper editors and Yankee soldiers in their letters vying for the most aggressive and humiliating epithets.

German America was first stunned and deeply hurt, then fought back with equal intensity. The consensus of editors, politicians, and officers was that this campaign of vilification, entirely unfounded in fact, was the infamous handiwork of nativists. Countless columns in the German-language press and several large "indignation meetings" expounded this conspiracy thesis with unprecedented bitterness, and in many reports and letters to their superiors German staff officers argued that the Eleventh had fought bravely but emphasized even more strongly that their regiments were so thoroughly demoralized that they needed rehabilitation and encouragement in order to become an effective fighting force again.

The defense of the German troops suffers from the dearth of reliable evidence.There is no doubt that the Eleventh Corps was in a position extremely vulnerable to Jackson's unexpected attack and that it was hugely outnumbered; it is almost certain that General Howard was repeatedly warned but chose not to order repositioning his troops, and there is good evidence that in a later phase of the battle some German regiments (or parts thereof) put up stout resistance on the "Buschbeck line." But apart from the fact that the terrified stampede was launched very shortly after the beginning of the attack, it cannot be established precisely who stood and fought for how long, who retreated in good order, and who just ran. Keller takes pains to avoid whitewashing and concedes that Germans were among those who fled in blind panic. His statement that "the Eleventh Corps had fought reasonably well at Chancellorsville" (72), however, is not meaningful without a definition of the attribute, yet his vagueness is justified by the lack of reliable information.

The basic pattern of the events and the propaganda, however, holds no secret. A major battle shockingly lost; an astounding, chaotic rout of panic-stricken soldiers; the involvement of many foreign regiments—who could possibly resist the temptation to blame the "Dutch" and exculpate the Yankees, generals and privates alike?

With the propaganda campaigns as starting point and also major evidence, Keller argues that the Americanizing effect of the war on immigrants is not only a myth but that the contrary took place with the Germans: the furious denunciation of the "Dutch" after Chancellorsville estranged them from American comrades as well as American society, curbed integration, and hastened ethnicization, with scars of that humiliation still visible at the turn of the century. From my familiarity with German Civil War letters, I agree emphatically with debunking the war as an Americanizing agent. I am more sceptical about both the depth and the longevity of the post-Chancellorsville humiliation.

Though one may regret that that Keller stopped short of an analysis of the social and psychological mechanisms at work in this truly textbook case of ethnic confrontation, his book will most likely remain the definitive work on his two major objectives. Readers who understand German may regret missing the original of the numerous quotations; perhaps this author and future ones could make foreign-language quotes available on the internet.