A French Civil War Adventurer: Fact and Fancy

A FRSNCH CIVIL WAR ADVSNTURSR: Fact and Fancy Lowell L. Blaisdell Many European officers fought in the Civil War, especially in the Union army.1 Among these was Gustave Paul Cluseret, a French intriguer , revolutionary, and soldier of fortune, who fought in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, and who gained subsequent fame as a military commander during the Paris Commune of 1871.2 Whereas Cluseret was endowed with several of the qualities indispensable to high-ranking military command, he habitually damaged his career by overweening ambition, lack of scruple, and inconstancy. These traits were revealed in this country, where, during the course of nearly a decade in the 1860's, he sought fame as a general, a journalist, or a political manipulator. The first of these alternate paths led Cluseret in 1862 to the Virginias. Cluseret, for many years an officer in the French army, had fought in the Crimean War and in the Kabylian campaigns of Algeria during the later 1850's. 1860 found him serving as commander of a French legion in Giuseppe Garibaldi's conquest of southern Italy. As a result of stressing the advantage of his experience, as well as by laying siege to George P. Marsh, the American ambassador to Italy, Cluseret wangled a colonel's commission in the Union army, a high rank for a foreigner.3 His first assignment, to the staff of Major General George B. McClellan , was brief, for that officer conceived an instant dislike for him.4 Next, thanks to a newly-formed friendship with Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, he was reassigned to the Army of Western Virginia, commanded by Major General John C. Fremont. Sumner 1ElIa Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1940), passim; and Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (Baton Rouge, 1951), passim. 2 Edward S. Mason, The Paris Commune: An Episode in the History of the Socialist Movement (New York, 1930), pp. 175-176, 215-216; Frank Jellinek, The Paris Commune of 1871 (London, 1937), pp. 187-189. 3 Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris, 1960), VI, 55-56; Marsh to Sec. of State William H. Seward, Sept. 16, Nov. 11, Dec. 7, 1861, Italy (Instructions , Dispatches, and Notes, vol. 26, National Archives). 4 George B. McClellan, McCleüans Own Story (New York, 1887), p. 143. 246 believed that the Pathfinder's Radical Republicanism would be more to Cluseret's political tastes than McClellan's conservatism.5 With Fremont, Cluseret was placed in charge of the army's advance guard, a force comprising soldiers from West Virginia and Ohio and officered by numerous foreigners.6 Before long the discipline and morale of Cluseret's unit left much to be desired, partly because of resentment of the foreign officers' assertiveness,7 and partly because Fremont, whose forte was not military organization, failed to delineate properly the advance guard's role and position within his command . Fremont's Army of Western Virginia, along with a force commanded by Major General James Shields, newly-detached from the army of Major General Irwin McDowell, is remembered chiefly for its futile pursuit of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley during the spring of 1862.8 Had Fremont and Shields succeeded in intercepting Jackson, the course of the war might have been altered, for his elimination would have removed a major thorn from the Union's side and enabled McClellan to undertake the investment of Richmond under very favorable conditions. However, even under the most auspicious of circumstances a victory of such proportions would have been almost beyond hope.9 As it was, the Federal generals were ineffective because of Jackson's exceptional skill, their own exalted estimation thereof, and the President's imposition both of a divided Fremont-Shields command and of a hastily-conceived campaign.10 For instance, after having marched his army a long distance under adverse conditions, Fremont reached the Shenandoah Valley, encountered Jackson at Strasburg, but, because his partner, Shields, failed to contact him, lapsed into a state of watchful inaction.11 At this juncture, Cluseret, leading the advance guard, proceeded as if the army were on the offensive. Pushing forward with his cavalry early on June 1, in disregard of orders to hold...