Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home

Preface

PREFACE This edition (like its German-language predecessor) presents an anthology of hitherto unpublished letters written by German immigrants from Civil War America, mostly to relatives and friends back in the Old Country. Selected from the holdings of the North America Letter Collection, or nabs,1 in Gotha, Germany, it includes the writings of soldiers and civilians, men and women, North and South. This ethnic component of the Civil War has largely faded from public memory, and it has been seriously neglected by scholars as well. Nearly one-quarter of all Union troops were foreign-born, and Germans alone accounted for about one-tenth of the Union army, about 200,000 of some 2 million troops. Germans thus made up as large a contingent as African Americans, whom most historians rightly see as essential to the Union war effort. This is not to disparage the importance of either group at the expense of the other. In fact, each played a crucial role at a particular time—blacks in the late phases of the war, because they first had to fight for the right to fight; Germans at the war’s outset, and especially in border states, where they were often among the most reliable and decisive Unionists. Neither of these groups—the two elements who stood out most conspicuously in the Union ranks—was without controversy, and they pose other interesting parallels and contrasts. While blacks were compelled to fight in segregated units, many Germans preferred and chose to do so. At the war’s outset , some thirty ‘‘German regiments’’ were raised, sometimes using German 1. NABS (Nordamerika-Briefsammlung), now part of the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, will be a frequent reference in this volume. The collection was established at the History Department of Ruhr-Universität Bochum during the 1980s under the name Bochumer Auswandererbriefsammlung (Bochum Emigrant Letters Collection), abbreviated BABS. As such, it has been frequently cited in many publications, and it was also microfilmed in 1997 by the Library of Congress —including the full German text of the letters excerpted and translated here (except two by Herbst and Ruff [nos. 30 and 48], which were acquired after 1997). The move to Gotha in 2002 and an expansion of the collection’s scope made the name change desirable to avoid confusion . So NABS contains all the material of BABS, plus some 2,400 recently acquired letters as of the end of 2005 and those expected to come in as a result of ongoing solicitation. Both editors are now involved in a German Research Foundation (DFG) project headed by Professor Ursula Lehmkuhl of the Free University of Berlin that aims to collect and make accessible immigrant letters written to the area of the former German Democratic Republic, which was inaccessible to the collection efforts of BABS. xii Preface as a spoken and even written language of command as late as 1863. In mixed regiments Germans were often concentrated in a company or two, and even at higher levels, the XI Corps was heavily German and popularly identified as such. But the majority of Germans in blue ended up serving in mixed units, whether by choice or necessity. Blacks had to be satisfied with fighting under white officers; Germans beleaguered the Lincoln administration with demands that positions of command, even generalships, be granted to their compatriots. Although both historians and the popular media have done important ‘‘catch-up’’ work within the last generation in documenting the role of black soldiers, the immigrant soldier—not to mention the interactions between the two groups—has largely escaped notice, if only because much of the evidence is hidden away in foreign-language sources. This anthology is designed to help remedy this deficit. Yet even a brief perusal reveals that the editors have no intention of ‘‘celebrating’’ the German contribution to the Civil War or telling tales of immigrant heroism. Filiopietistic adulation is not our goal, nor is vindication. Rather, it is the intercultural refraction created as immigrants experienced and interpreted the war that fascinates us and led to the publication of these texts. Immigrants brought different values, images, and experiences to bear on the war, which provide a contrast to the perspectives shared by most American letter-writers. They could make different comparisons, often had different motives for volunteering and fighting, and almost always experienced a different set of social relationships in the military. Some adapted quite easily to the war situation, others less...