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Buschmann 339 in the 49th Missouri Infantry, but Schorse turned this down. In the mental hospital his condition was diagnosed as ‘‘chronic mania’’ caused by ‘‘intemperance’’; no physical symptoms were noted. There is also no mention of his injury in his military record. This much is clear: the inexperienced troops of the 61st Illinois Infantry were in the front line when the surprise Confederate attack began on the first morning of the battle of Shiloh. They held the line for an hour and a quarter and were the last regiment to withdraw. The commanders of Schorse’s division and brigade were both taken prisoner, along with one of the three colonels in his brigade; a second one was wounded.10 In 1884 Schorse filed an appeal to have the negative decision about his pension reviewed; that is the last sign of life we have. Nothing indicates he ever received a war pension. In the 1890s these applications began to be treated more generously, but Franz Schorse was probably dead by then.11 10. Letter from Schorse to Louis Benecke, August 15, 1882, Benecke Family Papers,WHMC; Pension File, NatA; Report of the Adjutant General of Illinois, 4:241–43; Johnson and Buel (1987), 1:502–3, 538; Hicken (1991), 56–57, 65–66. The Rochester State Hospital Case Books note explicitly , ‘‘Accompanying bodily disorder, none.’’ 11. Schorse does not appear in MC MN 1885, Winona Co., where his brother-in-law Otto Sontag and family are listed; he also does not appear in the 1890 Veterans Census for Minnesota. 43. Bernhard Buschmann Bernhard Buschmann was not particularly interested in the Union cause for three reasons: he had arrived in the United States only a short time before the war, he was Catholic, and he had settled in a rural area, outside the influence of the big cities and their more liberal press. Buschmann, born in 1838, came from a mediumsized but heavily indebted farm in Ostbevern, in the ultra-Catholic Münsterland of Westphalia. Although he was supposed to inherit the family farm, in 1861 he left for America in secret, to avoid the impending threat of being drafted into the Prussian army.1 He settled in southeast Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River, and took up a familiar life as a farmhand. source note: Judging from his writing, Buschmann picked up quite a bit of arithmetic, but he did not learn much about language at school. His sentences are endless, and his spelling follows no recognizable rules; however, his descriptions are lively and sometimes quite witty. Not included here is one letter in the series from the time after 1865 and two undated letters. 1. Information provided by the donor. The farm consisted of about thirty-five acres, but it had a mortgage of 1,500 talers.* 340 Buschmann [Burlington, October 28, 1863] Dear mother, sister and brother-in-law, More than two years have passed now since I last saw you and spoke to you [10 ll.: correspondence; family; weather]. The wheat turned out well, and everything is very expensive, also clothing is almost twice as expensive as it used to be, but that’s because of the war, and no one knows how long it will last. The war makes everything expensive, but it also makes land cheap, now I could get a nice Bauerrei, Fahrm, for eight hundred dollars that otherwise wouldn’t sell for less than thirteen to fourteen hundred dollars. Fine soil and fine meadows and fine pastures and fine timber. A lot of people herewho know their way around are advising me to do this, and if I had all my money here I could pay for it directly, because if you sent it to me, I would get it paid out in gold, and then I could have it exchanged into paper money, and then for one dollar I’d get one and a half, and you can pay in paper money just as well as with gold.2 I won’t be getting married until I am twenty-eight or thirty, but I may never get the chance again to buy something for that price, and I’ll have to find a home here anyway since you can’t hire out when you’re old here, the farmers pay very good money, and so they like to get a lot of work in return [29 ll.: wants his settlement; is healthy; advice on emigration; greetings; signature; date]. You write...

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