Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Prior to 1990 the principal English-language sources of information about Germans in the Civil War were Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940); Lonn, Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); and William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988). Fordham University Press published a second edition in 1998. In 1999 a translated and edited edition of Wilhelm Kaufmann’s Deutschen im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, originally published in Munich in 1911, was published under the title The Germans in the American Civil War: With a Biographical Directory (Carlisle, Pa.: John Kallmann, 1999). Lonn, Burton, and Kaufmann must be used with caution because they are outdated, filiopietistic, tend to use ethnic stereotypes, or rely mainly on other secondary sources. As Christian B. Keller and David L. Valuska point out: “Both Lonn and Burton fail to treat Civil War-era Germans as that disunified, multifaceted conglomeration of people they were; they tend to view Germans largely as a bloc and play down the differences among them. This approach is . . . inaccurate.” Lonn and Burton also maintain that the Civil War served to Americanize its German participants without providing supporting evidence. Burton also incorrectly concluded that there was little difference between the Germans in blue and their Anglo-American comrades and that German regiments lost their ethnic character as the war progressed. Despite their faults these studies do contain much useful information. Christian B. Keller and David L. Valuska, Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2004), xiv, 205 n. 3. For further criticism of Kaufmann’s and Lonn’s books, see the introduction to Joseph R. Reinhart, ed. and trans., Two Germans in the Civil War: The Diary of John Daeuble and the Letters of Gottfried Rentschler, 6th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), xx–xxii; Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 110. For further information on Germans and German-born soldiers in the Civil War era, nativism, ethnicity, and postwar memory, see Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Wolfgang Helbich, “German-born Union Soldiers: Motivation, Ethnicity, and ‘Americanization,’” in German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, eds. Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich (Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of 203 Wisconsin–Madison, 2004), 296–325; Martin W. Öfele, German-Speaking Officers in the U.S. Colored Troops, 1863–1867 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), and True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008). Histories of German regiments include Donald Allendorf, Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army, The 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006); James S. Pula, The Sigel Regiment: The Twentysixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, 1862–1865 (Campbell, Calif.: Savas Publishing Company, 1998); and Constantin Grebner, “We Were the Ninth”: A History of the Ninth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, April 17, 1861 to June 7, 1864, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987). Regarding German-born generals, see Stephen D. Engle, Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Stephen D. Engle, “A Raised Consciousness: Franz Sigel and German Ethnic Identity in the Civil War,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 34 (1999): 1–17; Earl J. Hess, “Sigel’s Resignation: A Study in German Americans and the Civil War,” Civil War History 26 (1980): 5–17; Mary Bobbitt Townsend, Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Maj. Gen. Peter J. Osterhaus (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010); Earl J. Hess, “Osterhaus in Missouri: A Study in German-American Loyalty,” Missouri Historical Review, 78, no. 2 (Jan. 1984): 144–67; Lawrence G. Kautz, August Valentine Kautz: Biography of a Civil War General (Jackson , N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2008); and Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (1982, reprint; New York: Fordham University Press, 1998). Recommended essays and journal articles also include Walter D. Kamphoefner, “German-Americans and Civil War Politics: A Reconsideration of the Ethnocultural Thesis” in Civil War History 37, no. 3 (1991): 232–46; Eric Benjaminson, “A Regiment of Immigrants: The 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry and the Letters of Captain Rudolph Müller,” in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94, no. 2 (2001): 137–80; Marc Dluger, “The 82nd Illinois Volunteer Regiment...