August Willich's Gallant Dutchman: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry, and:"Behind Bayonets": The Civil War in Northern Ohio (review)

Scholars continue to puzzle over the motivations of the millions of Civil War soldiers who volunteered for service. Some stress political ideology, some emphasize unit cohesion at the regimental level, and still others observe how the war transformed a quest for personal courage to a quest for mere survival. With August Willich's Gallant Dutchmen, Joseph R. Reinhart offers a valuable collection of translated newspaper accounts of Indiana's 32d regiment, a unit comprised almost entirely of German immigrants, revealing the ways in which ethnicity informed military service in their adopted homeland. As is often the case, these primary sources complicate historians' best efforts to establish neat compartments of analysis, but they strikingly illustrate how this regiment's German identity supercharged their sense of regimental pride.

Reinhart nicely profiles the ranks of the 32d Indiana in his Introduction, showing how some men originated from the ranks of "Forty-eighters," socialists, communists, and free-thinkers while others originated from the Indianapolis Turnerverein, local German organizations dedicated to physical and mental fitness. But the men shared many values and experiences: a strong dislike for slavery, a passion for republican forms of government, and routine discrimination in the United States during the height of the nativist movement in the 1850s. August Willich symbolized the skill and ethnic pride of the regiment that he led into battle. Willich, a Prussian trained at the Royal Military Academy in Berlin, lobbied for the German revolution and the rights of workingmen. His call for German volunteers proclaimed that military service would prove that Germans "are not foreigners, and that they know how to protect their new republican homeland against the aristocracy of the South" (23).

Whether assessing organization, drill, engineering, or combat, the published correspondence typically offers flattering evaluations of the 32d at the expense of the native-born Union regiments. When called on to construct a pontoon bridge across Kentucky's Barren River, one correspondent for the Cincinnati Volksfreund, remarked, "50 of the Dutchmen completed a job in 2 hours that many regiments could not finish in 2 days. Later . . . they followed our example" (67). At times, the German-language correspondents use their platforms to critique the Union's top brass—no less than Generals U. S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman at Shiloh—but also to critique what they viewed as a fawning northern press too eager to congratulate these commanders.

Although ethnic pride never diminished as the 32d Indiana engaged in small battles such as Rowlett's Station, Kentucky, and major battles such as Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, the correspondence also offers valuable glimpses of a war-ravaged South. The correspondents denigrate the Confederates as the "Rebel horde" and note seeming exhaustion among Confederate combatants and civilians. However, they worry that Confederates would treat them especially harshly if captured, note frequent activity by Confederate guerrillas, and believe that "secessionist women are the most rabid" (142). But, ultimately, the correspondence reveals that men in the unit ascribed nearly every irritant of service—late pay, insufficient weaponry, garrison duty, and slights in promotion—to ethnic bias within the military, particularly in the first two years of the conflict. By 1863, the 32d continued to fight valiantly, but the correspondents wrote in more general terms of the hardships endured by Union troops. Willich and the regiment ultimately headed in opposite directions over the war's course. While Willich ascended the ranks from colonel to brigadier general, his prized regiment had sacrificed 171 men in combat and another ninety-one dead from noncombat causes. That toll, combined with unending disease, inadequate provisions, and hard marching, so sapped...