A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stangel, 9th Ohio Infantry (review)

Joseph Reinhart’s well-organized edition of Civil War letters translated from German-language newspapers serves as a reminder to scholars that fresh stories abound even in areas of history that seem most prone to redundancy. Amid the mountains of publications dealing with the Civil War, A German Hurrah! is noteworthy on several levels. For scholars of nineteenth-century immigration and the history of Germans in America, the letters, originally published in Louisville and Cincinnati in 1861 and 1862, offer a rare glimpse into the minds of two German-born Union soldiers. Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stangel were both officers in the 9th Ohio, a regiment made up of Germans closely wedded to their culture. Many soldiers in the 9th were “turners,” republicans whose economic views leaned toward socialism and who brought their ideas to the United States after Europe’s 1848 upheavals. Reinhart’s introduction to Bertsch’s and Stangel’s letters provides necessary biographical information on the two as it traces the background of the turner movement. His treatment of the two men contributes to scholarship dealing with the self-perception of German immigrants in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

Bertsch’s and Stangel’s letters also offer glimpses of the war from well-researched areas to places that usually sit on the periphery of scholarly and popular Civil War publications. Together with Reinhart’s commentary, the letters reveal the importance the Union placed early in the war on keeping control of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad west of the Potomac River as well as in securing western Virginia. As they tramped through snow and rain and huddled in cramped steamers and rail cars in the mountain South and the Ohio River Valley, Bertsch and Stangel penned useful travelogues for students of nineteenth-century America. Their letters provide perspectives on encounters between soldiers and civilians in the highlands of western Maryland and western Virginia, as well as observations of hill-country life at the lower end of the Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee and Alabama. Providing an interesting counterpoint are their accounts of the 9th Ohio’s sojourn through slaveholding Kentucky, Middle Tennessee, and Mississippi in early 1862. Most of Reinhart’s volume is set in the border South, and it approaches must-read status for students of the Civil War in the Alleghenies.

Reinhart does an effective job setting the geographical and chronological context for each set of letters, filling in gaps in time when necessary and pointing out Bertsch’s and Stangel’s factual errors. His chapter divisions are logical and contribute to the book’s smooth flow. Explanatory footnotes provide information on archaic place or town names that may be unfamiliar to the reader.

Bertsch’s and Stangel’s letters reveal their perspectives as Germans and as soldiers. The two are often overt in their expressed pride in their home-land and in their judgments of American culture. They also reveal concerns that their ethnicity prompted discrimination; soldiers in their unit went for months on end without pay and received, in their opinion, too little credit for their actions in American newspapers. Their rationalizations of Union depredations against civilians reflect their strong feelings against secession. Most of all, though, the two men vividly describe experiences common to most Civil War soldiers: the weariness of long marches, the thirst and hunger, the prevalence of dysentery and other illnesses and—particularly in the case of Shiloh—the terrible post-battle scenes of suffering.