"Your True Marcus": The Civil War Letters of a Jewish Colonel (review)

book reviews353 "Your True Marcus": The CivilWar Letters of aJewish Colonel. Edited by Frank L. Byrne and Jean P. Soman. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985. Pp. xi, 353. Cloth $22.50; paper $11.95.) Born into a middle-class Jewish family in southwestern Germany, Marcus Spiegel emigrated to the United States in 1849 at age nineteen, driven abroad by economic crisis and the failure of the 1848 revolution, which the liberal youth had supported. During the next twelve years, Spiegel married, fathered three children, and became a well-liked, wellconnected , and very ambitious merchant in a small but growing farm village near Akron, Ohio. (In later years his younger brother launched the Spiegel Catalogue Company. Other relatives joined the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx clothing firm.) With the outbreak of the Civil War, Marcus Spiegel obtained a commission , and during the next two and a half years he commanded Ohio troops in both the eastern and western theatres of war. He recorded these experiences in a steady stream of letters, most of them addressed to his wife, Caroline. The resulting chroniclebegan in December 1861. It was cut short on May 3, 1864, when a Confederate rifle ball struck Colonel Spiegel in the abdomen, killing him the next day. This wartime correspondence has now been carefully edited and extensively annotated by Prof. Frank L. Byrne of Kent State University and Jean Powers Soman, Spiegel's great-great-granddaughter. As always with works of this kind, the editors confronted many and difficult questions about what to include and what to prune, what to explain and what to pass over. And, as always, some of the answers they arrived at can be questioned. Although Byrne and Soman have tried to weed trivia and repetition out of the letters, for example, we still learn more than necessary about Spiegel's problem with boils. Indeed, deleting about a quarter of the present text would have made the volume considerably more engaging without losing anything of transcendant value. A second problem may be related to this too-reverant approach to Spiegel's prose—a tendency in the editorial commentary to stray toward filiopietism . And finally, the treatment of Spiegel's ethnic identity and significance seems somewhat one-sided. The editors have painstakingly researched Spiegel's specifically Jewish identity and background. One misses an equivalent stress on the generalemigration from southwestern Germany or the burgeoning German-American population in which Spiegel and his coreligionists were enmeshed. Greater attention to those themes might have suggested the broader significanceof Spiegel's experience . The collection's unmistakable value, however, overshadows these qualms. Spiegel's letters illuminate a range of important historical subjects . This journal's readers may be most interested in this northern officer 's evolving opinions about the war's central issues—slavery and emancipation. 354CIVIL WAR HISTORY Marcus Spiegel did not don Union blue out of any deep-seated hatred of chattel slavery. In this respect as in others he challenges facile old generalizations about how "the Germans" or even "the Forty-eighters" reacted to the South's peculiar institution. An ardent and active supporter of the War Democrats and their insistence on maintaining "the Union as it was, and the Constitution as it is," Spiegel worshipped Stephen Douglas and George McClellan, despised "Sumner, Wade, Hale, and other Abolitionists," (pp. 114-15) and regretted the Emancipation Proclamation . Like so many others, he took up arms against treason, to defend "the best government in the world and . . . the flag that was ever ready to protect you and me and every one who sought its protection from oppression" (p. 261), while initially insisting that "it is not necessary to fight for the darkies, nor are they worth fighting for" (p. 62). But—as Bell Wiley, James M. McPherson, and the Freedmen and Southern Society Project have demonstrated—the war itself proved a deeply educational and transforming experience for many Union soldiers . As the struggle dragged on and his familiarity with conditions in the deep South increased, Spiegel's views changed. By early 1864 he was writing from Louisiana, "Since I am here I have learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before...