Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus (review)

Mary Bobbitt Townsend’s Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus appropriately arrives following a recent call by Gary Gallagher for modern scholarly biographies of Union commanders not named Grant or Sherman. In this first full-length study of Osterhaus’s life, Townsend highlights the largely overlooked accomplishments of a general who played key roles in the Civil War’s western campaigns. Born in Rhine Province, Prussia, in 1815, Osterhaus commanded troops in Baden during the failed 1848 nationalist revolt against the Prussian confederation before fleeing to the United States. He settled in heavily German-populated St. Louis in 1860, just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War.

Like many German American Missourians, Osterhaus was a staunch unionist and opposed slavery. During the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns of 1861–62, he relied on his European military training; despite this, Townsend notes, historians have largely ignored Osterhaus’s contributions. He distinguished himself early at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, demonstrating an effective employment of batteries that served him well throughout the war. In 1863, Osterhaus’s Ninth Division led the Union advance down the Mississippi River’s west bank during the Vicksburg campaign. Townsend credits Osterhaus with planning at Chattanooga Joseph Hooker’s successful assault on Lookout Mountain. In 1864, Osterhaus led the Fifteenth Corps, more than a fourth of the army, in Sherman’s March to the Sea. In his last wartime assignment, he helped the inexperienced Edmund Canby plan the successful assault on Mobile Bay, the last Union charge of the war. After the war, Osterhaus briefly served as military commander of the District of Mississippi, where his ardent unionism and preference for discipline did not endear him to the state’s unrepentant Confederates. In 1867, he took a job as U.S. consul to Lyon, France. He spent his remaining years in his native Germany where, ironically, he lived long enough to see the coming German-American conflict in the Great War.

For source material, Townsend relies on Osterhaus’s memoirs of his wartime experiences, reports from the Official Records of the War, and the accounts of civilians and soldiers who knew and fought alongside Osterhaus. Her portrait of the general is one of a patriot devoted to discipline and military duty and who avoided the bickering that often hampered the Union’s high-ranking officers. Townsend makes clear that nearly all the men who served alongside Osterhaus held him in highest regard and recognized his contributions to the Union’s western victories. Her prose is clear and readable, and her accounts of some of the war’s major battles are never dull. That said, the book could have better placed Osterhaus’s experience within the broader context of foreign-born soldiers during the war. As historian Anne Bailey notes, more Germans fought for the Union, some fought for the Confederacy, and even more remained neutral. How did their experiences contrast with Osterhaus’s? Can any solid conclusion be drawn about the nature of German American loyalties during the war? Osterhaus immigrated as part of the wave of Forty-Eighters who fled Germany after the failed revolution, and this group’s unionism can in part be linked to its desire for a united German republic. Townsend does not ignore this issue, but her analysis is mostly limited to Missouri. Placing Osterhaus’s experience in the greater context of German American experiences would have strengthened the book’s social angle. As is, however, her study is a readable and welcome scholarly addition to the canon of Civil War biographies and reminds historians that the Union armies included more than just Grant and Sherman.