Yankee Dutchmen Under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry ed. by Joseph R. Reinhart (review)

This is the fourth—and best yet—collection of letters and personal accounts from German regimentals in the Civil War translated, edited, and annotated by Joseph R. Reinhard. This has nothing to do with the quality of Reinhart’s work, which has been consistently high, but rather with the character of the regiment and with the type of letters that are available from the unit. The 82nd Illinois Infantry, the state’s second German regiment, was a selfconsciously created ethnic unit raised especially for its colonel, Forty-Eighter Friedrich Hecker, and it continued to serve in his brigade when he was promoted to general. Secondly, the edition presents both letters published in German newspapers—the public face of an ethnic regiment— and more candid and less celebratory, if sometimes idiosyncratic, private letters written by an officer in the unit to Hecker after the latter left the regiment because of illness. Moreover, the unit was part of the Union’s most recognizably German unit, the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Its baptism of fire was Stonewall Jackson’s devastating attack at Chancellorsville, and it saw action all three days at Gettysburg. In September 1863 the 82nd was transferred to the western theater and participated in the battle of Chattanooga and Sherman’s Georgia campaign. The regiment also provides an interesting window into ethnic relations as one company was composed of Scandinavians and another a German Jewish company raised in Chicago.

The book includes a serviceable index and fifteen helpful maps, and is graced by some period photos. Instead of a full bibliography it offers a three page essay with a German accent. The editor presents an extensive and balanced overview of the historiography of the German American experience in the Civil War, particularly in the book’s introduction and epilogue, the former documented with thirteen pages of dense endnotes. The annotations, unfortunately also buried in the endnotes, generally provide an appropriate amount of context and detail on persons, places and events mentioned in the letters, though on a few occasions one might wish for more. One of the more frequent correspondents, Lt. Rudolph Müller, became Hecker’s son-in-law just three months after being mustered out, so it would be interesting to know whether they corresponded with the formal “Sie” or the more intimate “Du.” Since “it was widely known that Colonel Hecker hated Catholics” (8), it appears worth pointing out that Cook County Sheriff Anton/Anthony C. Hesing, who founded Company B of the unit, was Catholic (20, 23, 26). The 26th Wisconsin, mentioned several times in passing, is identified as the “Sigel Regiment” (224) but not as one of William Fox’s “fightingest.” The editor availed himself of a broad range of primary sources, but missed the WPA Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, long available on microfilm and going online with full text search capacity just as this book was completed. Particularly in its latter form, it would have furnished additional context on the regiment and the subsequent fates of its officers, for example that Henry Greenebaum, a leading promoter of the Jewish company and the regiment generally, finished second in a vote to name the most popular German “old settler” at the Old Settlers picnic in 1876.

With respect to inter-ethnic relations, the Scandinavian company gave rise to little or no antagonism except for a brief objection to the appointment of a German as one of its officers. As one of a handful of regiments with a Forty-Eighter rationalist “chaplain” whose first address “was a very liberal speech with the slightest religious reference” (13), one might have expected widespread religious pluralism within the Hecker regiment, but relations with its Jewish company were varied. Its formation was reported extensively and enthusiastically in the Chicago Staatszeitung from which many of the published letters were derived. Not just freethinking Germans...