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Chapter 5 The Atlanta Campaign and the March to the Sea As s o o n as Brig. Gen. Peter Joseph Osterhaus had ordered a salute fired to the new year of 1864, he left Camp Proclamation on a well-deserved month’s leave. He was headed not to St. Louis to see his motherless and scattered five children, at least not right away, but to New York City and Washington , D.C. On December 28 he had received word from Germany that his plea for help had been heard: his late wife Matilda’s younger sister, Emma Amalia Born, had agreed to come immediately to run his household for him while he was away at war. Amalie was three years younger than her late sister but as yet unmarried, so she was able to leave Kreuznach on a moment’s notice. Osterhaus had no time to lose if he was to meet her steamer, due to arrive in New York on January 8.1 Osterhaus had had a warm sendoff from Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who planned to write his friend in Washington, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, commending Osterhaus as “a glorious soldier” and urging his appointment to major general of volunteers. This was the third time that Osterhaus had been proposed for this appointment; the previous two came after the Vicksburg campaign. With Hooker’s additional endorsement, perhaps Osterhaus could finally pry the second star loose from Washington. If so, he would be in rarefied company. There were only eleven major generals in the Regular Army and just over a hundred in the Volunteers. Up to this point, of the two hundred thousand Germans fighting in the war only two German-born adult immigrants had achieved the grade of major general: Osterhaus’s fellow exiles Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz, both appointed to the Union high command for political reasons despite their lackluster performances in the field. Since Schurz’s appointment in March 1863, no other German American had achieved that rank. Osterhaus decided to take advantage of his brief trip to New York to swing by Washington on his way home to see if he could further his cause.2 145 146 Yankee Warhorse Carl Schurz was in New York at the time, so Osterhaus naturally turned to his old acquaintance for practical advice. After emigrating to the United States in 1852, Schurz had risen rapidly through midwestern politics to become President Lincoln’s valued spokesman for the German vote. He had already petitioned Lincoln in 1862 to appoint Osterhaus brigadier general; now two years further into the war this most political of generals would surely know which contacts would be most fruitful for Osterhaus to pursue in Washington. Osterhaus got in touch with Schurz and made arrangements to meet for dinner.3 What he learned was not encouraging: finding meaningful Washington patronage was going to be more difficult than he had hoped. Since the beginning of this war, both West Point–trained candidates and political aspirants had relied to a large extent on influential voices in the capital to help convince Lincoln to nominate them to generalships, although in the end Lincoln made the final decision. In this critical election year, Lincoln continued to weigh each hopeful’s influence on potential votes as well as his performance in the field, but the president had lately been more inclined to defer to his military leaders’ preferences now that he finally had what looked like a winning commander in Grant.4 Making the situation more complex was the growing polarization between the “professional” officers of West Point and the political appointees with no military training. The Regular Army men, led by Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, strongly preferred not to see politicians or other amateurs promoted to the highest echelons of command. Lincoln had to balance keeping his top West Pointers happy, on the one hand, with being able to capitalize on the unique nonmilitary contributions of his political generals, on the other. Osterhaus, of course, was not strictly in either category: he had little direct political influence other than his ethnicity, and his professional military training had not been at West Point, thus making him an outsider to academy graduates. All he really had in his favor were a few influential friends and his excellent performance in the field.5 Armed with advice from Schurz, on January 16 Osterhaus left Amalie in Philadelphia in the care of old friends while he made a brief trip...

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