Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home

46. Private Georg Bauer

360 Bauer work for good pay16 [20 ll.: recommends immigrating to Missouri; correspondence ; signature. alwine frick continues: 29 ll.: is pregnant; family; cold winter; greetings]. Although Adolph Frick only served for a short time in the militia, he suffered considerable losses in the Civil War, in particular due to General Sterling Price and his raid: from 1860 to 1870 the total value of Frick’s assets shrank from $6,800 to $3,200. Shortly after the war, he gave up his store, keeping only his position as postmaster , and turned his attention to farming and livestock trading. He seems to have been quite successful and well respected: in 1874 he owned almost 200 acres of land and had become a notary public, and in 1886 he became a justice of the peace. Not surprisingly, Adolph Frick continued to be an ‘‘active Republican’’ for the rest of his life.17 16. For more details on immigrant recruitment and contract labor law, see Schöberl (1990), 39–41, 66–68, 94, 145–51. 17. MC 1870: Franklin Co./Mo., Lyon Twp., #398; MC 1880: Franklin Co./ Mo., Lyon Twp., #11; MC 1900: Franklin Co./Mo., e.d. 32, #10; History of Franklin (1888), 749. Adolph Frick died on April 20, 1906; obituary of April 27, 1906. In 1910 his wife Alwine was living in the home of one of their daughters: MC 1910: Franklin Co./Mo., Boeff Twp., #184. 46. Private Georg Bauer Most of what we know about Georg Bauer, who emigrated from Baden in 1853, we learn from his brother Johann, an assiduous letter-writer who followed him to America the next year. Shortly thereafter, both of them settled on farms near Kirksville in northern Missouri, an area where Germans were a tiny minority and that boasted ‘‘10 Union men to every rebel,’’ according to Johann Bauer in 1867. Before the outbreak of the war, Georg had converted to Methodism, married an American wife, fathered a child, and settled down with his family on a rather substantial farm. Johann Bauer had become a fervent Republican as early as 1856, and his brother Georg presumably had similar political views. Johann was exempt from military source note: This one short letter fragment does not permit a precise and reliable analysis of Bauer’s German writing, but it is fairly certain that his schooling was only elementary.The structure of his extremely long sentences is loose and somewhat chaotic, his vocabulary is limited, his grammar and orthography shaky, though not so bad as to hamper comprehension. His German is slightly colored by his local Baden dialect. English interferes a couple of times (number instead of Nummer), but the writer spells American states correctly and is clearly more familiar with terms like Union army, rebels, or president than with the German equivalents he is struggling to find. Bauer 361 service; he was unmarried, but he had a glass eye; Georg, by contrast, volunteered for the Union infantry on July 15, 1861, despite the fact that he was leaving behind a small child and a pregnant wife.1 [Memphis, end of 1863]2 My dear parents, brothers and sisters and friends [. . .], [probably pp. 5–6 of a longer letter] It is also sometimes the case in our army that a man is a soldier with a wife and children at home and times are hard, but the problem is nothing but foolhardiness.The soldiers in the United States get 13 dollars a month, 42 dollars a year forclothing, enough to eat, paid out almost every 4 months, but before they send the money home to the wife and children to buy food and clothes, they play cards and drink, and in a short time, all the money is boozed up and completely wasted, and the family gets nothing. But thank God, in our free states there are still compassionate people back at home who help poor families, give them food when some foolhardy, shabby father, so to speak, doesn’t send anything to his wife and children, so at least the children, thank God, are taken care of[. . . .] I am still in the same place where I was when I wrote to you the last time, the place here is a town in enemy territory in the state of Tennessee, the name is Memphis, there are about 20,000 soldiers here. It’s been fairly quiet here all summer long, this summer three fortresses were captured from the enemy.There are 34 states in...