August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry, and: Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army, and: Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (review)

Since the 1980s, Civil War historiography has witnessed a renascence of scholarly interest in ethnicity and the ethnic experience. Irish and, to a lesser degree, German American subjects have received analytical attention from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic influenced by the interpretations of the “new” social and military history. For the intrepid American researcher with at least a passable knowledge of German, topics regarding German immigrant soldiers especially offered fertile ground. Stephen Engle’s and Hans Trefousse’s biographies of Franz Sigel (1993) and Carl Schurz (1982, reprint 1998), for example, were excellent additions to the literature, and William Burton provided a decent overview of the German regiments in his well-known Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (1988, reprint 1998). Numerous memoirs, letter compilations, and even a good regimental history also appeared, among them Earl Hess’s A German in the Yankee Fatherland: The Civil War Letters of Henry A. Kircher (1983) and James Pula’s The Sigel Regiment: A History of the 26th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry (1998), contributing valuable bits and pieces to the heretofore poorly explained experience of German immigrants in the Union army.

Academic interest in the Germans has surged since 2000, and if the three works featured here are any indication, the quality of the scholarship has as well. These books offer cogent, well-written, and analytical introductions that place their contents—edited letters or a regimental history—in the context of nineteenth-century German America and the war as a whole. Two of them, Germans in the Civil War and August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen, also include good historiographical analyses of recent works on Germans in the war and venture new ideas about the broader implications of German immigrant involvement in the conflict. Both of these works propose (but do not clinch), for instance, the thesis that the war failed to acculturate the Germans, an idea in contradiction to the prevailing—but poorly documented—conventional wisdom that it served as a great melting pot. The tantalizing glimpses of antiassimilative commentary from men like surgeon Carl Uterhard of the 119th New York make the reader wish that Kamphoefner and Helbich had not so thoroughly edited out certain lines from their carefully collated letters: “I only associate with Germans.—I don’t have much hope of being promoted, since the Americans loathe all the Germans and slight them whenever they can” (161). Indeed, one of the few flaws of this work is the subjective omission of potentially interesting material, which the editors, to their credit, summarize in parentheses throughout the letters.

Kamphoefner and Helbich’s work, first published in Germany in 2002, is an exhaustive compilation of over three hundred letters from seventy-eight different immigrants, soldier and civilian, Union and Confederate. Its great strength is the sheer diversity and magnitude of opinions portrayed by the letter writers, reflecting accurately the diversity of 1860s German America. A comparison with the original German edition reveals an expert translation job by Susan Carter Vogel. Reinhart’s book is comprised of letters written from soldiers in the ethnic 32nd Indiana Infantry that appeared in various Midwestern German-language newspapers from 1861 to 1864. Reinhart’s translations are also excellent, and his commentary about the letters aggregately creates an honest, eye-opening portrait of life in one of the North’s most...