German Americans in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  German Americans were called "lop-eared Dutch" by Confederate soldiers and "Dutchmen" by their own Union comrades. They were also the largest ethnic contingent to fight for the Union in the American Civil War.

  More than 200,000 native-born Germans joined the Union Army. Another 250,000 first-generation German Americans followed. Approximately 516,000 Union soldiers, or 23.4% of the entire Union force, were immigrants. About 216,000 of them had been born in Germany.

  New York sent the largest share of those German-born soldiers: 36,000 men. Wisconsin added 30,000, and Ohio contributed 20,000.

  German-American units built a general reputation for discipline across the war. Many of their soldiers had served in European armies before emigrating. That experience set them apart from volunteers who had never drilled before 1861.

  34 men died in Kinney County, Texas, trying to escape Confederate conscription. Their deaths came at the end of a long chain. It began in the failed revolutions of 1848 and ran through the burning streets of St. Louis.

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• 2. The Forty-Eighters

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  "Fight mit Sigel" was both a recruiting slogan and a political reality. Major General Franz Sigel was the highest-ranking German-American officer in the Union Army. His popularity with German immigrants was enormous, and Abraham Lincoln made him a deliberate political appointment. Lincoln hoped Sigel's fame would help deliver the votes of the increasingly important German-American electorate.

  Sigel had been a member of the Forty-Eighters: German revolutionaries who had tried to transform the German states into a liberal democracy. Their effort failed. The failure drove thousands to emigrate to the United States. Among those who came was Carl Schurz, who rose to Major General. Others included August Willich, Louis Blenker, Max Weber, and Alexander Schimmelfennig, all of whom became Civil War officers.

  Schurz was also part of the Turners, a socio-political movement in America that had helped deliver Lincoln's presidential election. The Turners provided Lincoln's personal bodyguard at his inauguration on the 4th of March, 1861. They stood watch again at his funeral in April 1865.

  Scores of entirely German-American regiments formed across the North, each carrying that political conviction into the field.

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• 3. Regiments and Officers

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  The 9th Ohio, the 74th Pennsylvania, and the 32nd Indiana were among the Union regiments composed entirely of German Americans. The 32nd Indiana was officially designated the 1st German. The 52nd New York, the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and the 9th Wisconsin followed the same model. Recruitment for these units ran through German-American population centers: Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee were among the primary sites.

  Col. Leopold von Gilsa, Col. Paul A. Frank, and Col. Friedrich Hecker were among the hundreds of German-born officers who led Union regiments. Alongside them were Col. Gustav Tafel and Maj. Jurgen Wilson. At higher grades, Peter Osterhaus, Edward S. Salomon, Frederick Salomon, August Kautz, and Felix Salm-Salm all reached general officer rank.

  Capt. Hubert Dilger had trained at the Karlsruhe Military Academy in Germany before the war, and he brought that preparation to the Union's artillery arm. He ranked among the finest Union artillerists of the war. George Armstrong Custer, whose family name had originally been Kuester, was not an immigrant himself. He fought Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg and died years later at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

  First Sergeant Frederick Fueger and Chief Bugler Ferdinand F. Rohm were among the dozens of German immigrants who received the Medal of Honor. Others included Sergeant Ernst Torgler, Sergeant George Uhrl, and Civilian Martin Freeman, along with many more whose names appear in the war's formal records.

  Missouri remained officially neutral in 1861, but German-American soldiers were already positioned at the center of its most volatile tensions.

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• 4. Riot in St. Louis

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  On the 9th of May, 1861, Union Captain Nathaniel Lyon walked into Camp Jackson in neutral Missouri disguised as a woman. He had come to investigate the Missouri State Guard's intentions and search for signs of secessionist activity.

  Lyon discovered falsely labeled crates that held siege guns. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had sent them, intended for an assault on the Federal arsenal in St. Louis. The next day, on the 10th of May, Lyon marched a force composed mostly of German volunteers to capture the camp.

  German-American Union soldiers formed two lines to escort the captured militia prisoners through the streets of St. Louis. Many civilians in the city had come from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, and they resented the German soldiers' anti-slavery politics. People hurled fruit, rocks, and paving stones at the column. Shots rang out, killing three militiamen. The German soldiers fired into the crowd of bystanders.

  Federal troops patrolling the city over the following two days shot at least seven more civilians. Angry mobs rioted through St. Louis, burning buildings. The final death toll reached 28.

  The violence in St. Louis clarified which side German Americans were willing to fight for. On the Confederate side of that same conflict, other Germans were finding their own reasons to take up arms.

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• 5. German Confederates

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  Heros von Borcke made his way to the Confederate Army by slipping through the Union naval blockade into Charleston Harbor. He joined the staff of Major General J.E.B. Stuart and became one of Stuart's closest confidants. By the war's end, he served as Stuart's Adjutant and Chief of Staff. Von Borcke returned to Prussia in 1866 to fight in the Austro-Prussian War.

  General John A. Wagener of South Carolina was the only German-born officer to reach general rank in the Confederate Army. Colonel Adolphus Heiman, a Prussian-born veteran of the Mexican-American War, commanded the 10th Tennessee Infantry and later a brigade. Colonel Augustus Buchel, a native of the German state of Hesse, commanded the 1st Texas Cavalry.

  Simon Baruch served three years as a Confederate army surgeon. After the war, he became a leading advocate for hydrotherapy and bath houses in New York City. His son, Bernard Baruch, went on to become a famous presidential adviser.

  Louisiana and Texas held the largest populations of German-born Confederate residents. For some of those Texans, loyalty to the Confederate cause would become impossible to maintain.

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• 6. The Nueces Massacre

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  In the spring of 1862, German Texans living in Central Texas and the Texas Hill Country were ordered into the Confederate Army. Most were Unionist in their politics or had chosen to remain neutral. Confederate authorities read their refusal to serve as open rebellion. They sent in troops.

  On the 10th of August, 1862, Confederate soldiers and German Texan civilians met in a violent confrontation in Kinney County, Texas. 34 German Texans died there, all of them trying to reach Mexico and escape the draft. Those men had sought what many of the Forty-Eighters had found before them: a border to cross when political safety at home had run out.

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