Richards-Wilson, Stephani

English

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteCollege of Arts and Sciences Leadership Researchand Publications Provost, Office of7-1-2009Review of "Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of aGerman Regiment in the Yankee Army - the 15thMissouri Volunteer Infantry," by Donald AllendorfStephani Richards-WilsonMarquette UniversityPublished version. H-German, H-Net Reviews, July 2009. URL: http://h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=25017The published work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works 3.0 United States License.Donald Allendorf. Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army–the15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006. xxvii + 342 pp. $39.00 (cloth),ISBN 978-0-87338-871-9.Reviewed by Stephani Richards-Wilson (Marquette University)Published on H-German (July, 2009)Commissioned by Susan R. BoettcherGermans in the War of the WestThe American Civil War continues to intriguescholars and history buffs alike, and many works havebeen written about the battles, military leaders, andtroops in both North and South. This book, how-ever, deals with the war in a lesser-known arena.Long Road to Liberty makes a welcome contributionto Civil War historiography and German Americanstudies for several reasons. What sets this mono-graph apart is its exploration of a neglected groupand a forgotten front: German immigrant soldiersserving in Union armies in the western theater, wheremany saw frequent, direct, and intense combat. Don-ald Allendorf does an outstanding job of bringingtheir service and sacrifice to life, and exploits vari-ous sources, including letters, diaries, service records,regimental files, state and federal archives, Germanperiod newspapers, and secondary literature, to shedlight on their motivations, mindset, and courage.The book is well organized, in twenty-three shortchapters, and progresses chronologically from 1861to 1865. Maps, black and white photographs, andillustrations add perspective and geographical orien-tation. Personal details about the German immigrantsoldiers and their backgrounds, professions, and cul-tural differences in comparison to native-born Unionand Confederate soldiers allow the reader to appre-ciate the difficulties and challenges Germans encoun-tered on both the home front and battlefield duringthe conflict.The regiment Allendorf chose to focus on is note-worthy in itself as the 820-man 15th Missouri Vol-unteer Infantry, which consisted initially of primar-ily German immigrants (close to 75 percent) andhailed from a state with fiercely divided loyalties.St. Louis’s large German population supported theUnion, but the native-born minority sympathizedwith the South. Also noteworthy is that comparedto native-born soldiers, German-born veterans fromMissouri wrote very little about their motives or bat-tlefield experiences afterwards. Despite a lack ofabundant primary source material, Allendorf is ableto piece together their story by mining state and mili-tary archives and the only known firsthand account ofthe 15th Missouri, written by Maurice Marcoot, a vet-eran of this Union regiment. Allendorf’s research isaugmented by his ability to skillfully describe the ebband flow nature of the several major battles that theregiment experienced. The author’s descriptions ofevents at Stones River, Missionary Ridge, and SpringHill and Franklin, in particular, bring both the horrorand heroism into vivid focus.German immigrant soldiers made up approxi-mately 10 percent of the Union army and a largerpart of the armies that served in the western theater.They tended to be older and better educated thanthe working-class, native-born soldiers and saw indi-vidual rights and freedom as the crux of the conflict.Familiar with discrimination and tyranny from theirGerman homeland, German immigrants volunteeredin large numbers at the outbreak of the war in supportof the Union Army and its cause. They did not waitto be drafted and took a strong stance against slav-ery for both social and economic reasons. Allendorfis quick to point out that in fact, German immigrantsbroke up the last public sale of slaves in St. Louis.Yet, he observes that they wanted to end slavery forpragmatic reasons as well. Slavery kept wages lowfor immigrants. Many German immigrants thoughtthat if they could gain a better income, they couldachieve the same social status as other white Amer-icans. To start, the army offered regular pay and ahundred-dollar bonus, just for signing up.1H-Net ReviewsPrior to the war, Missouri’s German immigrantsarrived in waves, but they all shared a desire to makea better life in the New World in America. Referredto as“the Dutch”by native Missourians, two waves ofwell-educated Germans came for religious reasons inthe 1830s. Another wave arrived around 1850, afterthe failed democratic revolution of 1848 in the Ger-man states, and included professionals such as jour-nalists, teachers, and lawyers. Still another wave,mainly comprised of tradesmen and farmers, immi-grated for economic reasons and arrived during thedecade leading up to the Civil War. Members of allof these groups hoped to gain improved personal lib-erties. Those that joined the 15th Missouri VolunteerInfantry served almost five years, spoke little to noEnglish, and fought Confederate troops in Missouri,Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia.The 15th Missouri was one of thirty-nine infantryregiments from that state that fought for the Union.They were also one of the first to go to war, servedthe longest, and endured the highest percentage ofbattlefield mortality of all the Union regiments fromMissouri. Poor leadership, communications, medi-cal care, and battlefield provisioning make it a won-der that the regiment performed as well as it did inthe dozen or so major battles in which its membersfought. Soldier families in St. Louis did not fare muchbetter than the troops, given that they had little in-come with their men away at war.Allendorf describes the physical wartime hardshipand carnage endured by the German regiments atthe hands of the enemy, but also the psychologicalchallenges, hostility, and ethnic slurs they sufferedat the hands of their Union comrades and Southernsympathizers. Nativism was pervasive at the timeand racism was applied to both blacks and membersof certain national groups, making serving alongsidenative-born Americans difficult because bias, discrim-ination, or favoritism often entered into military af-fairs. Different religious beliefs, political convictions,and drinking habits, as well as a foreign tongue, apropensity for military drilling, and the perceivedrigid discipline of German officers did not endearthem to the other infantry units. Allendorf notes thatby the end of the war, Germans still made up approx-imately 10 percent of the Union army, but comprisedless than 5 percent of the ranks of brigadier generalor higher.In summary, Long Road to Liberty is an impor-tant contribution to Civil War scholarship because itunderscores the diversity of Union troops, the signifi-cance of the western theater in winning the war, andthe complexity of the conflict from the perspective ofGerman immigrant soldiers who had recently arrivedin America in hopes making better lives. This bookwill be of interest to historians and general readersalike; however, scholars in German American studiesare mostly likely to appreciate Allendorf’s nuancedresearch and diligent defense of “the Dutch.” Read-ers who speak German will find the occasional mis-spelled German word a minor irritant, but the workin general is a valuable resource in illuminating thenineteenth-century German immigrant experience inthe American Civil War. For readers interested inthe actual fighting, additional battlefield maps, ter-rain drawings, and historical illustrations of the phys-ical battle areas would have been helpful to expandtheir awareness of the courage and sacrifice that Al-lendorf’s narrative so effectively documents.If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.Citation: Stephani Richards-Wilson. Review of Allendorf, Donald, Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey ofa German Regiment in the Yankee Army–the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry. H-German, H-Net Reviews.July, 2009.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25017This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.2

Review of  Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army - the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry,  by Donald Allendorf

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Review of Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army - the 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, by Donald Allendorf

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