CHAPTER 27

I Goes to Fight mit Sigel

Mine heart ish proken into little pits,

I tells you, friend, what for;

Mine schweetheart, von coot patriotic kirl,

She trives me off mit der war.

I fights for her, der pattles of the flag.

I schtrikes to prove as I can;

Put now long time she nix remempers me,

And coes mit another man.

Henry Clay Work

Blenker’s German division had been sent west rather than invade the Peninsula with McClellan. Stonewall Jackson was prowling the Shenandoah Valley, menacing Washington, and Blenker was to help General John C. Frémont, the former Republican presidential candidate, remove the threat. Blenker’s division set out March 10, 1862, on “one of the most miserable, ill-timed, and ultimately useless forced marches in the Civil War,” according to historian Christian B. Keller. They slogged through mud, drowned in the swollen Shenandoah River, and clambered over three mountain ranges, sleeping without tents in rain and snow. As food ran out they were reduced to butchering their dogs and tossing empty coffee sacks into boiling water. When Blenker let the men out in foraging parties, they treated the Virginia locals so roughly, looting their homes and pillaging their farms for anything edible, that “to blenker” became slang for “to plunder” or “to pilfer.” Southern papers denounced the “bloodthirsty Dutch,” and some in the North, including the Herald, chastised them as well. By the time the ragged and starving division met up with Frémont two months later, Blenker had lost an appalling two thousand of his ten thousand men to drowning, frostbite, malnutrition, and Rebel bushwhackers.

On June 8, Frémont sent them crashing into Jackson’s forces at Cross Keys. The Garibaldi Guard took heavy losses but held the center of Frémont’s line against repeated Rebel attacks. The battle was disastrous for Blenker’s original regiment, the 8th New York. Somehow they found themselves marching alone across an open field of clover, lined up perfectly, their muskets on their shoulders as though they were crossing a parade ground, when more than a thousand Confederates fired on them from the trees. Almost two hundred of the regiment’s men were cut down in a single thundering volley; the rest broke and ran. “In their very first battle and in one brief moment,” Keller writes, “the 8th New York suffered one of the worst regimental casualty rates of the Civil War.”

For all his earlier showing off, Blenker fought the battle from the rear. In disgrace he yielded to his critics, resigned, and would die a dejected man on a farm in New York’s Rockland County in October 1863.

The two preeminent Forty-Eighters in America, Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz, now joined the division. Sigel, a newly minted major general, assumed Blenker’s command. He was a legend among Forty-Eighters for commanding an army of volunteers in Baden’s failed revolution and successfully leading them on a storied flight into Switzerland afterward. He’d immigrated to New York City in 1852, taught school there, then in 1857 moved out to St. Louis, where he ran the public schools. At the start of the war he joined the Union fight and quickly made brigadier general. In December 1861, feeling he’d been slighted by English-speaking officers—which he most likely had, given the high levels of anti-Dutch prejudice among them—Sigel resigned. Seemingly every German in Kleindeutschland turned out for a pro-Sigel rally at Cooper Union in January 1862. Not wanting to lose German support, Lincoln not only reinstated Sigel but bumped him to major general. This only increased the resentment of him among Anglo officers, especially the West Pointers. Sigel even had a popular song written about him, “I Fights mit Sigel,” also known as “I Goes to Fight mit Sigel”:

I’ve come shust now to tells you how,

I goes mit regimentals,

To schlauch dem voes of Liberty,

Like dem old Continentals,

Vot fights mit England long ago,

To save der Yankee Eagle;

Und now I gets my sojer clothes;

I’m going to fight mit Sigel.

More politician than soldier, Carl Schurz had fled Germany after the unsuccessful revolution and sailed into New York harbor in 1852. He moved on and settled among the large German population in Wisconsin, learning to speak and write excellent English along the way. Toward the end of the decade he joined the Republican Party and stumped for Lincoln. When the war broke out, Schurz was in New York City and recruited the 1st New York Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, nicknamed the Lincoln Cavalry, combining Anglo recruits with companies of German, Hungarian, and Polish New Yorkers. Lincoln rewarded him by making him ambassador to Spain, and the regiment went to war without him. Reading about the furor over Sigel’s resignation the following winter, Schurz begged Lincoln to bring him home and let him fight. Lincoln did, and made him a brigadier general. The Germans of the division were ecstatic to have men they considered real heroes leading them now rather than the opéra bouffe Blenker. Despite the mocking stereotype, they adopted “I fights mit Sigel” as their motto.

The German troops rejoined the army in the east, which was now under General Pope. Sigel took command of the largely German First Corps, with Schurz leading one of its three divisions. All through August 1862, Pope skirmished and maneuvered around the Rappahannock River with Lee and Jackson, who’d escaped Frémont’s grasp. They finally clashed at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). Lee sent Jackson around behind Pope to cut his lines of supply. On August 29, Pope detailed Sigel’s First Corps to root out Jackson’s well-entrenched forces. The fighting was vicious, and the Germans might have broken Jackson’s line had Philip Kearny shown up with his division to assist as ordered. He did not. Kearny was one of the Anglo officers who resented Sigel, and historians believe he simply ignored his orders and let the Dutch be mauled. Alfred Waud was on hand to draw the Germans scattering in full retreat.

Kearny might have faced a court of inquiry, but his actions three days later rendered that unnecessary. The morning of September 1, in fog and rain, he found some soldiers cowering behind a fence at the edge of a cornfield. When he tried to spur them on, they told him there were Rebels hiding in the fog out there. He flew into “an ungovernable rage” and charged out into the field to prove it was safe. Rebels surrounded him and shot him dead. Lee, who had admired Kearny since Mexico, had his body carried over to the Union side. The whole North—except in German communities—mourned for the man the Times called “the best general in the army.” He was interred in the family crypt in Trinity churchyard, and moved to Arlington National Cemetery in 1912. The township around Bellegrove named itself Kearny, New Jersey, in 1867.

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Michael Corcoran was back in New York City to mourn for Kearny. For thirteen months, as he’d been shifted from one prison to another, his legend had grown in the North. The Times printed his letters home, balladeers like Tony Pastor wrote odes to his courage, and the entire Union kept track as he was threatened with hanging, stricken with typhoid, and caught in an escape attempt. Finally released in an exchange of officers in August 1862, Corcoran went first to Washington, where he dined with Lincoln, who promoted him to brigadier general, and a large crowd greeted him with “an outburst of irrepressible and vociferous enthusiasm,” the Times said.

When he reached New York a few days later, normal business was suspended and a crowd the Times estimated at one hundred thousand massed in the streets to cheer him. In an editorial headlined “Corcoran, the Patriot,” Raymond thought he saw an important turning point in the relations of the city’s Irish and nativist populations. “If any class of our population who yesterday so grandly received and honored Col. [sic] Corcoran had a special appreciation of the occasion, we hold that it was the native-born Americans. And the reason is this; that Col. Corcoran, in all his military career, marked as it has been by vicissitudes unequaled in the war, has on all occasions exhibited a devotion to the American Government and to republican principles that proves him a patriot of faultless intelligence and perfect mold.… Never were nationalities more entirely forgotten than in New-York’s reception of Col. Corcoran.” It was the peak of Corcoran’s fame. Soon enough he would sully his dazzling image.

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That September, D’Utassy and the Garibaldi Guard were attached to the Federal garrison guarding the Harpers Ferry armory. Flush with victory after Second Bull Run, Lee sent Stonewall Jackson to encircle and take the armory. D’Utassy got to command not only the Garibaldis but a whole brigade. As Jackson laid siege, brutally shelling the garrison from the surrounding hills, D’Utassy and his men distinguished themselves for their tenacious and sometimes reckless courage. With hope fading and ammunition low, the commander of the garrison, a Colonel Miles, ran up the white flag. D’Utassy was outraged and begged leave to lead his men on a breakout charge through the enemy lines. Miles denied him. Civil War historians tend to agree with D’Utassy that Miles gave up too soon and might have faced a court-martial had not one of the last Confederate shells fired at the garrison landed on him. Released in a prisoner exchange, D’Utassy and the Guards were back in the Washington area by November.

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