General after Union general appeared before the stern-faced and forthright politicians comprising the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and nervously took their seat, not knowing if they would suddenly find their careers at an end. These were some of the most important men in the Federal army: Sickles, Pleasonton, Birney, Warren, Hancock, Butterfield, Devens—even Joseph Hooker himself. Led by Republican Senators Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, the Committee was bent on finding a scapegoat for the miscarried Chancellorsville campaign of the past spring.Someonehad to officially take the fall...

The most significant reason Chancellorsville later became so important for German Americans had to do with a pre–Civil War sociopolitical movement called the “Know Nothing” or “American” Party. This nativistic, anti-immigrant group of Anglo Americans strove to curtail immigrant voting rights, attacked immigrant religion and culture—especially German and Irish beer, whiskey, and Catholicism—blamed those groups for fomenting crime, and urged quick assimilation of immigrant communities into the mainstream of American life. Although the Know Nothings were themselves a party created mainly out of irrational xenophobia, they represented a powerful and deep-set impulse within American society that inherently...

Although Civil War soldiers everywhere collectively shared many things—the drudgery of drill, sickness, hunger, the terror of battle, and a yearning for loved ones at home—ethnicity undoubtedly influenced the experiences of German American soldiers in the eastern ethnic regiments and inspired in them different reactions and experiences from their Anglo American comrades. Recruited into regiments that boasted memberships entirely or mainly German, performing daily tasks among German comrades, and routinely hearing and speaking the German language, these soldiers could not escape the fact that they were different. Some relished their ethnicity and used it as a means to...

In the months prior to Major General Joseph Hooker’s spring campaign of 1863, the veteran German American regiments of the newly formed Eleventh Corps moved from their encampments at Fairfax to winter quarters at Stafford Court House, north of Fredericksburg. Arriving at the scene of battle too late to have taken part in Ambrose Burnside’s calamitous frontal assaults at Marye’s Heights in early December, the men in the New York and Pennsylvania regiments nonetheless participated in the ill-conceived and frustrating “mud march” that occurred afterward. Although letters home from this period were filled with complaints about the weather and bungling...

Just as the German soldiers in the Eleventh Corps began to recover from the shock of their losses and attempted to reorganize their shattered regiments in the days after the battle, they were attacked again, this time by their own comrades in the Army of the Potomac. Non-Germans in the Eleventh Corps itself railed against the “damn Dutch,” but because of their own experiences in the battle and proximity to the Germans many of their vituperations were either qualified or muted. The most vocal denunciations emanated from soldiers of other corps, especially the Third and Twelfth, which had to be...

Three realizations quickly dawned on the German Americans of the Eleventh Corps even before the battle of Chancellorsville had concluded. The first was disbelief at what had just befallen them. For a day or two most soldiers still suffered from a state of shock, unsure just how they, as a corps, had been overwhelmed, and how as individuals they had escaped becoming killed or wounded. The second, also an entirely human reaction, they shared with soldiers of every time and place: sadness. Many of their comrades had fallen and would be sorely missed by friends, brothers, and relatives. Normally, this...

The aftermath of Chancellorsville confirmed for most northern Germans that the hated nativism of the 1850s had returned. In the last two years of the war, the residue of the battle lingered long, especially among German soldiers and civilians from the eastern states. The Eleventh Corps was split up in the fall of 1863, one division headed for the sea islands of South Carolina and the other two, along with the Twelfth Corps, sent west to relieve the Confederate siege of Chattanooga. Despite a good fighting record and participation in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, the legacy...

In the November 1883 issue of theDeutsche Pionier, a Cincinnati-based historical, news, and literary journal for German Americans, an article appeared entitled, “The Assimilation of the Germans.” Its main theme questioned the need for Germans to quickly Americanize. About half-way through, the author, “J. G.,” included these thoughts:

We fought in the war of the rebellion on your side; our part of the population sent a full delegation to the ranks of the Union army, and we fought bravely together. We mourn together and take pride together when we honor the dead, who fell in defense of us both,...