A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army

by Brian Matthew Jordan

Overview

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a pathbreaking history of the Civil War centered on a regiment of immigrants and their brutal experience of the conflict.

The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, yet our nation remains fiercely divided over its enduring legacies. In A Thousand May Fall, Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan returns us to the war itself, bringing us closer than perhaps any prior historian to the chaos of battle and the trials of military life. Creating an intimate, absorbing chronicle from the ordinary soldier’s perspective, he allows us to see the Civil War anew—and through unexpected eyes.

At the heart of Jordan’s vital account is the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which was at once representative and exceptional. Its ranks weathered the human ordeal of war in painstakingly routine ways, fighting in two defining battles, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, each time in the thick of the killing. But the men of the 107th were not lauded as heroes for their bravery and their suffering. Most of them were ethnic Germans, set apart by language and identity, and their loyalties were regularly questioned by a nativist Northern press. We so often assume that the Civil War was a uniquely American conflict, yet Jordan emphasizes the forgotten contributions made by immigrants to the Union cause. An incredible one quarter of the Union army was foreign born, he shows, with 200,000 native Germans alone fighting to save their adopted homeland and prove their patriotism.

In the course of its service, the 107th Ohio was decimated five times over, and although one of its members earned the Medal of Honor for his daring performance in a skirmish in South Carolina, few others achieved any lasting distinction. Reclaiming these men for posterity, Jordan reveals that even as they endured the horrible extremes of war, the Ohioans contemplated the deeper meanings of the conflict at every turn—from personal questions of citizenship and belonging to the overriding matter of slavery and emancipation.

Based on prodigious new research, including diaries, letters, and unpublished memoirs, A Thousand May Fall is a pioneering, revelatory history that restores the common man and the immigrant striver to the center of the Civil War. In our age of fractured politics and emboldened nativism, Jordan forces us to confront the wrenching human realities, and often-forgotten stakes, of the bloodiest episode in our nation’s history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495144
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/26/2021
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,127,811
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Brian Matthew Jordan is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. He lives in Willis, Texas.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Chapter 1 "We Feel It Our Duty" 21

August and September 1862

Chapter 2 "To Crush Out the … Ungodly Rebellion" 43

October to December 1862

Chapter 3 "Stop All Firing in the Rear of Us" 61

January to April 1863

Chapter 4 "Completely and Scientifically Flanked" 78

April to May 1863

Chapter 5 "Heaping Upon Us … Ignominy and Shame" 105

May to July 1863

Chapter 6 "All That Mortal[s] Could Do" 128

July to August 1863

Chapter 7 "We Are Not Cowards" 152

August 1863 to February 1864

Chapter 8 "So Many Hardships" 172

February 1864 to July 1865

Chapter 9 "The Feelings of a Soldier" 203

July 1865 and Beyond

Epilogue 217

Acknowledgments 243

Bibliographic Note 249

Notes 253

Bibliography 317

Index 343

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/23/2020

Historian Jordan (Marching Home) delivers a captivating chronicle of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during and after the Civil War. Composed mainly of German immigrants living in Ohio, the 107th was the target of Stonewall Jackson’s furious attack at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. Two months later, the 107th was “thrashed” at the Battle of Gettysburg. For these two disastrous encounters, the regiment was vilified by the northern press. Jordan portrays Ohio as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment; details how one private in the 107th won the Medal of Honor; and recounts the lengths veterans went to in order to secure pensions and medical benefits for themselves and their loved ones. Annual reunions brought emotional relief to the 107th’s survivors, Jordan writes, and produced two regimental histories that served to fend off criticism of the Union Army’s ethnically German soldiers in the years after the war. Jordan profiles his characters with precision, revealing the deep emotional and physical scars they carried back from the conflict. This meticulous and engrossing history brings the Civil War to vivid life. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Like many other regiments in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the 107th Ohio was composed mostly of German-Americans and shared the Corps’ unhappy role as scapegoat for the army’s defeat at Chancellorsville and the first day at Gettysburg. This stigma shaped much of the regiment’s experience, which was otherwise typical of Civil War soldiering. In this splendid regimental history, Brian Matthew Jordan gives color and texture to that hard-knock experience."

James M. McPherson James M. McPherson

"Jordan has constructed a humanistic history of how ordinary men became soldiers under extraordinary circumstances none could have foreseen . . . In giving the men of the 107th their hard-earned place in history, Jordan has set a high bar for future historians to meet and a template for exceptional historians to follow."

Civil War Times - Gordon Berg

"Prodigiously researched and elegantly crafted, Brian Matthew Jordan’s A Thousand May Fall chronicles the lives of the men of the 107th Ohio, a regiment roughly seventy percent foreign-born. Unlike many midwestern units that fought for abolition as much as reunion, the ‘ethnically German’ regiment remained loyal to the Democratic Party and believed that nativism, and not unfree labor, presented the greatest danger to American liberties. Jordan’s vivid prose and engaging narrative brings his characters and battlefields to life. A powerful and moving story."

Douglas R. Egerton

"A Thousand May Fall is a scholarly and literary achievement, a unique study not only of a Civil War regiment, but perhaps also the deepest probing ever of the experience of soldiers in that awful war. Jordan writes about the men of the 107th Ohio as though he became their neighbors, their confidant, their scribe. We learn the political impulses of these mostly German-born men, especially about slavery. The research is almost unfathomable in its granular depth, and the story a journey into the lived physical and medical reality of war. Above all, Jordan has written a singular study of human emotions under the greatest sustained pressures."

David W. Blight

"Jordan's talent for vivid narrative rivals John Keegan's . . . The story of the 107th Ohio is not one of adventure, brave charges, and celebrations. But this is what makes it a welcome and essential contribution to the scholarship on the common soldier . . . The true strength of his book is its evocation of the dizzyingly complex experience of the men who fought to preserve the Union."

Angela M. Riotto

"Like many other regiments in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the 107th Ohio was composed mostly of German-Americans and shared the Corps’ unhappy role as scapegoat for the army’s defeat at Chancellorsville and the first day at Gettysburg. This stigma shaped much of the regiment’s experience, which was otherwise typical of Civil War soldiering. In this splendid regimental history, Brian Matthew Jordan gives color and texture to that hard-knock experience."

James M. McPherson

01/01/2021

Award-winning author Jordan's (Marching Home) regimental history of the 107th Ohio tells a complex and tragic story from the American Civil War. The regiment was composed mainly of ethnic Germans who came from communities that largely did not support the war. Because of their ethnicity and background, they were not trusted or respected by the Northern press, and because of their decision to fight for the Union, they were ostracized by loved ones at home. The author explains how the regiment was poorly led both at the regimental level and by their commanding generals, and saw horrific losses at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Jordan continues by explaining how and why they were one of only a few regiments in the U.S. Army to support George B. McClellan in the 1864 election. In addition to hundreds of deaths, many in the regiment were badly wounded, finding it difficult to adjust to civilian life or receive relief from the military pension board. Surviving members of the regiment took up their pens to try to draw meaning from the war and defend the performance of their comrades with limited success. VERDICT The personal sacrifice of soldiers in war often gets lost in military histories, and Jordan's moving account of the 107th Ohio is a welcome corrective.—Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL

Library Journal

2021-02-08
Affecting portrait of an Ohio infantry regiment in the Civil War.

Jordan, a historian who has previously focused on Union veterans in the postwar era, follows a promising and fresh approach by studying the war through the lens of a single unit. In this instance, the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was made up largely of immigrants, one of 30 “ethnically German” regiments in the Union Army. Two prevailing views of Union soldiers have emerged in the literature: one of a tireless and determined force, the other of a battle-weary mob just this side of collapsing. As Jordan demonstrates, neither view is quite correct, and neither is quite wrong. The men he portrays in this account were “betwixt and between, men who belonged but did not”—but who took it as their duty to fight for their new country. Their defeat at Chancellorsville soon led to Gettysburg. “It would be difficult to imagine a worse position than the one the 107th Ohio had been ordered to assume in Gettysburg that afternoon,” writes the author, facing down hardened Rebel fighters in a fixed-bayonet infantry charge. Before these battles, the 107th had endured Ambrose Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” and been elevated in morale by the arrival of Joseph Hooker, who allowed the Ohioans 15-day leaves to accommodate travel west. Not all of them returned to the fight, and many who came back did not survive. At Gettysburg, Jordan writes, “of the 458 men who entered the fight that morning, no more than 171 limped back to Cemetery Hill.” Reflecting the author’s previous scholarly interest, much of the book concerns the final year of the war and the immediate postwar era, when families at home suffered from those losses as well. Movingly, he writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men “gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets” and remembered their fallen brothers in arms.

A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history.

Kirkus Reviews