Germans in the Civil War: the letters they wrote home

Abstract

Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home. Edited by Walter D. Kamphoefher & Wolfgang Helbich. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiv, 521. Illustrations, maps, glossary, index. Cloth, $59.95) Although United States history textbooks usually mention that about twenty-five percent of the soldiers who served in the Civil War were foreign born, the ethnic component of the war is generally neglected, especially the German element. Even television reflects this bias. Ken Burns's landmark series on the Civil War, for example, barely mentions the German immigrant soldiers. This is in spite of the fact that approximately 200,000 Germans served in the Union Army during the course of the war. Part of this neglect stems from the fact that most of the correspondence to and from German-American soldiers is in German, and most Americanists do not master a foreign language. In their book, Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home, Walter Kamphoefher and Wolfgang Helbich seek to rectify this problem by providing the reader with a rich collection of Civil War correspondence from German-Americans to their kinfolk in Europe. It is neatly divided into two parts. The first part is an excellent interpretive section by the editors spanning some seventy pages of preface and introduction. The second part is a very wide selection of letters from German participants in the War to their family members carefully translated by, coincidently, the great-greatgranddaughter of Robert E. Lee. The source carefully mined by the editors, and supplemented with plenty of other pertinent material, is the North America Letter Collection housed in the Forschungsbibliotek in Gotha, Germany. The collection consists of 956 letters from the period 1860-1865 written by 258 German immigrants and the editors selected 343 letters by 78 individuals as the focus of the book. The editors estimate that immigrants sent nearly four million letters to Germany during those years and that perhaps 500,000 came from soldiers. Because of this the editors cannot and do not claim their selections to be representative of the views of German immigrants, but rather to be illustrative of those views. Despite this disclaimer, Kamphoefner and Helbich argue that this book is useful not only as a primary source collection to be mined by others, but as an interpretive work in its own right illustrating the ethnic role and providing an ethnic perspective on the war (xiii). After carefully explaining their procedures and qualifying their right to generalize, the editors put forth three very important interpretive claims. First, they argue these German immigrants saw themselves as Germans regardless of their regional or confessional background. …