Long Road to Liberty: The Odyssey of a German Regiment in the Yankee Army: The 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry

By Donald Allendorf
Illustrated, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index, 342 pp., 2006. The Kent State University Press, 307 Lowry Hall, Kent, OH 44242, $39 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Robert L. Durham
Robert L. Durham is a computer specialist. A longtime Civil War buff, he is also interested in Old West history and has written articles and book reviews for Alamo Journal, True West, Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association, and Alamo de Parras web site at www.flash.net/~alamo3

Review:
At the outbreak of the Civil War, St. Louis, Mo., was a divided city within a divided state. A large segment, 60 percent, of its population was made up of German immigrants or descendants of German immigrants, many of whom fled the 1848 revolution in Germany.

These German immigrants sided overwhelmingly in favor of the Union, and did much to keep Missouri from seceding. Ironically, while the "Forty-eighters" were predominantly anti-slavery and pro-Union, some of the earlier German immigrants were more ambivalent and favored neutrality.

Germans enlisted in overwhelming numbers at Abraham Lincoln's first calls for volunteers. In fact, so many enlisted that there was fear of a backlash, with the larger population of the United States fearing the Federal Army was made up of too large a proportion of German soldiers.

Despite the large number of predominantly German regiments, there is little recorded primary history from these regiments. After the war, German veterans were less likely than their native- born comrades to write regimental histories. Fortunately for Donald Allendorf and the readers of his book, veterans Maurice Marcoot and Adolph Faess collaborated on a memoir of the15th Missouri Regiment. The memoir provides a firm foundation for this volume.

Raised mainly in and around St. Louis, one company of the 15th was composed largely of Swiss immigrants and their descendants from nearby Highland, Ill., across the Mississippi River. The 15th Missouri Volunteer Infantry was one of the "Fighting Three Hundred" regiments of the Civil War. They saw action at Pea Ridge, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain, Peach Tree Creek, Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville.

When the war was over for most other Union soldiers, the 15th was sent to Texas. They did not get their discharge until Jan. 24, 1866, after four years and eight months of service. They suffered a higher percentage of battlefield deaths than any other Missouri Union regiment.

At Stones River, Tennessee, they suffered 40 percent casualties. At Chickamauga, they lost another 40 percent. Before the war was over, one of every eight men in the regiment died in combat; more than half of the 904 officers and men who served with the 15th became casualties, either killed or wounded, and 107 died of disease.

This volume is an excellent regimental history of an often-neglected segment of the Union Army, the German volunteers. I highly recommend it to all Civil War enthusiasts, especially those with an interest in the Western Theater of the war or in regimental histories.