Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory

By Christopher B. Keller
Illustrated, maps, endnotes, bibliography, index, 222 pp., 2007. Fordham University Press, University Box L, 2546 Belmont Ave., Bronx, NY 10458, $65 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Michael Russert
Michael Russert, a member of the North Shore Round Table of Long Island and the Company of Military Historians, has a MALS plus 60 hours in American Studies. He is Coordinator of The New York State Veteran Oral History Program.

Review:
Carl Schurz, in his after action report for Chancellorsville, dated May 12, 1863, bitterly observed, "The Eleventh Corps, and, by error or malice, especially the Third Division, has been held up to the whole country as a band of cowards’Ķ.Preposterous as this is, yet we have been overwhelmed by the army and press with abuse and insult beyond measure."

Thirty-five years later, in 1896, Augustus C. Hamlin, a Civil War veteran who termed himself "Historian of the Eleventh Army Corps," wrote a passionate and documented defense of the First Corps' role at Chancellorsville in a monograph entitled The Battle of Chancellorsville: Jackson's Attack. Hamlin's account rested primarily on a military analysis of events surrounding the May 2nd collapse of the Eleventh Corps.

Professor Christian B. Keller's Chancellorsville and the Germans follows a different track. He presents an overview of the organization of the Eleventh Corps and a military inquiry into the battle of May 2. However, the strength of Keller's study is his exploration of how the denigration, as alluded to by Schurz in his Official Records report, affected German-American ethnicity throughout the entire country at the time.

The author has made use of a great number of previously untapped resources. As he noted in the introduction, "Using’ĶGerman- and English-language materials, it was possible to reconstruct how and why Chancellorsville became the key event of the nineteenth-century for the nation's largest ethnicity."

Dozens of German-language newspapers, along with previously unused letters, diaries, and memoirs of German-Americans, provide a far different perspective on the harmful effects of this event on the German-American population.

Unfortunately, due to questionable command decisions by Joseph Hooker and Oliver Otis Howard, the officers and enlisted men of the Eleventh Corps, especially those regiments of German origin, became the scapegoats for the Chancellorsville defeat.

Although Theodore Lyman did not join Meade's staff as an aide-de-camp until the fall of 1863, he concluded, "He [Howard] has been placed in an unfortunate position, being given the 11th Corps, a body of very inferior material, and full of insubordinate Germans &c. They ran at Chancellorsville. ’Ķ"

Such shadows of suspicion would always haunt the Eleventh Corps. As Keller so effectively demonstrates, not only was this event so injurious to the morale of the corps; it had a lasting and profound impact upon the entire German immigrant community.

Like the study co-authored by Christian Keller and David L. Valuska; Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (2004), Chancellorsville and the Germans provides ground-breaking research that challenges accepted paradigms surrounding the effects of the Nativism Movement on ethnic groups during the 19th century.

Keller challenges the jaundiced view of the Eleventh Corps on May 2 that was repeated by prominent historians even in the most recent studies of Chancellorsville by Ferguson and Sears.

This study should be required reading. It is a masterful blend of military history and social history at its best; it establishes a standard for ethnicity studies of 19th-century United States.