Those Damned Black Hats! The Iron Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign
By Lance J. Herdegen
(April 2009 Civil War News)

Illustrated, notes, appendices, 323 pp., 2008. Savas Beatie LLC, P.O. Box 4527, El Dorado Hills, CA 95762, $32.95 plus shipping..

Reviewer: James A. Percoco
James A. Percoco teaches U.S. and Applied History at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va. He is author of A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History and Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict in U.S. History. Percoco is a USA TODAY All-USA teacher and is an adjunct professor in the School of Education at American University where he serves as History Educator-in-Residence.

Review:
The Civil War is replete with stories of individual units that valiantly defended a position or made a charge, only to pay with blood and loss. No one battlefield is riper with these tales of extraordinary heroism than Gettysburg.

Civil War buffs are well schooled in the story of the 20th Maine, the 1st Minnesota and the Irish Brigade, among many. Historians of those three days in July 1863 have offered all manner of arguments defending these units and their subsequent engagements as the pivotal moment during the battle.

These regiments or brigades have received book treatments germane to their respective actions. Lance J. Herdegen has now provided a sterling account of another brigade at Gettysburg that is equally as well known as the others, but to this point has not received a battle specific narrative.

Those Damned Black Hats! is an exceptional tale of the famous Iron Brigade and their role in the Gettysburg Campaign, a brigade that on the morning of July 1 deployed along McPherson’s Ridge with 1,833 men to have only 671 men answering the muster role later in the evening.

In the aftermath Rufus Dawes, the intrepid colonel of the 6th Wisconsin, raised a fair question: “Where has the firmness of the Iron Brigade at Gettysburg been surpassed in history?”

His question only adds to the Monday morning quarterbacking debate about which Union regiment played the greatest role at Gettysburg.

For Herdegen there is only one choice. He argues that the Iron Brigade, and specifically the delaying action fought against overwhelming odds by Col. William Morrow and the 24th Michigan on the grounds just west of the Lutheran Seminary, bought the Union Army the time it needed to pull back through town and secure Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge and Culp’s Hill, setting the stage for the next two days of carnage.

Expanding on the work of the recently deceased Alan Nolan, Herdegen plumbs the depth of these men from Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources. Rather than focus solely on their role during day one west of Gettysburg, the author provides a fuller picture of the men, both at the command level as well as the privates.

In Herdegen’s deft hand we learn the background story of many of the Black Hats and their loved ones back home. Teasing out a larger story within a greater context, the men of the Iron Brigade become flesh and blood as opposed to mere statistics or arrowed drawings on book maps. Here home front and battlefront are co-joined.

With a crisp and tightly woven narrative sliced up into small segments, readers stand toe to toe with the heroes of the book be they on McPherson’s Ridge, in the Railroad Cut, or riding on limbers and caissons pulling back through town. As each flagstaff falls, is picked up again, or shatters in someone’s hands readers feel it.

The exhaustion felt by the broken remnants collecting in the twilight is palpable as is the recognition among those answering the muster call that their singular all-Western unit was no more.

Ironically it will be the collective veterans of the 24th Michigan who will serve as the honor guard for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, fittingly a shattered regiment sharing intimately with a shattered nation.

The author concludes his work with the tale of the Iron Brigade’s postwar years as veterans begin to honor themselves and their fallen comrades with monuments and memorials on the field at Gettysburg. Here men not only rekindle old friendships but also engage in the work of reconciliation with their former foes, many of them writing moving letters to past enemies asking each other important questions about July 1.

With their iconic black Hardee Hats, the veterans of the Iron Brigade worked hard in the postwar years to help restore a nation with a handshake rather than with the rifles they used for a different kind of restoration, one that called for blood, sacrifice and loss on the fields west of a small Pennsylvania town on July 1, 1863.