Fire Within

A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin

Kerry A. Trask

• Editorial: The Kent State University Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771564
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

Winner of the Council for Wisconsin Writers Leslie Cross Book-Length Nonfiction Award and the Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Achievement Recognition

"This remarkable book blends the experiences of several young Wisconsin men who fought in the Civil War with the course of events back home in Manitowoc. Using the letters and diaries of both soldiers and civilians, the author deftly handles the organizational problems of recounting military campaigns on several fronts as well as the travails of civilians on the home front. Written with verve, the narrative sweeps along the reader, who finds it hard to put down the book until the fate of the protagonists is finally revealed."—James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

"[A] compelling narrative of a place and a time and the lives engulfed in the storm of the Civil War.... [Trask] has done a seamless job of amalgamating the war itself and the course of life at home into an affecting human texture and history of theregion."— Washington Times

CHAPTER ONE

A Place to Begin Again

American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

—Frederick Jackson Turner,
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

THE YELLOW GLOW of a lamp burnt late in an upstairs window of the Williams House Hotel, an imposing three-story brick building on Manitowoc’s main street. Inside, on the night of April 18, 1861, Rosa Kellner sat writing friends and recording the events of the day in her journal. She also listened to the many sounds that, since suppertime, had filled the usually quiet village streets.

Rosa ran the hotel with her sometimes less-than-dependable younger brother Leopold, or “Labolt” as she affectionately called him. She had been in charge since their older sister Anna and her husband, Samuel Williams, had departed for Texas that previous August. Samuel was dying of tuberculosis. Once a tall and robust man, he deteriorated at an alarming pace, the cold, damp Lake Michigan climate only hastening his decline. Eventually, the dry warmth of the Southwest seemed his only hope for survival.

Rosa had never wished to become an innkeeper and had moved to town initially only to help her sister and Samuel. She was willing to do what she could for the sake of family, but from the very beginning Rosa found the work unrelenting and exhausting. In May of 1860 she wrote in her journal: “I feel very tired doing all the work alone [and] how I wish we were all safely stowed away in some pretty white cottage instead of keeping a public house for there is always work and so little time to improve our minds.” The burden of it all became much worse once Anna and Samuel left her completely in charge of their establishment, which also contained a tavern and dining hall. Leopold was expected to assist her, and he sometimes did, but even with his help she found her situation almost overwhelming. “I am 18, Labolt 16, how will we get along [running] a public house and [we are only] two children to take care of it, may God give us strength to do our duty,” she scrawled on a journal page.¹

Rosa was a member of a large immigrant family from the Bohemian region of the Austrian Empire. Altogether there were fourteen of them who left the family’s home village of Neumark in the late summer of 1846. Their crossing was a rough one, and the sailing ship on which they came was in a serious state of disrepair when they finally docked at Beauport, a small French Canadian village on the St. Lawrence River, a few miles downstream from Quebec City. The Kellners remained there for the better part of three years, and it was during their sojourn in Lower Canada that Anna met and married Samuel. The Williamses operated a mill in Beauport, and Joseph, the oldest of the Kellner boys, worked for them. He, as well as his sisters Barbara and Mary Ann, both of whom were older than Rosa, married in Quebec, and while there, John, the last of the Kellners’ children, was born in early January of 1847. By then Mrs. Kellner was forty-seven years old, and Joseph Sr., the family patriarch, who had served in the Austrian imperial army during the Napoleonic Wars and fought in the Battle of Dresden in 1813, was sixty-one.²

While they waited in Canada, Michael, the second oldest son, went on to Wisconsin. The rest of the family landed in Milwaukee and joined him in Manitowoc County in May of 1849. Old Joseph was a tanner by trade, but in Wisconsin he purchased land a few miles northwest of Manitowoc, up near French Creek, and became a farmer. His son Joseph acquired another farm right across the road from his, and Michael bought and cleared a number of acres a few miles north of that. In time, Michael built a shingle mill, opened a general store, and eventually operated a grist mill at what became known as Kellnersville. By 1860, all of them, including the sons-in-law from Canada, seemed to be prospering, and the aging parents, along with the younger children, had taken up residence in “a pretty white cottage surrounded by a sweet garden,” which Rosa said was “beautiful compared to the old log house” they had lived in until 1857.³

Rosa was by then a tall, spindly, plain-looking girl with a fine mind and affectionate nature. Her relationship to Anna, who was seventeen years her senior, was especially close, and at one point she wrote in her journal: “Dear Anna, she is very different from my other sisters, more kind, more considerate, more like a dear mother.” Rosa also cared deeply for Samuel, describing him as “more than a brother, almost a father.” When he became ill she pitched in and worked harder than before, even though her own health was far from robust, and when Anna and Samuel departed for Texas, she became still more conscientious in her attempts to hold the business together.⁴

The hotel was a busy place. It was in the midst of the village, just two blocks south of the river and on the northwest corner of Franklin and Eighth streets. Farmers who came to town and passengers off the boats that docked in the harbor congregated there. Rosa was an observant and inquisitive girl, and the Williams House Hotel provided her with an excellent place from which to watch the passing parade of village life.

On Wednesday, April 17, news of the attack on Fort Sumter reached Manitowoc by steamship and immediately produced a commotion. The lakeshore had emerged from the isolation and confinement of the long northern winter. The weather was growing warmer, the harbor was finally free of ice, and ships were running again. People were once more coming in from the surrounding countryside. Since Abraham Lincoln’s election and the secession of the Southern states, suspense had been building, but when the message of the attack reached the village, the mounting anxiety gave way to a sense of relief. People in the streets and taverns speculated about what would happen next. Most of them believed that the rebellion should be crushed. As the agitation increased, Gideon Collins, the village president, announced there would be a public meeting in the courthouse the following evening. There they would decide what Manitowoc’s response to the crisis should be.

“I heard the tramp of heavy boots continually. They were going to the war meeting,” wrote Rosa in her journal that Thursday night, April 18. All day long men and boys had seemed unable to talk about anything else as they waited impatiently for the meeting to begin. When it finally did, it was “attended by several hundred persons” from the village and surrounding area who packed themselves into the building’s largest room. There, throughout the evening, the “vast assemblage” was whipped into a frenzy by a succession of impassioned speakers. Among them was Charles Esslinger, who delivered a fiery harangue in German. Temple Clark, a rising political star in the local Democratic party, declared that although he had not supported Lincoln’s election, “the time had come for true men to be united” behind the president and his policies. There was also a Mr. Anderson, perhaps James’s father, who took to the podium and shouted that the “traitors … should be hung as Tories in the Revolution were.” Each time a speaker finished there was wild applause, and then another would rise to offer his condemnation of the South and secession. The crowd passed a series of resolutions by thunderous voice votes, but then, after much time and talking, Perry P. Smith, one of the community’s original settlers, went forward and spoke. He chided the audience and sternly asserted that the speech making ought to finally give way to some action, and that rather than mere words the situation demanded men—“men that will fight, men enough to go down and wipe the [damn] rebels off the face of the earth.” A roar of approbation filled the hall and it was unanimously decided that Manitowoc would raise an infantry company for the war. Another meeting, they determined, would be held that Saturday night, and men would be asked to sign up. The crowd was exhilarated by its own decisiveness, and after the meeting everyone poured out into the cool spring darkness, where they were joined by a brass band. Torches were lit and they all “marched through the principle streets to the music of stirring airs,” reported the Manitowoc Herald.⁵

Next morning, when Rosa learned of the decision to form an infantry company, she boldly wrote: “If I were only a boy tomorrow with other brave men I would enlist and let those Southern traitors see what northern men can do!” She was caught up in the emotions of the moment and felt so strongly about the dramatic turn of events that she seemed to resent the limitations of who and what she was. “Why, Oh why am I a girl? If I was only free!”⁶

James Anderson was free. He was nineteen and had just finished school that spring. He had taken work in Ben Jones’s lumber mill on the south bank of the river but did not intend to make the sawing of logs his life’s work. Like Rosa, he too became caught up in the emotions of the developing events, and when the call came during the Saturday night meeting, James was among the first to surge forward to enlist. He later boasted that he had been “fourth or fifth on the list” of volunteers.⁷

Anderson was a tall, thin, light-haired Scottish boy who had been born in the Kelvin Haugh district of Glasgow on Christmas Day 1841. His father, John, who was once described as “a man of good education [and] an unwearied reader of good books,” was then a calico printer in that city’s textile industry. But before taking up that demanding trade, he, like so many other young Scots, had been a soldier in the British army. John Anderson had grown up in Stirling, a substantial community to the north of and in between Edinburgh and Glasgow, a place of ancient battles where a great thick-walled castle, once considered the strongest in all of Scotland, stood high upon the cliff above the town. Mary Stuart had been crowned there and for a time had made Stirling Castle the royal residence before events compelled her to seek asylum with her cousin queen in England. John Anderson too had left his home there for foreign places, departing in December of 1822, at the age of eighteen, to serve in the Seventy-first Highlanders Light Infantry Regiment. During the next seven years he saw duty in India, Ceylon, and the British West Indies. His superiors rated him “Very Good” at soldiering, but in 1829, and still at the rank of private, he had apparently had enough of army life and rather than reen-listing, he once again returned to Scotland.⁸

Scotland was then a poor country of struggling people, of uprooted crofters from the harsh highland countryside who had been pushed from the land, where they were replaced by large flocks of more profitable sheep. At the very time when their miseries were increasing, their numbers were multiplying at an alarming rate. The population was increasing, at least in part, because more people were being vaccinated against smallpox and because the nutritional conditions of the lower classes were improving due to widespread cultivation and consumption of potatoes. However, the population growth made the already wretched social conditions even worse, and that, in turn, made Scotland prime recruiting territory for the British army. For many young men the chance to march to the pipes behind the Union Jack was greatly preferred to the dismal prospects of remaining mired in rural poverty or the surrendering of themselves to drudgery and early death in the mill towns to the south. But not all who wished to serve were taken, and many landless young men had few choices left other than migrating to Edinburgh, Glasgow, or the English industrial cities, where they would engage in a desperate search for wage labor. If they found work and were able to endure the exhaustion and monotony of the mills, they might then, if they properly disciplined themselves and enjoyed considerable good luck, eventually save enough money to escape to the colonies or perhaps even off to the rising opportunities in the United States.⁹

The flight from the countryside and the massive, if unplanned, growth of textile manufacturing turned Glasgow into one of the great urban monstrosities of the British industrial revolution. During the first forty years of the nineteenth century, its population exploded from about thirty thousand inhabitants to well over three hundred thousand, and by 1840, at about the time when John Anderson married Harriet Sibree, the inner city had become a grotesque slum sprawling for miles along the foul and polluted banks of the River Clyde. Of the three hundred thousand people living there, nearly 80 percent were impoverished workers who lived among what Friedrich Engels described as the “endless labyrinth of narrow lanes and wynds … [in] old, ill-ventilated, towering houses crumbling to decay, destitute of water and crowded with inhabitants, comprising three or four families (perhaps twenty persons) in each flat.” It was a city full of smoke-belching foundries and factories, constant noise and motion, foul sewage-strewn streets, and great stinking heaps of manure and garbage. Also, according to Sir Archibald Alison, nearly thirty thousand miserable people there were “every Saturday night in a state of brutal intoxication.” Drunkenness seemed their only means of numbing the pain and escaping the near hopelessness of their circumstances. Glasgow was the second largest city in the entire British Empire, but by 1839 conditions within it had become so atrocious that the much-traveled English social scholar J. C. Symons wrote: “I have seen human degradation in some of its worst phases both in England and abroad, but I can advisedly say that I did not believe until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed in one spot in any civilized country.”¹⁰

It was from all of that that the Andersons fled in 1852. John was then forty-eight years old, Harriet his wife, thirty-five, and young James was just a boy of eleven. There were three other children: six-year-old Jean, little Harriet, who was then just four, and an infant boy who died shortly after they reached Wisconsin. They arrived in September, and after the squalor of Glasgow and the crowded discomforts of the long Atlantic voyage, Manitowoc County must have seemed like an unspoiled, and nearly unoccupied, promised land.

“It is a land which has but awakened out of a sleep of thousands of years and reveals many, many traces of its primeval conditions,” wrote Westphalian immigrant Gerhard Kremers, who settled near Manitowoc Rapids in 1848. Just a few years earlier, John M. Berrien, a civil engineer conducting a survey of the Manitowoc River region for the War Department, reported: “Its valley is fertile, and abounds in valuable timber of all kinds, especially pine.”¹¹ When the Andersons arrived it was a place still more wild than settled, where the trees stood dense and towering and the forest stretched back mile upon unbroken mile from the lake. And among its shadows wolves still howled in the darkness, especially when the white smoke of cabin chimneys rose straight up in clear, cold, windless winter nights.

The Andersons brought with them few worldly goods, but John had managed to save sufficient funds to cover the cost of their voyage as well as the purchase of a homestead in Kossuth Township, the same area northwest of the village where the Kellners had settled. The Andersons were a little east of them, not far from French Creek, in a part of the county still only sparsely occupied. Some French Canadian families were living along the creek, and near Michael Kellner’s place there was a cluster of Bohemian farms, but otherwise there were few other white people in the area. There was, on the other hand, a substantial Indian community on the Neshoto River, to the east of the Andersons. At least that village was there during the warmer part of the year, for its inhabitants, most of whom were Ojibwas, came and went, appearing and disappearing, with the annual round of the seasons. Each year they would appear out of the emptiness of the winter forest in early March and would first make camp near the west bank of the river in the midst of a large grove of maple trees. There, observed young James, “their ponies would graze and grow fat and sleek after their winter’s privation,” and there the women of the band would tap the trees, collecting and straining the clear sweet sap through old blankets into black caldrons that simmered and steamed over low and steady fires for days at a time. When sugar making was through they packed up and crossed over the river, where they resurrected their bark hut community, and there, in time, when the cold was finally gone, the women planted extensive gardens of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash in the black silt left behind by the spring flooding. “Each family seemed to have its own tract, which the women industriously worked with their hoes throughout the season,” observed James. The band’s leader was a man named Katoose. Anderson said he was very friendly toward the settlers and described him as being “tall, with a large frame, very spare in flesh, well past middle life, b...