318 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

died at Camp Morton. Official figures JAMES J. BARNES is professor emeritus put their number at 1,763 out of the of history at Wabash College, Craw- entire prison population of 12,082. fordsville, Indiana. He and his wife, They were eventually laid to rest in a Patience, have recently published a special section of Crown Hill Cemetery three-volume collection of documents in Indianapolis. The photographs used titled The Civil War through British in the book, some taken by the author, Eyes (2003-2005). add immediacy to this sorry story.

August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry Translated and edited by Joseph R. Reinhart (Kent, : Kent State University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 262. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $35.00.) Joseph Reinhart has done an impres- ment; a list of books containing Civil sive job of translating, editing, and War letters and diaries by “Native Ger- annotating sixty letters written by mans”; and a bibliographic essay. In members of the 32nd Indiana Infantry, his chapter introductions and fifty- the state’s “only German regiment” (p. two pages of detailed notes, Reinhart 2) in the Civil War. Part of the Army provides information on battles, skir- of the Ohio, the 32nd fought at mishes, and marches; qualifies and Rowlett’s Station in ; Shiloh, corrects accounts of the numbers Stones River, and in killed and injured on both sides; and Tennesee; and Chickamauga in Geor- gives an ongoing overview of the war gia. Reinhart discovered these letters, as seen from the perspective of the most of them written between August men of the 32nd. 1861 and December 1863, in the Ger- The most interesting letters, sev- man-language newspapers the enteen in all, were written by an Louisville Anzeiger, the infantryman who called himself Volksfreund, and the Indianapolis Freie “Artaxerxes.” Highly literate, poetic Presse von Indiana. Reinhart also in his description of landscapes, self- includes notices by the editors of the possessed, and sometimes speaking newspapers; chapter introductions with a sarcastic edge, this unidenti- with maps and photographs; an epi- fied author from Cincinnati emerges logue summarizing the life and death as an authoritative voice. Another of the officers following the war; dozen letters were written by Carl appendices on the “Original Officers Schmitt of Evansville, a native of and Color Sergeants”; a descriptive Bavaria who had fought in Germany history of the 32nd Indiana Monu- during the revolutionary uprisings of REVIEWS 319

1848-1849 under August Brandes, who had served two years of Willich, the well-respected Prussian- military service in Germany, became born organizer of the regiment. One a paid voluntary substitute for a of the motifs in the letters is the pride draftee twenty years his junior, in taken by the officers and infantrymen Company D of the 83rd Volunteer in their colonel’s leadership qualities Infantry Regiment of Indiana. His let- and in his paternalistic affection for ters tell a story of hardship and mis- them. The soldiers also express eth- ery, of having to drink water that he nic pride in their courage and their says not even his pigs would drink. important contributions to the Union He died in the summer of 1863, cause. Aware that nativists questioned weeks before he was to be discharged, their patriotism as “foreigners,” the of diarrhea, lung infection, and German Americans had something to swollen feet. His letters reveal no prove, and took defiant satisfaction devotion to freedom, great leaders, in proclaiming it in print. moral principle, or ethnic pride. In As complement and contrast to different ways, Antaxerxes and Bran- the letters in the Reinhart collection, des are both part of, and help to tell, where literate, liberal, and freedom- the German American story. loving Forty-eighters speak, anyone interested in Indiana Germans should NORBERT KRAPF, who lives in Indi- also read A Lost American Dream: Civil anapolis, is emeritus professor of Eng- War Letters (1862-63) of Immigrant lish at Long Island University. His Theodore Heinrich Brandes in Histori- books include Finding the Grain cal Contexts (2005). Brandes was a (1996), a collection of pioneer Ger- poor, barely literate Catholic day man journals and letters from Dubois laborer who came from a farm near County, Indiana; The Country I Come Münster to Oldenburg, Indiana, From (2002), nominated for the where an aunt and uncle lived. He Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Invisible married an Oldenburg woman, and Presence (2006), a collaboration with moved with his family to Cincinnati. Indiana photographer Darryl Jones.

These Men Were Heroes Once The Sixty-Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry By Carolyn S. Bridge (West Lafayette, Ind.: Twin Publications, 2005. Pp. xvi, 414. Maps, biographies, rosters, index, CD of regimental poetry and song. $24.95.)

It is appropriate that Carolyn S. Indiana Volunteer Infantry. She pro- Bridge is listed as compiler rather vides only five pages of preface and than editor of this volume on the 69th introduction and offers occasional