Reviewed by Steven Wright
By Mark Dunkelman
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2004
I recently had occasion to tour the Gettysburg battlefield with two schoolteacher friends. After tromping the field for several hours, we finally reached the Angle and the peaceful vista across which Generals Pickett and Pettigrew led their Confederate troops in an attempt to breach the Federal line. While surveying the scene, one of my friends asked the simple question that all students of the Civil War ponder at some time: “How could men do this?” After contemplating this most complex question for a moment, I answered: “Esprit de corps.”
With Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2004, $39.95), historian Mark Dunkelman takes the opportunity to closely examine the men of the 154th New York Infantry in an effort to analyze their transformation from ordinarycivilians to among the Federal Army’s most battle-hardened elites. Dunkelman first became interested in the 154th as a child in the 1950s when he discovered that his great-grandfather, Corporal John Langhans, served in Company H of the regiment. Dunkelman’s study of the regiment has certainly benefited Civil War scholarship.
Raised in Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties, the 154th earned the nickname the “Hardtack Regiment” through its service in the battles of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Lookout Valley, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Atlanta, Savannah and the Carolina campaign. The regiment paid dearly for its hard campaigning, suffering 630 combat casualties, with an additional 60 men dying in Confederate prisons and 87 more succumbing to disease. The regiment’s most famous casualty was Sergeant Amos Humiston, who was discovered dead on a Gettysburg street clutching a photograph of his three children. (Humiston is the subject of another one of Dunkelman’s books.) The esprit de corps that the men of the Hardtack Regiment developed in the Civil War stayed with them and ruled their lives for the rest of their days. After campaigning with them for three long years via this fine volume, it is easy to see why.
Dunkelman suggests that relatively little has been written about regimental esprit de corps and that an examination of the 154th might serve as a worthy archetype for regiments North and South. His research is voluminous and prodigious. During more than a quarter-century he has contacted more than 900 descendants of 154th soldiers, read more than 1,300 wartime letters and over a score of wartime diaries, examined more than 200 soldier portraits and discovered an unpublished regimental history written by survivors of the regiment.
Dunkelman is extremely careful to develop his thesis, suggesting that the necessary factors for esprit often existed in home communities prior to the unit’s existence. The forge of war welded together even more tightly men who were already close because of home ties. That experience, however, also tested men’s mettle, and it is here where the author is at his best. Using his vast knowledge of the regiment and its resources, he allows the men to tell their stories through the brilliant and extensive use of quotes. We learn of their time in camp, battle, hospital and prison and of the regiment’s heroes, cowards and villains. Where all too often regimental histories digress into flag-waving pablum, Dunkelman pulls no punches, presenting a warts-and-all assessment of the unit to try to understand the motivations of the men who composed the regiment. His efforts are successful.
Dunkelman closes the book with a fascinating chapter suggesting that esprit de corps lived on long after the war with the veterans’ movement, although it was certainly a different type of sentiment than what existed during the war. He also includes a tragic postscript as to how one man betrayed the battle-hardened men of the Hardtack Regiment and denied students of the Civil War a great resource for many years.
Even though this is Dunkelman’s third volume on the 154th New York Infantry, Brothers One and All presents fresh material and new concepts and allows the veterans to speak through heretofore unpublished accounts. In addition, while respected historians such as Joseph Glatthaar, Francis A. Lord, Reid Mitchell, Earl J. Hess and Bell Irvin Wiley have previously approached the subject of esprit de corps, this is undoubtedly the most detailed treatment. It is an extremely well-crafted, well-written and well-researched book that offers new scholarship. It would make a worthy addition to any Civil War library.
