German-Americans and the Eleventh Corps

German-Americans made up a large share of the soldiers who camped in this area and built the roads and fortifications preserved here, and they were the largest ethnic group in federal service during the Civil War, enlisting in numbers greater than their proportion of the overall population. In the Army of the Potomac, immigrant soldiers of German descent outnumbered those of Irish descent two to one, with most coming from New York and Pennsylvania and smaller numbers from Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin. Many had fought earlier at Wilson’s Creek, Carthage, and Pea Ridge, where General Franz Sigel was celebrated as a hero, while in the east General Ludwig Blenker and his German Division were praised for covering the Union retreat from 1st Manassas. Public opinion changed sharply after the Battle of Chancellorsville, where the 11th Corps, composed largely of German-speaking soldiers and led by Major General Oliver Otis Howard, was flanked and decisively defeated by Stonewall Jackson’s veteran Confederate infantry. Afterward, German-American soldiers were made scapegoats for the failed campaign even though many soldiers of the Eleventh Corps had tried to warn Union generals Hooker, Howard, and Devens that Confederates were massing on their flank. Captain Hubert Dilger of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery, Battery I, carried such a warning to Hooker’s headquarters and was dismissed, then returned to prepare his battery for action. In the Virginia woods in May 1863, about 8,800 poorly deployed 11th Corps soldiers were attacked on their right and rear by 26,000 Confederate soldiers, and in the campaign’s aftermath blame fell not on one man but on an entire corps and, by extension, on German-Americans. Years later, Major General Darius Couch wrote that no corps in the army, surprised as the Eleventh Corps was, could have held its ground under similar circumstances, and thirty years after the battle Hubert Dilger received the Medal of Honor for his actions at Chancellorsville.

Virginia · United States