Thousand May Fall

Brian Matthew Jordan is a historian of the Civil War and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His earlier book, Marching Home, examined what became of Union veterans after the fighting ended. In A Thousand May Fall, he focuses on a single unit, the 107th Ohio, an infantry regiment made up largely of German-speaking immigrants. Its soldiers faced suspicion from other Americans as well as the Confederate army.

The regiment was both typical and distinctive. Its men fought in two major battles, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, yet their language, their sense of identity, and doubts about whether they could be counted on as loyal citizens set them apart from the rest of the army. Jordan follows them along the hard roads and through the daily hardships of campaigning, and he shows how these soldiers thought about the larger meaning of the conflict, including what citizenship meant to them and how emancipation figured into their understanding of the war.

Drawing on many sources that have never been used before, the book tells the story from the perspective of the ordinary immigrant soldier. It notes that 200,000 native Germans fought for the Union in total, and it challenges many common assumptions about the bloodiest war in American history.