Upcoming CCWRT Program
Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 6:00 p.m.

November 2024 Roundtable Meeting: “A Thousand May Fall – An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army”

The November 2024 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable will take place on November 13, 2024 beginning at 6:00 p.m. This will be an in-person meeting. The speaker will be Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan, and the title of Dr. Jordan’s presentation is “A Thousand May Fall – An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army.”

This presentation, from a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a pathbreaking history of the Civil War centered on the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of immigrants with a connection to Cleveland, and their brutal experience of the conflict. The 107th Ohio was at once representative and exceptional. Its ranks weathered the human ordeal of war in painstakingly routine ways, fighting in two defining battles, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, each time in the thick of the killing. But the men of the 107th were not lauded as heroes for their bravery and their suffering. Most of them were ethnic Germans, set apart by language and identity, and their loyalties were regularly questioned by a nativist Northern press. So often it is assumed that the Civil War was a uniquely American conflict, yet the contributions made by immigrants to the Union cause are too often forgotten. An incredible one-quarter of the Union army was foreign born, with 200,000 native Germans fighting to save their adopted homeland and prove their patriotism.

Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, American military history, and the U.S. history survey. A cultural historian of the nation’s fratricidal conflict, he is interested in the human longitude of the Civil War battles and the problem of memory. Dr. Jordan is the author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, a narrative history of the men who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History and, in its dissertation form, won the George Washington Egleston Prize (for best U.S. history dissertation at Yale) and Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize. In 2020, he co-edited The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans. In 2021, he authored A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War, which earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. He also co-edited Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves. A native of Akron, Ohio, Dr. Jordan serves as the Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor and is a member of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is the founding co-editor of the Veterans Book Series (University of Massachusetts Press). His more than 100 articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, and The New York Times.

The November 2024 meeting will be held at the Holiday Inn Independence (6001 Rockside Road, Independence, Ohio 44131). Reservations should be made by sending an email to the Roundtable’s reservation email account (ccwrtreserve@gmail.com). Reservations must be made no later than eight days before the meeting (i.e., no later than November 5, 2024). When making a reservation, please include your name and the number and names of any guests. Please also indicate the meal choice for you (and any guests). The three meal options are grilled sirloin, Tuscan chicken, and stacked eggplant parmesan. If a reservation needs to be canceled, it must be canceled no later than November 12, 2024. Dinner will be provided to anyone who has a reservation. The cost of dinner is $35 per person. Other details can be found on the Reservations web page by clicking on this link.

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Meeting Summary: October 2024 – “The Three General Presidents – Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower”

The October 2024 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable featured a lively and informative presentation by Steve Pettyjohn. Steve’s presentation focused on the only three people who have been both the supreme military commander during a war and also U.S. president. These three people are George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Steve’s presentation highlighted some of the traits that made these three people successful in their demanding military and civilian roles.

Steve began by relating how his presentation came to be. As Steve discussed, he was giving an adult education course about the traits that lead to success in business, and he talked about a particular company that he considered successful, to which a student in the class challenged him and emphatically declared that the company was terrible. In response to this student, Steve deftly switched gears and used successful military leaders to demonstrate the traits needed for success in difficult operations. From this experience, Steve developed the presentation that he gave to the Roundtable at the October 2024 meeting.

The first trait that Steve discussed is the valuable and often overlooked trait of domestic tranquility, by which Steve meant a supportive spouse. All three of the men whom Steve discussed benefited from this. Martha Washington fully supported her husband throughout his service first in the Revolutionary War and then during his precedent-setting presidency. Similarly, Julia Grant dealt with the difficult separation from her husband during his pre-Civil War military service as well as their hardscrabble life after Ulysses Grant left the military. Likewise, Mamie Eisenhower withstood the peripatetic and unsettling life of an army wife, frequently moving to her husband’s next post, which included a difficult stay in Panama and another in the Philippines.

Another important trait that Steve described is what he called learning the business, by which he meant gaining experience at the beginning of a career. For Washington, Steve focused on Washington’s service during the colonial period under Edward Braddock in a war against the French and in particular when Washington saved Braddock’s army from destruction. Similarly, Grant learned the business in the Mexican-American War, during which he served in many battles in both Winfield Scott’s army and Zachary Taylor’s army. As for Eisenhower, he had extensive experience learning the business, for example in World War I, where he, along with George Patton, came to realize that mechanization was the way of the future for the army, a fact that they had difficulty making their compatriots accept. In addition, Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower all shared the important trait of careful observation and then absorbing the lessons from what they observed and assimilating those lessons into their thinking.

These three men also possessed a skill that Steve said is essential for success, that is, adroitly dealing with difficult people. For Washington, some of these difficult people were Alexander Hamilton, Charles Lee, and the Continental Congress. Washington also was in the touchy situation of having previously fought against his most important ally, the French. Grant’s difficult associates, according to Steve, included Henry Halleck, John McClernand, and, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln. As Steve pointed out, Lincoln, although very supportive of Grant, was not averse to imposing himself into the war effort, as evidenced by the fact that he had replaced a sizable number of Union military leaders earlier in the war. Eisenhower likewise had his share of difficult associates, in that he had to deal with the prickly Bernard Montgomery, the temperamental George Patton, the mercurial Winston Churchill, and the formidable Franklin Roosevelt, not to mention Charles de Gaulle and the French as well as the Russians.

Steve used a military campaign from each of these three men’s careers to exemplify how each was able to apply his talents and experience to achieve success in a difficult operation. For Washington, it was his Yorktown Campaign, when he brilliantly brought together forces from widespread locations to concentrate them against Charles Cornwallis, after Washington expertly anticipated that Cornwallis would move his army to Yorktown. Grant’s exemplary campaign was the Vicksburg Campaign, which Steve called the greatest military campaign in U.S. history. In this campaign, Grant had the perceptiveness to discern an unconventional pathway to position his forces against his foe and then brilliantly maneuvered his forces in a way that was completely unexpected by the enemy. Then Grant kept his forces in motion, which kept the enemy off balance and unaware of Grant’s next move. For Eisenhower, it was D-Day, for which Eisenhower faced opposition from the Allies with regard to the optimal location for the invasion of Europe. But Eisenhower convinced the allies of the soundness of Normandy as the location and then magnificently oversaw the operation despite severe obstacles.

Steve’s superb presentation adeptly conveyed his message about the traits of successful military leaders as demonstrated by the only three people to serve both as supreme military commander in a war and then as U.S. president. Steve’s engaging presentation provided an enjoyable and informative evening for those at the meeting, and the Roundtable thanks Steve for a terrific presentation.

October 2024 Charger Uploaded

The October 2024 issue of The Charger has been uploaded. It can be accessed by clicking on this link.

Program Schedule for 2024-2025

The 2024-2025 program year is rapidly approaching. Gene Claridge, the president of the Roundtable, has put together an excellent program with a roster of outstanding speakers who will give presentations on a wide range of interesting topics. Gene’s program schedule can be accessed by clicking on this link.

Membership Roster and Contact Information

We have worked very hard to improve our membership database and contact information this year, but we know we probably have more work to do. Please be sure to keep us advised of changes in contact information by sending us the information at clecwrt@gmail.com. We monitor that email account on a regular basis, so this would be a big help in making sure we can keep you informed of group activities. If you want to see what has been posted on our Facebook page or Twitter account, you do not have to become a member of the Roundtable. Everyone is welcome to view our Facebook page and Twitter account. These can also be accessed by googling “Cleveland Civil War Roundtable” and either “Facebook” or “Twitter” and clicking on the appropriate link in the search results.