A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army

by Brian Matthew Jordan Narrated by Christopher Douyard

Overview

The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, yet our nation remains fiercely divided over its enduring legacies. In A Thousand May Fall, Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan returns us to the war itself. Creating an intimate, absorbing chronicle from the ordinary soldier's perspective, he allows us to see the Civil War anew-and through unexpected eyes.



At the heart of Jordan's vital account is the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which 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. Most of them were ethnic Germans, set apart by language and identity, and their loyalties were regularly questioned by a nativist Northern press.



In the course of its service, the 107th Ohio was decimated five times over, and although one of its members earned the Medal of Honor, few others achieved any lasting distinction. Reclaiming these men for posterity, Jordan reveals that even as they endured the horrible extremes of war, the Ohioans contemplated the deeper meanings of the conflict at every turn-from personal questions of citizenship and belonging to the overriding matter of slavery and emancipation.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Jordan has constructed a humanistic history of how ordinary men became soldiers under extraordinary circumstances none could have foreseen . . . In giving the men of the 107th their hard-earned place in history, Jordan has set a high bar for future historians to meet and a template for exceptional historians to follow."— Gordon Berg Civil War Times

"Jordan's talent for vivid narrative rivals John Keegan's . . . The story of the 107th Ohio is not one of adventure, brave charges, and celebrations. But this is what makes it a welcome and essential contribution to the scholarship on the common soldier . . . The true strength of his book is its evocation of the dizzyingly complex experience of the men who fought to preserve the Union."— Angela M. Riotto Michigan War Studies Review

"Historian Jordan (Marching Home) delivers a captivating chronicle of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during and after the Civil War.... Jordan portrays Ohio as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment; details how one private in the 107th won the Medal of Honor; and recounts the lengths veterans went to in order to secure pensions and medical benefits for themselves and their loved ones.... Jordan profiles his characters with precision, revealing the deep emotional and physical scars they carried back from the conflict. This meticulous and engrossing history brings the Civil War to vivid life."— Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The personal sacrifice of soldiers in war often gets lost in military histories, and Jordan's moving account of the 107th Ohio is a welcome corrective."— Library Journal

"Movingly, [Jordan] writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men ‘gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets’ and remembered their fallen brothers in arms. A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history."— Kirkus Reviews

"A Thousand May Fall is a scholarly and literary achievement, a unique study not only of a Civil War regiment, but perhaps also the deepest probing ever of the experience of soldiers in that awful war. Jordan writes about the men of the 107th Ohio as though he became their neighbors, their confidant, their scribe. We learn the political impulses of these mostly German-born men, especially about slavery. The research is almost unfathomable in its granular depth, and the story a journey into the lived physical and medical reality of war. Above all, Jordan has written a singular study of human emotions under the greatest sustained pressures."— David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

"Like many other regiments in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the 107th Ohio was composed mostly of German-Americans and shared the Corps’ unhappy role as scapegoat for the army’s defeat at Chancellorsville and the first day at Gettysburg. This stigma shaped much of the regiment’s experience, which was otherwise typical of Civil War soldiering. In this splendid regimental history, Brian Matthew Jordan gives color and texture to that hard-knock experience."— James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

"Prodigiously researched and elegantly crafted, Brian Matthew Jordan’s A Thousand May Fall chronicles the lives of the men of the 107th Ohio, a regiment roughly seventy percent foreign-born. Unlike many midwestern units that fought for abolition as much as reunion, the ‘ethnically German’ regiment remained loyal to the Democratic Party and believed that nativism, and not unfree labor, presented the greatest danger to American liberties. Jordan’s vivid prose and engaging narrative brings his characters and battlefields to life. A powerful and moving story."— Douglas R. Egerton, Lincoln Prize–winning author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America

Kirkus Reviews

2021-02-08
Affecting portrait of an Ohio infantry regiment in the Civil War.

Jordan, a historian who has previously focused on Union veterans in the postwar era, follows a promising and fresh approach by studying the war through the lens of a single unit. In this instance, the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was made up largely of immigrants, one of 30 “ethnically German” regiments in the Union Army. Two prevailing views of Union soldiers have emerged in the literature: one of a tireless and determined force, the other of a battle-weary mob just this side of collapsing. As Jordan demonstrates, neither view is quite correct, and neither is quite wrong. The men he portrays in this account were “betwixt and between, men who belonged but did not”—but who took it as their duty to fight for their new country. Their defeat at Chancellorsville soon led to Gettysburg. “It would be difficult to imagine a worse position than the one the 107th Ohio had been ordered to assume in Gettysburg that afternoon,” writes the author, facing down hardened Rebel fighters in a fixed-bayonet infantry charge. Before these battles, the 107th had endured Ambrose Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” and been elevated in morale by the arrival of Joseph Hooker, who allowed the Ohioans 15-day leaves to accommodate travel west. Not all of them returned to the fight, and many who came back did not survive. At Gettysburg, Jordan writes, “of the 458 men who entered the fight that morning, no more than 171 limped back to Cemetery Hill.” Reflecting the author’s previous scholarly interest, much of the book concerns the final year of the war and the immediate postwar era, when families at home suffered from those losses as well. Movingly, he writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men “gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets” and remembered their fallen brothers in arms.

A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176177817
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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