In 1856, on the Illinois prairie, Norwegian farmers ANDERS and MARIA encounter DANIEL, a young fugitive slave. Will they do their legal duty by turning him in? Or will they break the laws of their new country and put their lives at risk to aid Daniel in his bid for freedom?
Peasant Farmers, by Julien Joseph. Public Domain.
That’s not really a story. It’s more like a situation, a setup. But it’s a start.
In historical fiction, an author wants to pay attention to the underlying morality of the situation. But you have to build on that. The story of Anders, Maria, and Daniel, as mentioned above, is incomplete without some sense of where Anders and Maria have come from, to be newly-arrived Scandinavian immigrants in central Illinois.
The Captive Slave, by John Philip Simpson. Public Domain.
One also ought to sketch Daniel more fully. What kind of slave life is he trying to escape from? What are his chances? What will he do with his new freedom, if he makes his escape good?
There are more questions than answers.
John Brown.
It’s notable that Anders, Maria, and Daniel all arrived at the same place in 1856—just when the nation’s quarrel over slavery was starting to come to a head. John Brown was murdering pro-slavery men in Kansas about this time. The Dred Scott decision, which gave iron force to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, would come along in early 1857. Lincoln and Douglas would contest for the Illinois Senate seat in a series of debates in 1858. Brown would show up again, this time raiding the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in 1859. The pot was coming to a boil.
How would these events affect Anders? Maria? Daniel?
It’s all there in Price of Passage—A Tale of Immmigration and Liberation, coming August 23 from DX Varos Publishing.
Sign up for my free newsletter, The Haphazard Times, above right, to be kept fully informed.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
Last Tuesday, I posted a jeremiad. It was my first response to the destruction of a venerable statue here in Madison, Wisconsin.
Friends who saw this lament commented, “Well, at least now, from your blog post, I have learned about Colonel Hans Christian Heg.” Meaning, they now know the name of the man whose statue was destroyed.
But if that’s all you know of Heg, then you need to know quite a bit more before you can begin to understand just why his story happens to be especially important right at this moment.
So here goes:
Immigrant
Hans Christian Heg’s father, Even Hansen Heg, was an enterprising man who owned and operated a hotel in Drammen, Norway. In 1840, encouraged by letters from two acquaintances, Sören Backe and Johannes Johanneson, Heg took his wife and four children to join Backe and Johanneson at Wind Lake in the new Muskego Settlement in Racine County, Wisconsin.
Heg built a huge barn. It became a social and religious center and a place of first haven for Norwegian families arriving at Muskego. With its burgeoning population of Norsemen, Muskego was a place where new arrivals could adjust to America bit by bit, learning the new language and customs at an unhurried pace, because almost the whole community spoke Norsk. In 1847, Even Heg joined with Backe and editor James D. Reymert to start America’s first Norwegian-language newspaper, Nordlyset (The Northern Light).
Abolitionist
But by then, Even’s eldest son, Hans Christian, had already mastered the language and customs of America. In 1848, at nineteen, he became an active worker for the Free Soil Party, which opposed extension of slavery into the new states west of the Mississippi. The Nordlyset meanwhile had also become the party’s house organ in the Norwegian community.
Colonel Hans Christian Heg. Public Domain.
At age twenty, Heg answered the siren song of gold and joined the army of Forty-Niners headed for California. After two years there, and just when his prospecting was starting to pay, he received word of his father’s death. Since his mother was already dead, duty to his younger siblings called him home.
He took over the family farm at Wind Lake, married, and immersed himself in Free Soil politics. When the party merged into the new Republican Party, Heg became a Republican. In 1859, he was elected state prison commissioner, a post in which he worked to promote vocational training for prisoners. Two years later, with Republican Abraham Lincoln elected president, the states of the South seceded. The Civil War began. Heg resigned his prisons post and started recruiting fellow immigrants into the Union Army. His “thousand Norsemen” were mustered into service as the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, under Heg’s command.
Soldier
Bronze statue of Heg, by Paul Fjelde. Public Domain.
After leading the 15th through major battles at Perryville, Kentucky, and Stones River, Tennessee, Heg was shot through the gut at Chickamauga, Georgia. He died the next day. His body was shipped back to Wisconsin and buried in the Lutheran churchyard near Wind Lake. In 1925, the Norwegian Society of America commisioned Norwegian-American sculptor Paul Fjelde to create a nine-foot bronze statue of Heg in uniform. The society gave it to the state of Wisconsin and it was installed on the capitol grounds. There it stood, honoring Heg and his regiment for 95 years, until a mob—ostensibly seeking racial justice—tore it down, dismembered it, and threw it into Lake Monona on June 23, 2020.
But Wait—There’s More
If the information just given is all you know about Colonel Heg, you’re still missing the point. For context is everything.
As stirring and sad as Heg’s story is, it’s far from unusual. The reasons why it’s not unusual form the heart of the story. The statue destroyed last week was not so much a tribute to Heg as to the spirit shared by Heg and his comrades-in-arms.
Heg was one of at least 360,000 Americans who gave their lives wearing Union blue and who therefore can be said to have died in the fight against slavery. They were mostly white men, but increasingly as the war went on, many black soldiers also served and died.
Heg commanded the only all-Norwegian regiment in the war. But the 15th Wisconsin was hardly the only ethnic regiment.
Germans
Prussian troops storm the revolutionaries’ barricades at Alexander Platz, Berlin, 1848. By JoJan – Own work; photo made at an exhibition at the Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, Germany, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17630682.
Many Germans had come to America as political refugees after the Revolutions of 1848-49 in the German states. They and other German-Americans populated all-German units such as the 8th and 68th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 52nd New York German Rangers, the 9th Ohio, 74th Pennsylvania, 32nd Indiana, and 9th Wisconsin infantry regiments. Each Northern regiment had approximately one thousand men. Counting all who served in these ethnic units, and many more who served in ordinary regiments from the states where they lived, some 200,000 of the Americans who fought for the Union had begun life in Germany.
Irish
Green Ensign of the 1st Regiment (69th N. Y. Volunteer Infantry), Irish Brigade, Union Army. Public Domain.
The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and 1850s brought a million and a half Irish people to America. Recent Irish immigrants serving in the Union Army numbered 150,000. Some served in all-Irish regiments like the 37th New York Volunteers and the 90th Illinois Volunteers. The 63rd, 69th, and 88th Infantry Regiments of New York formed the core of what was called the Irish Brigade. The brigade was shredded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, its effective force reduced from 1,600 to 256 men. In the whole course of the war, the Irish Brigade suffered the third greatest number of combat dead of all brigades in the Union Army.
Others
New York’s 79th Infantry Regiment was made up of recently-arrived Scots, who wore tartan kilts as part of their uniforms.
Other ethnic units had soldiers who had come to America from Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, France, and Spain.
Many immigrant soldiers joined the fight in mixed units of ordinary Americans.
My great-great-grandfather, Anders Gunstensen—a second son of a second son who came from Norway in 1853 because he could not inherit the farm—settled in central Illinois, where Norwegians were scarce. There was no local Norwegian regiment to join. The unit he did join—Company K, 106th Illinois Volunteer Infantry—was an outfit from Menard County whose other soldiers all had Anglo-American names, except for a handful of Germans and Irishmen.
Motives
I wrote a novel, Freedom’s Purchase, a fictional account based on the lives of Anders Gunstensen and his wife, Maria. In making up the plot, except for a few dry, statistical facts—such as Anders’ membership in the 106th Illinois—I had no information about Anders’ and Maria’s lives in America. No letters, no diaries, no heirlooms. So I was free to speculate that a large part of Anders’ motive in serving was a strong opposition to slavery in his adopted land. I dare anyone to prove otherwise.
But the assumption is not far-fetched. It was demonstrably true of many immigrant soldiers in the Civil War, like Hans Christian Heg.
Most or all of the African Americans who volunteered as soldiers had fighting slavery as a prime motive. They joined regiments such as the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—the unit celebrated in the film Glory—and various federal units known as United States Colored Troops.
Why?
What’s the point of all this?
I said when you knew more about Colonel Hans Christian Heg and understood why he was not unusual, you would know the point of the story. What does that mean?
Here it is: Millions of men, women, and children braved long, perilous voyages in sailing ships from Europe to America in the years before the Civil War. Whether they fled famine, political persecution, or simple economic hardship, they came to America hoping for a better life.
They sought not only the material wealth of this blessed country. They hungered also for the democratic, republican political system of the new nation that had electrified the world with its revolution of 1776 and its constitution of 1789.
Upon arrival, they found themselves part of a dynamic nation, strongly swayed by recent immigrants like themselves. When that nation was threatened with extinction, they came together to save it.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln told all Americans, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” And they believed him.
These immigrants, whether they ate lefse, potatoes, or sauerkraut, came together in a joint cause. People who grew up in autocratic monarchies like that of Sweden/Norway (joined as a single country at the time) and those who came from German states jockeying for prominence in post-Napoleonic Europe came together for a complex of reasons. It was imperative to save the Union and high time to end the system of slavery.
They joined forces with Anglo-Americans whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, with recent immigrants from other lands, and with undaunted, agitated African Americans whose friends and families still wore chains.
They did something special for themselves, for black people in America, and for all of us descendants. What they did, they did at the cost of their lives. Or they left arms or legs or facial parts on bloody fields and lived out their days hobbled.
What they achieved was noble in conception but turned out to be a far cry from perfect when put through the wringer of a racist society. Their battlefield success was only one phase of a longer war—a struggle for freedom, understanding, and decency that is still being waged today.
Those immigrant soldiers of the Civil War, men like Hans Christian Heg, did not solve all the big problems they inherited from America’s slavemasters. But they came together; and what they did, they did together. They kept the Union together to face the internal struggles of later times.
We have a gigantic task ahead of us—the formation of a better society—a task which can only be accomplished bit by bit.
The only way it can possibly be done is together.
That is why we should remember Hans Christian Heg and his many brothers in arms. That is why they are important.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
Ulysses Grant—rated by his contemporaries the great man of the nineteenth century, perhaps the greatest in American history besides George Washington. Even Abraham Lincoln was an also-ran to Grant.
Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant. Matthew Brady photo. Public Domain.
His giant reputation became sicklied o’er with the pale cast of revisionism in the twentieth century. “Grant? Oh, yes. He was that pathetic, cigar-puffing drunk who couldn’t do anything right except win battles and who went on to lead the most corrupt presidential administration in history.”
Grant’s stock is now on the rise again thanks to a generation of careful historians who have worked for decades to set the record straight. That is the background against which the History Channel now offers its three-part miniseries—Grant: Unlikely Hero; Grant: Lincoln’s General; and Grant: Freedom’s Champion.
I am writing this before the series airs. Here, I will not rehash the humilitations of Grant’s early life or the transformation of a hapless man into a world-beater. You can get those tales elsewhere—perhaps even in this week’s telecasts.
I will, however, assert that a proper kenning of Grant’s role in the Civil War is the best way to illuminate the war’s grand strategy as a military matter.
Civil War Mystery?
It’s often asked: “Why did Lincoln wait so long to promote Grant? Why did the president hire and fire so many other top dogs before finally, almost as a last resort, settling on Grant in 1864?” The question is presented, usually, as an unparalleled mystery.
Abraham Lincoln on November 8, 1863. Alexander Gardner photo. Public Domain.
But it is the wrong question.
Merely to ask it implies at least three silly ideas:
That Lincoln was a bumbler and no judge of military talent.
That Lincoln was an absolute monarch, with no Congress to satisfy and no Army bureaucracy to work through.
That had Lincoln been smart enough to put Grant in charge much earlier, he would have greatly shortened the war.
This perennial “Why so late on Grant?” question looks at the Civil War through the wrong end of the telescope.
Fort Donelson
Grant became a hero when he captured Fort Donelson, Kentucky, in February 1862. Not long after, Lincoln said of Grant, “I can’t spare this man—he fights.” Of all his generals, only Grant got results without badgering the War Office to double his resources. Lincoln had to know from early 1862 that Grant stood out among his commanders.
So, a more fruitful heuristic might be: “For what job was it that Lincoln thought he could not spare Grant, if not for supreme command?”
(SPOILER ALERT: THE ANSWER STARTS WITH A “V”.)
Anaconda Plan
Lincoln was a mature politician who relied on incisive, lawyerly reasoning skills. Before many months of war had passed, he stopped deferring to his military establishment and began to urge his own views. The subsequent record of the Civil War shows Lincoln to have been, in fact, its master strategist.
Winfield Scott in 1861. Public Domain.
In this he was not wholly original. His strategy differed little from the “Anaconda Plan” proposed in 1861 by General Winfield Scott, the grand old man of the Army. But if Scott originated the strategy, Lincoln understood it deeply and applied it from the start.
Lincoln’s lifelong habit was to zero in on what he called “the nub of the case,” going straight for the main issue that lay at the heart of any matter. Scott’s Anaconda Plan called for squeezing the Confederacy from all directions, by sea and land. But the nub of the plan was to regain control of the Mississippi River. It was America’s prime artery of commerce and the natural path of cleavage between the Confederate states. The fate of the Mississippi would dictate the outcome of the war.
December 1861 cartoon map of Scott’s Anaconda Plan. Public Domain.
Vicksburg the Key
At the start of 1862, Lincoln endorsed a naval plan to seize New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi, and along with it Vicksburg, which commanded the lower river from tall bluffs well suited to the placement of artillery. Flag Officer David Dixon Porter recorded Lincoln’s speech to his planners:
“See,” said Mr. Lincoln, pointing to the map, “what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key. Here is Red River, which will supply the Confederates with cattle and corn to feed their armies. There are the Arkansas and White Rivers, which can supply cattle and hogs by the thousand. From Vicksburg these supplies can be distributed by rail all over the Confederacy. Then there is that great depot of supplies on the Yazoo. Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”
To Lincoln, the Western man who had twice run the Mississippi by flatboat and who knew it as the commercial dynamo of the nation, Vicksburg was not just an objective. It was the grand strategic prize.
“Old Brains” Halleck
Henry Wager Halleck, carte de visite, c. 1861-1865. Public Domain.
After Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson, his superior, General Henry Wager Halleck, deprived him of command and placed him under virtual arrest for various imagined deficiencies. Halleck, known as “Old Brains,” was a martinet but also a bureaucrat to the core. He wired Washington asking what to do with the deficient Grant. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton replied, probably at Lincoln’s behest, requesting further details. Halleck, perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, chose to drop the matter.
Grant resumed command of his army at Shiloh on the Tennessee River, only to be welcomed with a surprise attack by 40,000 screaming rebels. After a hard day of fighting, his army decimated and backed up against the river landing, the unflappable Grant stood fast and launched a counter-attack the next day that swept the rebels from the field.
Again, Halleck sidelined him. This time, he hamstrung Grant by the subtle device of promoting him to be “second in command”—a position commensurate with Grant’s seniority in the department but removed from direct command of troops.
Meanwhile, New Orleans had been taken by a naval squadron under Flag Officer David Farragut. But it was clear that Vicksburg would not succumb to naval operations alone.
Consider Lincoln’s point of view: Vicksburg, the key objective of the war, required a combination of vigorous naval and land movements. Grant, the best general, was stymied as deputy commander to the dithering, overcautious Halleck, who nonetheless was by all accounts a genius at military administration.
Take Vicksburg
And Lincoln was beginning to learn how the Army worked. He named Halleck to command all Union armies on July 11, 1862. Halleck was pleased to be appointed general-in-chief and left immediately for Washington. Meanwhhile, Halleck’s departure cleared the way for Grant to command the Department of the Mississippi. It now became Grant’s job to take Vicksburg.
Gentle Reader, perhaps you wonder, “Just what primrose path are you leading me down, O New Favorite Writer?”
Well, here it is:
Those great Eastern battles you always hear about—Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, even Gettysburg—were battles that Lincoln understood had to be fought. Although they did not always end well, they were essential attempts to generate the big squeeze that gave the Anaconda Plan its name.
But Lincoln protected Grant from Halleck’s machinations in order to put Grant on the most important project: Vicksburg.
With its artillery trained on a hairpin river bend from three hundred feet above it, and protected on its landward side by strong earthworks, Vicksburg was a tough nut that took Grant eight months to crack. Throughout that time, Lincoln with patience and cunning resisted enormous pressures to dislodge Grant from command. When Vicksburg finally capitulated, the president exulted: “The Father of Waters goes again unvexed to the sea.”
Eastern and Western Theories
Grant moved on to Item Two: Lifting the rebel siege of Chattanooga—a key point commanding the lower Tennessee Valley and protecting an important pocket of Union sentiment in East Tennessee. Grant completed this job much faster, in late 1863.
Finally, Lincoln appointed Grant supreme commander of all Union forces, leapfrogging him over Halleck and promoting him to Lieutenant General—a rank previously held only by George Washington and Winfield Scott.
The timing of this appointment and promotion shows that overall command of all Union forces and a showdown with Lee’s Army in Virginia was actually Lincoln’s third wish, to be pursued only after the Mississippi was liberated and East Tennessee secured.
“But, what about Gettysburg? Wasn’t that the most imporant battle?”
No, Dear Reader.
Gettysburg was the largest battle of the war and held its own rightful importance. It ended July 3, 1863, with the failure of Pickett’s Charge at the Angle, termed “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.” This defeat for Robert E. Lee may be called “the end of the beginning” of the Civil War.
The very next day—July 4, 1863—when Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant, can just as reasonably be called “the beginning of the end.” The loss of Vicksburg sealed the South’s fate, although it took almost two more years to complete the end game.
We hear more about the great Eastern battles than about Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga because at the start of the war, many saw it as a game of “Capture the Flag”; sieze Richmond and you win the war. That was never actually true, but it’s a view that has shaped perception of the conflict from that day to this.
What you have just read, on the contrary, is the Western theory of the war.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
My irascible sometime friend and former work supervisor, Tim, once went ballistic in my presence over the historic fact that U.S. presidents including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and in the twentieth century Woodrow Wilson on various occasions had issued public calls for “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”
Tim—alas, now deceased—was a military man. He was quite intelligent, tolerably well-educated, and always in the grip of a steamy anger that was never far from the surface. He had been raised in a Catholic family but in adulthood described himself as “agnostic.”
He made no quarrel with presidential calls for fasting and prayer. He understood that even in a nation that prohibits “an establishment of Religion,” a leader may give voice to the general religious impulses of the people. But he did not think a chief executive should call for the country to be humiliated.
Tim was a notable narcissist, full of pride in himself and esteeming pride as a general virtue in all cases. He considered humiliation as the one thing to be avoided above all. Therefore, to call for humiliation of the whole nation was tantamount to treason. After all—the British, the Germans, and the Japanese had tried to humiliate us and we had not let them get away with it. Why, then, do it to ourselves?
With more time and more patience, had I been wiser and deeper, I might have helped Tim understand the concept of national humiliation in a larger context. But I did not.
In his sensitivity to that issue, Tim inadvertently put his finger on a key dimension of America’s church-state relationship. If we understand our nation’s affairs to fall within the Providence of a Power who calls each of us to approach life with Christ-like humility, then it seems proper for all of us, as a body politic, periodically to be humbled. To be reminded, that is, of our proper place in the world under the overarching care of God.
“Humiliation” in this sense may be what Lincoln had in mind when he said, in his Second Inaugural Address,
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”
That kind of thinking, I believe, is what Washington, Lincoln, and others meant when they called for national “humiliation.”
Past generations have mostly understood and assumed a close kinship between our lives as Christians and our lives as citizens. Alhough the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment has always forbidden the government to prescribe forms of prayer and worship, nobody construed it to prevent Americans from expressing our religious affiliations and sentiments in our public lives.
Under such a general understanding, it seemed perfectly natural to Americans of the mid-twentieth century to salute our national sovereignty by displaying flags in our houses of worship and recognizing national holidays during regular worship services. But expectations and understandings are much different today.
Our pastor—no bomb-throwing activist, she—called our attention to three articles in the current online Alban Weekly dealing with churches’ sometimes uneasy relationship with Independence Day celebrations. She wanted to know what we thought about them. The leading piece, a nine-year-old reflection from Duke University’s Faith & Leadership website, titled “What to do about the 4th,” written by a retired Methodist minister named Ed Moore, mentioned some “local traditions” that he called “affronting.” These were: “an American flag draped over the Lord’s Table, the Pledge of Allegiance included in the liturgy, or the choir expecting to deliver a patriotic anthem.”
I suppose these “local traditions” must exist somewhere in Christendom, or Rev. Moore would not have called them out. But they must be exceeding rare. In all my years I have never seen any of these “affronting” cases included in the worship of any churches I have attended. Using the U.S. flag as a communion cloth or a chancel parament? Such a practice must be abhorrent both to Christians and to patriots (bearing in mind that many of us aspire to be both).
Some patriotic expression in worship space, however, has been a commonplace in most churches since the dim past. It might take the form of red/white/blue floral decorations on July Fourth (a practice Rev. Moore okays, faintly); or the display of the flag somewhere in the worship space; or the singing of a patriotic song such as “America the Beautiful” by the congregation on the Fourth, in place of a regular hymn.
The reason such practices come under the microscope of critical examination now is not that we somehow are better educated than our grandparents about the implications of the Establishment Clause. Rather, it’s because we now live in a society that is markedly less religious than theirs was. I believe we are the poorer for that. But it does not follow that those who still keep the faith must embrace a sharp divorce between that faith and our inner sense of national identity. There can be room for both.
The Christian flag.
In the church where I have been a member for the past forty years, we have never practiced extreme liturgical patriotism. Sometimes we sing a patriotic song or two on national holidays. We used to display a U.S. flag and a “Christian flag” in our sanctuary. We retired those flags a while back; I am not aware of any complaints about that.
But should we, at some future time, choose to restore flags to our worship space, that would not show that we had sold out our Christian faith to some crypto-fascist conspiracy. It would only signal that fashions, or group preferences, had shifted slightly.
Some wise person once decreed that sleeping dogs ought to be permitted their slumber. Despite any number of learned articles that may be written, already or in the future, I doubt that most American church people feel any great tension between their devotion to Christ and their loyalty to our country.
I’ll bet my combustible friend Tim, if he were here today, would at least agree with that.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
