TC contingents fought in Civil War

By LORAINE ANDERSON
landerson@record-eagle.com

February 23, 2009 10:39 am

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It all happened so fast for Curtis Fowler, after the Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteer troops three days later. Grand Traverse County resident Fowler answered, enlisting in the 1st Michigan Infantry, the state's first regiment. Its 10 divisions were made up mostly of trained and practiced men from independent military units in the state.

On May 13, a week before required, the regiment's 798 men left Michigan, clad in new uniforms and armed with new minie rifles, a rapid muzzle-loading weapon widely used in the Civil War, and known for the huge and terrible wounds its bullets inflicted.

Two steamships transported Michigan's "boys in blue" to trains in Cleveland, and the Michigan troops arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 16. The Michigan 1st literally was the first regiment from the "western" frontier to march past the White House.

"Thank God for Michigan," President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said as the state's soldiers paraded by.

Fowler was wounded in late July in the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas Junction, Va., the first real major land battle of the war. About 5,000 men were killed, wounded, captured, or missing in the battle*, 3,000 of them federal troops. That battle quickly dispatched romanticized Yankee notions that the war would end quickly.

Fowler was sent home and lived another 55 years; he died March 25, 1916. He is buried in the Ogdensburg Cemetery on Old Mission Peninsula.

His brother, Francis Z. Fowler, was not so lucky.

Francis enlisted in the Union Army after Curtis was wounded and became "the first martyr from Grand Traverse County to the Slaveholders' Rebellion," as the Grand Traverse Herald put it on Sept. 19, 1862.

He had fallen at the Second Battle of Bull run in August 1862.

The numbers

About 370 men from northwest Michigan enlisted in the Union Army over the course of the war and about 100 lost their lives in battle, to injuries or hardships and disease in Confederate prisons.

Unlike today, soldiers of that time were recruited by counties and generally served together in the same units. The two largest groups of area men became part of Company A in the 26th Infantry and the all-Indian Company K in the Michigan 1st Sharpshooters regiment.

About 30 of the 55 enlisted in Company A were recruited in 1862 by Lt. Charles H. Holden, a 30-year-old Grand Traverse County prosecutor who resigned in 1862 to fight with Union forces. At least 10 of that group died.

Sixty-six American Indian sharpshooters from northwest Lower Michigan and Pentwater were recruited in 1863 from villages along northwest Michigan's coast to serve in Company K, and 26 lost their lives. Of the 43 American Indian soldiers from Grand Traverse and Antrim counties, 14 died and another seven were never heard from again after being reported wounded or taken prisoner. More than half of the Pentwater soldiers -- 12 of 23 -- died in battle, prison or of injuries.

Company K was the only all-American Indian unit in the Michigan regiments and Army of the Potomac, and the largest unit of American Indians east of the Mississippi. Nationally, about 20,000 American Indians fought for the Union and Confederate sides in the Civil War.

Another 42 soldiers from northwestern Michigan who enlisted at various times were scattered throughout the Sharpshooters' nine other companies, as well. Overall, the Michigan 1st Sharpshooters fielded 1,300 soldiers -- 108 from northwestern Lower Michigan.

'God bless them'

"God bless them and give them victory!" the Grand Traverse Herald headline said in late August 1862 after wives, children, mothers, fathers, siblings and friends gathered to bid farewell to the local men of Company A.

Lumber baron Perry Hannah, Traverse City's town father, made an eloquent and patriotic speech to the 25 "gallant men who have left their families and their workshops to fight the battles of their country," the paper reported.

The Traverse City contingent and 60 other area men in the company became known as the "Lake Shore Tigers." They mustered into Company A in Jackson for training and left for Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13, 1862.

Whitewater recruit John Brainerd reported on the Dec. 13-17 train trip from Jackson to Maryland in a letter to Perry Hannah that was published in the Herald in February 1863. In Toledo, "coffee was served to men in wash tubs."

On Dec. 17, they arrived in Baltimore. After a dinner of bread, meat, coffee and raw cabbage, "the privates were crowded into three large rooms like a drove of hogs" to wait for the cars.

Michigan's 26th Infantry fought mostly in Virginia in Army of the Potomac campaigns, as did Company K and other Michigan 1st Sharpshooter companies.

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