From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and Its Civil War Community

Dennis W. Brandt, Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 274 pages. Hardcover. Contact Publisher

Review by Daniel H. Reigle, 2007

© Cincinnati CWRT and Daniel H. Reigle, 2007

From Home Guards to Heroes is a thoroughly researched, creative, and engaging history of the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry and the primary location from which its members came, Adams and York Counties, Pennsylvania. (Reviewer’s disclosure: my great-great-great uncle, Daniel P. Reigle, was a member of Company F of the 87th, leading to my personal interest in this unit.)

Author Dennis Brandt is a native of the York County area, and has long been interested in the 87th. His stated purpose in constructing the book was to “provide something unique” by “delving into soldiers’ personal lives in a way I hoped would be unprecedented” and to seek to understand the “connective fiber that tied soldiers to their feelings, regiment, communities, and families.” In my opinion, he has accomplished this objective and has produced a valuable book.

The foundation of this book is Brandt’s “vacuum cleaner research”, to use a favorite term of Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr. that he attributes to Allen Nevins. Brandt studied U.S. census records, nearly 2000 Compiled Military Service Records, and over 1000 pension files for 87th Pennsylvania members, in addition to those records for over 800 men from the Adams/York areas who enlisted in other units in 1861. This study yields descriptive data on the 87th and comparative data relative to men in other units on factors such as their professions, age, physical characteristics, age at death, life expectancy, American-born and foreign-born, and their personal worth in personal property and real estate at the time they enlisted. The data on 1861 enlistments (both 87th and other units) is presented with the 1860 Lincoln vote for each of the fifty-five townships and boroughs in the two counties. I found this data very interesting. Using my own relatives, for example, many of them (including the 87th member) lived in Adams County’s Mountjoy Township, which gave Lincoln 43% of its votes, with 11.5% (22) of its eligible men enlisting in 1861; however, many of my collateral relatives were still in York County’s West Manheim Township, about ten miles away, which gave Lincoln only 25% of its votes, and less than 2% (3 men) who enlisted in 1861.

The quantitative research is complemented by extensive use of newspapers, including not only major city newspapers, but the local newspapers in the Gettysburg, York, and Hanover, important for understanding the political landscape and personalities in the area. In addition to the rich contemporary information yielded by those papers, this research also yielded the valuable recollections by Michael Heiman in the York Gazette in 1891-1892. Further, Brandt has made use of any available manuscript sources, such as the George Blotcher papers at the excellent library of the York County Historical Trust, the Thomas Crowl papers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute and Penn State University libraries, and other materials provided by 87th descendants. He uses this information to create “sketches” of each company in the 87th, and the primary officers who were instrumental in its formation and its four years of service. I have seen many of these names “on paper” in years of reading about the 87th, but I found Brandt’s sketches to provide an entirely new level of perspective on the men themselves. Not all of this information is pleasant or routine; for example, Benjamin Snyder of Company K was believed to have been killed by a train on his way back to camp after an unauthorized evening of drinking in Baltimore, leaving his widow and two children. Recent research, however, has discovered that he is the same person who later served in the 149th PA, changed his name to Benjamin Taylor (the English equivalent of the German Schneider), married, and fathered eight children in Jefferson County, northeast of Pittsburg. At the time Snyder/Taylor was killed by the train or disappeared to start a new life, he also left a third woman pregnant with a son born outside of marriage. The identity of the person in uniform actually killed by the train is not known.

This is a “real people” approach to the regiment’s people and history, and it does not hesitate to share information that is delicate or uncomplimentary. For example, in the unit’s rush to organize, there was no attempt to make any pre-enlistment physical examination of the potential enlistees. Brandt presents data to show that this resulted in more than 11% of the 1861 enlistees leaving the service for illness or injury; by comparison, the 7th PA Reserves’ Company H, recruited in the same area, conducted full physical exams and experienced less than half that level of attrition. At another level that paints a less-than-heroic picture of some of the 87th’s men, the unit was chartered and recruited primarily to provide security on the important Northern Central Railroad between Harrisburg and Baltimore.  Although this was critically important to the Union effort in the first year of the war, such duty was not expected to involve major combat, long marches, or significant hardships at great distances from home. As a result, there was significant consternation among some parts of the 87th when their mission changed to becoming a fighting unit in the Union Army. Brandt examines the subject of desertions in detail, both real and on paper only, especially those occurring in the aftermath of the 87th’s loss of 293 men captured at 2nd Winchester during the prelude to Gettysburg in June 1863.  Drawing on Ella Lonn’s classic Desertion During the Civil War for perspective, he provides many details on the individual cases of some men who intended to desert and did so,  but also includes cases that illustrate how men could be tagged as “deserters” unfairly due to cumbersome administrative processes,. Finally, the chapter on “South-Central Pennsylvania and Race” will undoubtedly leave readers with roots in the 87th’s home territory with a better understanding of the complex views of the community on race, slavery, emancipation, and the meaning of citizenship, but also with some embarrassment in accepting in our 21st Century the opinions of our ancestors in the 19th Century. These are difficult subjects to tackle objectively and fairly, and I commend the author for doing so. It provides additional perspective for the 87th’s solid performance as part of the VI Corps in 1864 and 1865.

A difficult choice for the author of any regimental history is how much detail to include on the battles in which the unit participated. Brandt made the choice to not attempt to relate in detail the battles at 2nd Winchester, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, 3rd Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, Cedar Creek, the Petersburg Campaign including the Breakthrough on 2nd April 1865, and the Appomattox Campaign. He does include a more extensive analysis of Monocacy  because of the 87th’s pivotal role there in slowing down Early’s advance on Washington D.C. This is clearly the right choice, in my opinion, because it enables Brandt to use the space of his book to focus on the 87th, while the reader interested in more depth on the 87th at the major battles can readily turn to other excellent studies, such as Wilbur Nye’s Here Come the Rebels! on 2nd Winchester; Gordon Rhea’s series of books on the battles in the Overland Campaign; books on the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign and battles by Jeffrey Wert, Thomas Lewis, and Theodore Mahr; and A. Wilson Greene’s excellent study of the Breakthrough at Petersburg.

I was interested in this book, obviously, because of my interest in my own family member’s experience in the 87th and in the York/Adams County community in which seven generations of my direct ancestors lived. This book will be of value to anyone studying the genealogy or local history of the York/Adams County area. However, I also believe this book to be of significant value to anyone interested in an indepth understanding and history of a Union infantry regiment. Although the 87th was, of course, a set of specific individuals and events, the themes, dynamics, and pattems likely have a high degree of similarity in other units. It is similar in nature to the excellent studies that provide a broader study of the participants in a battle or of the members of a unit, such as William Piston and Richard Hatcher’s Wilson’s Creek, Lois Lambert’s 91st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, or Kirk Jenkins’ The Battle Rages Higher: The Union’s Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry. I will not only be re-reading this book more than once, but will use it as a valuable reference in my own Civil War genealogy and history research.