EL DORADO — Six months after the first shots were fired upon Fort Sumter, S.C., a German immigrant enlisted in the Union Army.
Jacob Haas, enlivened by the words and promises of President Abraham Lincoln and desperate to show his patriotism to his new home, prepared to march off into war and lay down his life to see the Union cause succeed.
Jacob left behind a memoir detailing his account of being a Union soldier during the Civil War. This memoir was passed down from generation to generation until Jacob’s ancestor reached out to Mark Christ, the community outreach director with the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.
Christ worked to publish the translated version of the diary from its original German.
The book, “This Day We Marched Again,” was the subject of a presentation Christ gave to the South Arkansas Historic Preservation Society Thursday when he discussed the life of Jacob.
For Christ, Jacob’s diary became a passion project he felt should be shared with the world. It is not just a book about a man in a war, but the honest, detailed account of a soldier fighting for a cause he believed in.
The book was published in 2014 by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.
Jacob, a farmer, left his tumultuous homeland of Germany in search of a peaceful land of promise, a land he found in Wisconsin. With its golden fields of wheat and forests of oaks that towered into the sky, Jacob, his wife, Katharina, and their four children found their home in Sheboygan County near Lake Michigan among the large German population of the state.
Too soon, Jacob witnessed his new country torn apart by an uprising similar to the one that drove him from his native land.
Jacob, one of the 2,215 soldiers who enlisted in the Sheboygan Tigers that later became Company A in the Ninth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, heeded Lincoln’s call as he marched deep into the war-torn country.
Jacob’s early days in the company went by slowly with each dreary day bleeding into another as they remained in camp at Lake Michigan. As the biting winds began to blow off the water and the soldiers watched their encampment be buried under snow in December and January, Jacob remained at Camp Siegel in Milwaukee. Daily drills slowed as the snow piled higher until finally no commander could demand their men to leave their tents.
The men of Company A gathered their belongings and left Camp Siegel on Jan. 22, 1862. On Jan. 30, they reached Leavenworth, Kan., where they found shelter in the churches.
The men savored their idle days spent in a town with little snow when they had few duties, but as spring began to offer a promise of warmer days, the company was off on their long trek to Fort Smith.
Their journey began with cold days where rain and snow mixed on its descent to the earth, but was quickly replaced by milder days when the men trekked through a prairie of dry grass that was over half their height at some points.
When Fort Scott, Kan., lingered on the horizon, plumes of dust blew up forcing the men to find a shelter. They reached the fort on the eighth day of a 140 mile march.
On May 16, the men were the first federal troop to be ordered into Indian Territory under the direction of Colonel William Weir. Jacob followed Weir in his endless, aimless wanderings through Indian Territory.
After Weir lost his position for drunkenness and the Ninth Wisconsin pursued their enemies across Missouri and Arkansas, they traveled 148 miles to return to Fort Smith on Sept. 1.
Soon the company was marching again and their journey would take them into Arkansas were the fear of rebel guerrillas was rampant through the remote countryside.
On Nov. 3, Jacob and his comrades were stationed at Camp Boone near Bentonville. When a young lieutenant from the Second Indiana went missing, the troops feared foul play.
The lieutenant had fallen for a young woman and had left camp to visit her. On that ill-fated day, a trap was set by the family with about a dozen rebel guerrillas lying in wait.
The women stole the young man’s gun and the guerrillas descended upon the young lieutenant. When Union forces went to investigate their missing colleague, his mutilated body was discovered under a pile of crisp, autumn leaves.
The Union troops burned the family’s home, but Jacob never learned the fate of the two traitorous women.
The march continued until Dec. 7 when the Battle of Prairie Grove was fought in Washington County.
Jacob and the rest of the company were not on the battlefield that day, but were instead guarding a Union wagon train.
However, they did witness the aftermath of that day. Jacob saw a field so strewn with the bodies of fallen soldiers that a person could walk across it without their feet touching the ground.
When the sounds of battle ceased and all that was left was the wails of men nearing death, a woman and her children emerged from a cellar. She inspected the death that had fallen around her home and screamed at the soldiers for ruining their lives.
As her home burned to the ground, Jacob witnessed the despair of a woman losing her home who was only left with the family around her.
During the march to Little Rock in September, the Union troops faced another fearsome enemy from nature.
Jacob had already faced rats the size of small animals that soldiers killed with a bayonet, but now the forest around their encampment was fighting back.
As they laid under their tents, the shadows of dead trees loomed overhead, dead trees that creaked their protest against the strong winds blowing through the camp. Suddenly, a tree fell on a tent, killing a soldier who would be buried with honors in Little Rock.
The men left their hidden camp that night to find safety in a field where they risked discovery if any Rebels found them during the night.
In March and April of 1864, the company left on the Camden Expedition to join up with another regiment in Louisiana on the Red River Campaign. Their mission was clear, claim the rich cotton fields in Texas to feed the factories in the North.
On April 30 during the Camden Expedition, Jacob found himself in the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry in Grant County.
In the early morning, the sounds of cannons echoed through the surrounding woods. Fear struck the Union men at the encroaching Confederate army.
The rebels approached the federal troops who fled back towards Little Rock.
Jacob was soon discharged after he began to suffer from scurvy and rheumatism.
He worked as a carpenter after returning home and settling in Missouri.
Jacob suffered from debilitating rheumatism until he died on Sept. 12, 1906.
The book is not a glorious account of a nation divided, for Jacob did not fight for glory, nor a glamorous retelling of infamous battles, such as Vicksburg or Gettysburg. It is the story of a German immigrant fighting and marching through a country he loved. A country he wanted to see united.
LeeAnn Jones may be reached at 870-862-6611 or by email at [email protected].