Overview

Often called Lee’s greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by “Stonewall” Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the “flight” of German immigrant troops. The impact on America’s large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers’ letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, military and civilian. He offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiers’ valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. He critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo-American and German-American reactions—and on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German-Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and Keller traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion and assimilation in American life.

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Reviews

.. .German American studies, which flourished a century ago and were nearly moribund fifty years later, flourish once again. -Robert W. Frizzell, Journal of American Ethnic History Keller has added a highly valuable and much-needed revisionist work to Civil War historiography and to the study of ethnicity in nineteenth-century America. -The Journal of Southern History A truly groundbreaking work of research and analysis. -Civil War Books & Authors Keller's finely-crafted study offers a wealth of insights into the Civil War . . . -Civil War Book Review. . . Superbly-written and detailed . . . Keller outlines with a clarity which few have done before him . . . -Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy Chancellorsville and the Germans is an important corrective to the prejudiced charges against the 11th Corps and the Germans in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Showing by exhaustive research in primary sources that these accusations were unwarranted, he has finally laid to rest misinformation about the battle and the German-Americans. -Hans Trefousse

Keller's finely-crafted study offers a wealth of insights into the Civil War . . .

Author Information

Christian B. Keller is Professor of History at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Along with many scholarly articles focusing on the ethnic experience in the Civil War, he is author of Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (Fordham, 2007) and coauthor of Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (Stackpole, 2004). He is currently editing and translating the memoirs of a German American soldier in the 41st New York.

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