Chapter excerpt · The Lives Before Us
From Atlanta to Washington
Heinrich Fenner crossed the Atlantic as a ten-year-old immigrant in 1849. Fifteen years later, after serving at Vicksburg and Allatoona, he joined Sherman’s march across Georgia.
Then the army turned south. The march across Georgia carried Heinrich through a different kind of war. He had seen armies fight at Vicksburg and Allatoona. Now he moved through a countryside where the war reached railroads, bridges, farms, plantations, towns, and the people who lived among them.
Sherman’s army cut itself loose from its northern supply lines. It would live off the land as it moved toward Savannah. Railroads were torn apart. Depots and military stores were destroyed. Livestock and provisions were taken. Mills, bridges, and other resources that could sustain the Confederate war effort disappeared behind the advancing columns.
Along the roads were people for whom the approaching army meant something entirely different. Enslaved men, women, and children left plantations as the Union columns passed. Some followed the army. Others remained behind in a world whose foundations were collapsing. Heinrich’s thoughts about what he saw were never recorded. But he marched through it.
The boy who once left Michelsberg with his family was now moving through another great human migration—people leaving behind the only lives they had known, uncertain what waited ahead.
By December, the army reached Savannah. Fifteen years earlier, Heinrich crossed the Atlantic as a ten-year-old immigrant. Now, after nearly three years of war and a march across Georgia, he reached the Atlantic coast again.
Savannah fell on December 21. The war was still not over. In January 1865, the army turned north into the Carolinas. Winter rain replaced the heat and dust of Vicksburg. Rivers and swamps slowed the guns. Roads became mud. The destruction continued.
On February 17, the army entered Columbia. That night, the city burned.
The causes and responsibility for the fire would be argued long after the war. Heinrich left no account of what he saw, but his battery was there. At Columbia, he saw what war could do to a city.
Still the army moved north, into North Carolina and across more rivers and more roads. At Bentonville in March, Confederate forces made one of their last major attempts to stop Sherman’s army. They failed.
By then, the world Heinrich entered three years earlier was collapsing. Richmond fell. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. On April 26, Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Confederate forces under his command to Sherman. The war was ending.
Before peace was secured, another shock passed through Sherman’s army. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Washington. The news reached Sherman while he was negotiating with Johnston, and grief quickly mixed with anger. Some soldiers demanded vengeance rather than surrender. Sherman strengthened the guard around Raleigh, worked to calm his men, and continued the negotiations. Heinrich left no record of what he thought, but he marched north in an army that had won the war and lost the president who guided it.
On April 29, Heinrich began the long march north. The route carried him through Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy that no longer existed, and then toward Washington. On May 20, the army reached the city.
Four days later, Heinrich marched in the Grand Review. The crowd celebrated victory, but the review was missing the man many had expected to salute them. Abraham Lincoln was gone.
For two days, the victorious Union armies passed through Washington. Tens of thousands of soldiers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue before crowds that filled the streets and buildings along the route. On May 24 came Sherman’s army—the men who had marched from Atlanta to the sea and then north through the Carolinas. Somewhere among them was Heinrich Fenner.
He had marched through Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Now he passed through Washington.
The next day, May 25, 1865, Heinrich was appointed second lieutenant in the 12th Wisconsin Battery. He enlisted more than three years earlier as an ordinary soldier. The surviving records do not tell me why the promotion came when it did, and I will not invent a reason.
Less than two weeks later, on June 7, the 12th Wisconsin Battery was mustered out. What began for Heinrich on January 2, 1862, was over. In the summer of 1865, he returned to Wisconsin. The twenty-two-year-old who left Wisconsin with his older brother did not return until he was twenty-six. Hermann came home in 1862. Heinrich had stayed almost three years longer.
He crossed much of the South. He had seen slavery collapsing, cities burning, armies surrendering, and a nation trying to imagine what would come next.
