Unidentified Member of 6th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry U.S
Advertisement for 1st German Kentucky Regiment, October 1861, Louisville Anzeiger. P. Marker, was promoted to captain and was killed by s shell at the Battle of Chickamauga, Sept 1863.
Recruiting ads for the 2nd Kentucky Volunteer Infantry; 34th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry; and 2nd Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, appearing in the Louisville Volksblatt, November 7, 1862. Courtesy of Mr. Lynn T. Harpring.
The War Department was having difficulty raising new troops in 1864 and was therefore conscripting men for military service. A drafted person could get out of military service if they furnished a substitute. The above advertisement by an attorney appeared in the Louisville Anzeiger (a German American newspaper) on November 1864. This attorney sought forty substitutes at a price of $600 each.
Two Germans in the Civil War: The Diary of John Daeuble and the Letters of Gottfried Rentschler, 6th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry was released by the University of Tennessee Press in May 2004 in a hardcover book containing 279 pages, 8 maps, and 7 photos and engravings. Translated and edited by Joseph R. Reinhart.
Retail Price $32.00
Praise for this Book
"Joseph Reinhart has provided us with an invaluable collection of Civil War soldiers' firsthand accounts. The words of Daeuble and Rentschler not only offer valuable glimpses into the life of the average soldier in the Western Theatre, but even more significantly illuminate some of the differences between German-American and Anglo-American troops. Expertly translated from the original German, Reinhart's edited compilation of these important letters and diary entries eloquently reminds us that the Civil War was not simply a struggle between North and South, but also a period of competing ethnic identities, nativism, and immigrant acculturation." —Chrisian B. Keller, Co-author of Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg
Available from major bookstores, internet booksellers, or the web master at jrein8@yahoo.com
“Louisville's Germans in the Civil War Era” has just been published in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Volume 117, Numbers 3 & 4, Autumn 2019, pp. 437-484.