Oliver Otis Howard, believed that Lee was retreating. Confederate troops had been observed on the march in the vicinity, but Hooker and the corps’ new commander, Maj. On May 2, 1863, the Eleventh Corps made up the exposed right flank of the Army of the Potomac, resting along the Orange Turnpike. Lee’s Confederate army and create a path to Richmond, but he stopped his advance in the face of Confederate opposition around Chancellorsville, Virginia. In the spring of 1863, Union Major General Joseph Hooker planned to maneuver around Robert E.

The 26 th Wisconsin’s first major battle proved every bit as horrible as those that had come before it. However, Benda surely heard of the terrible bloodshed of Fredericksburg and Antietam from other men in the army, and he may well have felt apprehensive about what he had signed himself up for. The 26 th Wisconsin did not engage at Fredericksburg, avoiding the disastrous slaughter that took place there. Franz Benda drilled with the men of his new brigade and participated in some brief campaigns around Thoroughfare Gap in his first months in the army. They also liked their brigade leader, a Polish political exile named Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski, who contributed further to the Corps’s ethnic diversity. To the men’s delight, they were assigned to the Eleventh Corps, which was commanded at that time by Franz Sigel himself.

The regiment soon headed east, eager to begin its fight for the Union.īenda and the 26 th Wisconsin departed the Midwest in early October 1862, joining the Union Army of the Potomac near Washington. Benda would have been a bit of an outsider in this unit as a Czech immigrant, but he seems to have adapted nonetheless. Views on the capabilities of these soldiers varied, with some respecting their fighting accomplishments and others viciously attacking them when they failed, based on ethnic tensions and a general suspicion of foreigners as “the other.” Command of the regiment went to Colonel Wilhelm Jacobs, a Milwaukee banker, and the men of the 26 th referred to themselves as the “Sigel Regiment” or “ Unser Deutsches Regiment” (Our German Regiment). Approximately one in every ten men who served the Union during the war had been born in Germany, making the regiment part of a larger fraternity of German soldiers. The 26 th Wisconsin was one of the regiments specifically recruited in German-based communities by the well-known German-born general Franz Sigel, and this ethnic identity came to largely define the unit. He became a part of the regiment’s Company F, nicknamed the Lake Shore Rifles, and was officially mustered in as a private in Milwaukee on September 17, while the bloodiest day in American history unfolded nearly six hundred miles away at Antietam. Clearly, some sort of patriotic spirit, desire for the steady wages of the army, or childhood-based motivation to serve his country in its time of need guided the actions of the young Benda, as just three days after his eighteenth birthday, on August 21, 1862, he enlisted to serve for three years in the newly-formed 26 th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. He worked as a farmer and lived with his family near Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a county seat town along the shores of Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee. Whatever the reasons may have been, by 1862 Franz Benda was eighteen years old. He came across the Atlantic with his family, so perhaps they were seeking a fresh start, or an escape from the decaying Habsburg Empire. Unfortunately, little is known about his early life, including when or why he immigrated to the United States.

Franz Benda was born on Augnear Prague, in the modern-day Czech Republic.

Wisconsin civil war hospital