Stonewall's Prussian Mapmaker:
The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs
The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs
Edited by Richard B. Williams
University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 392 pp., $45.00
Review by Gordon Berg
Jedediah Hotchkiss is justly famous as "Stonewall" Jackson's principal mapmaker. But almost no one has ever heard of Oscar Hinrichs That's all changed now, thanks to the historical sleuthing of Richard B. Williams. Historians, archivists, and researchers all dream of stumbling across a relatively obscure, previously unpublished, primary source that offers new perspectives on important people and events. Williams' eureka moment came in 2000 when a Civil War memorabilia dealer tipped him off to the existence of the unpublished diaries of Captain Oscar Hinrichs, a Prussian born engineer officer who served the Confederacy with distinction throughout the war. An experienced researcher and manuscript editor, Williams developed a plan-of-action to verify the journal and validate its content. It proved to be a long and complicated process but Williams and a host of dedicated helpers stuck to their guns. The end-product is a treasure trove of detailed observation and candid insight that Robert Krik's forward rightly characterizes as "an enormously important primary source."
Hinrichs was an infant when his parents
brought him to New York from Germany. His comfortable childhood was interrupted by the death of his mother
when he was only four. His loving North
Carolina-born stepmother, however, immersed him in the culture of her
successful Southern family and his frequent visits probably sowed the
seeds of the divided loyalties he experienced later in life. Classically educated in Europe, Hinrichs
returned to the United States in 1853 as a confident, idealistic, and ambitious
young man steeped in the skills needed for a career as an engineer. Williams' illuminating introduction concludes
that "the close relationship Oscar had with his stepmother influenced his
decision to join the Confederacy."
In a postwar essay not included in the monograph, Hinrich wrote "My
sympathies were with the people of the South, among whom I had lived so long,
and where I had many warm friends."
He joined the U.S. Costal Survey in December
1856 and his first assignment was to map the coast from Virginia to Georgia
would be the first of many professional Southern sojourns. When the war broke out, however, he found
himself surveying the coast of Maine.
His clandestine journey south to join the Confederacy had enough
nocturnal rendezvous, narrow escapes, and secret signs and safe houses to fill
a Hollywood screenplay. Shadowed by a
government detective after he left New York, Hinrichs and a few colleagues
headed to Baltimore. With the help of
Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland, they crossed the Potomac River
in a skiff on New Year's Eve and entered the camp of Colonel Wade Hampton on
the first day of 1862. John Wilkes Booth
would follow nearly the same route in 1865.
Hampton quickly sent Hinrichs on to General Joseph Johnston's army
camped near Centerville, Virginia.
Hinrichs' makes the purpose of his journals
clear from the beginning. He describes
them "as notes public and private of my own personal feelings and
experiences during the war" which include "my opinion at the time of measures and affairs as they occurred
to me." In the future, Hinrichs hopes
"they may become useful references and also records which have mostly been verified by subsequent events."
After early duty in Tidewater Virginia, Hinrichs was ordered to join
Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862, just in time for the battles of
Cross Keys and Port Republic. He would
remain with Jackson's vaunted Second Corps throughout the war. With a true engineer's eye for topographical
detail, Hinrichs brought the same skill to his observations of men and
events. From his transcript, Hinrichs
opines that the Gettysburg campaign failed "first in not getting
possession when it was practicable of the ground commanding the Baltimore pike
and the hill contested by [Edward] Johnson.
Second the want of unity of action on the part of the attacking columns;
third, the not supporting of those columns which had effected lodgments in the
enemy's lines in a manner adequate to the occasion."
He was equally as candid when assessing
the qualities of his fellow officers.
Hinrichs believed General D.H. Hill
"uncouth and ungentlemanly in his manner" with "a mind
narrow and shallow, he possesses no genius for command." Jackson, on the other hand, was "In
person, quiet, modest, diffident and unassuming, [Jackson] bears upon him his
honors lightly and meekly."
Hinrichs observed Jackson on battlefields from Malvern Hill to
Chancellorsville and found him "Brave to insensibility, insensible to
rashness and obstinacy, he stands firm and cool among a shower of shot and
shell which makes him stand aghast at the apparent tempting of God's mercy and
kindness." A man with a facility
for the English language like that deserves to be published.
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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org). His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.
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