Alternative Histories: Integrating Drafted Men into the Military Narrative

“How I hate the whole thing,” wrote a decidedly unhappy new recruit to the Sixth Wisconsin late in 1864, “from beginning to end.”[1] That was Joshua B. Ingalls, a Richfield County blacksmith in his late thirties with a wife and six children. He had managed to avoid earlier drafts, but his name was finally called in fall 1864. Also drafted into the Sixth at about the same time were three German immigrant brothers from Sheboygan: Gottlieg, Wilhelm, and Gottfried Torke. Gottlieb was about thirty with a farm, a wife, and several children.[2]

There is no reason to think that Ingalls and Torke ever met—they served in different companies—but they both provide rare, if quite different, accounts of the last few months of the Civil War through conscripts’ eyes.

The Sixth was part of the famous Iron Brigade, which had fought in almost all of the major battles in the eastern theater. But by late 1864 both the brigade and the regiment were shells of their former selves. Indeed, only a few dozen original members were still with the regiment. As I argue in The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, heavy casualties and sickness had caused a constant turnover of officers and men, meaning that there wasn’t a single “Sixth Wisconsin,” but an ever-changing roster of men with different motivations and experiences.

Ingalls and Torke, along with over 470 other draftees, comprised the bulk of the version of the Sixth Wisconsin that actually finished the war. Their experiences and reflections are necessarily very different from the more familiar narratives created by men who had volunteered earlier in the war and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. They help us appreciate the evolving nature of Civil War regiments and the wildly varying attitudes of the men who joined them. While Ingalls poured out his disgust and sorrow in bitter diary entries, Torke described his experiences in letters to his wife filled with pious encouragement, expressions of affection, homely advice about turnips and cattle, and an innocent, wide-eyed response to combat.

Ingalls began his diary upon arriving at Camp Randall, the state’s mustering grounds in Madison. He complained particularly about his fellow draftees, many of whom were German immigrants. “I tell you this is a hard place, lots of dutchmen—Jabber, jabber all the time,” he sighed. “I look around me” and ask, “can I stand it a year[?] O my heart almost fails me.”[3] An uncomfortable three weeks in camp was followed by even more uncomfortable week of train travel to Virginia. Ingalls resented the casual cruelty and lack of consideration for the comfort or feelings of the new soldiers. They were under guard from the time they left Camp Randall—even when “tend[ing] to the calls of nature. How mean it makes one feel.” By December 11 they were at Fortress Monroe, where, crowded into a “bull pen,” they were exposed to the cold and rain, and ignored except for the guards that still watched their every move. When one of the draftees got too close to a pen of Confederate prisoners, a rebel stabbed him.[4]

Ingalls was appalled by the squalid conditions in camp. At one point two thousand men waited in line for meager rations—next to the latrines. “You cannot imagine the stench that is there & all on an empty stomach.” Finally, after a short train trip and a long march through vast fields of tents and ruined homes, they reached the Sixth in late December.[5]

Predictably, none of the officers had any interest in granting Ingalls’ request to be assigned to a non-combat role. Indeed, when he met with the regimental adjutant and another officer, they “called me everything that they could turn their toung to & swore that if they could. . . they would hang me.”[6]

Ingalls gave up and began learning how to be a soldier. The newcomers were punished for such violations as blowing their nose on dress parade. One of the draftees tried to get a medical discharge by pressing a brass button into a wound to keep it from healing, but he “got catched at it” and was “made to stand on a board for half a day” with “a paper pinned on his back stating his crime.” Ingalls’ last surviving entry ended in disgust: “I have to get me a hat with a bugle 6 & E & a feather.” That would have shocked the original men of the Sixth, for whom that black hat and feather were symbols of courage and respect.[7]

Betraying none of the bitterness of Ingalls’s diary entries, Gottlieb Torke’s letters to his wife Elizabeth were loving and plain, even as they revealed a certain bewilderment with his surroundings. He reported on the long days and plain food, hard drilling and daily camp chores, the unfamiliar weather and sandy soil. He gave homely instructions for managing the farm, including advising his wife to “keep yourself away from the sheep that they don’t butt you.” He imagined his young children asleep in bed as he walked the midnight shift on guard duty. He hated missing Christmas, prayed for peace, and worried that Elizabeth might be working too hard. In mid-January he reported that the regiment was training “very hard now. . . As soon as something happens here at Petersburg, then we will have to go off to the war.”[8]

They did, indeed, go “off to the war” when the Army of the Potomac began the climactic campaign in February 1865. Torke described the movements and battles through what must have been a terrifying haze. His first thoughts as he went into the fight on the Boydton Plank Road were of Elizabeth and of God: “I could think of you only a little. I directed my thoughts to the heavenly father above, to whom many thousand prayers were rising.” When the shooting finally started, “we all looked at the world through tears, and I had given myself over completely to dear God.” Clearly unfamiliar with military terminology Gottlieb captured a blur of fearful images and disorienting sounds:

It was a hard day for us, we were quite wet and freezing. We had to fight the                      Southerners . . . and had driven them back. . . . There we made a good trench                    where the bullets would always fly over our heads, and then when we had                          finished making the trench, we went out again against the Southerners [who]                  stayed in their trenches, and we stood in the woods. Then we lay down on the                  ground and fired at them. We had been firing a half-hour, then we sprang up                    again and ran back again in our trenches, as we wanted to draw the Southerners              out of their trenches so that they would come near our trenches. And so we tried              to decoy them but they wouldn’t come, so then we went out again toward them.              They were firing very much at us with cannons.

Torke received a wound to his head that, while minor, would eventually earn him a discharge. “Dear God had surely placed his almighty arm on my head and so the bullet couldn’t go any farther.”[9]

Both men survived the war and lived into the twentieth century. Neither in life nor in death did they celebrate their military service. It seems to have been a wrenching and terrifying experience, better forgotten than memorialized. We do not know whether they were proud of having helped to save the Union; they don’t seem to have participated in post-war veterans’ activities. Unlike the volunteers of 1861, they saw their service as an imposition, a frightening and disruptive event in their lives in which they apparently took little pride.

Yet the nature of that service is no less important to examine if we are to understand Civil War soldiers’ motivations and experiences.

[1] January 14, 1865, Diary of J. B. Ingalls, Library and Research Center, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, PA.

[2] James Marten, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 151, 159.

[3] November 30, and December 7, 1864, Ingalls Diary.

[4] December 10, 13 and 14, 1864, Ibid.

[5] December 15, 1864, Ibid.

[6] December 17, 1865, Ibid.

[7] January 15, 1865, Ibid.

[8] Gottlieb Torke to Elizabeth Torke, December 20, 1864, and January 12, 1865, transcription translated by Leona Torke Kane, Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

[9] Gottlieb to Elizabeth, February 9, 1865, Ibid.