Students' interest inspired teacher and Army Reservist Gary Schreckengost to find out more about Wheat
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Gary Schreckengost finished writing his newly published first book before serving three tours of duty with the Army Reserves in Bosnia and Fallujah.
Had the Martin Meylin Middle School teacher written "The First Louisiana Special Battalion: Wheat's Tigers in the Civil War" after his return in 2006, it might read a little differently.
"I regret that I did not get a little more descriptive with the terror of battle," he said.
The Army Reserve infantry officer tells his eighth-grade history classes that battles are not just moving icons on a map. "They are collective events of human triumph and tragedy, shaped by error-wrought human decision-making."
Having been to war and back, Schreckengost better understands what Wheat's Tigers faced during the Civil War.
"War is war," he said, "whether it was yesterday or 20,000 B.C."
The seed for the book was planted in Schreckengost's social studies classroom.
"When I was teaching about the Battle of Bull Run during the mid-'90s, it spurred interest in several of my students, and they had questions that I could not answer about the Tigers."
In researching the battalion, he visited the National Archives for official records and had other information sent to him from New Orleans.
Schreckengost, who has written for American Civil War and other military magazines, said his 15 years in the Army Reserve helped him piece together the story of the little-known and short-lived Wheat's Tigers through their demise in 1862.
He found that Irish dock workers and transients largely made up the battalion under the command of Maj. Roberdeau Wheat. Many were considered "the lowest of the low of white Southern society," he said. Schreckengost explained that Irish immigrants were used in dangerous jobs because loss of a slave meant a financial loss to his owner.
In the book, Schreckengost writes: "What made the First Louisiana Special Battalion different from the rest of the Confederate military establishment is that many of its recruits, including Major Roberdeau Wheat, its commander, were veterans of the now-forgotten Filibuster Wars of the 1850s."
The Filibuster Wars were conflicts in which private American citizens tried to overthrow Latin American governments in Cuba, Nicaragua and some northern Mexican states, Schreckengost said. The goal was to have them annexed to the U.S. as slave states, like Texas.
After the Filibuster Wars, many of the soon-to-be Tigers returned to their dangerous jobs along the New Orleans waterfront, but some, like Wheat, went on to fight with other mercenaries in Italy. When the Civil War broke out, Wheat returned to New Orleans, reopened his old Filibuster recruiting station, and found enough men to form the battalion. He promised his volunteers that if the Confederates won the war, new states would be set up for them to control in Latin America.
What also made the Tigers different from most Southern units was that one of the companies, "the largest, giving character to them all, the Tiger Rifles," was uniformed like the Zouaves, a colorful unit of Algerians in the French army. The Tiger Rifles stood out among other Civil War units by wearing a red fez, short blue wool jackets (later gray), white-and-blue-stripped pantaloons and white canvas leggings.
The battalion fought in Jackson's Valley Campaign and the Seven Days Battle, as well at Bull Run. "One too many frontal assaults led to the unit's demise," Schreckengost said. The 65 men remaining at the end of 1862 were reassigned to other units.
The 210-page hardcover includes photos of Tigers and maps of their battles. It is priced at $45 and can be obtained from publisher McFarland and Co.,
www.mcfarlandpub.com, or through Amazon.com.
Civil War buffs are invited to hear Chambersburg author Richard Wagner's take on Union Maj. Gen. Samuel W. Crawford laid out in his new biography, "For Honor, Flag, and Family."
Lancaster Civil War Round Table will host this free, public presentation at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10, at Lititz Public Library.
Crawford, born in Fayetteville, graduated from University of Pennsylvania medical school in 1850. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an assistant surgeon in the Southwest before the war. In addition to his medical duties at Fort Sumter, Crawford commanded a battery. Although severely wounded at Antietam, he recovered to lead the Pennsylvania Reserves at the Battle of Gettysburg.
"Crawford's military contributions were significant as he served from the first shot of the war, through nearly all the battles in the eastern theater, until the last shot was fired at Appomattox. He was one of only two Union officers who accomplished this feat," said Gettysburg battlefield guide James Frick.
Preregister by e-mailing name, phone number and number attending to
srihn@lititzlibrary.org or call the library at 626-2255. For more information on the program, contact Micky Kraft at 392-4976 or
lancastercivilwarroundtable@gmail.com.
