Iowa's Forgotten General: Matthew Mark Trumbull and the Civil War

by Kenneth L. Lyftogt

Overview

Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. By the end of the Civil War, he was a brevet brigadier general, and in his later years he was an author and lecturer. Kenneth Lyftogt’s biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man, also shedding light on the histories of the Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry and the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587297342
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	05/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	763 KB

About the Author

Kenneth Lyftogt is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Northern Iowa. He has walked all the major battlefields of the Civil War and participated in reenactments. He is editor of Left for Dixie and the author of From Blue Mills to Columbia: Cedar Falls and the Civil War (Iowa, 1993) and the novel Road Freaks of Trans-Amerika.

Read an Excerpt

Iowa's Forgotten General Matthew Mark Trumbull and the Civil War
By Kenneth L. Lyftogt
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2005 Kenneth Lyftogt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-612-3



Chapter One The Chartist

Matthew Mark Trumbull was born in the city of Westminster, St. Margaret's Parish, London County, England, in December 1826. He was born at midnight, the evil hour, and every aspect of his birth seemed to cause controversy. In his autobiography, Trumbull put it this way:

It is a perilous thing for a man to be born at midnight, literally between two days, so that he can never have a birthday, nor tell how old he is. Besides, think of the evil auguries connected with low twelve, "when the churchyards yawn," when disembodied spirits walk the earth for punishment, when mischief broods in the time and elfish goblins hide in careless babies who trespass into the world at that unlucky hour.

His mother said that he had been born on the 30th, but his father said the birth was actually past midnight on the 31st. Their disagreement was settled by the attending doctor who said that the baby was born on the very instant of midnight "and consequently not properly born at all."

The next difficulty was his actual place of birth. The dividing line between St. John's and St. Margaret's parishes "ran through my father's house and lengthwise along my mother's bed ..." so both parishes claimed the child. The whole neighborhood argued about it until they decided to toss a coin.

The story goes that the rector of St. John won the toss, and at once decided that I was in the other parish. In this way he relieved himself of all responsibility on my account, and threw the whole burden on St. Margaret.

When his parents had him baptized, the question of Trumbull's birthday came up again. This time the rector of St. Margaret ruled that he was actually born on Friday, the 30th of December.

Even his name presented problems. He was named Mark after his father and given Matthew as a middle name in honor of his uncle Matthew. But Mark - Matthew is in the wrong "apostolic order." Trumbull wrote it was "something like the Lord's Prayer backwards" that could bring a lifetime of bad luck. The name order was reversed and he became Matthew Mark Trumbull.

It is not wonderful that a boy started on a journey through the world amid contentions about the date of his birth, the place where he was born, and destined never to know his own name, should have a checkered career, embarrassed and impeded by contradictions, doubts, discords, and denials.

Trumbull's parents were working class poor and very religious, "Their lives never deviated a hair's breath from the straight lines of truth, honesty, and charity." His father ran a small store, but when Matthew was three years old, his father was put into the infamous Marshalsea prison as a debtor. His mother managed to borrow enough money to pay off her husband's debts and get him out of prison. "My parents sacrificed everything to pay every man his claim to the last penny, and then began the world again with nothing but stout hearts and willing hands."

His parents' poverty meant that the young Matthew had to go to work. The early years of 19th century England were ones of social and economic upheaval as the Industrial Revolution took hold of the economy. The early factory system was a wage-slave system that was often brutal and unjust, trapping children from birth in poverty, misery, and degradation. Such conditions produced class antagonisms that were as bitter and hateful as any between master and slave. Trumbull was one of those children, and he nursed a resentment for the rest of his life:

Sixteen hours a day of hard work is bad schooling for a boy.... In the bright days of childhood, when the mind and body should grow to strength and beauty, mine were being stunted and warped by toil savage and unnatural. I ought to be five feet ten; that's my correct stature by rights; I am less than five feet six. Toil stunted me when I was in the gristle. I had no time to study books, and the principles of life that I learned, such as they were, I had to gather in the college of hard knocks.

The new economy, with its hardships, produced a many-sided reform movement that slowly gained influence in England. The movement had two great victories. The first was the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which rewarded middle-class investors and industrialists with the vote (but not the working poor). The other was the success of the English abolitionist movement. Slavery, in England proper had been abolished in 1772. In 1807, after years of being the world's leading slave-trade nation, the English Parliament (in cooperation with the U.S. government) voted to take England out of the African slave trade. In 1833 Parliament finally outlawed slavery across the empire. Slavery ended by government decree set an example for the abolition movement in America.

One of the most important parts of the reform movement in England was the struggle over what was known as Chartism. Chartism was a practical "knife and fork" movement dedicated to the idea that social equality could be achieved through political reform by finishing what the Great Reform Bill of 1832 had begun - giving the poor access to political power. Chartist reform took two forms. The first was to put pressure on Parliament's members to enact as law the six points of The People's Charter. The second was to go beyond political lobbying and into "direct action," a nebulous phrase that implied Jacobin-like revolution. The Peoples' Charter itself was no Communist Manifesto; it made no claims of historical inevitability. Nor was it a "Declaration of Independence" as it had no appeals to "nature's God" and no call to revolution. Rather, it had only political reforms that Chartists believed could transform the nation. The Chartist demands were:

1. Equal representation in Parliament. England should be divided into political districts with each district represented by an equal number of representatives.

2. Universal manhood suffrage. Every man of twenty-one years of age be entitled to vote. (Some Chartists also advocated women's suffrage as well.)

3. Annual meetings of Parliament, with a general election every year.

4. No property qualifications for members of Parliament.

5. Vote by secret ballot.

6. Regular meetings of Parliament, and pay for members of Parliament.

The center of the movement was a nationwide campaign to collect signatures on the Charter and present it to Parliament. Chartist organizers took the petition to workers in sweatshops, factories, mines, and cottage industries, and to laborers on the docks. The Chartists sponsored large public demonstrations and published a widely read journal, The Northern Star. Matthew Trumbull was one of many angry, idealistic young people who earned their radical's service stripes in the Chartist movement.

At the time I speak of, the lines of caste were sharply drawn in England, and I was duly instructed to "fear God, Honor the King, and be contented in that station of life which it had pleased God to give me."...

When the facts of our lives are considered it will not be surprising that we ceased to honor the King or to fear God. We became Chartists. The years of my youth were the years of the Chartist movement in England, and I flung myself headlong into it. Its high purpose, and its delirious enthusiasm attracted me. Its revolutionary promises fascinated the disenfranchised and the poor. We were ready to storm the Tower of London as the Frenchmen stormed the Bastille. I made imitation Jacobin speeches, bombastic as the real ones, and I wrote red poetry for the Northern Star, the fiery organ of the Chartist party.

The first Charter petition, launched in Birmingham in 1838, contained 1,280,000 signatures and was presented to Parliament by a large enthusiastic crowd. The conservative members of Parliament ignored the crowd and rejected the Charter.

The Chartists refused to give up and gathered even more signatures. In 1842 the Charter was again presented to Parliament. This time the Charter had 3,317,702 signatures and thousands in the streets expected passage. Yet, once again, Parliament refused to endorse the Charter.

Inevitably, failure of the Charter destroyed the movement. Parliament's refusal to consider the reforms caused the more moderate supporters to abandon the Charter and allowed the more radical "direct action" members to dominate what was left of Chartism. The "direct action" Chartists became involved in more violent rhetoric and demonstrations, and some openly called for members to arm themselves. Increased Chartist radicalism resulted in increased government repression. Chartist leaders were brought to trial in the 1840s on charges of riot, conspiracy, and sedition. Three leaders were sentenced to death (but were pardoned after ten years in prison), and many others were imprisoned or transported to the English penal colonies.

The young Matthew Trumbull was not in a leadership position as a Chartist and was not threatened with either prison or deportation, but the failure of the Charter meant that he had little reason to stay in England.

One Sunday evening I was at a coffeehouse in London where the Chartists used to meet and study the Northern Star. The paper for that week contained a copy of the new Constitution of Wisconsin, which territory was then making preparations for admission as a state into the American Union. Discussing it, one of the party said, "Here is a land where the Charter is already the law; where there is plenty of work and good wages for all; why not go there?" To me the question sounded logical; if the Charter was not to be obtained in England, why not go to America, where people were all happy under its encouragement and protection! Shortly after that, I was on board an emigrant ship a-sailing Westward, Ho.

Chapter Two My Light Is None the Less for Lighting My Neighbor

The story of an American immigrant is always the story of a person who has strong reasons for fleeing one country and equally strong reasons for choosing to go to another country. For Trumbull those reasons were resentment and ambition. He very much resented the class structure of his native England. He resented being looked down upon as a "commoner" when he knew that he was as good a man as any. And Trumbull was ambitious. He knew that he was capable of accomplishing much, if allowed an opportunity. America was the land of opportunity.

It was the year of the great exodus from Ireland (1846), when I bought a steerage ticket on board the pestilential Julius Caesar, a worm-eaten old tub bound from Liverpool to Quebec. She was in the lumber trade, and her scheme was to take out a cargo of emigrants, and bring back a cargo of lumber.... The crazy old vessel was crowded with rats, a phenomenon I could not understand. What pleasure or comfort they could find in that ship was always a mystery to me.

The cross-Atlantic voyage was a horror. Trumbull described the "dark, damp, and noisome dungeon called the 'hold'" crowded with over four hundred desperate men, women, and children, "mostly Irish peasant farmers and their families, fleeing from the famine which was then ravaging Ireland."

The passengers were told that the crossing would take about three weeks but, to be safe, the ship carried supplies for a month. The supplies turned out to be foul water and hard bread that was "black, moldy, and full of worms." Typhus and dysentery broke out in the crowded hold before the ship was a week out to sea. On the eighth day, a young Irishman died and was "flung into the sea without preparation or prayer." Storms tore the sails, broke the masts, and spoiled much of the dry bread, and death became a daily thing on what proved to be a fifty-five day ordeal. Trumbull described the voyage.

There was a rugged Englishman on board.... His mother was with him, a ministering angel, always comforting the sick. She took fever and died. When we buried her in the sea the stalwart Englishman went mad. There was a peasant farmer with us from the south of Ireland, accompanied by his wife and three children. They were kind, respectable people, and the children were good looking and good. One of them, a bright little boy about seven years old, was my particular playmate and pet. One day the fever struck him and speedily burned him to death. We placed him on the floor underneath the hatchway for the advantage of such fresh air as might be thereby obtained. While his father and mother knelt in agony beside him, watching his throbbing pulses beating fainter and fainter, until they stopped forever. The photograph of that scene is imprinted on my memory ineffaceable evermore. In a few days another of the children died, and then the last one. When we landed at Grosse Isle (Canada), I saw the father and mother, fever smitten and delirious, swung ashore in baskets.

The fever struck passengers and crew alike; even the captain of the ship fell victim. Trumbull was spared, he believed, because he refused to live in the hold of the ship. Instead he and a half a dozen others took refuge in the ship's longboat and slept amid the "ropes, blocks, tackle, and miscellaneous rubbish." They were exposed to wind and rain but also to more fresh air than the other passengers and Trumbull believed "that in my case it operated as an antidote to the deadly 'ship-fever.'" He summed up the voyage with these words:

No regiment in the civil war could show such a list of killed and wounded in any battle, or in any two or three battles, as our little regiment could show as the result of a fifty-five days campaign on board the Julius Caesar.

The Julius Caesar was not permitted to land in Quebec but was sent to the nearby Grosse Isle, a quarantine ground. The healthy Trumbull was immediately given work as a roustabout unloading ships filled with lumber to be used in making sheds for the hundreds of sick immigrants from the Julius Caesar and other ships. A few days later a steamboat took him and the other healthy passengers to Quebec, but, again, Quebec authorities refused to let them enter. The steamboat then took the passengers to Montreal and dumped them on the levee. Others might have felt helpless and abandoned, but not Trumbull. He soon discovered that he had found exactly what he wanted when he shipped out of Liverpool, honest work in America.

... the new world already looked bright and beautiful. Men were actually walking about the levee inviting the newly come emigrants to work. I saw in a moment that it was only a question of health and strength with me, and that I need not be hungry in America.

Trumbull was given work on a railroad construction gang near the St. Lawrence River for a dollar a day. It was here that he acquired an important skill and the pen name that he would use in the future - "Wheelbarrow." Wheeling a barrow full of dirt up a plank efficiently took a great deal of practice. It was a "skill" that Trumbull and his fellow workers took very seriously. In fact, they were so serious that Trumbull and many others refused to help newcomers learn how to do it, thinking that this made their skill more valuable. Over this small issue, Trumbull learned one of the most important lessons of his life:

One day a greenhorn came along and got a job on our gang; he was awkward as a landlubber trying to climb the top-gallantmast. He would look at his feet as he went up the plank, and the wheel of the "barrow" would run off; he would look at the wheel and his feet would step off; he asked advice, but we who had learned the trade had now become monopolists, and refused to give any instruction; all of us except Jemmy Hill; he took the fellow in hand and showed him how to walk the plank, which he obviously had no right to do. That night, up at the shanty where we lived, my tongue swaggered a good deal, to the admiration of everybody except Jemmy Hill....

The next day was Sunday, and Jemmy and I took a walk to a favorite spot where we used to smoke our pipes and gossip. The glorious St. Lawrence rolled at our feet, and the sun shone bright overhead. Jemmy was a young fellow from the north of Ireland, about five feet nine or ten, slim, all sinew and bone, blue eyes, light and fair, smooth face, beautiful as a girl's. He had a soft musical voice, and there was nothing manly about him, except that he liked to smoke; but he was as brave as Phil Sheridan; he was a holy terror in a fight; I saw him scatter a dozen fellows once in a riot, like Samson used to clear out those Philistines. He is president of a railroad now, and rides in his own special car, in which there is always a berth for me.

We talked about the necessity of protecting our craft from "plug" workmen, or, rather, I did; Jemmy merely smoked his pipe and listened. At last he pulled out of his pocket a watch-charm, and handed it to me to examine. The crest on it was a couple of torches, one lighting the other, with this motto underneath: "My light is none the less for lighting my neighbor." He explained that this was the motto of some secret society that he belonged to in Belfast; I forget the name of it now, but no matter, that was the motto of it. "My light is none the less for lighting my neighbor." I accepted the rebuke and acknowledged that the motto was a good one. That was many years ago but the longer I live the more I am convinced that it is sound in political science and social economy.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

 Table of contents: 

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Foreword
1. The Chartist

2. My Light Is None the Less for Lighting My Neighbor

3. Iowa

4. The Butler County Unioin Guards

5. The Matter of Rank

6. The Shelbina

7. The Battle of Blue Mills Landing

8. The Battle of Pittsburg Landing (Shiloh)

9. The Hero of the Hatchie

10. Tattoo

11. The Ninth Iowa Calvary

Epilogue: Wheelbarrow
Notes
Bibliography
Index