| A FORLORN HOPE Oregon Civil War hero is remembered 100 years after his death By Randy Fletcher Ulysses S. Grant sent out the call for volunteers. He had spent months encircling the enemy and now he had them trapped within their fortress on the Mississippi River. He would take that fort by storm, and this time, by God, he would not fail. Two days earlier his men had been pushed back but that assault had been hurried and made without careful planning and proper support. Grant had lost one thousand men in that attack. This time would be different: The Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg would fall. Grant chose his best general, William Tecumseh Sherman, to lead the attack, which would be preceded by a bombardment from Union gunboats on the River. Vicksburg sat high on the bluffs of the Mississippi, protected on one side by the river and on the land side by steep  cliffs
and fortifications. In order to breach the fort, the Union troops would
first have to cross a dry moat and then scale the heights in a direct
strike. A volunteer storming party would lead Sherman’s attack, one
hundred and fifty men carrying logs, planks, and ladders. The plan was that some of the men would charge and throw the logs across the deep but dry moat while the men with planks would place them across the logs creating bridges over the trench. This would allow the third group of volunteers to cross the moat with scaling ladders and place them against the Rebel embankment. The main body of armed troops could then advance and attack the fort directly. The mission would be a "Forlorn Hope," a nineteenth century military term for a charge where most members could expect to be killed or wounded. Such an attack today would be called a suicide mission. Each regiment would have a quota for volunteers and Sherman specified that only single men would be accepted, no fathers or husbands would be sent on this mission. Even with that limitation, twice as many men as needed stepped forward and the volunteers were paired to the one hundred and fifty required. One of the volunteers, one who survived the assault, was twenty-one year old Louis Renninger who would one day make his home in Oregon. Renninger, the son of German immigrants, was born on his parent’s farm in Liverpool, Ohio in 1841. He volunteered for the Union at the start of the war and was assigned to the 37th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, one of three all German regiments from Ohio. The commander of the 37th Ohio, Colonel Edward Siber, was a veteran of the Prussian army and was known for his discipline. The attack begins at dawn  The naval bombardment of Vicksburg began at dawn
on May 22, 1863.
Commodore David Dixon Porter commanded the Union’s brown-water navy and
he directed the full fury of his gunboats firepower against the rebel
fort. At the same time, Union artillery opened fire from their
positions on land. Renninger could literally feel the earth shake as he
waited for his part of the attack to begin. The big navy guns fell
silent at ten o’clock that morning. It was time for the army to begin
their assault. (Illustration
or photo of gunboats graphic supplied by the author -- source unknown.)Sherman ordered the volunteer storming party to move out. He would follow them with his entire Fifteenth Army Corps comprised of nearly sixteen thousand Federal soldiers. Louis Renninger was a seasoned veteran whose performance had earned him promotion to corporal. His regiment had been engaged in combat operations for two years, but this mission was different. The volunteers had all faced the possibility of death or injury before; today death or injury was a near certainty. Few men were expected to survive a Forlorn Hope. The path of Sherman’s attack was down the chillingly named Graveyard Road. Two of General Grant’s other Union corps would coordinate their assaults simultaneously with Shermans’s Fifteenth Corps. The volunteers were initially protected from enemy fire by a ravine but as they emerged from the chasm they faced four hundred yards of open ground between themselves and the Confederate fortifications. The first party, groups of two men carrying a log, started at a dead run but half of them were shot down. The next two groups, with the planks and scaling ladders followed under withering fire yet many reached the moat where the survivors of the first group had taken refuge. One of the volunteers who were carrying planks, Sergeant William Bumgarner of the 4th West Virginia, reported fifteen bullets pierced the board he carried during the charge. The volunteers found it impossible to build a bridge, as so many logs had been dropped along the way. Exposed to deadly enemy musket fire and unwilling to retreat, the survivors dove into the ditch they were meant to cross to seek shelter. Protected from direct musket fire, the men in the ditch were still subject to attack. The Confederate defenders would light the fuses on small bombs, primitive hand grenades, and toss or roll them into the moat where they exploded. Occasionally, a Union soldier would grab the bomb while its fuse was still burning and throw it back at the rebels. Sherman’s main body of troops repeatedly pressed the attack forward but each time they were driven back unable to breach the rebel fortifications. General Grant’s other two corps fared no better than Sherman’s men. Of the one hundred fifty volunteers, seventy-two were killed and most of the remainder were wounded. Sunset occurred at eight o’clock in the evening. Finally, after nearly ten hours in the moat facing non-stop enemy musket fire and bombs, Louis Renninger and the survivors of the Forlorn Hope were able, under the cover of darkness, to retreat back to the Union lines. The survivors that could walk carried or dragged those volunteers that were too badly wounded to retreat on their own. Renninger himself was bloodied, military records indicate that he was wounded in the shoulder and suffered an injury to his eye. The Forlorn Hope was one of the most thrilling and tragic charges of the Civil War, but it proved to be a foolhardy undertaking. Grant lost thirty-two hundred soldiers that day while Confederate losses were less than five hundred men. With the second straight failure of a frontal assault, Grant changed tactics and laid siege to Vicksburg. After seven weeks of constant bombardment, with little ammunition remaining, and his men and the civilian population facing starvation; Confederate General John Pemberton struck his colors and surrendered the city on July 4, 1863. The Union would take thirty thousand prisoners and establish total control over the vital Mississippi River. Pemberton chose the 4th hoping for favorable surrender terms from Grant but due to the date of the surrender, the citizens of Vicksburg refused to celebrate the 4th of July for the next eighty years. Renninger completes his service: heads to Oregon As a result of his injuries Louis Renninger was transferred to the Veterans Reserve Corps, a branch of the army where disabled soldiers performed light duty while recovering from their wounds. Corporal Renninger completed his military service and was discharged on October 14, 1864. During the war his regiment, the 37th Ohio, lost two hundred-six enlisted men and officers killed or mortally wounded in battle or dead from disease. Their losses at Vicksburg were nineteen killed and seventy-five wounded. Twenty-percent of the stalwart German lads that marched out of Ohio with Louis Renninger never came home again. Upon returning to his Ohio farm, Renninger married German born Elizabeth Mann and they started a family that would grow to four sons and five daughters. Louis and Elizabeth left Ohio for Michigan about 1870 where they bought a place near the tiny hamlet of Leavitt. They would farm their land for more than twenty years until harsh winters and the cold winds from Lake Michigan prompted them to seek the moderate climate of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. By 1898 the Renningers had established a farm in the Marcola district of Lane County, east of Springfield, Oregon. Once established in the area, Louis Renninger, like many other Civil War veterans, joined the Grand Army of the Republic. Medal of Honor awarded in 1894 In the decades after the end of the Civil War, historians began to closely examine the battles  of the war and the men who fought them. In
addition, the U.S. Army and the various states compiled histories of
their regiments that served in the conflict. Veterans groups such as
the Grand Army of the Republic examined individual acts of heroism and
congressional committees held hearings to scrutinize acts of valor. As
a result, from 1890 to 1899 more Medals of Honor were awarded for Civil
War action than were awarded during the war … a total of six hundred
eighty-three Medals of Honor in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. (Right: Civil War CMOH)The events that occurred in Vicksburg, Mississippi had been overshadowed during their time by actions on the east coast, primarily the Battle of Gettysburg. The military’s review of the actions at Vicksburg resulted in the award of one hundred twenty Medals of Honor. The events of May 22, 1863 alone accounted for ninety-six of the Medals, the highest one day total in the Medal’s entire history. Seventy-eight still-living survivors of the Forlorn Hope were decorated with the Medal of Honor. Their citation reads simply “Gallantry in the charge of the volunteer storming party.” Corporal Louis Renninger of Company H, 37th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, was awarded his Medal of Honor on August 15, 1894. On November 17, 1908 Louis Renninger left home for the last time. He had gone to his son’s farm, also located in Marcola, just a half-mile away. When he did not return as expected, the family became alarmed and Renninger’s body was found in his son’s barn. The  local
Justice of the
Peace concluded he had died of a massive heart attack. Renninger was
sixty-seven years old. He was laid to rest in the Eugene Pioneer
Cemetery. The J.W. Geary Post of the Grand Army of the Republic
presided at the funeral, which was also attended by the Womens Relief
Corps and Ladies of the G.A.R. along with his family and many friends. (Photo of grave marker by the author)The Eugene Daily Guard reported the death and covered the funeral yet made no mention of the Medal of Honor. When they died years later, Renninger’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Maude were later buried next to him in the family plot. In 2008, one hundred years after Louis Renninger’s death, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War named a new camp in Springfield in his honor. Note: There are four other Medal of Honor recipients from the Forlorn Hope storming party that are buried in the Pacific Northwest. Three of the veterans are buried in Washington and the fourth rests in Idaho. They are: Corporal Matthew Bickford, Company G, 8th Missouri Infantry, Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, Washington; Corporal John Warden, Company E, 55th Illinois Infantry, Orting Cemetery, Orting, Washington; Private Jerome Morford, Company K, 55th Illinois Infantry, Riverton Crest Cemetery, Tukwilla, Washington and Private John W. Conaway, Company C, 83rd Indiana Infantry, Evergreen Cemetery, Post Falls, Idaho. Original text © Randol B. Fletcher 2008 Bibliography available on request. |