Church Records Speak -- Lancaster's Slaveholders, "Elmer Ellsworth ___", 79th Pa Connections, Faith and Gender

Trinity Lutheran Church, Lancaster
(From Memorial Volume, 1861)

While it may seem that the Civil War has been studied from virtually every angle, one important but largely missing perspective is the experience of religious communities such as churches and synagogues on the local level.  Over the past ten years, I've thoroughly enjoyed researching Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (see here) -- one of Lancaster's more physically and historically prominent churches -- and have been lucky in the abundant high-quality primary source material that I have been able to glean.  This has better enabled me to better understand the war's effect on individuals at the local level, as well as take historical persons more seriously (sometimes a problem in Civil War studies) due to our shared institutional connection.

Since earlier this year, I've even been working with members of First Lutheran Church in Pittsburgh (the one at the base of the US Steel Building) to reproduce this line of research inquiries and see what we find.  A comparative lack of newspaper primary sources and turn-of-the-century industrial biographies for First Lutheran Church and Pittsburgh vs. Holy Trinity and Lancaster has made us turn to (1) published sources related to famous pastors Passavant and Krauth and (2) church records as staring points.  Studying church records prompted me to go back and do something during a recent weekend in Lancaster that I had not done before (at least not comprehensively): examine Holy Trinity's baptism, marriage, and burial records.  In this post, I'll give some thoughts based on my preliminary scan of these records.

Slavery in Lancaster

(This paragraph refers to an LCHS Journal Article: Ebersole, Mark. ‘German Religious Groups and Slavery in Lancaster County Prior to the Civil War.” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society. Vol. 107, No. 4. Winter, 2005-2006. 158-187.)

I'll start by saying that it's rather jarring to someone with your last name (Schlauch, or its many Anglicized forms such as Slough and Slaugh) and connected to the same church listed as "one of the largest chattel-holders of the county" with eleven slaves.  It turns out that there's no perceptible genealogical relationship, as my Schlauch line only came from Germany to Lancaster in 1871 (Andreas Schlauch, from Baden Baden), but the somewhat surprising fact remains that some of Lancaster's and Holy Trinity's leaders in the mid-1700s owned African Americans as slaves.  Ebersole describes this essentially as a adaptation by select Germans of a more largely English practice.  While it may not have had the industrial scale of later forms of slavery in the cotton South, slavery in Lancaster still evidently involved the separation of families for profit and slaves and a system that some slaves tried to flee.  Clearly, it's a complex subject with a range of primary and secondary sources that I still need to study.

At Holy Trinity in the late 1700s and early 1800s, free and enslaved African Americans had some level of participation in church life through baptism, marriage, and burial (hence, the helpfulness of church records).  In the years after emancipation began as a gradual process in 1780, laymen and pastors of Holy Trinity supported the founding of African-American churches in Lancaster and later joined the Africa colonization movement.  Despite giving some prominent examples of slaveholders, Ebersole writes that "for the most part, the Moravian, Reformed, and Lutheran churchmen also stayed aloof from the English culture, and from all slavery practices, upon their arrival in the New World."  It will be interesting in future research to identify differences in opinion between members of the congregation, as well as the German-born Rev. Gottlob F. Krotel and the Pennsylvania-born Rev. F. W. Conrad,  Furthermore, what can we infer from the exclusion of African-Americans at Trinity-connected Woodward Hill Cemetery, or from the Ladies' Kansas Relief Meeting at Holy Trinity that so irked the Democratic Intelligencer (12/4/1860)?

I don't recognize too many family connections between the mid-1700s slaveholders and those active with Holy Trinity in the Civil War Era, with one exception: records exist of George Hopson Krug's grandfather Valentine Krug leaving slaves to George's father Jacob in his will.  The Krug family was known for its tannery, and George H. Krug was an important lay leader at Holy Trinity until his death in 1869.  At Holy Trinity in 1842, Krug's daughter, Rebecca, married a young Navy officer named William Reynolds, whose father was in the same Democratic Lancaster social circles (think James Buchanan) as Rebecca's father.  William went on to lead a remarkable career in the Navy, and his younger brother John Fulton Reynolds achieved even greater fame as a general in the Army of the Potomac.

Baby Names 

Col. Elmer Ellsworth

One rather interesting way to assess the patriotism of the people affiliated with Holy Trinity at this time is to look at trends at baby names.  And we're really talking about one trend: many people named their child after Elmer Ellsworth, the Union martyr who died one month into the war while trying to seize a Confederate flag in Alexandria, Virginia.  A total of nine(!) children (out of roughly 10-12 per month) baptized at Holy Trinity in the succeeding months would bear some version of his name (one baby born in April 19 was even apparently named retroactively).  Especially because the original Elmer Ellsworth was known pretty much solely as a martyr, these children seem to be a way for families to signal their willingness to sacrifice for the Union cause.  Here is a list:     

• Elmer Ellsworth Filler (b. 4/19/1861), son of Henry and Juliana Filler (sponsor).   
• Elmer Ellsworth Shreiner (b. 6/15/1861), son of Henry Michael and Mary Shreiner (sponsor). 
• Ellsworth Leibley (b. 6/20/1861), son of Jacob and Elizabeth Leibley (sponsor).  
• Elmer Ellsworth Winour (b. 7/15/1861), son of George Washington and Fanny Winour. Sponsored by Amelia Sensendorfer.  
• Charles Ellsworth Peterman (b. 8/2/1861), son of George and Frances Peterman (sponsor). 
• Ellmer Ellsworth Steigerwalt (b. 9/5/1861), son of Michael F. and Martha Steigerwalt (sponsored by both parents).   
• Charles Ellsworth Bowman (b. 9/23/1861), son of William and Catherine Bowman (sponsor).
• Ellsworth Holtz (b. 8/9/1862), son of George Washington and Mary Ann Holtz (sponsored by both parents).
• Edward Elmer Ellsworth Cogley (b. 12/13/1861), son of Joseph and Sarah Ann Cogley (sponsored by grandmother).

A couple other names show up in the records, but none with the concentration of Elmer Ellsworth:

• George B. McClellan Killian (b. 4/18/1863), son of Henry K. and Pricilla Killian (sponsored by both parents).  I wonder how ardent abolitionist F. W. Conrad felt baptizing this child.  
• Abraham Lincoln Mishler (b. 11/9/1865), son of Isaac and Catherine Mishler.  Sponsored by mother.

At least two children were also named after the Rev. Dr. Gottlob "George" F. Krotel, who had earned the admiration of much of the congregation before his departure to Philadelphia in 1861.

• George Krotel Bender (b. 8/17/1861), son of Benjamin S. and Hetty Bender (sponsor).  
• George Frederick Krotel Erisman (b. 2/23/1863), son of Emanuel J. and Mary Erisman (sponsor not listed). 

79th Pa Connections

79th PA Monument, Chickamauga

From the baptismal records, I also recognized a few 79th Pennsylvania connections, which I note here for future biographical or genealogical research or investigations of the social networks from which the Lancaster County Regiment was raised:

• Capt. Jacob Gompf: Jacob Augustus (b. 10/14/1860) baptized 3/14/1861 with mother Susan as sponsor.  
• James P. Dysart (brother of 79th PA captains): Henry Scherff (b. 11/26/1860) baptized 4/18/1861).  Sponsored by grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Henry Scherff.
• Capt. Edward Edgerly: Edward Everett Edgerly (b. 9/3/1859).  Son of Edward and Rosanna Edgerly. Sponsored by grandparents John and Rosanna Stehman.  
• Lieut. William P. Leonard.  Three children with wife Harriet baptized on 6/10/1867.  Daughter Emma Virginia (b. 6/24/1846) baptized on July 15, 1846.
• William F. Dostman (b. 10/8/1841), son of John Peter and Catherine Dostman (sponsor).  
• Horace Binney Vondersmith (b. 5/6/1844), son of Daniel B. and Clara Elizabeth Vondersmith.  Both parents sponsored.
• Robert M. Dysart and Lyman G. Bodie: both listed in death records for mid/late-1860s which I did not copy.

Note that Dostman and Vondersmith are the color bearers depicted in the 79th Pennsylvania's Chickamauga monument.  In the battle, Dostman was fatally wounded by an exploding shell and Vondersmith carried the flag forward.  As an aside, Vondersmith's father, Daniel B. Vondersmith, had become infamous during the 1850s when he fled the United States on charges of fraud in a pension forging scheme.  He later returned to serve jail time before being pardoned.  Later in life, he could be found as the cashier for a traveling circus.  His son, meanwhile, earned a sterling reputation as Lancaster's fire chief.  I'll have to document the lives of the father and son Vondersmith in a future post.

And connections to other notables:

• Oliver J. Dickey (Republican politician): Mary Elvira (b. 9/10/1858) baptized 11/10/1860.  Sponsored by mother Elizabeth.
• Rebecca Reynolds Krug (b. 6/23/1861), daughter of John H. and Henrietta Krug.  Named after her aunt, wife of future Admiral William Reynolds.  Baptized 8/12/1861. Sponsored by grandfather George H. Krug.  Rebecca Reynolds Krug and Rebecca Krug Reynolds seemed to have a mother-daughter relationship (see latter's obituary). 
• Emlen Franklin (Col., 122nd PA): Emlen Augustus (b. 2/23/1864) baptized on 12/3/1865, son of Emlen and Clara Amelia Franklin.  Both parents were sponsors.  
• George Unkle (correspondent and Pvt., 9th PA Cavalry): Ann Elizabeth Unkel (b. 2/11/1845), daughter of George and Ann Adelaid Unkle.  

Future Questions -- Gender and Faith

One thing that stuck out is approximately one-third to one-half of the baptisms only seem to have the mother as the sponsor.  What does this say about church membership and gender roles?  Is this specific to Holy Trinity or to Lutherans?  Was there a lost generation of men in churches in the mid-1800s?  Were maternal lines more important in determining a family's religious life?  Or is there some other reason to explain the trend?  I'll have to pay attention to these questions as I look at other churches' records and dig up Lutheran newspapers to see if any editorialists comment on a trend.

I'm glad I finally took the time to flip through Holy Trinity's records.  It's given a few interesting data points to help characterize the Union cause and will help to fill in some holes about 79th Pa personalities.  I haven't even touched on the weightier themes of the interplay between competing Lutheran ideologies and competing national ideologies regarding the Lutheran identity, race, patriotism, and church life.

Look for a future posts with a more biographical focus on members of Holy Trinity to enhance our capacity to imagine and study how the war affected communities and individuals.

Donations Collected from Drumore for the Patriot Daughters: Photos and Biographical Notes

Donation list appearing in July 14, 1863, Daily Evening Express

In the weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, Lancaster's citizens responded liberally to the need for hospital goods in Gettysburg.  The Patriot Daughters of Lancaster sprang to action, collecting goods from Lancaster and surrounding towns (and then taking them to Gettysburg and serving as nurses, but that's another story).  The Daily Evening Express supported their work by printing daily lists of donors and their gifts that filled column after column in July 1863.  I noticed one in particular from Drumore Township in southern Lancaster County, and recognized a few of the names from a photo album that is one of my favorite items in my wife's and my collection.  Since going through that list took my on a few research tangents, including one related to the underground railroad, here's a post matching that list with a few photos and biographical notes.

Detail of Bridgens 1864 Atlas map of Drumore Township showing area around Liberty Square

Rachel S. Smith
Photo by T&W Cummings, Lancaster

This particular donation list appeared in the July 14, 1863, Daily Evening Express, and contains the names of many residents from near Liberty Square in Drumore Township (not far from the Susquehanna River) populated by Quaker, Scots-Irish, and African-American families.  Acting on the Patriot Daughters' behalf, Rachel S. Smith collected dried fruit, preserves, and hospital supplies from about forty of her neighbors.  Rachel lived with her father, Joseph Smith, a wealthy Quaker farmer, on their farm near where Susquehannock State Park is today. 

Little else is known about these donations, but I was excited to find Rachel's photograph in a CDV album I purchased on Ebay a couple years ago.  That album mostly depicts the extended family of her cousins, Annie and Edwin Shoemaker, and their spouses, John B. and Margaret F. Kensel, who were also siblings.  Most individuals in the album belonged to the Drumore Friends Meeting at Liberty Square.  The women's well-fitted bodices, full and pleasingly-shaped skirts, and elegant trim--as well as the Philadelphia backmarks of almost all images--testify to a level of prosperity enjoyed by this neighborhood of southern Lancaster County farmers.

It turns out that Rachel (1825-1904) also had interesting stories to tell, as her father's farm was one of the most important Underground Railroad stops in Lancaster County.  African-American drivers working for her father would take produce to Baltimore and have the chance to interact with slaves and spread knowledge of a network to escape.  Rachel even became involved, and is mentioned in Robert Smedley's History of the Underground Railroad for once accompanying slavecatchers executing a search warrant to search her father's house.  We also have this very interesting account (p. 231) attesting to the importance of her family's role:

In October, 1859, Joseph's daughter Rachel visited Niagara Falls, and registered at the Cataract house.  The head waiter, John Morrison, seeing her name and residence upon the book, approached her one day and politely made apology for intruding himself; but said he would like to ask if she knew a man named Joseph Smith in Pennsylvania.  She replied that he was her father.  He continued, "I would like to tell you about the poor fugitives I ferry across the river.  Many of them tell me that the first place they came to in Pennsylvania was Joseph Smith's.  I frequently see them when I visit my parents at Lundy's Lane.  Many of them have nice little homes and are doing well."  He ferried some across the river during two of the nights she was there. 

Emmeline Smith
Photo from Larkin Gallery, Philadelphia

Rachel Smith's sister-in-law, Emmeline Smith (nee Tennis) also appears on the list, having donated "1 shirt, 2 bags peaches, 1 pot sauce, rusk."  Emmeline's husband, George Smith, is listed in Pennsylvania records as one of six conscientious objectors from Drumore Township.  See this link for a biographical portrait of their son, Gerritt Smith. 

The third woman on the list who also appears in our photo album is Emeline Shoemaker (nee Lamborn), daughter of Smedley Lamborn, who had a farm near Joseph Smith and is linked to the Underground Railroad (see biography of his son, George).  Emeline donated two cans of fruit, two shirts, and a roll of muslin.  Three of her siblings are included in the album, including William Lewis Lamborn, who fought with Company E, 79th Pennsylvania, and Mary Elizabeth Lamborn, who married Thomas B. Hambleton of the same unit.  Interestingly, their older brother, Aquilla Lamborn, is another one of the six conscientious objectors from Drumore Township.  

Emeline Shoemaker
Photo by I. R. Bishop, Philadelphia

The goods collected by Rachel Smith were likely forwarded to the Patriot Daughters' outpost of mercy, Christ Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, to be distributed to the wounded soldiers of the Second Division, First Corps, of the Union Army (although the could have very easily been donated to another location in need, as well).  I don't know of any of the women mentioned going to Gettysburg as nurses, but the donations show how a Quaker community in one corner of Lancaster County responded to the battle and provide an opportunity to learn about a family network with deep connections to abolitionism and the Underground Railroad.

'What Women Undertake They Carry Through': Aid Efforts, Part I

Illustration of Ladies' Sewing Circle
From Harper's Weekly, 6/29/1861

As soon as the Lancaster County Regiment settled into its Kentucky campground, a steady stream of boxes began to flow from Lancaster to Camp Nevin to help supply the soldiers of the 79th Pennsylvania with necessary clothing, minor luxuries, and the warm wishes of folks at home.  Shortly after the war began, the women of seemingly every Lancaster County village and town, spearheaded by the city's Patriot Daughters of Lancaster, formed aid circles to collect canned goods, clothing items, and medical supplies to send to Lancaster soldiers in Eastern and Western Theaters and army hospitals in need.  Aid efforts represented a very practical way in which wives and mothers kept in touch with soldiers in Kentucky and expressed their loyalty to the nation and the war effort.

In particular, Col. Hambright worked hard to get hundreds of pairs of stockings from sewing circles across Lancaster County to keep his soldiers' toes warm on cold November nights.  I don't know if the government had sock supply chain issues or they were of inferior quality, but newspapers of late 1861 contain appeal after appeal for stockings. (See the second half of the article in the post for a "A Suggestion to Patriotic Ladies" about knit goods.)  Women across the county responded, determined to produce not just socks but "heavy, well knit half hose that will challenge competition with any other...pair in the country."  (DEE, 11/29/1861)

A week after the regiment left Lancaster in early October 1861, the Patriot Daughters opened a repository in Fulton Row on West King St. (through the liberality of Christopher Hager) to collect "socks, blankets, and nourishing food."  They announced a goal of meeting Col. Hambright's request for 800 pairs of socks, and the editors of the Daily Evening Express added:

We appeal to every loyal, warm hearted woman to aid our Government in this emergency; let us add, by all in our power, to the comfort of our brave fellows, who have forsaken home and all that was dear to them, for a great and noble cause. (DEE 10/15/1861)

 On October 25, an announcement followed that they were still 500 pairs short of their goal, despite contributions of up to twenty-six pairs from some ladies. 

One practice associated with aid efforts, which continued a common practice related to benevolent societies of the 1850s, was to publish the name and amount of all donations in the newspaper (at least the daily newspaper).  The first such list associated with the Lancaster County Regiment appeared in the November 15, 1861, Daily Evening Express: (alternate link)


Other lists appeared in the November 30 and December 4, 1861, Daily Evening Express specifically for socks from East Earl Township, Carnarvon Township, Lancaster City, Enterprise (Bird in Hand?), and Binkley's Bridge (where Rt. 23 crosses the Conestoga).  (alternate link)  Among the names of cash and food donations, we see many prominent citizens--wives of judges, doctors, etc.--but I'd be curious to know if the sock donations came from a broader class of citizens.


Overall, the aid efforts are important for understanding the mobilization process, how women related to the nation and expressed loyalty, class antagonism, and new roles for women who for the first time had to practice production and supply chain management.  Future posts will highlight:

• Responses to aid efforts by soldiers in the 79th Pennsylvania.
• Antagonism between Lancaster City and Lancaster County, primarily in the form of antipathy toward (especially Amish and Mennonite) farmers who many felt were not contributing their fair share to the nation in need.
• Special Christmas-related aid efforts (Hint: it involves lots of sauerkraut for Col. Hambright's regiment).

Northern Women, Patriotism, and the Civil War

The Consecration, 1861 by George Cochran Lambdin
www.metmuseum.org / Indianapolis Museum of Art, James E. Roberts Fund (71.179)

For Northern women, the Civil War was remarkable as the impetus for their developing a patriotism very different from anything before the war.  Women who sent husbands and sons to fight against an enemy based on the political ideal of preserving the Union--instead of simply defending hearth and home, like Confederate women--suddenly had to develop a sort of personal political philosophy to internally justify why fighting the war was worthwhile.  Their relationship as individuals to the nation became relevant, and the war brought with it a new role for women in the public sphere.  I'll refer to Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War by Nina Silber to more fully characterize and document this important transformation.  (Here's a review of the book, if you're looking for a summary.)

As part of this change, men began to care more about women's political views, specifically their level of support for the war effort.  J.M.W. Geist, editor of the pro-Lincoln Daily Evening Express, characterizes this level of support as patriotic loyalty, and here is a story from that paper on August 17, 1861 (alternate link):