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| Civil War Memorial, Peoria, Illinois |
Most of us grew up reading about Tom Sawyer and his adventures on the Mississippi. John Bremer lived them. The 18-year-old immigrant wasn’t an orphan, like Tom. But his parents were a world away. Like many in his generation, he left his home in Schleswig-Holstein (northern Germany) for the New World.
Certainly, opportunity beckoned. But he was also driven by strife in his homeland. Prussia and Denmark were vying for control. The First Schleswig War (1852) ended in a stalemate before he could be conscripted. Now, a second war was brewing. In 1864 it would subject his Lutheran homeland to the same religious oppression that drove waves of German emigrees to America in the previous decades.
Before that could happen, in 1857, John boarded a steamer to America. He landed in New Orleans and took a Mississippi riverboat to Davenport, Iowa. There, he found work as a barrel-maker, sending his earnings to his mother in Germany.
After several years, she wrote that she didn’t want the money, she wanted to see her son. Obediently, he began retracing his steps back home. But along the way everything changed. His first time through New Orleans the horrors of the slave-trade did not oppress him as they now did. With America on the brink of Civil War, his senses of justice and decency were assaulted by what he saw. Men, women and children were being bought and sold in the open market. A strong young man, of comparable age to John, brought $1,100 at auction.
He could no longer continue his journey. Nor could he return to his life in Davenport. The people whom he saw at the slave market filled him with an inescapable sense of duty. He returned north to Peoria, Illinois where, in August of 1862, he joined the 86th Regiment of the Illinois volunteers. The young man who earlier had fled war, now willingly sought it out.
He did not fight for loyalty to the Yanks, nor for land, nor for glory. It was duty for his fellow man that drove him to put his life on the line. For two years and nine months he fought. His first battle was at Perryville, Kentucky—one of the bloodiest of the Civil War. The following year he saw the carnage of Chickamauga and soldiered on to victory at Lookout Mountain. By the war’s end, he marched with General Sherman to the sea.
On April 9, 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Five days later President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. That summer, John was discharged from the volunteers and made his way back to Davenport. There he courted and married Miss Bertha Prien and began to raise a family.
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| John G. Bremer discharge, June 6, 1865 |
God had spared his life in numerous battles and given him the opportunity to continue building the American legacy, not with a rifle, but with a plow. In time he saved enough money to buy a farm in central Nebraska where his daughter became my great-grandmother.
It would be nice if I could claim John Bremer’s honor for myself. But I cannot. Nor can anyone. The descendants of abolitionists have no more claim to righteousness than the descendants of slave owners deserve condemnation. Every man stands before God in his own generation to be judged by his own actions. None of us receives either the honor or dishonor of father or mother. But we do receive their legacy.
We are the beneficiaries of the world that they built. Hundreds of thousands of men like John fought, bled, and died to build a world where all men might be free. They fought “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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| John G. Bremer |
John was inspired to join the fight when he saw his brother sold for $1,100. They probably never saw one another again. I wonder, however, if any of the great, great grandchildren of John Bremer have ever met the great, great grandchildren of the man who stood on that auction block. We can only imagine.
If divine providence should bring me to meet a descendant of the slave that inspired John to volunteer, I would probably never know it. But any chance encounter might be exactly that. Will we treat each other with the gratitude and respect befitting such equals? That is the question of our day. It is the only question that matters.
It’s not only a question of honoring the past. That interaction also has the potential either to build community or to destroy it. This weekend as we gather to honor those who fought and died to give freedom to our generation, let us honor their memory by building a future for our own great grandchildren.
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