The 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War has arrived and my cousin, Gary Barlow, returns in a guest blogging appearance for the occasion. Since the topic didn’t fit the theme this week, pleas consider this a “bonus blog.”
“Jacob Bastel and Bryant Barlow – A House Divided”
By Gary Barlow
With the Confederate Army’s surrender 150 years ago, the American Civil War came to an end, closing the bloodiest war in our country’s history. An estimated 750,000 soldiers died as the nation fought to determine if the people who had formed the world’s first democracy would stay united or split into one country where the equality of all would be the ideal and another where many would remain in the bondage of slavery.
The war famously divided many families, especially in the border states. Those conflicts were even manifest in the family of the man who led the fight to keep the Union together, as Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had several half-brothers who fought for the Confederacy.
One of the most important battles of the war took place in the spring and early summer of 1863 at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Losing Vicksburg was a critical blow to the Confederacy as it enabled the Union to control traffic on the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in half. And while many Americans today likely have ancestors who fought on both sides of the war, I recently discovered that two of my ancestors ended up on opposite sides of each other at Vicksburg. Sadly, the results of that battle were different for those two ancestors.
Jacob Bastel was born in Hockenheim in the Palatinate region of Germany in 1836 and emigrated to the U.S. at age 18. He settled in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, joining many others from his hometown who were already there. The Palatines, as they were called, were staunchly anti-slavery and when the southern states seceded and the Civil War broke out, many of them quickly enlisted in the Union cause. On Aug. 31, 1861, Jacob enlisted in Company F, 37th Infantry Regiment, Ohio, a unit that would become known as the German Regiment. They would fight across the Confederacy, from Virginia to Mississippi to Georgia and the Carolinas, before the war ended.
Jacob Bastel
About 1861, Jacob’s older brother Joseph Bastel also emigrated from Hockenheim to Upper Sandusky, bringing his wife, Eva Kretz Bastel, and three children with him, including their daughter Anna Bastel, born in 1855. Anna grew up to marry John Gaa and the couple moved to Columbus, where they raised 12 children, including my great-grandfather, Vincent Gaa, whose son, Victor Gaa, was my mother’s father.
Joseph Bastel didn’t live to see his daughter Anna marry, though, dying of unknown causes in 1864. When the Civil War ended, Jacob Bastel returned to Upper Sandusky and married his brother’s widow in October 1865. They had a child of their own and Jacob lived until 1898, becoming one of Upper Sandusky’s leading citizens. So he was both my great-great-grandmother’s uncle and stepfather.
Like Jacob Bastel, Bryant Barlow was also born in 1836, though a world apart in Perry County, Mississippi. That part of the state was not big cotton plantation country. Instead, it was populated by sturdy farmers and ranchers who raised a variety of livestock and crops. Few owned slaves. Bryant would marry Sarah Ellen Rush in 1858 and the couple had two sons, Wyatt Columbus Barlow and William Green Barlow, who was my great-grandfather. His son, Oliver U. Barlow, was my dad’s father.
The farmers of southern Mississippi waited some time after the war began before enlisting in the Confederate cause, but in May 1862 Bryant joined with others to form Company B of the 7th Battalion, Mississippi Infantry. They would become known as the Beauregard Defenders. Bryant’s company was ordered to north Mississippi and by October 1862 had fought bloody battles at Iuka and Corinth. There, Bryant was badly wounded, and he would spend the next five months in a Confederate hospital in Enterprise, Miss. On March 9, 1863, Bryant wrote his wife, telling her he expected to be sent back to his unit in a few days.
“I have been thinking that I would get to come home to see you before I went to my command but it is out of my power to get a furlough for they have orders to furlough no man,” Bryant wrote. “I have no such calculation of ever returning until the treaty of peace is made, and they are no telling when that will be done. They are but one thing that cheers me up and that is I have a helping God to put my trust in that I may go through the troubles and trials of this war. And if it falls to my lot to fall by the ball of the invader and depart from this unfriendly world I hope to be ready to meet my God in paradise. And I hope if we never on earth are permitted to meet again we will be able to meet in paradise where they are no troubles to be seen; where they are nothing but peace, joy, and good tidings for ever and ever.”
Bryant was right – the Confederate cause in Mississippi was falling apart and within days every available soldier was sent toward Vicksburg as the Union armies of Grant and Sherman slowly advanced on the invaluable port city. By mid-May the struggle for Vicksburg, which would last a month and a half, was underway.
On the Union side, Jacob Bastel’s 37th Regiment took part in the furious Union assaults of May 19 and May 22. They fought on the northwest side of the city, just south of Graveyard Road. About a half mile south of them, on the opposite side of the lines, Bryant Barlow’s 7th Battalion helped the Confederates hold the line at the Jackson Road. Then began Grant’s siege, a brutal war of attrition and starvation that saw the Union cannons pound the Confederate trenches day and night. The Union Army’s grip steadily tightened as Confederate trenches were blown apart by the steady cannon fire. On July 4 Vicksburg surrendered to Grant.
Sadly, Bryant Barlow hadn’t survived. He was killed on June 24, one of almost 20,000 men on both sides who died in the campaign that ended in Vicksburg’s surrender. Like most Confederate soldiers there, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the old city cemetery.
Ironically, it was another war that brought Jacob’s and Bryant’s families together again; my mom was working as a clerk in Denver in 1942 when my dad was sent there to train for the Army Air Corps in World War II. They met there and married just before he was sent off to England to prepare to take part in the D-Day invasion of France. They remained happily married for 66 years.
As they fought on opposite sides within shouting distance of each other at Vicksburg, neither Bryant Barlow or Jacob Bastel could have conceived of the possibility that one day, less than 80 years later, the daughter of one of their families would meet the son of the other’s family, and that the two would marry and raise a family of their own. Such is the story of America.