America's communist war hero

How a commie more left than Marx helped win the Civil War

The German communist August Willich was so far to the left he once tried to kill Karl Marx for being too right-wing, yet America wouldn’t be what it is today without him.

Willich was born on November 19, 1810 in Braunsberg, East Prussia. His father was killed in the Napoleonic Wars and he was raised by none other than the Christian liberal thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose wife was a relative of Willich’s. He became a Prussian Army officer but resigned due to his republican beliefs and later led a Communist League faction. He fought in the German revolutions of 1848 and 1849, where one of his aides-de-camp was a man by the name of Friedrich Engels.

Prussian forces defeated the revolutionaries and Willich and Engels ended up in London, where Willich took up carpentry and became close to the French radical Emmanuel Barthélemy. The two men soon agreed that local celebrity Karl Marx was not radical enough for their tastes and they plotted to kill Marx.

After Willich challenged Marx to a duel and Marx refused, Willich moved to the United States and Barthélemy was later hanged for killing his employer. Willich worked as a carpenter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then moved to Cincinnati and became editor of the German-language free labor newspaper the German Republican.

In April 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, sparking the American Civil War, and Willich signed up.

His military experience served him well and he quickly rose though the ranks to become colonel of the all-German 32nd Indiana Infantry Regiment. He had a reputation for taking good care of his men, seeing that they were well-rested, well-fed and battle-ready, and as a result they took to calling him “Papa.”

In April 1862, the 32nd saw action at the Battle of Shiloh, where they took heavy fire, ran low on ammunition and became badly shaken. Willich stood before the line, his back to the enemy as they fired their rifled muskets, and put fire in the bellies of his men with a rousing speech that inspired them to rise up in a bayonet attack.

At the Battle of Chattanooga, the 32nd routed Confederate forces, breaking their siege on starving Union troops and clearing a path for the assault on Atlanta, where the 32nd fought alongside General William Tecumseh Sherman and took the city in July 1864, changing the course of American history.

You see, in the 1864 presidential election, Democratic candidate and former Union general George B. McClellan ran on a campaign seeking a truce with the Confederacy to end the bloody war. But the victory in Atlanta had invigorated the North and McClellan lost badly to incumbent candidate Abraham Lincoln.

In 1870, Willich returned to Germany to fight in the Franco-Prussian War but since he was 60 years old and a communist, they turned him away, so he went to Berlin University, got a doctorate in philosophy and retired to St. Marys, Ohio.

P.S. Another Prussian officer in Willich’s regiment was Fritz Anneke, also a republican and commander alongside Willich and Engels in the German revolutions. He also fought in the U.S. Civil War as a Union commander, also worked as a newspaper editor and later married into the Anneke family that owned the famous but sadly now defunct Fitger’s Brewery. You can’t get a Fitger’s beer anymore but the next time you’re in Duluth, Minnesota, you can visit the old brewery—now a museum.