THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
done to General McLean. There was, therefore, some unkind feeling between the commander and the command. Another new-comer was General Francis Barlow, whose record in the war puts him on the roll of the bravest of the brave. But at that period his record was still short, and his appointment to the command of a brigade in our Second Division also had the misfortune of displacing a very brave and popular officer, Colonel Orland Smith, who was entitled to much honor and consideration.
My command remained the same—the Third Division of the Eleventh Corps, but it was strengthened by the addition of some fresh regiments. There was the Eighty-second Illinois, commanded by no less a man than Colonel Friedrich Hecker, the most prominent republican leader in the Germany of 1848, now an ardent American patriot and anti-slavery man, no longer young, but in the full vigor of ripe manhood. Among his captains was Emil Frey, a young Swiss, who had interrupted his university studies to come over and fight for the cause of human liberty in the great American Republic. After the war he returned to his native land, and then came back to the United States as Minister of Switzerland; and he has since held some of the highest political offices in his native country. There was also the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin, mainly composed of young men of the best class of German-born inhabitants of Milwaukee. There was, finally, the One Hundred and Nineteenth New York, commanded by Colonel Elias Peissner, a professor at Union College, Schenectady. His face bore a very striking resemblance to Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, and rumor had it that he was a natural son of that eccentric monarch, who in his day cultivated art and poetry along with his amours. I have good reason for believing that, in this instance, rumor spoke the truth. Colonel Peissner was a gentleman of the
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