Monks in the Military: The Benedictine Brothers Confront the Civil War Draft

ECW welcomes back guest author Joseph Casino.

Evan Portman’s interesting article, Tales from a Monk in the Union Army, got me thinking about my own research on Catholic clergy facing the American Civil War draft. More specifically, I focused on those Benedictine monks at St. Vincent’s Abbey in Latrobe, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, addressed in that article.

The Benedictine religious community contained ordained priests, seminarians, college students, and ninety-four lay Brothers who performed all the manual labor. The monastery was designed to be self-sufficient, with farmland, barns, stables, and workshops, but it still depended on financial aid from the European mission societies, the Leopoldinen Stiftung and the Ludwig-Missionsverein, from tuition from its college students, and from revenue generated by its brewery, gristmill, and sawmill.[1]

Four Benedictine Brothers, from the abbey faced forced military service under the Militia Act of 1862, authorizing a draft within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers. Abbot Boniface Wimmer took advantage of an invitation to take over operation of Assumption College in Sandwich, Ontario, to send to safety eight monks who were most threatened by the draft.[2] Even so, four Brothers were drafted into the military, with one sent back as unfit and two left to join the others in Canada. Regarding the fourth, Brother Gallus Maier, Wimmer wrote to the bishop of Munich in February 1863, “Brother Gallus was enticed into the military and fought in the three-week campaign in Maryland. He was wounded in the bloody battle at Antietam and had to be hospitalized. He was discharged, however, and is home again. … He has a great respect for grenades and shrapnel. The stories of his adventure have provided us with many enjoyable hours.”[3]

Abbot Wimmer petitioned President Abraham Lincoln in November 1862, arguing that “by religious belief and doctrine of said order,” the Brothers were “bound irrevocably to the order by solemn vows” to avoid “taking up arms.” The reply from Brig. Gen. C. P. Buckingham read that “it is hereby ordered that the members of the Benedictine Order are relieved from military service.”[4]

However, the new Enrollment Act of March 1863, listed no exemptions for religious persons. The only options, short of fleeing to Canada, were paying a commutation fee or finding and paying someone to serve as a substitute for the draftee. Wimmer wrote to the secretary of war in June 1863, using references to European practices and infusing his appeal with a slight hint of humor. “I cannot believe,” he began, “that the law intends to press clergymen (of any denomination or religion) into military service, because as a general matter these men are very warlike indeed if the fight has to be done with their tongues or pens, but otherwise they keep at a good distance from danger.

“What should the Government gain,” he queried, “if some hundred cowards were in the Army?” If the government really intended to bring the clergy into the ranks of fighting men, he asked, why did it allow them to buy their way out by paying $300 in commutation money? Wimmer pointed out that the order could not possibly afford to pay for commutation or substitutes for all of his community. Finally, he explained that in the German states, students of law, medicine, and divinity were enrolled and drafted, but then obtained a furlough for an indefinite time period. Could not that plan work in America, he asked?[5]

Nevertheless, six Benedictine priests and eight Brothers were called up for military service. Two priests and two Brothers were released when the monastery paid the commutation fee of $300 for each, and four others were declared unfit to bear arms by army doctors. Evan Portman maintains that Gallus Maier and five other brothers were drafted into the 61st Pennsylvania Regiment on July 14, 1863. Likewise, Jerome Oetgen wrote that the Brothers drafted included Gallus Maier, Bonaventure Gaul, Ulric Barth, Ildephonse Hoffmann, George Held, and Leo Crist.[6] Brother Maier was included in this enrollment even though he had already served, because he is listed in Bates History of Pennsylvania Volunteers as being drafted on July 14, 1863.[7] Another source lists Brother Gaul as drafted in February 1863, one month before the passage of the 1863 Enrollment Act.[8]

Exemptions came at a heavy price. As Abbot Wimmer explained, “our township paid $23,000 to have us exempt from the draft. We had to pay $1,000.” Perhaps Latrobe’s lay members valued the spiritual and material benefits from the monastery as worthy of such a financial contribution. Fortunately, the monastery had just received about $1,000 from the output of its sawmill, but that was still not enough to cover all exemptions. Wimmer confided to Brother Ildephonse Hoffman, “it seems as though you poor brothers must be the scapegoats for us all.”[9]

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton insisted that the Brothers had to perform hospital duty in the regiment in lieu of carrying a musket into battle. Five of them served until the war ended. Brother Leo Crist was severely wounded during the Petersburg Campaign in 1865 and suffered from the wound until his death in 1883.[10] Brother Gaul, participated unhappily in the major campaigns of 1864, and spun out his grief in letters to his associates at St. Vincent’s. Appalled at the butchery of Grant’s Overland Campaign, which he would have witnessed as a hospital orderly, he suggested that it was all for nought, since just then Confederate forces under Jubal A. Early were on their way to attack Washington, DC.[11]

The absence of Catholic chaplain he found especially unfortunate. “A prisoner in a penitentiary has it better than we in this case,” he lamented, and claimed that “as soon as I can free myself from this yoke, I will have no guilty conscience.”[12] When he returned to the monastery after the war, he excelled at artistic woodcarving and shoe repair. In addition, the knowledge he gained in the army prepared him to become the infirmarian at the college, where he became quite adept in setting broken bones and reducing slight fractures, and frequently mixing up a batch of ‘wizard oil,’ an ointment whose recipe he had learned in the army.[13]

The military service performed by the Benedictine Brothers may be unique in the annals of the Civil War. Among the other Catholic religious communities I have investigated, no priests or brothers ever carried muskets in the Union Army. They avoided military service through commutation, substitution, flight to Canada, or through the interposition of influential friends in the military or government.[14]

Joseph J. Casino has been an adjunct professor of history at Villanova University since 1978 and serves on the Board of Governors of the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia. His most recent Civil War publications are “‘Plenty of Work to Do’: Correspondence of an Illinois Farm Girl during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 65:1 (March 2019) and “What’s in a Name? Solving the Mystery of an Italian Confederate,” Emerging Civil War (July 25, 2023).

Endnotes:

[1] Wimmer to Scherr, February 26, 1863, Jerome Oetgen, ed., Boniface Wimmer: Letters of An American Abbot (Latrobe, PA: Saint Vincent Archabbey Publications, 2008), 265; Jerome Oetgen, Mission to America: A History of Saint Vincent Archabbey, The First Benedictine Monastery in the United States (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 78, 141.

[2] They remained in Canada until the war’s end. Oetgen, Mission, 119-120.

[3] Wimmer to Scherr, February 26, 1863, Oetgen, Boniface Wimmer, 265.

[4] Buckingham to Lincoln, June 10, 1863, The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 3, Vol. 3, p. 336.

[5] U. S. Statutes at Large, Vol. 12, 731-737. Wimmer to Stanton, June 11, 1863, OR, Series 3, Vol. 3, 341-345.

[6] Wimmer to Scherr, February 26, 1863, Oetgen, Boniface Wimmer, 265.

[7] Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5 (Harrisburg, PA: B. Singerly, 1869), Vol. 2, 423.

[8] Oetgen, Mission to America, 122.

[9] Wimmer to Hoffman, October 19, 1864, Oetgen, Boniface Wimmer, 282.

[10] The Benedictine priests drafted were Fathers Valentine Lobmayer from St. Joseph’s Parish, Johnstown, Pennsylvania.; Fathers Bernard Manser, Casimir Seitz, and Erhard Vanino of St. Mary’s Parish, Erie, Pennsylvania.; Father Benno Hegele, from the Newark, New Jersey Priory; Father Isidor Walter from St. Bendict’s Priory, Carrolltown, Pennsylvania. Oetgen, Mission to America, 122, 123.

[11] Evan Portman, “Tales from a Monk,” Emerging Civil War, June 29, 2024.

[12] Letter from Brother Bonaventure Gaul, 1864, Portman, “Tales from a Monk.”

[13] Oetgen, Mission to America, 123, 159.

[14] These include the Redemptorists in Maryland, the Seminary of St. Francis de Sales in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Congregation of Holy Cross in Notre Dame, Indiana.