Ozaukee County's
War History
by Daniel E. McGinley

as extracted from THE PORT WASHINGTON STAR
October 23, 1897



Personal Sketches
Chapter 2

WM. H. RINTELMAN

The first paragraph of this article is damaged and unreadable.

The subject of this sketch was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1842; came to America three years later with his parents and, after a year's stay in the city of New York, came to Wisconsin and Ozaukee county, and settled in the town of Cedarburg, where his father began to clear a farm. But his father was soon prostrated with the typhoid fever from which his recovery was so slow that he was forced to sell his farm and move his family to Milwaukee in 1848. Eight years later, the father's health having improved, the family again went to the town of Cedarburg where it settled upon the farm which is now owned and occupied by the subject of this sketch.

Here William labored on the farm, attended the district school in winter, and suffered the hardships and privations of a pioneer's life. But this rough experience was good schooling for his large frame, and stood by him grandly when a few years later he was exposed to the privations and tortures of the rebel prisons. It was largely owing to their pioneer life that the volunteers from Wisconsin made such hardy and effective soldiers, and it was her common district schools that gave them the intelligence for which they were noted.

When the onset of war startled the land to the fact that the Slave Holders were in earnest when they boasted that they would set up the government of their own, destroy the Union and trail our Starry Banner in the dust, Wm. H. Rintelman and the other members of the family were staunch Unionists -- a very unpopular class in Ozaukee county at that time. When the second year of the war came, bringing with it the disasters to the Union arms in Virginia and elsewhere along the front, William and his brother Henry W., who was three years his senior, volunteered on the 18th of August, 1862, to serve their adopted country ìthree years or during the warî in Company A, Twenty-sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, and were soon drilling and learning the duties of a soldier in Camp Sigel, Milwaukee.

Henry was made a sergeant, and leaving the state with their regiment, the two brothers marched into Dixie with high hopes and light hearts, clothed in loyal blue and carrying muskets in defense of the old flag which waved above them proudly and was their guide by day and by night. Little did the gallant boys think as they marched so proudly and hopefully on, that long months of the most horrible suffering were in store for them.

Down into old Virginia the brothers marched with their regiment, suffered the inconvenience and, as they then thought, the hardships of ìMudî and other marches. When they now compare those "hardships" with those of later years of the war, they do not consider them so very great after all. The brothers lived through those days without any serious trouble, and in the spring of 1863, marched across the Rappahannock with their regiment, it being a part of the unfortunate army with which Hooker entered upon the Chancellorsville campaign.

On that eventful 2nd of May, 1863, the Rintelman brothers stood in their places in the line of the Twenty-sixth on Hawkinsí farm near Chancellorsville and met "Stonewall" Jackson's veterans in one of the most desperate battles of the war. Without flinching, they stood gallantly by their colors in that tempest of death, their comrades going down by the score around them, until the regiment was ordered to retreat, when having escaped the bullets of the foe, they reluctantly retreated before overwhelming numbers.

Surviving the harvest of death at Chancellorsville, the Rintelmans accompanied the regiment and army back to the old camps north of the Rappahannock, and a few weeks later, accompanied them on he march north in pursuit of Lee's army. On that hot and eventful morning of the 1st of July, 1863, the boys of the Twenty-sixth accompanied its corps, the Eleventh, on that forced march from Emmetsburg to Gettysburg, a march so trying that hundreds of the toughened veterans fell by the wayside from sheer exhaustion, but the Rintelman boys kept their places in the column, safely reached the front and took positions in the line of battle, wet with perspiration and choking with thirst.

But there they had no time to rest and cool off, for in a short time, the long grey lines of the enemy bore down upon them in great numbers. Their incompetent corps commander had formed his lines in such an exposed position, and in such a disconnected manner, that the most heroic fighting could not hold the position, and after a short but sanguinary struggle, the scene at Chancellorsville had to be repeated -- the men were obliged to run or surrender. The Rintelman brothers had again escaped the bullets of the foe, but they, with hundreds of others, had held their line a little too long for their own safety, and when they reached the edge of the little town, they were surrounded and taken prisoners.

The unfortunates were quickly disarmed and hastened to the rear of the rebel lines, for our troops were making a hard fight as they retreated through the town. Reaching a safe place in the enemy's rear, the prisoners were "rounded up" under a strong guard, and then had a chance to look around for friends. The Rintelman brothers here found six more of their company, viz: Christopher Moegling, Anton Nolde, John Schauss, Joseph Schultz, John Trapschuh and Anton Schieffeneder. A remarkable fact in regard to this squad of eight prisoners may be here noted. They all survived their imprisonment, although some of them were confined in the worst prison pens nearly twenty-one months.

From Gettysburg, the Union prisoners were marched to Harper's Ferry, thence to Martinsburg, Strassburg and Stanton. Here they were kept about two weeks. Then they were marched to Richmond, and being put into one of the tobacco warehouses, they were searched -- principally for money. The most of their money and valuables were found and taken from them, but some of the boys managed to save their money by many ingenious ways, the Rintelman brothers being of that number. After being robbed, the prisoners were marched on to Belle Island in the James river, where they found between two and three thousand other unfortunate boys in blue -- no, not in blue, but in dirty rags. A few of them had tents, but a large majority had none, and the newcomers were told that they could lie down wherever they found room.

When they reached Belle Isle, some of the Twenty-sixth boys had some hardtack. Wm. Rintelman was offered a dollar a piece for his. Knowing that he would need them sorely himself, he would not sell them, but that night, someone took them and left no pay. The next night, Henry's were stolen also and the brothers found themselves poor as the rest as far as food went. William says he does not care about describing the "grub" furnished the prisoners at Belle Isle, but it is needless to say that none of the prisoners grew fat on the fare. Adolph Eichmeyer, of Co. E was the first member of the Twenty-sixth to succumb to the exposure and torture of this prison, dying Dec. 9, 1863. In the meantime, some of the prisoners confined on Belle Isle were exchanged and several members of the Twenty-sixth were of that lucky number.

By the first of February, the condition of the prisoners remaining on Belle Isle became so deplorable that the stench arising from the dead and dying reached the olfactory nerves of Richmond's "Four Hundred," and instead of trying to alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners, they petitioned the government to have them removed from the city. Therefore, one cold morning a report was circulated through the pen that all the prisoners that could get on board of a certain train of cars on the river bank would be sent to the Union lines and paroled. The strong assisted the weak and carried the helpless, and soon hundreds of the famishing boys were stowed away on a freight train, which steamed away from the rebel capital, but instead of being taken to the Union lines, the poor fellows were whirled away to the south, and after a long and torturous ride, during which many of the weakest died, they were landed in the notorious prison-pen at Andersonville, Ga.

Here the poor fellows were doomed to see much harder times and rougher usage than they had endured at Belle Isle. They were in fact, fated to endure and witness the most inhuman and barbarous usage of prisoners ever invented or put in practice by so-called Christians. The "Black Hole" of India was a Paradise when compared with Andersonville, for there the prisoners died for want of pure air in a few hours, while at Andersonville they were slowly starved to death in the foulest of surroundings and in sight of plenty.

When in the second year of the war, the U. S. Government had many thousands more rebel prisoners in its hands than the rebels had Union men, Jeff Davis and his blood-thirsty gang of advisors came to the conclusion that they would not continue to exchange prisoners man for man, as had been the custom, unless the National authorities would consent to parole all rebel prisoners in its hands, over and above the number for which the rebels could give the Union soldiers in exchange. As this plan would release on parole without recompense, forty or fifty thousand able-bodied men, who would undoubtedly be forced to break their parole and again take up arms, as was the case with the Vicksburg garrison paroled by Gen. Grant, the Government refused to agree to the terms, and all exchanges of prisoners ceased. The inhuman Davis and a few unprincipled tools now went to work to murder the prisoners in their hands, by the most barbarous and inhuman of methods -- exposure and starvation.

Early in 1864, two monsters in human form, Howell Cobb, of Georgia, and Gen. John H. Winder, of the rebel army, selected a site for a large prison-pen, a place near Andersonville Station, a hamlet of but three or four houses on the railroad leading southwest from Macon, Ga., and about sixty miles from that city. It was in the northern part of Sumter county, seven or eight miles west of the Flint river, and in an unfrequented out-of-the-way part of the country. It was so far in the interior of the so-called Confederacy, that at the time it was selected as a prison site, none of the rebel leaders thought it possible that it would come within reach of the Union army for years to come, but the fortunes of war brought Shermanís army near enough to force the removal of the prisoners from it before the year expired.

Near the station was a large pine forest, and thither a large number of slaves were sent, the trees were cut down and a clearing of forty acres or more was made on either side of a small stream of water formed by springs. In this clearing, a prison-pen enclosing seventeen acres lying on both sides of the creek was built, the stockade being logs twenty-five feet in length, hewed square and set five feet in the ground and close together, thus forming a solid timber wall twenty feet high. A timber was then spiked horizontally three feet below the top of the wall, on the outside, and on this forty guard stands or shelters were built at regular intervals, from which the rebel guards could overlook all parts of the pen. There were two gates leading into the pen from the railroad side, and on either sides of the creek. These gates, and the whole prison, were commanded by the guns of a number of earthworks or forts built on ground high enough to overlook and sweep with their fire every portion of the pen, and manned by a strong force of rebel soldiers.

Inside of the stockade and twenty feet from it, was the "dead line," marked by strips of pine boards supported on stakes three feet high. The prisoners were not allowed to touch this line or go nearer to the wall, under pain of death. Hundreds of the poor fellows were shot for unthinkingly disobeying these orders or rules. About half a mile northwest of the pen was the burying ground, which soon became densely populated. On the road to it was a log house where some forty bloodhounds were kept for the purpose of running down and capturing or killing any prisoners who might escape from the prison. On the creek above the pen were the camps of the rebel garrison and a large number of slaves, the drainage from these camps and their sinks, reinforced by that from a large cook-house just outside the walls, flowed into the creek just before it entered the prison and made its water more impure than the washings of a slaughter house.

It was the latter part of February when the Rintelman boys reached Andersonville. They had been terribly disappointed when they saw that they were being carried off farther south instead of being sent north or to the sea coast to be paroled, as the rebels had promised, and their hearts sank within them and nearly lost all hope when they entered the Andersonville pen and saw the misery there. But there in that pen full of filth and festering and dying humanity, they were fated to pass many horrible months of suffering.

There were about five thousand prisoners in the pen when our boys first entered, but the unfortunate boys were brought in by train loads until in July, there were over thirty-five thousand starving prisoners in that filthy, disease-polluted seventeen-acre lot, where they sweltered, broiled, raved with fever and died by scores. The rations issued to the prisoners were musty, half-ground corn meal and worm-filled stock, peas, and in quantity were not sufficient to keep body and soul together. No clothing, blankets nor tents were issued to prisoners at any time, and those possessed by them when they reached the prison were quickly taken from them by the guards. The result was that the poor boys were left nearly naked and with little or no protection from the elements. They invented many ways and means of protecting themselves from the weather. Some managed to erect shelters composed of pieces of blankets, tent-cloth and bits of wood, while others, less fortunate, dug holes in the ground into which they crawled for protection from the cold, heat and storm. Sometimes those dugouts caved in upon their occupants, and they being very weak, were often smothered to death before they could be dug out.