Today’s Activists Respect Their Abolitionist Heritage
by
John J. Dunphy
(Originally published in the Independence Day 2020 edition of The Telegraph of Alton, IL)
Born in Norway in 1829, Hans Christian Heg came to Wisconsin with his family in 1840. After participating in the California Gold Rush, he returned to Wisconsin, married and put down roots.
Heg abhorred slavery. He stood in 1852 as the candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil party for the state legislature. He narrowly lost. Heg soon found a political home in the newly-founded Republican party, which was determined to prevent slavery from spreading to new territories in the United States. While not pledged to end slavery in states where it already existed, the Republican party included a number of abolitionists — one of whom was Heg.
This immigrant’s humanitarianism extended beyond abolitionism. Heg in 1859 won election to a two-year term as Wisconsin’s state prison commissioner. Most American prisons at that time were hellholes. Heg believed that prisons should be institutions that “reclaim the wandering and save the lost” and expressed that philosophy through a series of reforms.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, a group of prominent Wisconsin citizens of Scandinavian descent persuaded Governor Alexander Randall, an ardent abolitionist, to ask Heg to raise a regiment composed of Scandinavian immigrants. Heg accepted this assignment because it gave him the opportunity to strike a blow against slavery. On Oct. 1, 1861, Randall commissioned Heg a colonel.
Heg used stirring language to secure recruits among his fellow first-generation Americans. “The government of our adopted land is in danger,” he warned. “Is it not our duty as brave and intelligent citizens to extend our hands in defense of the cause of our country and of our own homes?” Heg addressed potential recruits as “young Norsemen” and urged them “to band together and deliver untarnished to posterity the old honorable name of Norsemen.”
Heg’s appeals for volunteers bore much fruit. According to a 1920 article by Theodore C. Blegen, “the great majority were of Norwegian blood” and “not a few soldiers of the Fifteenth were immigrants of but a few weeks’ standing.”
The Fifteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, commanded by Heg, was mustered into service on January 31, 1862. Because of the ethnicity of its men, the Fifteenth Wisconsin is sometimes referred to as the Norwegian Regiment or the Scandinavian Regiment. It first saw action on Oct. 8, 1862 during the Battle of Perryville, which was the largest battle fought in Kentucky. The Wisconsin Fifteenth, however, lost not a single man.
During the Battle of Stones River, however, the Fifteenth endured heavy casaulties. Heg’s horse was shot while he was riding it but Heg suffered no injuries. This courageous immigrant led a charge against a gorge “fortified by eight pieces of artillery and dismounted cavalry.” Blegen stated that “the regiment loved its colonel after Stones River more than ever before, for it was clear to them that he did not expect his soldiers to go where he himself would not go.”
Heg was killed in action while commanding the Fifteenth at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. An eyewitness described his last hours by noting, “Not once did he falter or swerve from his duty…His comrades fell at right and left, still he rallied on.” A sniper’s musket ball struck him in the abdomen. Nonetheless, Heg continued to ride his horse for about a quarter mile until he was overcome by pain and blood loss. On his hospital deathbed, Heg said that he was willing to die because he knew he had given his life for a just cause.
A statue of Heg was installed in Madison, Wisconsin in 1925. On June 23, 2020 a towing vehicle was used to pull down this statue. It was then vandalized, decapitated and thrown into a lake. This act was committed by rioters, not protesters. Those of us working for justice and equality regard abolitionists such as Heg as our ideological forebears.
John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois and Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investigative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945–1947.