In the annals of our country’s history, the most high-profile moments happened in locales far from Mokena. The watershed moment in America’s story, the Civil War, is one of these events that most of us consign to distant places, be they Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Vicksburg, Mississippi; or even Chancellorsville, Virginia. While the front lines in the struggle would’ve been a hard, days’ long trip from Will County, our community was just as affected by the conflict as all others were across the United States as they existed in those days, now a century and a half past. All one must do is visit Mokena’s cemeteries to find the time-honored graves of dozens of Abraham Lincoln’s soldiers. At least 45 Mokena men, some mere teenagers, took to the musket to preserve the Union. This is story of Carl Hacker, and a private soldier’s life after the guns fell silent.
To understand Hacker’s life, we have to first examine its beginning. Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Hacker was born February 23, 1846, at a place called Rosenhagen, a postage stamp-sized, wind-swept village on the Baltic Sea in what is today northern Germany. The son of Heinrich Hacker and Hanna Kitzerow, the boy’s homeland would be torn asunder with tumult and revolution from the time he was an infant, and like so many of his countrymen in search of a better, more stable life, Carl Hacker left the German plain and made his way to America as an adolescent. Barely 17 years old, in October 1863 he and his brother Christian, who had a year on him, left the port of Hamburg aboard the John Bertram, a wooden ship guided by huge sails. After a rough, weeks-long trip over the choppy waves of the Atlantic, the Hacker brothers first touched American soil and promptly made their way to eastern Will County.
Carl Hacker’s new home was thickly populated with his Teutonic brethren, and years later, in the early 20thcentury, Will County historian W.W. Stevens would matter-of-factly write that our neighborhood “…is indebted to Germany for many of her best citizens.” Through the thick fog of the ages, it appears that Carl Hacker’s first station here was the New Lenox Township farm of his aunt and uncle, Maria and Heinrich Schmuhl, who at this point were already well established at their property along today’s Route 30. Originally a resident of the hamlet of Mokena, Heinrich Schmuhl worked as a laborer on the new Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad as it was built through our neck of the woods eleven years earlier.
At the time Carl Hacker first set foot in our environs, America was already two years deep into our nightmarish Civil War. At this late date, we can only image what his reaction was to landing in a new country deep in the mire of war, and what feelings it awoke in him. On October 4th, 1864, the fresh-faced 18-year-old joined Company F of the 64th Illinois Volunteer Infantry in Joliet. Upon mustering in, he was measured at five feet six and a half inches tall, with brown hair, hazel eyes and a light complexion. It should be noted that young Hacker volunteered to join the Union army, which begs the question, as to what inspired this newly arrived immigrant, who by his own later testimony did not yet speak a lick of English, to risk life and limb for his newly adopted country so soon after his arrival.
The 64th Illinois had already been under President Lincoln’s wing for almost 3 years before Private Hacker came onto the scene, having been raised at Springfield’s Camp Butler at the end of 1861. Picking up the moniker “Yates’ Sharpshooters” along the way, (after then-governor Richard Yates) the regiment had already been bloodied at various engagements in the western theater of the war, such as at the Battle of Atlanta in the summer of 1864. At some unknown date, while on duty at Newport, North Carolina, Private Hacker was temporarily transferred to the 15th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. As such, certain details of his time in the service of the Union are murky, as it is hard to pin down when he was with which regiment.
Not too long after New Year 1865, something happened that would follow young Carl Hacker for the rest of his life. Memories as to exactly when this mishap occurred were greatly clouded in the years thereafter. Was it on January 20th? Or around February 15th? Maybe as late as March 20th? No one privy to it could agree. In any case, it was in the lead-up to the war’s end. While at camp in Louisville, Kentucky, Private Hacker was with his company on drill, and while passing through a ravine at the double quick, the young man tripped and fell upon a small stump, absorbing the hard blow in his left side. Using the terminology of the day, it was clear that the fall caused a rupture in his torso.
Not too long afterward, the rupture was further aggravated while he was unloading barrels of sugar, and marching through the Carolinas only made it worse, and at one point, the German-born private could barely walk. Further compounding this, was the fact that Carl Hacker was taken prisoner on March 8th, 1865, at the Battle of Wyse Forks, near Kinston, North Carolina, an oft-forgotten engagement in the annals of the Civil War. He was held for about eighteen days in the Confederate capitol of Richmond, then in a stroke of luck, exchanged for rebel prisoners and released, thus miraculously avoiding the untold horrors of the infamous holding pen at Andersonville, Georgia. Upon his return to Union arms, he completed a roundabout tour of Indianapolis and St. Louis, before mustering out of the army on July 13th, 1865, at Springfield. Carl Hacker was ultimately in the service for less than a year, but in those ten months, he saw and did his share, and earned the laurels to rightly call himself a veteran of the Civil War.
In the hot summer of 1865, he went back home to New Lenox Township to his aunt and uncle Maria and Heinrich Schmuhl’s farm, where upon his return, his aunt would later remember that he was filthy and infested with body lice. The Schmuhls got rid of his dirty uniform, while Maria bathed him (in the presence of her husband, she wanted it known) and treated his still-festering injury with home remedies. Years later, Maria Schmuhl would matter of factly go on record stating that she was doing her patriotic duty and “deemed it her (duty) as an aunt towards her nephew to assist him in the manner she did.”
After the war, life went on for Carl Hacker, and he married Maria Mau in November 1867 at the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church in Mokena. It is with this tight knit congregation that the Hackers would be affiliated for the rest of their lives. Maria was also a new arrival to the United States, having arrived here not even four years previous. The pair came to have five children born between 1868 and 1880, namely (in the order of their birth) Louisa, Charles, George, Minnie and Philip. Blessings were abundant, as they all lived well into adulthood. All of the Hacker children were born in Mokena except Philip, the youngest, who made his appearance when the family lived for a two-year spell at Gallatin in northern Missouri. Of all of his siblings, George Hacker’s name is writ largest upon our village’s narrative, as he would not only become a successful lumber and real estate man in Mokena, but was also mayor from 1915 to 1929.
In the autumn of 1878, Carl Hacker bought a house on today’s McGovney Street from Joachim Möller, paying the handsome sum of $600 for the property. The old homestead would stay in the family for decades. As so many of our town folk have, Carl Hacker put food on the table courtesy of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, the lifeblood of Mokena. However, the injury he suffered in the war, while not sustained on the battlefield, was coming back to haunt him. As a result of the 1865 rupture, he suffered no small amount of hardship in his day-to-day life. By the end of the 1870s, while working as a laborer on the railroad tracks, section foreman and Front Street resident Patrick Brennan noticed that Hacker “would hold back from lifting” and when asked why, would blame his war injury. Eventually Brennan got him work cutting grass and pitching hay, as in the foreman’s words, “he could not do more at best.” In regards to the old trauma, Brennan had seen it, and would blunty say that “it is very bad.” Carl Hacker also worked as a switchman, and later became foreman of the railroad section himself, courtesy of Patrick Brennan’s help, who after some time thought it would be an easier job for the old soldier. All in all, Hacker put in 43 years for the Rock Island in Mokena.
The home of Carl and Maria Hacker on today's McGovney Street. The old homestead was acquired by the Hackers in 1878, and stayed in their family for many years.
As the years marched onward, the time had come for the former Private Hacker to seek financial help from Uncle Sam. Like most of his brothers in arms, Carl Hacker applied for a federal pension for his services to the Union in those hard, trying days of the 1860s. He submitted his first papers in the fall of 1878, thirteen years after the war ended. As was the case for most of the former fighters, it was a long, tangled, bureaucratic effort, one in which special pension attorneys were even involved. The veteran and Mokena resident spent years in a back and forth with Washington in an effort to get the highest possible compensation for his time in the army. The basis of his claim was the injury he suffered after the fall he took on drill on that day in 1865, which by then had required the more or less constant wearing of a truss.
The complexities of getting the pension were compounded by the fact that there were no records of his having been treated by a regimental surgeon, who at the time of the fall, in Carl Hacker’s recollection, took a look at him, fitted him with a truss and more or less said “We’ll see what happens.” He didn’t press the issue at the time, because as he recalled years later, he considered the injury “under the circumstances it occurred (as) more of a disgrace than an honor.” Also complicating things were the fact that two buddies who were intimately familiar with Hacker and his injury were no longer alive by the time the pension process started, with one having died in the war and the other in Kansas after the conflict, or so he had been informed. His cousin, fellow St. John’s member Frank Kitzerow, who served side by side with him in the Civil War, couldn’t be of much help either, writing that he knew Hacker to be hale and hearty before the war, and that he was familiar with the rupture, but at the end of the day wasn’t sure exactly how his cousin had received it. All things considered, on November 8th, 1890, Uncle Sam finally granted Hacker $8 a month, or about $250 in today’s money.
By the 1890s, the wearing of the truss had also come with its own issues, which in the words of Dr. Edmund Lynch, fellow Union veteran and Mokena medicine man, left Hacker’s skin “chaffed and reddened,” while another doctor wrote that the debilitating injury left him capable of “performing about one fourth of a(n) able bodied man’s labor.” In the eyes of the experts, he was suffering from a complete left inguinal hernia.
Carl Hacker hung up his railroad worker’s tools and retired around 1911. Before he called it quits after four decades of service, he received a hefty reward from the Rock Island for having kept the best section of the line. As of May 22, 1912 his pension had been generously raised and he was now taking in $15.50 per month for his services in the Civil War, or a little over $450 in current figures. He was a respected man in Mokena, as is evidenced by the three terms he was elected to serve on the village board from 1896 to 1902, and was also a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, the venerable, nationwide organization of northern veterans.
The Hacker family lot in St. John's Cemetery.
Carl Hacker breathed his last on October 24th, 1916 at his home on McGovney Street, having reached the age of seventy years, surpassing the life expectancy for an American male in his day by two decades. His loved ones buried him in the family plot in St. John’s Cemetery on Wolf Road, where to this day his dark red gravestone holds watch. An American flag, placed on the earthen mound by caring hands, can always be found billowing over his dust. Carl Hacker’s name won’t be found in any grand histories of the Civil War, but he nevertheless played an important role in the siren call of his generation, and the biggest crisis our country ever faced. His memory is enthroned not only in the Valhalla of Union heroes, but in the pantheon of Mokena’s history.
