‘They picked the wrong guy’
Descendants of Civil War vets upset over destruction of Col. Heg’s statue in Madison
WIND LAKE - Brian McManus opened his email the morning after and saw a link to a news story revealing the decapitation of a statue dragged from the Capitol and unceremoniously dumped into Lake Monona.
His first reaction was disbelief. Followed by “words that can’t be printed. Followed by — Why? Why his statue?” McManus said.
While most Wisconsinites had never heard of Col. Hans Christian Heg before protesters pulled down his statue last week, McManus and the other 45 members of the Wind Lake chapter of Sons of Union Veterans named after Heg knew exactly who he was and what Heg stood for.
Standing in front of a display case in a museum dedicated to Heg on Tuesday, McManus listed some of Heg’s accomplishments: highest-ranking Army officer from Wisconsin killed in the Civil War, commissioner
of Wisconsin’s prisons, prominent antislavery activist, a founding member of the Republican Party.
To McManus, commander of Wisconsin Sons of Union Veterans, Heg is more than a statue or a black and white daguerreotype of a bearded soldier with piercing eyes.
“The desecration of his statue is very personal to us,” said McManus, adding that he was speaking his personal views and not as the leader of the state group that traces its heritage to veterans who fought for the Union.
While Confederate statues and symbols have been torn down and removed in recent weeks during Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country, it’s perplexing why a group would pick Heg, whose statue has been on the Capitol grounds since 1926.
“They got the wrong guy when they pulled that statue down,” said Lance Herdegen, a Wisconsin Civil War expert. “But it has been beneficial because now his story is more well-known.”
A Norwegian immigrant who settled with his family at the age of 11 in a Racine County community near Muskego, Heg grew up to become one of Wisconsin’s early leaders. He was a fierce foe of slavery, a member of the short-lived Free Soil Party that opposed the expansion of slavery in America’s western territories and a leader of Wisconsin’s Wide Awakes, a group of young men opposing slave catchers.
“He’s one of my favorite characters in Wisconsin history,” said Herdegen, author of several books about Wisconsin Civil War units, including “Union Soldiers in the American Civil War” published in 2017. “I admire him. I think he was a decent man and he died for a noble cause.”
A few years before the Civil War began, Heg was elected commissioner of the prison in Waupun where he earned a reputation as a reformer. When the first Wisconsin unit was formed shortly after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the 1,000 men who volunteered for the 1st Wisconsin Regiment had no uniforms.
Heg came to the rescue. “When the war started and Wisconsin didn’t have uniforms, Heg volunteered three inmates (from Waupun) and a sewing machine,” Herdegen said.
Soon Heg recruited 1,000 men, mostly Norwegians, to form the 15th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment. So many soldiers in the regiment were named Ole Olson a numbering system was used to differentiate them — Ole Olson 1, Ole Olson 2, etc.
Three months before he was mortally wounded astride his horse at the Battle of Chickamauga, Heg and his men fought in what’s known as the Tullahoma Campaign in Tennessee 157 years ago this week. Overshadowed by the brutal Battle of Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg fought at the same time, Tullahoma was a Union victory now considered by historians as one of the most brilliant maneuvers of the Civil War.
Wisconsin’s Scandinavian Regiment helped Union troops push Confederate soldiers under the command of Gen. Braxton Bragg — the namesake of Fort Bragg in North Carolina — from Tennessee.
By then Union commanders had noticed Heg’s natural leadership and placed him in command of a brigade, which are normally led by brigadier generals or senior colonels. At Chickamauga on Sept. 19, 1863, Heg got caught between two advancing lines and was shot in the abdomen. He died the next day.
At the small Heg Museum in Heg Park in Wind Lake, a display case contains the sword Heg wielded during the battle as well as a framed piece of cloth from the blue wool vest he was wearing when he was shot. When Heg’s commanding officer learned of his death, he said he had intended to promote Heg to brigadier general.
The museum has not opened this year because of the pandemic but is normally open noon to 4 p.m. on weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Heg’s body was returned to Wisconsin for burial in a cemetery on a hill next to Norway Lutheran Church, where the entrance features the flags of America and Norway. Church leaders refused to allow his funeral to be held there because Heg was an abolitionist, said McManus. Instead the funeral was held in Waterford.
Six decades after Heg’s death, money was raised to create three identical statues by the same sculptor that were placed at Heg Park in Wind Lake, in Heg’s birthplace in Norway and the Capitol in Madison.
Newspaper accounts reported nearly 2,000 people came to the Capitol Square to see the statue’s dedication in October 1926. When the statue at Heg Park was dedicated on July 4, 1928, the last surviving member of his regiment attended the ceremony.
McManus wants to know where Heg’s statue is now, if it’s still in Lake Monona or has been fished out, whether it will be repaired and if so, who will pay for repairs. Only the pedestal, where someone scrawled “Black Lives Matter,” remains outside the Capitol. A message left Tuesday with the state Department of Administration was not returned.
McManus occasionally cleans the statue at Heg Park and every September, on the anniversary of the colonel’s death, he and other members of Col. Hans Heg Camp 15 pay tribute at his grave in the cemetery filled with the final resting places of many Norwegians, including at least 10 Civil War veterans.
“This is like sacred ground to us,” McManus said as he cleaned dried flowers someone had left at Heg’s white obelisk-shaped marker.
On the sesquicentennial of Heg’s death, Sons of Union Veterans members dressed in period uniforms marched up to the cemetery like they do every year on the anniversary. They fired musket volleys and stood at attention as taps was played. They saluted the grave of their chapter’s namesake.
The day of the 150th anniversary of Heg’s death, McManus recalled, was very windy. He remembers watching a replica 15th Wisconsin Regiment flag in the ground next to Heg’s grave snapping in the wind. Just as the final notes of taps died away, the wind died, too.
“Just then a hawk flew out of a tree next to the cemetery and circled above us and above his grave,” said McManus. “That was pretty much a hair on the back of your neck stand-up moment.”