longislandwins
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- Feb 25, 2011
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For a full list of articles in The Immigrants’ Civil War, click here.
If you have been reading The Immigrants’ Civil War, you know that one-in-four soldiers fighting for the Union was foreign born. Immigrants rushed into the ranks of the new army every bit as fast as the native born in the weeks after Fort Sumter was attacked. Many immigrants who just weeks before had been complaining about discrimination in America volunteered to protect a government they had voted against.
The question that should be obvious, but is not often asked, is why would any immigrant join an army during a civil war?
The normal thing for foreigners to do when a civil war breaks out is to flee the country.
Think of events in Libya in the spring of 2011. As rebel forces traded fire with Gaddafi loyalists, British, American, Italian, and Egyptian workers in Libya fled. The same scene has been repeated when civil wars have wracked the Balkans, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Yet, tens of thousands of immigrants joined the Union army in 1861 and over the course of the war roughly half-a-million foreign born would serve.
Every immigrant who joined the Union Army in 1861 and 1862 was a volunteer. Most had only come to the United States within the last decade. Many were not even citizens yet when they joined. Some were buried on the battlefield before they took the oath of citizenship.
What were their motives for joining?
This installment of The Immigrants’ Civil War looks at the reasons men gave for enlisting during the first months of the war. This was at a time when patriotic fervor was at its highest, there was a confidence that the war would be short, and knowledge of the gory cost of battle was non-existent. I will devote future articles to the men who joined the army later in the war.
But before beginning to look at the many motives that may have led a foreign-born man to abandon the safety of civilian life, I wanted to point to a reason given by native born and immigrant alike for enlisting. Abraham Lincoln called America “the last best hope of earth” for democracy, and saw the war as the only way to preserve that hope. Many young soldiers, immigrant and native born alike, said the same in their letters home.
The Civil War came just a little more than a decade after the defeat of the democratic revolutions of 1848 in Europe. So-called government of the people, always under attack worldwide, appeared to be at its lowest point since 1776. Many immigrants, fleeing despotism in their homelands, believed that the Southern attack on the Union threatened to extinguish the flame of democracy worldwide.
One extraordinary letter that many soldiers would have agreed with was written by a member of the Irish Brigade. Peter Welsh wrote it not when he enlisted, but after the famous brigade was nearly destroyed at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Welsh’s wife, who never supported his decision to enlist, wrote to him asking why an immigrant would want to get involved in a war between different groups of fanatical native-born Americans.
To read the rest of this post on Long Island Wins, click here.