Civil War Am

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Elevating the Few

Elizabeth R. Varon

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.” So JD Vance declared earlier this month at the Claremont Institute, where he was accepting an award for “statesmanship.” In the speech, Vance attacked a creedal definition of citizenship that would include immigrants who believed in the idea of America, and exclude native-born people labeled as far-right extremists who are told “they don’t belong in America” unless they agree with what Vance described as “progressive liberal values.”

Since he partnered with Donald Trump, Vance has emerged as one of the main spokespeople for the effort to redefine national belonging around heritage rather than creed. In doing, he is tapping a corrosive tradition of nativism that runs through much of American history. But the specific history that Vance is invoking in this case runs directly counter to the anti-immigrant argument he is attempting to make. In every war it has won, the United States owes a major debt of gratitude to immigrant and minority soldiers. The Civil War might be the best example of this history.

German Radicals vs. the Slave Power

Immigrants and the sons of immigrants made up 43% of the Union’s armed forces in the American Civil War. An estimated 25% of Union soldiers were foreign-born — more than half a million men out of an army of 2.1 million. Most were German and Irish-born (more than 200,000 German and 150,000 Irish-born men wore the Union blue), but many other places of origin were represented in the Union ranks, including China, Italy, Japan, and Mexico.

The stunning number of immigrant soldiers reflected the waves of antebellum and wartime immigration by Europeans fleeing from poverty and political proscription. Immigrants were about 13% of the American population on the eve of the war, and they were clustered overwhelmingly in the urban centers of the free labor North, where jobs and communities could be found. While some served in “ethnic regiments” of fellow Irishmen and Germans, most served in nonethnic regiments. Some professed “ethnic” motivations — Irish nationalists like Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher, for example, saw the war as a training ground for their liberation struggle against England, and some Germans, in light of their failed Revolution of 1848, saw the American Civil War as another chapter in an ages-old struggle between republicanism and aristocracy.

Most immigrant soldiers, however, shared the motivations of their native-born counterparts, especially a sense of fealty to the Union. Historians such as James McPherson and Gary W. Gallagher, combing through thousands of letters and diaries by soldiers, have found that patriotic devotion to the Union “cause” was the primary motive they professed. An idea of transcendent and even mystical appeal, “Union” connoted the singular American experiment in representative government. For European immigrants, life in America promised a degree of upward mobility and political participation unavailable anywhere else in the world — and military service was the chance to prove their loyalty to their adopted country.

BackStory: Why They Fought

The other marginalized social group essential to the Union’s military victory was African Americans, who by the end of the war comprised 10% of the U.S. army and navy. Of the 200,000 Black soldiers who donned blue uniforms, nearly 80% were Southerners, who fled the horrors of slavery and undertook hazardous journeys to Union lines, to seize their own freedom and then risk their lives liberating others. Together with free Black Northern recruits, these Black Southerners fought a two-front war, against the institution of human bondage and persistent discrimination in the North. They fought for an unfulfilled Union, to realize its promises of equality and democracy.

:{The U.S. army was roiled by the same racism and nativism that impoverished American society. Immigrant soldiers attained at best a sort of probationary acceptance. The military sacrifices of Irish regiments were underappreciated, as the Northern public often conflated the Irish soldiery with the anti-war, anti-emancipation “Copperhead” element of the Democratic Party. Copperhead politicians, fomenting disaffection among Irish immigrants on the home front, sparked the 1863 New York draft riot, which devolved into a vicious, deadly spree of anti-Black violence.

Despite the fact that roughly 95% of the Union army were volunteers (and only 5% draftees), and that most ethnic soldiers did their duty regardless of their partisan politics, the draft riot fueled a narrative of ethnic disloyalty in the North. German regiments, for their part, were unfairly scapegoated for military defeats such as the Union debacle at Chancellorsville (where they bore the brunt of a Confederate surprise attack for which the entire Union army was unprepared). Even after they proved their combat mettle at battles such as Fort Wagner, African Americans in United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments faced a gauntlet of discriminatory policies, including inferior pay, medical care, and provisions; barriers to promotion; and being relegated to back-breaking garrison duty.}:

As is so often the case, war was an accelerant of social change. “Entrenched racial prejudice among the troops was often impervious to argument, but not to the course of the war itself,” the historian George Rable has written, on the complex dynamic within the Union army: events on the battlefield, including the performance of Black troops, “would vindicate the wisdom of emancipation and change white soldiers’ attitudes as well.”

The point here is not that the Union army was a bastion of progressivism and social harmony. (It was not.) The point is that immigrant and minority soldiers shed their blood to prove their patriotism, in the hopes that citizenship could be won as well as inherited. They were not bound together by a shared heritage but instead motivated by a shared hope: that the Union could be the vehicle for their progress and prosperity, and a beacon to the world.

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