Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflicts (review)

In March 1863, Christopher Byrne, an Irish Catholic living in Minnesota, wrote a fascinating letter to his brother in Ireland describing his decision to enlist in the Union army. “I was not Drafted,” he wrote. “I went voluntarily, but the country got into such a wild state of excitement that a young man would be looked on as a traitor if he did not go” (99). Byrne’s letter opens Susannah Ural’s essay on northern Irish American Catholics and the Civil War, and it is a fitting introduction to this valuable collection. Byrne’s decision to enlist came down to his conviction that, despite some reservations about the Republican Party, “this was the best government that ever the sun shone on” (99–100). As Ural points out, ethnic Americans commonly felt dual loyalties when confronted with the Civil War. For the nation’s newcomers, terms like “citizen” and “traitor” took on complex meanings.

This volume brings together seven essays about the wartime experience of America’s ethnic, religious, and racial outsiders. Ural’s essay and Stephen D. Engle’s contribution on Germans in the Union army do much of the heavy lifting, offering broad surveys of the war’s two most numerous ethnic groups. David Gleeson’s essay surveys the history of Irish Confederates. Andrea Mehrla Ÿder’s interesting piece on southern Germans concentrates on three cities: Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. The final three essays expand the conversation by examining groups with deeper roots in American soil. Robert N. Rosen’s essay on the “Jewish Confederates” notes that Jewish southerners had a long history in the southern states and played major roles in the Confederacy. William McKee Evans sketches three case studies involving American Indians; the Indian actors in each of these dramas adopted different strategies, but all suffered similar—and predictable—hardships at the hands of whites. Finally, Joseph P. Reidy concludes the volume with a superb discussion of African Americans and citizenship.

Ural’s introduction notes that whereas immigrants and non-whites comprised 15 percent of the U.S. population in 1860, there is no single volume that attempts to tell their wartime history. These essays do not completely fill that void, but they cover quite a bit of ground. Unlike some collections that include provocative case studies suggesting broad themes, most of these essays emphasize empirical breadth and coverage. They focus primarily on their subjects as soldiers and thus how the behavior of men illustrated issues of loyalty and citizenship. Some essays do engage with the civilian communities and their ethnic identities, but this is not the place to look for extended discussions of how women responded to the war. All of the authors are established experts in their fields, and most have written important monographs on the same themes. Each essay takes pains to lay out the antebellum context, and most contemplate the war’s legacies in the postwar decades. Evans and Rosen are particularly attentive to how the war years fit into a longer narrative. Gleeson offers interesting observations about how after 1865 southern Irish Catholics aggressively asserted their place in the memory of the “Lost Cause.” At the close of the introduction, Ural adds an intriguing “Note on Sources” that seems to almost apologize for the attention given to the leaders of these various ethnic communities, as well as the relative weight given to newspapers as a window into collective sentiments. True, leaders do appear, and knowledgeable readers will recognize some of the usual suspects, but that is hardly a flaw. Moreover, this reviewer found the range of archival research in these essays truly impressive.

Although each author is attentive to the distinct circumstances that shaped the experiences of his or her own subjects, some themes run through the essays. Ethnic identity certainly shaped their stories, especially for the German-speaking recruits, but it is also...