Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict

Introduction

2 1 Introduction Susannah J. Ural On September 10, 1861, applause shook the walls of Institute Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. The audience cheered its local men, most of them German-born, who had volunteered as soldiers for the Confederacy. Having enjoyed a “stirring and patriotic address in the tongue of the Faterland [sic],” it was the gift from the German Ladies Society of Charleston that brought the audience to its feet. The women had sewn the company flag with the colors of the United States on one side and the colors of their homeland on the other. As Captain W. K. Bachman raised the banner and turned to address his men, the ladies rained flowers down from the balcony, which the young volunteers placed in their muskets. Addressing the enthusiastic crowd, Bachman cried out, “Comrades. This is our flag. Under it you are to go to take your place in the contest. . . . Recollect at all times who made [this] flag. All that they ask in return is that you will never bring dishonor upon their own loved German name.”1 Twelve days earlier an even larger crowd had gathered in Jones’s Wood in New York City. Irish revolutionary Thomas Francis Meagher, a Captain in the 69th New York State Militia Regiment, spoke to a crowd gathered to honor the Irish men who had fallen the previous month in defense of the Union at the Battle of First Bull Run. The Wood, a New York Times reporter observed, “was crowded to an excess which can scarcely be described without apparent exaggeration.” Meagher cast his voice over the audience and called on the listeners to join him in honoring with “proud regard and duty . . . those whose husbands and fathers, fighting in the ranks of the Sixty-ninth, were slain in battle, sealing their oath of American citizenship with their blood.”2 Despite the wealth of scholarship on the U.S. Civil War, especially regarding how individuals and communities responded to the conflict, there is no comprehensive study of immigrants and nonwhites in the North and South during this era, who constituted nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population in 1860. Despite their numerical significance, as well as their influence on 2 2 Susannah J. Ural military and political policies and their active role in the armies and navies engaged, these groups have received relatively little attention from historians . Scholars have long used, and criticized, Ella Lonn’s classic books on immigrant service in the Union and the Confederacy. More recently, historians enjoyed William Burton’s study Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments and Lawrence Kohl’s excellent series of edited memoirs and letter collections relating to soldiers in the Irish Brigade. Since 2000, Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich published Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home, and Fordham University Press reprinted Grace Palladino’s study Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868, addressing ethnic responses to war on the home front, as well as Christian Keller’s Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory.3 Still, scholars lack a work that ties all this material together. Historians need a book that highlights the complexity of the ethnic and religious responses to America’s bloodiest war. Such a work can show that there is no single “Irish” or “Jewish” reaction. Just as native-born white communities responded in different ways due to their social makeup or their economic infrastructure, immigrants, Native Americans, African Americans, and Jews also responded at times with one voice, and at other moments differed greatly, including within their own communities. Scholars understand this through individual studies, but not in a work that examines these groups side by side. That is what Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict offers. Contributors challenge the idea of immigrants and nonwhites volunteering to prove their loyalty while recognizing their frustration when such rewards were not forthcoming. They underscore the different expectations these groups had of citizenship and what they expected from their sacrifices for the survival of the Union or the Confederacy. The wartime responses of immigrants and nonwhites reveal an acute awareness that whatever actions their communities took would be carefully scrutinized not only by the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans but also within their own populations. This collection examines the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship...