“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 J.D. 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.
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.
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.
Immigrant and African American women, too — Harriet Tubman, who led a daring raid into enemy country, most notably — made crucial contributions to the Union’s military success, in a wide range of roles including as nurses, factory workers, spies, and scouts.
“Review of Federal troops on the 4th of July by President Lincoln and General Scott; the Garibaldi Guard filing past,” by Frank Vizetelly, 1861. Library of Congress.
Fortunately, the United States was led during the Civil War by a statesman who rose above his own prejudices to forge a diverse pro-Union coalition. Abraham Lincoln rightly saw the North’s population advantage as a decisive asset, and he leveraged it — drawing roughly half his army from the ranks of immigrants, first-generation Americans, and African Americans — to give moral as well as military force to the Union cause.
Lincoln poignantly acknowledged the sacrifices of African American and immigrant soldiers. To critics of his policies of emancipation and Black enlistment, he offered a stinging rebuke: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you.” When peace comes, Lincoln observed, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”
As the historian Harold Holzer has shown in his recent book Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration, Lincoln as commander-in-chief recognized the “symbolic impact” of Irish and German regiments, as evidence of the breadth of his coalition. He praised their courage and heroism. In his annual message of 1864, Lincoln declared: “I regard our immigrants as one of the principal replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war and its wastes of national strength and health.”
Lincoln knew that such testimonials not only infused the Union war effort with moral purpose, but also countered the Confederacy’s exclusionary, reactionary propaganda. Confederate leaders scorned the diverse make-up of the Union army in the most vituperative terms, using epithets such as “amalgamationist,” “mongrel,” and “mercenary” to condemn Federal troops as social inferiors who sought to “pollute” Southern blood and soil. The Confederates charged that Yankees relied on, as Rable put it, “foreign-born men driven into battle by alcohol and bounty” and on “deluded” slaves intent on race war. Regarding Black troops with murderous wrath, Confederates adopted the exterminatory “no quarter” policy of re-enslaving, or killing in cold blood, captured and wounded USCTs.
Roughly 5% of Confederate troops were foreign-born, mostly Irish and English. Elites consistently downplayed their presence, preferring to frame the war as a contest between the North’s “invading mongrel hordes” and the “hereditary valor and virtue” of Southern “Anglo-Saxons.” Referring to Southern recruits, a North Carolina paper boasted in 1861 that “History records no single instance in which the Anglo-Saxon stock from which they spring has been subjugated.”
In 1865, in the war’s closing months, Confederates tried to salvage their “hereditary valor” by claiming they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The Union’s “mongrel assortment of negroes, Dutchmen, Yankees and Irishmen,” the Richmond Whig editorialized, had never shown the perseverance of the outnumbered Southern troops; if the Confederate men had not been of superior stock, the Whig posited pathetically, “they would have been subdued years ago.”
The “overwhelming numbers” explanation for Southern defeat, which relied on images of a rapacious Yankee war machine, denigrated the heroism and sacrifices of Union men. In the case of immigrant and African American Union soldiers, enlistment was a leap of faith — a decision to save, and to reimagine, a nation that had so often scorned them. Confederates had underestimated the power of an idea — the capacious idea of Union — to inspire Americans.
In the late 19th century, resurgent nativism, the pall of Jim Crow repression, and the ascendant cult of sectional reunion, which valorized the shared heroism of white men in blue and grey, minimized the role of ethnic white soldiers in the Union’s victory and sought to erase the role of Black soldiers altogether. A kind of historical amnesia set in among whites in both the North and South, as the historian David Blight has observed. In the past 50 or so years, modern scholarship — including the revitalized “new military history,” with its emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of warfare — has worked to recover suppressed and forgotten stories, to provide a more rigorous, comprehensive account of the role of armies and warfare in American life. J.D. Vance’s comments about Civil War ancestry, along with the Trump administration’s attempted suppression of the histories of minorities, immigrants, and women in the military (such as the Navajo Code Talkers, Tuskegee Airmen, and female pilots in World War II), threaten to undo this progress, and inflict amnesia on American society again.
In his Claremont speech, Vance took a swipe at New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, questioning his patriotism and asking, bizarrely, “I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?” But it’s Vance who needs to hit the books. He can start with the September 18, 1864, letter of Seargeant Charles W. Singer, of the 107th United States Colored Infantry, published in the A.M.E. Church newspaper the Christian Recorder. Singer wrote,
Remember, soldiers, we are fighting a great battle, for the benefit, not only of the country, but for ourselves and the whole of mankind … While this Government stands, there is hope for the most abject, disabled and helpless of mankind … The so-called southern Confederacy is fighting for the establishment of a Government, which will have for its corner-stone the perpetuation of human slavery—the degradation of the many for the purpose of elevating the few; but never shall they succeed so long as I can raise my arm against them.
Invoking the sacrifices of soldiers’ families, Singer added,
Shall we not console our aged mothers with the hope, that, when hereafter their souls, crowned with the garlands of martyrdom, look down from the home of the blessed, the united joys of the heavens shall thrill through their immortal spirits, seeing their dear people free from the bondage of slavery?
Singer saw in America’s promise of equality a creed worth fighting for.