Civil Warriors

A branch of War Historian's world. This post, Following the anti-immigrant tangent, was put up Jan 30, so I'm commenting here on the off chance one of them will read us and get back to A.C.E.

I'm an American military history who also does immigration, ethnic, and political history, mostly in the 20th century, so I have a question. You wrote:

"In the antebellum South it meant something to be white. It meant not being black. European immigrants such as the Germans were clearly white. The Civil War intensified the need for white solidarity to overcome distinctions in social position, wealth, and nativity. Did Everard Smith mean to adjust this widely-accepted interpretation?"

My question is, is that really the widely accepted interpretation? It seems pretty limited to me. I guess the question is also how many Germans there actually were in the South with whom to have solidarity as white. It seems to me the number is pretty low, but I could be wrong. In any case, it seems pretty clear that lots of Rebs had a real problem with Irish and Germans to begin with, but that problem got way worse when the Irish and Germans started fighting on the Federal side. Maybe it is just a memory thing, but in Apostles of Disunion Charles Dew quotes John Smith Preston as sarcastically saying of the Confederate cause “That liberty was lost ... and now the loud hosanna is shouted over land and sea—‘Liberty may be dead, but the Union is preserved. Glory, glory, glory to Massachusetts and her Hessian [German] and Milesian [Irish] mercenaries’” (pg. 75). That seems pretty hostile to me.

Spread the word. I would love to hear comments from some proper Civil War historians.