Why did Northerners volunteer for Civil War service?

Anniversary events this week remind me of something that’s nagged at me for years: Why did large numbers of Northerners volunteer for Civil War service?

I realize it’s very difficult to put ourselves in the minds of young men 150 years ago, but the cause of “preserving the Union” just seems too cerebral and remote to spur Wisconsin and Iowa and Maine farmboys to volunteer to go and fight on Southern soil. I don’t believe the war was yet defined as one to end slavery, but even that would have seemed rather remote to these boys who’d probably never seen a slave. Did they have a romantic, unrealistic notion of war that our post-Vietnam minds don’t grasp? Were they motivated by a now-vanished notion of “duty,” the details of which they willingly let national political leaders define?

It was, I think, simply patriotism and a wish to preserve the Union that led so many to volunteer. As you say, at the beginning of the war the issue of slavery was not really a major one for most.

I’ve wondered about this issue from the point of view of the immigrants who volunteered, since I had three ancestors who fought in the Civil War, a German, an Irishman, and a Swiss. The first two joined up in the earliest days of the war, in 1861. (The Swiss joined in 1864; he may not have been in the country before then.)

The German was probably a “Forty-Eighter,” a refugee who had to flee Germany after the rebellions of 1848. He served in the 45th NY Volunteer Infantry, an all-German outfit also known as the “5th German Rifles.” This site discusses some of the motivations of German immigrants:

Despite the prejudice against them, many Irish also enlisted due to patriotism. That was probably the case for my Irish ancestor, who emigrated to the US after the Potato Famine.

I’ve seen it claimed in the past that a major motivation was sex. Women had a disdain for men who were too “cowardly” to volunteer.

The Civil War was about a lot more than just slavery (it always surprises me when some people argue about this). It’s very easy to point to the south and say that they were just trying to preserve their plantation way of life and keep their slaves. But if you look at the north, their motivations were much more complex.

There was an anti-slavery sentiment that had been growing in popularity for many years, and many northerners did support the war because of it.

Patriotism, as Colibri detailed, was also a very important reasons for many northerners.

States rights factored into it as well. This wasn’t necessarily about the rights of states to do what they wanted within their borders as it was an overall fight for control of the country. Starting very early in the 1800s, you had this battle between the southern agricultural states and the northern industrial states, and back then, like today, people didn’t necessarily compromise very well. Instead, whichever group happened to have more votes in congress used their majority vote to beat the other group into submission (just like today - we never learn). So as each group of states tries to exert its will over the others, and the balance of power keeps shifting back and forth, you end up with a lot of anger on all sides. This was probably a big factor for the farm boys out west mostly due to the anger and control issues involved. They were so angry at the southern states for trying to rip the country apart and for trying to push down their states economically and politically that a lot of them felt that something simply had to be done about those damn southerners. The Civil War didn’t happen over night, and the decades of political fighting leading up to it where the main issue is mostly anger and control are a much more important factor than a lot of people seem to realize. Without that built up anger, a lot of folks wouldn’t have felt a need to pick up a weapon and shoot the other guy with it.

So there were a lot of reasons and a lot of anger on both sides, plus folks back then had a lot different ideas about war. Attitudes about war changed rather dramatically in the Vietnam era. You have to look back and see how folks back then saw war, which was a lot different than how we view it. Duty and honor were a lot more important. People had faith in their leaders. It was a whole different world back then.

And, as in any war, the military offered a chance at a steady income, food, and lodging, and even the prospect of promotion. There was even the prospect of veterans’ benefits afterward, including the real possibility that being a non-veteran would hurt one’s job prospects later on. Despite the getting-shot-at bit, for many, such as Irish laborers, it was a huge career opportunity.

Keep in mind this was a time when many didn’t leave their towns, or might only make a few trips in a life time. This was the seminal event in their lives. They wanted in. It was excited and big and in faraway places. The same reason that men have always gone off to war.

At some point in the war (I’m too lazy to look up whether it was this way from the start or at what point it began) each state and community had a quota of volunteers to meet in order to avoid a draft. This created a lot of incentive for local officials and town fathers and state legislators to drum up enough volunteers to meet the quota.

As a result, a major ongoing effort was made by established, trusted older people to persuade young men to volunteer. There would be meetings, and bands playing, and food served, and adoring females watching, and admired heroes advocating enlistment, and beloved figures speaking about ideals of service, and ministers talking about duty, and all the apparatus of peer pressure would be brought to bear. Young men are very susceptible to these things.

This system, as much as anything else, may have been the major factor in producing so many volunteers.

edit: Later, after a “bounty” system went into effect (men paid extra for signing up), localities would chip in matching funds to increase the Federal bounty and make volunteer enlistment even more attractive. A man could sometimes wrangle Federal, state, and community bounties for his enlistment. That was later in the war, but it shows that communities were willing to put their money behind volunteerism (and thus avoid the feared draft). That system brought the evils of bounty jumping – men who signed up, deserted, and signed up again for another bounty.

Did they ever walk into a bar?

Yeah, there’s something to this. It’s worth noting that, for various reasons, the South had been very successful in exerting more political dominance out of proportion to its population, and some people in the northern states were pretty unhappy about always being bossed around by what they viewed as a minority.

Something I was reading last night, in fact, shows precisely this attitude. As late as Lincoln’s re-election campaign in 1864, some people still resented the decades of Southern political supremacy:

I found an online source Service with the Sixth Wisconsin, although the quote first came to my attention without the first sentence in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox.

I’d heard, as an analysis of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, that Mark Twain wrote it because he wanted to satirize the saber rattling of contemporary European pulp writers glorifying warfare. I don’t know who, in Europe, at that time was pushing for an over romantic view of warfare, but at least Mark Twain thought warfare was being sold, to the populace, by over romantic fiction writers.

And never underestimate the appeal of regular meals.

I have another great quote from Catton that’s relevant (from the same book):

A documentary called “Fág An Bealach” just aired on Irish television about Irish volunteers in the American Civil War. It’s partially in Irish but should be subtitled.

I learned about the 1st Minnesota in middle school history. I seem to recall being told that the volunteers to the regiment wanted to prove that Minnesota, being in the union less than 3 years at this point, was the equal of any larger eastern state. This would seem to be similar to the stated reasons that I’ve heard about a number of Confederate volunteers, with loyalty to the state coming first.

On reading the Wikipedia article, I knew they took large losses at Gettysburg, but I was not aware that the casualty rate was 82%.

I get to leave this Michigan winter and go to the warm sunny south and shoot Southerners? Sign me up!

Untrue. The Confederate states specifically stated in their documents for secession that the only “state’s right” they were claiming was the right to leave the Union. And the Federal government had done nothing to interfere with any other right of the southern states.

The South actually objected to the rights of other states to pass anti-slavery laws within their boundaries and the fact that the Federal government refused to prevent states from passing these laws:

So the South wanted the Federal government to overrule state laws – and all the laws they objected to were those involving freeing slaves, most obviously the Fugitive Slave Law. This is what they specifically stated as their reason for succession.

After the war, the South knew it couldn’t argue that they fought the war over slavery, so they started the myth that it was about States rights. But that’s not what they said before the war. The Federal government did nothing to interfere with the way of life in the South, and wasn’t likely to.

While it’s true that the North was not all that interested in freeing slaves, the South specifically said that they seceeded because Federal policy on slavery did not allow states to pass laws governing it within their borders. That is anti-state’s-rights.

There were certainly other tensions, but there is no reason not to take the South at their word: they left because of slavery.

My Irish great-great grandfather at first had an easy time of it. He was in the 2nd NY Heavy Artillery, which was posted to guard the forts around Washington. They spent most of their time drilling and marching in parades for visiting dignitaries.

His enlistment was up in 1864, and he was paid a bounty of $300 to re-enlist, which I’m sure was a major windfall for an Irish immigrant. Unfortunately for him, that summer Grant pulled most of the Heavy Artillery regiments out of the forts to replace the huge numbers of casualties he was taking in the Overland Campaign against Richmond.

My great-great grandfather was in fact captured in that battle, the rout at Jerusalem Plank Road on the outskirts of Petersburg. He was sent to Andersonville Prison Camp, where he died of scurvy (ironically enough for a Famine refugee).

I’m sure they did, although not together. My German great-great-great grandfather was captured while on outpost duty in his regiment’s first skirmish with the Confederate calvary near Washington. The captain in the next regiment down the line complained that there had been rather “free use of spirits” among the German troops that day, who didn’t even fire when the Confederates rode through their lines. So he was probably captured because he was too sloshed to run.:slight_smile:

Why do current young men and women volunteer for military service? Answer that and you’ll likely find the answer to the OP.

No, I don’t think that’s a useful inquiry at all. I don’t think the young men of Ohio volunteered in 1861 because they felt their nation and their way of life had been attacked by foreign extremists, because they came from families where military service was a tradition, or because they saw it as a promising way to fund a college education or learn a technical trade.

I’m going to have to disagree with you a bit on that one. It wasn’t quite as simple as you are making it out to be.

State rights did factor into it, but as I said, it was more about control than it was really about state rights. For one thing, the south wasn’t anywhere near as unified and consistent about the subject as you make them out to be. They were opposed to state rights when it favored allowing other states to outlaw slavery, but that was because they didn’t want slavery outlawed in the new western states. And again, the underlying issue was control. If there were more non-slave states voting in congress, then the balance of power would shift away from the southern states.

However, the southern states opposed a strong central government and wanted individual state rights when it came to things like trade tariffs. The northern states wanted tariffs since they favored the northern manufacturing based economy. South Carolina, the state you quoted as being against state rights, also voted to nullify the tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The southern state’s inconsistent attitude toward state rights is even reflected in the confederate constitution. At the very beginning of their constitution they make a point of saying that each state is sovereign and independent. The confederate constitution then proceeds to limit the independence of these states.

I’m not saying that state rights is the reason that the south seceded, because that’s certainly not true. All I’m saying is that the control aspects related to state rights were very much an issue.