“Instead it’s about freedom or slavery, and you can well imagine, dear mother, I support the cause of freedom with all my might.” “It isn’t a war where two powers fight to win a piece of land,” one German enlistee wrote to his family. They took up arms in what they saw as yet another battle in the revolutionary struggle against the forces of aristocracy and slavery. “We foreigners know the preciousness of that great, noble gift a great deal better than you, because you never were in slavery, but we are born in it.”įollowing the failed Revolution of 1848, thousands of young Germans fled to America. “I am from Germany where my brothers all fought against the Government and tried to make us free, but were unsuccessful,” she said. One immigrant mother gave testimony in 1863 to an antislavery convention as to why her 17-year-old son was fighting for the Union. Patriots of all nations” to fight for their “adopted country.” One poster reads: Patrioti Italiani! Honvedek! Amis de la liberté! Deutsche Freiheits Kaempfer! (Italian patriots! Hungarians! Friends of liberty! German freedom fighters!) Then, in English, it urges “250 able-bodied men. Why did they fight? What were they fighting for? Recruitment posters in the New York Historical Society provide hints at the answers. But the voices of the foreign legions remain silent-thanks to the paucity of records in the archives, the language barriers posed to historians, and, perhaps, a lingering bias that keeps foreigners out of “our” civil war. Historians have done an excellent job of retrieving the voices of native-born, English-speaking soldiers.
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