Originally Posted March 2, 2011 by Patrick Young, Esq.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. The Immigrants’ Civil War is an ongoing series that will examine the role immigrants played in the conflict, how immigrants responded to the war both individually and as communities, and how the place of immigrants in America changed dramatically during the Civil War era. The first installment looks at America’s immigrants in 1861.
At the start of the Civil War in 1861, the United States was no longer the homogenous Anglo-America that the Founding Fathers may have believed they had left as an inheritance to their descendants.
The 1850s had seen a vast influx of new immigrants from places outside the traditional English and Scottish wellsprings of American ancestry. The “new immigrants,” as they were called, would form the demographic basis for modern America.
The foreign born-population of the United States had nearly doubled between the 1850 and 1860 censuses. This was the largest percentage increase of immigrants in American history.
Immigrants now comprised 13 percent of the population, a larger percentage than they had ever made up previously in the history of the Republic. And this wasn’t a gradual change – the overwhelming majority of these foreign-born had entered the US within the decade preceding the war.
It was not just the number of immigrants, but their countries of origin, which would radically change America. Before 1850, the foreign born population was largely from England, Scotland, and Wales. Those three regions began to be overshadowed in the new immigration era of the Civil War years.
Irish immigrants, considered unassimilable by many Americans because of their Catholic beliefs and peasant origins, made up nearly four in ten of all foreign-born people in 1860. The 1.2 million Germans were almost a third of the immigrants living here at the start of the war.
In 1850s, the US also experienced its first large migration of Czechs, Hungarians, Swiss, and Scandinavians. In addition, 35,000 Chinese immigrants settled in the Pacific Coast region, moving to Chinatowns on the edges of white communities, and 27,000 Mexicans were living in the Southwest.
Before this period of immigration, the majority of immigrants weren’t so much different from those who preceded them, emigrating from the same English villages as the Pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers.
Now, new immigrants seemed to flood in from every part of the earth, each group bringing their own strange folkways, religions, and political views, whether espousing Buddhism or monarchism. The new immigrants refused to give up their native languages and many never really learned to speak English comfortably.
The newcomers tended to concentrate certain states while avoiding others, and nine out of ten new immigrants went to live in the North.
Where were immigrants settling? In South Dakota, 37 percent of the population was foreign born; in Wisconsin, 35 percent, in Minnesota, 34 percent, and in New York, 26 percent, to give you an idea.
In contrast, states in the southern heartland had almost no immigrants at all. For example, South Carolina, where the war began at Fort Sumter, had only 2 percent foreign-born residents, and Georgia had 1 percent.
The South’s slave-based labor system was the key factor in keeping newcomers out.
Immigrants, whatever their views on the abolition of slavery, didn’t want to live in slave states since in those states, they would have to compete with unpaid African American labor. In addition, they would find little hope for social advancement amid the hereditary aristocracy that dominated the South.
So the immigrants went north, pioneering the upper Midwest and recreating the urban centers of the East. Immigrants in the 1860s were also drawn to areas that had already been settled by people from their native countries, finding cultural support systems in certain villages and neighborhoods.
Big cities were among the most profoundly transformed by this concentrated migration. In 1860, New York City was 47 percent foreign born,and Philadelphia was 30 percent. Half of Chicagoans were born abroad, as were half of those living in San Francisco, the biggest city on the West Coast.
Cincinnati and Milwaukee were virtually German cities, with almost half the population of each being German speakers.
In fact, Cincinnati, on the banks of the Ohio River, was referred to as Over the Rhine, because it was so German in character. British reporter Edward Dicey wrote in 1862 that it was hard to believe that you were not in some city in the German fatherland when visiting it because of the “German air of the people and the place.”
In Milwaukee, a person could walk through the large German district in the city without seeing a sign in English or hearing English spoken on the streets.1
But immigrants did not just settle in urban centers. Economically hard-pressed farming communities from Europe tried to establish colonies in America for their land-starved young people.
Groups of a hundred or more immigrants from a rural district in Europe would often journey together to found farming villages in the United States. These villages would sometimes receive names transplanted from the homeland, like Erin or Connaught from Ireland, or Tell (remember William Tell?) from Switzerland. Swiss colonies, as they were called, were particularly successful in transplanting their old-country culture from Europe to America.
In the New York City of the 1850s, the Five Points slum in Lower Manhattan was the first stop for Irish and Chinese immigrants.
In these transplanted villages, the immigrant settlers would establish a church from their home country where they could worship in their native language according to their old customs. In the secular realm, they would conduct business, teach the young in local schools, and even carry out governmental functions like court hearings and town meetings in the language of their native land. The immigrants would appeal to friends who stayed in Europe to come over and join them in the New World, starting a wave of chain migration for cultural and demographic replenishment.
Thus, America of the 1850s was populated and reborn.
Ella Lonn, the seminal historian of immigrant America in the 1860s, wrote more than half-a-century ago that on the eve of the Civil War, immigrants still preserved the customs and ideas of the homeland, despite their new place of residence:
In many villages and in many sections of our cities, a visitor could readily believe that he was in a Rhenish [German] city or had dropped into a Dutch village, so faithfully was the atmosphere of the homeland reproduced. Many tongues were spoken here, and many persons neither spoke nor understood any tongue other than their native speech.2
The newness of the immigrant populations, their resistance to assimilation, and the areas where they chose to live would all have a profound effect on the strategy and outcome of the Civil War.
But before we get to all of that, we’ll first look further backward. In the next installment of “The Immigrants’ Civil War, I’ll travel back to the revolutionary year of 1848, where events abroad set the stage for future waves of migration.
Footnotes
1 Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict edited by Susannah J. Ural NYU Press (2010) p.13
2 Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy by Ella Lonn LSU Press (1951) p. 39-40
Statistical Sources
“Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850-1990”
Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon
Population Division
U.S. Bureau of the Census
Washington, D.C. 20233-8800
February 1999
Population Division Working Paper No. 29
Foreign-born population in the US in 1860
*The census in 1850 was the first time a census asked whether or not a person was foreign born.
In 1850, the US had 2.2 million foreign-born residents. By 1860, there were 4.1 million, nearly twice as many. The 4.1 million made up more than 13 percent of the total population.
Foreign-born population by country of birth in 1860
Ireland- 1.6 million
Germany- 1.2 million
Other Western Europe- 900,000
China- 35,000
Mexico- 27,000
Canada- 250,000
Eastern Europe
States with highest percentage of foreign-born in 1860
California- 38%
South Dakota- 37%
Wisconsin- 35%
Minnesota- 34%
Utah- 31%
Nevada- 30%
Washington- 27%
New York- 26%
Nebraska- 22%
Massachusetts- 21%
Rhode Island- 21%
Michigan- 20%
Illinois- 19%
New Jersey-18%
Connecticut- 17%
Iowa- 16%
Pennsylvania- 14%
Missouri- 14%
In 1860, the only southern state with a large immigrant population was Louisiana with 11 percent. South Carolina had 2 percent foreign-born and Georgia had 1 percent.
Overall, 3.6 million foreign-born lived in the North and 400,000 lived in the South.
Cities with largest immigrant populations in 1860
New York City- 47%
Philadelphia- 30%
Boston- 36%
New Orleans- 38%
Cincinnati- 46%
St. Louis- 50%
Chicago- 50%
San Francisco- 50%
Milwaukee- 53%
