Category: Immigrants’ Civil War
The Immigrant Story Behind Twelve Years a Slave
The new film Twelve Years a Slave is a narrative of a real slave’s life. Last year’s Django Unchained was a fantasy of a slave’s…
Emancipation: “All men are created equal, whether black or white”
Karl Frick was in his early twenties when he arrived in the United States from Germany just six years before the Civil War. He married…
Historian Compares Resistance to ICE Raids with Resistance to Fugitive Slave Act
This article originally appeared on July, 2019. Kate Masur, associate professor of history at Northwestern University, is one of our country’s leading historians of the…
Preliminaries to Emancipation: Race, the Irish, and Lincoln
Lincoln’s September 22, 1862, Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. It only announced that slavery would end in the Confederacy if the rebellion in the South…
Private Peter Welsh Joins the Irish Brigade
Peter Welsh was a married carpenter from New York when he went to Boston in 1862 to try to settle a dispute among his relatives. A…
The Irish Brigade at Antietam
Warning: This article includes historic photos of the dead at Antietam. The Battle of Antietam was the last act in the Confederate invasion of the North. After…
President Grant’s Atonement to America’s Jews For His “Infamous Order” Expelling Them
In 1862 Union General Ulysses S. Grant perpetrated one of the most notorious official acts against Jews in United States history. He ordered the expulsion of…
Immigrant Soldiers Chasing Lee Into Maryland
The Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August 1862 created a crisis in the North. Confederate General Robert E. Lee…
Cross Keys: A German Regiment’s Annihilation in the Shenandoah Valley
The 8th New York Volunteer Regiment was one of the first immigrant regiments to join the Union cause. Organized on the Lower East Side of…
Richmond Burning: The German Immigrant and Black Troops Who Saved the City
Join The Immigrants’ Civil War on Facebook Early on the morning of April 3, 1864, immigrant Major General Godfrey Weitzel wrote, “a little before two o’clock I…