Jewish Contributions in the America Civil War
This paper will examine the involvement of Jewish people during the American Civil War. The first part of the paper will examine the participation of Jews in the North and will discuss such issues as the appointment of Jewish chaplains and the creation of all-Jewish units. The second part of the paper will look at the experiences of Jewish soldiers in the Confederate Army. The last part of the paper will compare Jewish participation in the war to that of German and Irish Catholics, who comprised the bulk of recent immigrants to the United States.
The American Civil War occurred soon after the huge immigration waves of German and Irish during the middle of the Nineteenth Century, but before the large waves of Eastern and Southern Europeans during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Consequently, there were relatively few foreign-born troops serving in either the Union or Confederate armies. Moreover, later studies showed that immigrants were even underrepresented in the Union army, despite the fact that most immigrants during the Nineteenth Century settled in Northern and Eastern cities. Statistics show that while 30% of all military-age males in the Union were born outside the United States, only 25% of the Union Army and Navy were foreign-born.
On the other hand, most of this under-representation was among the Irish and German Catholic populations in the United States. Most of the other ethnic groups, including that of Jews, served in approximate proportion to their representation in the population as a whole. Approximately 9,000 Union troops claimed Judaism as their religion, as did approximately 2,000 Confederate troops. Most of the Jewish Union soldiers were of German descent, their families arriving in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s. Moreover, most of them resided in Illinois and Ohio and served in the units raised in those states.
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