Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 109 / Number 1
ABSTRACT:
Pennsylvania and Virginia Germans during the Civil War: A Brief History and Comparative Analysis
- By Christian B. Keller, pp. 37–86
When Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers in April 1861 many Germans throughout
Pennsylvania and Virginia responded enthusiastically to their respective
country's call to arms. Pennsylvania urban Germans—recently arrived immigrants living in
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—hastened to enlist in one of five ethnically German regiments
(the 27th, 73d, 74th, 75th, and 98th Pennsylvania). Richmond's German population
joined Anglo-Saxon neighbors in embracing the Confederate cause, forming several ethnic
companies out of prewar militia and fraternal organizations. Responses among
Pennsylvania "Dutch" Germans, living in the state's rural eastern counties, were mixed.
Scores of loyal Lutherans and German-Reformed eagerly enlisted in locally formed
regiments, but a majority of men from these denominations refused to enlist at all, believing
that the war was at once a vast Republican hoodwink designed to ignore the Constitutional
rights of fellow Democrats in the southern states and a scheme to interfere with their
sequestered, autonomous, and conservative way of life. Pacifist Germans, such as the
Mennonites, Dunkers, and Amish, voted mainly Republican in the 1860 election and hence
supported the Lincoln administration. Virginia's "old German" population was similarly
divided among war supporters and resistors: Lutherans in the Shenandoah Valley were
quick to support the Confederacy while their pacifist neighbors upheld their religious
scruples and struggled to achieve exemption from the draft. Regardless of their geographic
or religious differences, however, Pennsylvania and Virginia Germans's wartime character
was strongly influenced by their ethnicity.
As the war progressed, the urban Germans of Pennsylvania and Richmond grew
disillusioned as a result of nativist sentiment in the Anglo-American press and official
governmental proclamations. Both in and out of the army, these Germans strove to preserve
their ethnic identity at the expense of Americanization. Although fighting on opposite sides
in the conflict, both populations shared the phenomenon of an increased consciousness of
their German-ness, effectively halting their assimilation into the greater American society.
The older German populations in Virginia and Pennsylvania likewise maintained ethnic—
interpreted in the case of the pacifists as religious—ideals over allegiance to country. In
Pennsylvania, Dutch Lutherans formed lodges of the anti-war Knights of the Golden Circle
to protect themselves from the incursions of the federal draft, while pacifists in both the
Keystone and Old Dominion endured continual harassments from Anglo-Saxon neighbors
and government officials determined to break their commitment to non-violence. The Civil
War experiences of Pennsylvania and Virginia Germans thus suggest that ethnicity not only
played a decisive role in determining their behavior, but also proved stronger than local,
regional, and national loyalties.
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