BROUGHT FORTH ON THIS CONTINENT

The noted Civil War historian looks at a sidelight of the conflict: its role in encouraging foreign immigration to the U.S.

“The immigration debate had been raging since the beginning of the republic,” writes Holzer. As with so much else connected to abolition and civil rights, Lincoln’s thinking on it evolved even before he entered the White House. Though Lincoln did not harbor xenophobic views, as the author points out in this readable history, his growing support for immigration did not extend to newcomers from Asia or Latin America. Rather, he hoped for a steady flow of newcomers from northern Europe. There were reasons for Lincoln’s strategic recrafting of immigration policy: Most newcomers came to northern ports and provided fresh soldiers for the Union Army. One example was the vaunted “Fighting Irish,” as Robert E. Lee dubbed them, led at first by an immigrant named Michael Corcoran who, in a Confederate prison, declared, “God bless America, and ever preserve her as the asylum of all the oppressed of the earth.” Lincoln also reckoned that once the war ended and slavery was abolished, agriculture in North and South alike would benefit from a replenished foreign labor force. He had to balance carefully the competing demands of the newcomers. Many Germans, for example, were not always keen to follow orders by non-German superiors, even as Lincoln saw the wisdom of ethnically distinct units in the interest of unit coherence. The country’s open-door policy continued after Lincoln’s death. As Holzer reminds readers in closing, it was a Swiss-born immigrant, commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison camp, who was the last casualty of the Civil War, executed on November 25, 1865, his last words uttered “to remind his captors that he had merely followed orders.”

Of considerable interest to students of 19th-century American history as well as of the Civil War.