True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army
By Martin W. Ofele

Illustrated, endnotes, bibliographical essay, index, 200 pp., 2008. Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881, $49.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Michael Russert
Michael Russert, a member of the North Shore Round Table of Long Island and the Company of Military Historians, has a MALS plus 60 hours in American Studies. He is Coordinator of The New York State Veteran Oral History Program.

Review:
Ella Lonn’s Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (1951) has long been the scholarly and definitive classic study of the role of immigrants in the Union forces during the Civil War, however, it is somewhat dated. Although there have been other studies of immigrants in the Union armies, Michael Ofele’s True Sons of the Republic, while not as in-depth as Lonn’s book, is a fine overview on the subject.

Ofele has taught history at the Universities of Leipzig and Munich. He has written several publications about the Civil War period in German. His True Sons of the Republic is part of Praeger’s Reflections on the Civil War series.
The book’s first part is a brief survey and analysis of the background of the ethnic, political and social factors in the various nations of Europe prior to the Civil War. The reasons why so many people migrated to America, where they settled and how they interacted to American society of the mid-19th century are examined in the second section.

The majority of the text focuses on the motivations for different groups supporting the Union cause, how ethnic military units formed, how they related to American units, and who some of the leaders of these immigrant units were. While the author discusses each of the great number of immigrant groups, he primarily focuses on the two largest — the Germans and Irish.

Ofele concludes that the immigrants greatly aided the Union cause, not only through preserving the Union and the destruction of slavery, but also in the creation of a new and more “multicultural society.” He says the postwar nation was more open to immigrants, and society had a less of a nativism bent than during the antebellum period.

The difficulty of immigrant groups to assimilate was often neglected by Civil War historians until relatively recently. This is more true of studies of the German-related units, especially in the Army of the Potomac’s 11th Corps.

Ofele’s final chapters examine the contributions of the various ethnic Union regiments and the more notable leaders in all theaters of the war. However, this leads to a shortcoming of this study.

The author flows from theater to theater with great ease through the multitude of battles, especially in the Western and Trans-Mississippi theaters. Reader unfamiliar with these battles may have difficulty in following the flow of the narrative. This is made more problematic by the lack of any maps to indicate where these different battles took place.

There are a few minor typos and factual errors, which do not detract from the overall soundness of the author’s thesis nor his solid and reflective research. True Soldiers of the Republic is highly recommended as an important addition to the social and political history of the 1850s and 1860s.

Ofele has written a concise and thought-provoking examination of the decisive role played by immigrants in the Union armies. This does not supersede Lonn’s classic, but it is a supplement that must be read for its command of the most recent ethnic studies of this period.