Transnational Volunteers: A Research Note on Border-crossing to Enlist in the American Civil War

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Transnational Volunteers: A Research Note on Border-crossing to Enlist in the American Civil War
Abstract
The author notes that historians of transnational and global relations have increasingly reminded us that fighting in “someone else’s war” is not a new phenomenon. She focuses on soldiers who left British North America (BNA) to enlist in the American Civil War. The author’s research note describes a method for distinguishing cross-border enlistments from the many BNA-born immigrants already living in the United States. By cross-referencing online data archives, the author was possible to create an original database of BNA-born individuals who lived in the Eastern Townships in 1861 and crossed the border to enlist in Vermont. A comparison of patterns of enlistment behaviour shows that the transnational volunteers’ actions closely tracking those of native-born and naturalized Vermonters. Both groups followed the same trajectory, with high rates of volunteering in early months, a decline, and then a spike in late 1863, when federal authorities deployed more generous bounty payments as a policy instrument to alter the incentive structure for enlistment. Nonetheless, the author concludes that seventy percent of these BNA residents had already enlisted before September 1863.
Publication
The Canadian Historical Review
Volume
Vol. 104
Issue
no. 3
Pages
387-406
Date
September 2023
Language
en
Citation
Jensen, Jane. “Transnational Volunteers: A Research Note on Border-Crossing to Enlist in the American Civil War.” The Canadian Historical Review Vol. 104, no. 3 (September 2023): 387–406.
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