I'm going to fight (and get paid) mit Sigel
An editorial from the October 26, 1861 edition of the Richmond Daily Dispatch:
Who are we fighting?
–The term “Yankee” ought no longer to be applied to the enemy. Such a term is not just to the fighting men on the other side, nor to ourselves. We are, in point of fact, literally and truly, invaded by a European army. That army is made up of Irishmen and Germans with a small proportion of Yankees. Whilst the Yankee Government deprecates bitterly the sympathy of European Governments with the South, its own main reliance is European soldiers. The prisoners just brought in are chiefly of this class. If we call them Yankees we not only commit an error in fact, but give the Yankees credit for fighting their own battles. We have just whipped an Irish and German army, whose bravest leader was a depraved Englishman; and it is an army of foreign mercenaries which still remains for us to whip on the borders of the Potomac.
"Depraved Englishman" killed at Ball's Bluff
There is a great article about Union recruitment at the National Park Services’s Governors Island site. About 370,000 out of the approximately one million men who served in the Union army throughout the course of the war were native Germans and Irish. Employment/pay was one of several motivations.
The Confederates killed English-bornEdward Dickinson Baker during the rout of the Union force during the October 21, 1861 Battle of Ball’s Bluff.
Franz Sigel was a political general who was valuable to the Union because of “his ability to recruit and motivate German immigrants ..”. A resident of St Louis when the war started, Sigel was operating in Missouri 150 years ago today.
George Washington led the Continental army to victory over Hessians at the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War. According to Wikipedia although a Hessian soldier was from Germany, he was not strictly speaking a mercenary because German rulers got the money.
Famous Virginian leads American assault against German interlopers
Captured Hessians from Battle of Trenton led to Philadelphia
