Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War by William Marvel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War by William Marvel Jonathan Lande Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War. By William Marvel. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 329. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6952-0.) Outside the history of Civil War America, scholars have addressed soldiering as a form of labor. Historians have contemplated soldiers as laborers who filled jobs in other sectors of the economy in the fall 2011 issue of International Labor and Working-Class History. In Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour, 1500–2000, edited by Erik Jan [End Page 921] Zürcher (Amsterdam, 2013), historians have delved into the labor relations of fighting men. These scholars divide soldiers into three types of laborers based on the taxonomy developed by the International Institute of Social History’s Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500–2000: reciprocal laborers, or soldiers who served from social obligation; tributary laborers, or soldiers sworn to a state that owns its population’s labor; and commodified laborers, or soldiers who sell their labor to the state. Though William Marvel sets his sights on the historiography of soldiering in the American Civil War in Lincoln’s Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War, his book also contributes to this labor history of soldiering. He sees northern men in the 1860s as calculating workers. In contrast to previous Civil War scholars who have engaged soldiers as men motivated by ideology, Marvel argues that men enrolled, at least in part, for a wage. Marvel challenges the emphasis that earlier scholarship placed on patriotism, relying on new data furnished by the University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). He notes that in diaries and letters soldiers offered stories in which they consciously inscribed their patriotism, and he argues that early histories of soldiers by Earl J. Hess, Phillip Shaw Paludan, and James M. McPherson and later studies by Joseph Allan Frank, Reid Mitchell, and Gary W. Gallagher draw heavily on these manuscript collections without addressing the men’s biases. To sidestep the self-aware soldiers, Marvel calls on IPUMS data regarding household wealth in nineteenth-century America. Looking at median household wealth, Marvel determines the financial need of white men in the first companies mustered into service from each northern state (except border states) during major recruiting periods. He finds that a majority of the men came from the most economically distressed households. For example, hard-pressed shoemakers joined the first Massachusetts regiments in droves because the men were out of work, underpaid, or dissatisfied with their lot. In chapters that follow the seven major periods in the United States government’s enlistment drives, Marvel animates his statistics with manuscript analysis. He asserts that, after their patriotic platitudes, the men referenced their finances, and these asides expose the economic incentives that persuaded many white northerners to enlist. Marvel’s manuscript research provides compelling evidence that supports his thesis and supplies the most insightful contribution to date for historians who examine soldiering during the Civil War. The stories reveal the layers of thought beneath motivation and relay how a single inducement, be it patriotism or pay, did not wholly encompass a soldier’s decision to volunteer or reenlist. Incentives overlapped. For example, Minnesota schoolteacher James Madison Bowler espoused sentimental ideals to a young woman he was courting when he volunteered, yet he reenlisted not for cause (or for comrade) but to keep earning his significant wage as a major. Marvel’s study reminds readers that men under the influence of esprit de corps, or who sought the affections of women, could not resist the dollar. As ongoing skirmishes at Confederate monuments attest, Americans continue to clash over the Civil War and its meanings. These raised pulses may obscure the soldiers’ ideological calculations and drive historians to consider [End Page 922] the men’s nationalism, masculinity, abolitionism, or any motivation except cash. But Marvel demonstrates many of the men who did the actual fighting needed employment and found it in the...