US Civil War Highland Regiments

[macwilkin]

I too have been a student of the great conflict since I was old enough to start reading history books. Although there is far less written about the Confederate troop organizations, etc., than the comparable Union ones, the confederates were far more "confederated" so to speak on the basis of their states' soveriegnty than the Union. The Scottish ancestry was by that time fairly remote historically as most had been arriving in the US, and the South primarily, from 1700 or so on, so they were settled southern americans (or better Virginians, Carolineans, Tennesseeans, Texans, etc.) of scottish descent more than recent immigrants, with little ties to their " homeland". Most had left Scotland/NOrthern Ireland under less than happy circumstances to come to the Americas and now were settled and proud of and very defensive of their current situations at the start of the war, and far from thier heritage roots as communities. Many units in the Union Army, on the other hand, were raised directly from immigrants or their first generation american offspring (e.g. the famed Irish Brigade) or from very cloistered prior immigrant groups (pennsylvania dutch or minnesota swedes) and so had a much more ethnically patchwork nature, with loyalties to both their heritage and to the Union. Also the North was far more filled with a recent immigrant populace due to the much higher percentage of industrial jobs requiring cheap labor (immigrants) to fire that industrial engine, and so were much more prone to develop ethnically based units. Lastly, the final wave of scottish immigrants to the US came just before the war, along with the great Irish immigration, and most of those, for reasons cited above ended up in the North where the industrial jobs were rather than the south where labor was primarily based on the slavery model.

So it should be no wonder that the North would field such defined ethnic units as the New York Highlanders, the famed Irish Brigade, etc... while the south fielded homegrown southern boys from families who had been around for, in many cases, a hundred or more years and essentially eschewed their ethnicity for loyalty to their new found freedom and independence with the first and second generations after the Revolutionary War. They were much more beholden to one another as Virginians, Carolineans, and Southerners in general rather than to any distant past heritage.

The Union army was filled with a lot of fresh international accents in the voices of their troops while the south had one uniform accent, the southern drawl (this was a paraphrase of a comment made by a Union commander on why the Union, despite usually having the numerical and technical advantages in almost every battle, often had communication breakdowns and less than optimal support from the adjacent units while the underfed and usually outnumbered confederates worked much better as a whole army and pulled off so many miraculous battle wins under less than ideal circumstances).

Well done, Sir!

T.