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

Historians of transnational and global relations have increasingly reminded us that fighting in “someone else’s war” is not a new phenomenon. Despite the past two centuries being ones of state building and bordering, transnational volunteers have participated in many conflicts. These include soldiers who left British North America (bna) to enlist in the American Civil War. This 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, it was possible to create an original database of bna-born individuals who lived in the Eastern Townships of Canada East in 1861 and crossed the border to enlist in Vermont. Next, a comparison of patterns of enlistment behaviour shows 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, seventy percent of these bna residents had already enlisted before September 1863. This note suggests that transnational volunteering from bna to the Civil War merits further attention from both comparative and transnational historians.