Civil War Settlers
Civil War Settlers is the first comprehensive analysis of Scandinavian Americans and their participation in the US Civil War. Based on thousands of sources in multiple languages, Anders Bo Rasmussen brings the untold story of Scandinavian American immigrants to life by focusing on their lived community experience and positioning it within the larger context of western settler colonialism. Associating American citizenship with liberty and equality, Scandinavian immigrants openly opposed slavery and were among the most enthusiastic foreign-born supporters of the early Republican Party. However, the malleable concept of citizenship was used by immigrants to resist draft service, and support a white man’s republic through territorial expansion on American Indian land and, in part, into the Caribbean. Consequently, Scandinavian immigrants after emancipation proved to be reactionary Republicans, not abolitionists. This unique approach to the Civil War sheds new light on how whiteness and access to territory formed an integral part of American immigration history. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Anders Bo Rasmussen is Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the recipient of the Carlsberg Foundation Monograph Fellowship, a former Fulbright scholar at New York University, and has explored the Scandinavian Civil War experience across the United States for more than a decade.
Figure 0.1 Norwegian-born artist Ole Balling’s most famous painting “Grant and His Generals” from 1865.
Open access