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In 1862-1863 well over one thousand foreign-born men living in the United States argued that they had been illegally drafted into Union military service. Fearing a diplomatic row, the Lincoln administration sought to clarify the rules of draft eligibility and its relation to citizenship. William Seward, secretary of state, determined to include in the pool of potential draftees men who had filed their declaration of intent to become American citizens and men who had voted in any election in the United States. Seward's policy, already in action in 1862, partially codified in the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863, and further enunciated in circulars from the Departments of State and War, broadened and redefined the nature of American citizenship. By highlighting the parallels to earlier forms of impressment, and breaking new ground with a quantitative analysis of the Department of State's Case Files on Drafted Aliens, we argue that this history of forced military service for foreign- born soldiers during the American Civil War should be considered an example of impressment. With additional source material from archives in England, the Netherlands, and Denmark, we demonstrate the extent of Union impressment and its transnational character. Concerns about forced service were widespread and had significant consequences for Union foreign relations with European countries and for immigrant communities domestically. Official complaints about impressment represented a new kind of draft resistance, in which legal and political knowledge, as well as local and regional immigrant networks, were essential for securing freedom from military service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Civil War, 1861-1865, broke out during a time of intense debate over slavery and fear of foreign-born influence on American society. The war's outbreak, however, provided both freedmen and immigrants an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the United States. Scandinavian Americans, among other ethnic groups, seized the opportunity. This article argues that the Scandinavian elite implicitly constructed at least three different forms of ethnic identity - here termed exclusive, political, and national - to spur enlistment at the ground level, gain political influence, and demonstrate American allegiance. In the process the Scandinavian war effort strengthened these immigrant soldiers' ties to their adopted nation, while a political ethnic identity, initially constructed in opposition to other ethnic groups, was weakened by the Scandinavians' experience in the American multiethnic military crucible. The Civil War thereby hastened Scandinavian immigrants' path towards the American mainstream, where many veterans subsequently served as a bridge between their local communities and broader American society, and reinforced their belief in American civic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working from previously unknown sources in Danish archives, this article establishes for the first time the important role that the island of St Croix played in the Lincoln administration's considerations on colonizing African Americans abroad. This article argues that U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, commonly viewed as an anti-colonizationist, was at least a mild proponent of colonization in its earliest stages. The article demonstrates further that in the summer of 1862, the St Croix colonization project was an important stepping stone in the Lincoln administration's legal justification for emancipation, and that it was recognized as such by high-ranking Confederates. The negotiations failed for reasons that had little to do with Lincoln or his opinion on the matter. Rather, the plan fell through because the Danes slowly turned against it for economic and political reasons. The substantial conclusion of this article is that, contrary to earlier perceptions in the historiography, African American colonization during the Civil War was not led and directed entirely from Washington. Rather, in this case, the Danish minister proposed a colonization plan and then worked with the U.S. Government to attempt to see it through. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]