Like Sol Meredith, who walked out of North Carolina to prosper and grow strong in Indiana political circles, and two brothers named Clayton and Earl Rogers, who came from Pennsylvania to the new Wisconsin territory to open a sawmill “10 miles from the nearest white woman,” the settlers on the new frontier, Herndon said, could raise families and build a future, as well as drain a marsh, clear a field, and even create a state. Lincoln himself made his way from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, where he married well and became a lawyer of repute. “They were young men and women in their very prime a sturdy, stalwart, self reliant element such as pushed out to develop a new country … their superiority was noticeable,” William Herndon, Abe Lincoln’s law partner, wrote of his neighbors. Life on what was then a harsh frontier forever changed and shaped them. It mattered not if they came from Ireland, Germany, England, or other places across the sea, or from more established states. It soon led to the formation of the new states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and that brought more settlers, men and women of ambition and vigor interested in making a future. The nation’s population shift began at the end of the Revolutionary War, when the land west of the Appalachian Mountains beckoned. The millionaire’s son touched elbows with the son of his father’s hired man. The same tent covered the banker, lumberman, medical student, lawyer, merchant and machinist. Every condition of social, religious and political faith, all the trades, occupations and professions were represented. Not infrequently, every civilized nation on the face of the earth was represented in the rank and file of the same regiment. Whether born in America or “bred beyond her borders, or in foreign climes,” a Wisconsin veteran wrote after the war, the new soldiers from the Upper Midwest were proud of their new states and new nation: ![]() The 15th Wisconsin was composed almost exclusively of Norwegians, 115 named Ole. There were all-German and all-Irish units sent from these Upper Midwestern states, and even a company of Ojibwas in a Minnesota regiment. In some of the backwoods volunteer companies could be found one or two free blacks and slave runaways as well as representatives of the Ojibwa, Oneida, Potawatomi, and other tribes-all to carry a musket with the rest. ![]() These men in those frontier military regiments were a curious mix of backgrounds-sons of New England and Pennsylvania and Ohio and New York, and even Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as children of Germany, Ireland, Norway, and other places. But Midwesterners answered the call to defend the Union and to win recognition as full partners in a union of states that they had joined just a few decades earlier.Ī drummer boy of the 14th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee It wasn’t a universally popular war in those states-an anti-draft riot in Port Washington, Wisconsin, was the first significant anti-war disturbance in the country. ![]() Some 750,000 sons, brothers, fathers, and friends marched away from their homes and farms in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to serve on faraway battlefields, something like one in eight residents. And yet the newly developed Upper Midwest played a decisive role in the war between the North and South that in the final tally not only preserved the Union, but ended slavery. Not Milwaukee, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. These are the places you usually think of when you think about the Civil War.
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