Illinois Volunteers
By Drew E. VandeCreek, Ph.D.
By the summer of 1862 Illinois had sent over 130,000 men to war. Despite its early secessionist proclivities, southern Illinois counties led the way in the enlistment of troops, providing nearly 50% more than their quota. Illinois troops, like most other Union soldiers, organized in units linked to their state and locality rather than the regular Army. The 45th Illinois, hailing from Galena, became known as the "Lead Mine Regiment." The 34th Illinois, raised in Dixon, dubbed itself the "Rock River Rifles." Troops often organized themselves in outfits comprised of specific ethnic groups or occupations. Illinois sent regiments of Germans, Irish, Scots, and other ethnicities, as well as units comprised solely of Jews. Units made up of railroad men, schoolteachers and ministers joined a "Temperance Regiment" in service.
Illinois' first regiment of black troops hailed from Galesburg. African-Americans also served in regiments from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In 1863 the War Department organized a new black regiment at Quincy, but failed to provide the recruits with the same enlistment bounties and pay as white soldiers. Black soldiers also faced discrimination when many Union commanders opted to use them for heavy labor rather than combat.
Camp Butler and Camp Douglas, huge new military installations, opened outside of Springfield and Chicago, respectively. These facilities housed most Illinois troops before they departed for the South, as well as a growing list of Confederate prisoners. Cairo and Mound City in Illinois' southern tip became major military depots as well. Cairo served as the western armies' base of operations, ferrying rations, ammunition and other supplies downstream to troops in the field. Mound City hosted the Union Navy on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. In its foundry workmen converted steamboats into gunboats.1
The Civil War initially disrupted the Illinois economy. Farmers found no market for agricultural products normally floated downriver to New Orleans for sale. Many Illinois banks holding southern state bonds as backing for their note issues failed in the war's first months. But the federal government's seemingly insatiable demand for military supplies fired Illinois' industrial economy, and bad weather in Europe opened new agricultural markets as well. As the Illinois economy recovered, businesses increasingly turned away from antebellum markets linked by rivers and toward the Chicago and its contacts, via the Great Lakes and Erie Canal, with the northeast.
The war proved a great burden to many Illinois families by taking the husbands, fathers and brothers who provided their support away from their fields and workbenches. But the conflict also provided many women with new opportunities for public responsibility and leadership. For decades women had taken important posts in the nation's voluntary associations for charity and reform. Now these organizations proliferated and grew to unprecedented size in response to national and community crises. Voluntary associations organized in Illinois communities in order to provide for those left without support. Socialites organized balls and other events to raise funds for relief. But in most communities women worked together to provide for one another.
The war provided women with new opportunities in the field of medicine. The Chicago Hospital for Women and Children opened in 1863 with Dr. Mary H. Thompson as director. Mary Bickerdyke, a Galesburg nurse, served in hospitals at Cairo and with western armies in the field. Mary Safford, a woman who could speak both German and French, proved especially helpful with immigrant brigades. "Mother" Sturgis and "Aunt Lizzie" Aiken helped to form the Peoria Soldier's Aid Society, which later became the Women's National League.2
Mary Livermore, whose service in medicine brought her into direct contact with Illinois recruits, stated that a considerable number of women became soldiers during the conflict. One, who called herself Albert D.J. Cashier, served in the 95th Illinois and participated in several battles, was found long after the war had ended to have been born Jennie Hodgers and emigrated from Ireland.3
Illinois women also took the lead in organizing new groups to provide for soldiers still on the home front. Chicago churchwomen rented and renovated an old hotel for use by soldiers passing through Chicago. Shortly organizers took up the building of an even larger structure on Chicago's lakefront, and another Soldiers' Rest in Cairo. The Chicago Sanitary Commission provided doctors to inspect camps and hospitals in Illinois, and provided them with medical supplies.
By 1863 the United States Sanitary Commission had grown into a national organization. On October 27, 1863 Chicago hosted the Northwestern Sanitary Fair, which raised money for the group. The United States Christian Commission took up the nationwide mission of providing every soldier with a Bible. Women found large responsibilities in these organizations, yet their emphasis upon humane living conditions and religious evangelism largely mirrored women's antebellum sphere.
Military conscription, or the draft, did not take effect in Illinois until 1864. Many Illinois leaders preferred to turn out volunteer soldiers rather than submit to the draft's implied critique of their state's patriotism and its threat to individual liberty. The same spirit of voluntary action inspired the vast majority of the Prairie State's response to the war's emerging concerns for sanitary conditions, medical expertise, and the lot of the less fortunate. In this regard Illinoisians adapted the antebellum tradition of voluntary associations, discussed in such detail by Alexis de Tocqueville, to the unprecedented conditions of Civil War.
1. Robert P. Howard, Illinois: A History of the Prairie State (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1972) 298-302.
2. Victor Hicken, Illinois in the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) 23.
3. Hicken, 9.
