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Did the Midwest Win the Civil War?

States Like Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin Fed and Armed the Union—and Sent Men to Die for Their Country, Too

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By Lance J. Herdegen
October 24, 2014

Fort Sumter. Bull Run. Antietam. Vicksburg. Gettysburg. Appomattox Courthouse.

These are the places you usually think of when you think about the Civil War. Not Milwaukee, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Des Moines. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. There were all-German and all-Irish units sent from these Upper Midwestern states, and even a company of Ojibwas in a Minnesota regiment. The 15th Wisconsin was composed almost exclusively of Norwegians, 115 named Ole.

Continued: http://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/places/did-the-midwest-win-the-civil-war/

.. so looks like your Dad's state supported the winning side .. all interesting history for me .. speaking of history have a look at my next post which puts some real doubt
into the perception that the Republican Party was the party of civil rights back then, and so the reason i felt your Dad must have basically been a conservative guy ..