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Discussion
I am very familiar with the Sanitary Commission report on origins of the volunteers. The claims regarding the German contingent here are dubious. The Saniatary Commmission report was just a guess on the volunteers and didn't even address the regular army, the navy and the militia. The largest ethnic contingent was British in origin followed by the Irish. The Medal of Honor data, which is highly correlated with enlistments and combat mortalities, support this. By far the largest foreign-born group among the Civil War Medal of Honor recipients are the Irish. To say that this wasn't representative of the Union army and navy as a whole would be to argue that the Irish who served were braver than the Germans, an argument that really doesn't hold water.