3-011-716 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The War in America: recruiting in New York: the Irish Zouaves, 1862. Scene at a recruiting-office at Mozart Hall, Broadway. 'The Federal Government...was compelled to have recourse to the system of high bounty-money to foreigners...to fill up the depleted ranks of...[the] army...[They] offered 100 dollars bounty-money to each recruit, and, this sum not being sufficient to provide the first batch of 300,000 men that Mr. Lincoln demanded during the summer, and the second 300,000 that he demanded under the penalty of a conscription,...the corporations of the various cities in the north...doubled and trebled the offer of the Government, and in some places actually raised the bounties to 500 and 600 dollars. The results were a large enrolment of Irishmen and Germans, to whom the bounty-money was the attraction rather than love of the cause, and many of whom had been rebels in their own country before they took up arms to fight rebellion in the land of their adoption. The most favourite of the regiments thus raised among the foreign recruits wore the Zouaves, in imitation of those of Paris, and composed of a similar class of people, to whom the brilliant and picturesque costume was almost as much an inducement to enlist as the ready money'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.