The name "Billy Yank" was used to mean any average, common soldier in the Union Army. The Union Army represented a cross-section of American society in the mid-nineteenth century. About 75% of the soldiers in the Union Army were American born . Of the foreign born soldiers, the Irish and Germans were the most numerous due to heavy immigration of these two groups. The average Union soldier, unlike his Confederate counter-part, carried about fifty pounds of equipment and clothing. All this cost the Federal Government about forty-two dollars per man in 1861. Much of this equipment the soldier would deem as unnecessary and one could find heaps of discarded articles of clothing and equipment along the route of march of the Army of the Potomac. This drawing is of a typical federal soldier , the way he would of appeared during the middle of the war.
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