And now that I've managed to wander us into a tangent....
The pay issue was certainly true in the period after 1900, but prior to that it wasn't as bad as one might think (not great, but it compared reasonably well with some other common wages of the time). There were men who enlisted because the pay was better than what they could make as a day laborer, and as always the quality went up when the economy went down, but the majority of the information I've looked at cited the low social status of the regular soldier as being more of a deterrent to qualified applicants than the low pay ("Soldier soldier will you work? No indeed I'll sell my shirt" was a line from a ditty of the time-roughly post Civil War-that reflected popular sentiment rather well) . The immigrant communities most common in the army throughout this period were the Irish and the Germans; and the Germans tended to enlist because they had often been in one of the many small German state armies before coming to the US. The Irish are an interesting story in and of themselves, but I won't divert the thread any more than I already have. I promise....
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