Migration in Response to Civil Conflict: Evidence from the Border of the American Civil War

This paper documents a migration response to the American Civil War. We compare men who served in the Confederate Army with their men who served in the Union army in the border state of Kentucky, which contributed significant numbers of soldiers to both armies. To create the dataset, we collected the universe of existing Union and Confederate enlistees from Kentucky and matched men to their preand post-war occupations and place of residence using the 1860 and 1880 censuses. Our findings show that Confederate soldiers were positively selected from the Kentucky population prior to the onset of the conflict. We demonstrate strikingly di↵erent postwar migration patterns between Union and Confederate veterans, and we argue that this is driven by geographic di↵erences in the social returns to having served on each side. Our results suggest that the decision to serve on the Union or Confederate side created lasting social divisions between otherwise similar men, and that these divisions had real economic consequences.