Evidence from the Forty-Eighters in the Civil War∗
Leadership in Social Networks: Evidence from the Forty-Eighters in the Civil War∗ Christian Dippely Stephan Heblichz January 24th, 2019 Click Here For Up-To-Date Version Abstract A growing theoretical literature emphasizes that prominent individuals (‘leaders’) can be instrumental in changing behaviors and beliefs inside social networks. We test this assertion in the context of the U.S. Civil War. Our analysis is organized around the natural experiment of the “Forty-Eighter” anti-slavery campaigners’ settlement in the U.S., and their impact on the mobilization of Union Army volunteers. Towns where Forty-Eighters settled in the 1850s increased their enlistments by ten men per hundred adult males over the course of the war, or roughly eighty percent. The Forty-Eighters’ influence worked at least in part through the local press and local social clubs. In the army, Forty-Eighter officers reduced their companies’ desertion rate. In the long run, towns where Forty-Eighters settled were more likely to form a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Keywords: Leadership, Social Networks, Persuasion, Immigration JEL Codes: D72, J15, J61, N41 ∗We thank Daron Acemoglu, Toman Barsbai, Jean-Paul Carvalho, Dora Costa, James Feigenbaum, Raquel Fernandez, Paola Giu- liano, Michael Haines, Tarek Hassan, Matthew Kahn, Naomi Lamoreux, Gary Libecap, Jakob Schneebacher, Nico Voigtander,¨ John Wallis, Romain Wazciarg, Gavin Wright, Guo Xu, and seminar participants at UCLA, U Calgary, Bristol, the NBER DAE and POL meetings, the EHA meetings, and the UCI IMBS conference for valuable comments. We thank Andrew Dale, Karene Daniel, Andrea di Miceli, Jake Kantor, Zach Lewis, Sebastian Ottinger, Anton Sobolev, Gwyneth Teo, and Alper Yesek for excellent research assistance.
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