In the north it was common to pay newly arrived immigrants to take your place, especially German.
In our local library there is an autobiography of a Texas cavalryman who turned out to be a pretty amazing guy. At the end of the book there's a little postscript written by someone else that says what the guy did after the war, and it was surreal. It was like he funded the first hospital in Texas, set up the first game reserve, saved five babies from raging fires and saved the armadillo from extinction.
Anyway the story is that in the 1862 Confederate invasion of Kentucky he was seriously wounded. On the retreat back through Tennessee he was left with a family to get healed up.
After a while four Yankee soldiers came by the house. He decided he would be captured and prepared for the worst. What he got was four soldiers on their own. They spoke barely a word of English, all recently arrived from Germany. They had taken bounties to join the army. To his surprise the four of them offered to surrender if he would write letters of parole for them. So he wrote out letters of parole saying the four were duly captured and would have to sit out the rest of the war until properly exchanged. Everyone went home happy.
The German soldiers in the Union army had in general a pretty bad record especially considering that they had maybe served in the Prussian Army which was the best in the world at the time. At Chancellorsville it was the German troops of the XI Corps which were overrun by Stonewall Jackson's surprise attack and at Gettysburg it was the same XI Corps who were overrun on the first day of Gettysburg with one of their brigade commanders General Schimmelpfennig spending the night hiding in a drainage ditch.
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