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Born in Ireland, Killed at Gettysburg: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Patrick Henry O'rorke Donald M. Fisher before his death at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Patrick Henry O'Rorke, an Irish Catholic immigrant, had overcome some of the social handicaps that plagued mid-nineteenth-century American ethnic and religious minorities. And upon his death at age twenty-seven, this colonel ofthe 140th New York State Infantry Volunteers became a hero in Rochester, New York. Eventually, the Grand Army of the Republic named a post in his honor, and his regiment dedicated a monument to him at Gettysburg. While heroworship was not uncommon in the post-Civil War years, Americans usually did not idolize an "O'Rorke" from an indigent Irish immigrant family. Yet this O'Rorke had graduated first in his class at West Point and had become a colonel in the United States Army. An ingrained sense of order and discipline , a strong background in education, and intangibles such as natural intelligence and personal ambition helped allow for these unusual advances. Reconstructing the life of an "obscure" figure like O'Rorke is no easy task. His only written words that survive include a few army reports and personal letters and a brief diary. Despite this scarcity of material, it is possible to examine his life story from the writings of those who knew him and from other sources such as newspapers and military records. Though indeed truly atypical of Irish Catholic immigrants who served in the Union Army, O'Rorke's experiences illustrate the roles the Civil War and military service played in individual mobility for immigrants and the role of the military in assimilating ethnic Americans. To a lesser extent, his life helps define the appointment processes of West Point cadets and volunteer regiment colonels, while the legacy of his death illuminates the origins of the mythologization of Civil War heroes. O'Rorke, the fourth son of Patrick and Mary O'Rorke, was born in March 1836 in County Cavan, Ireland. Though Protestants dominated emigration Civil War History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, © 1993 by The Kent State University Press 226CIVIL WAR HISTORY from southern Ulster at this time, the number of Catholics from "impoverished and overpopulated' ' Cavan rose significantly. Unfortunately, nothing is known of the O'Rorkes' lives in Ireland, mainly due to the destruction of parish records. But we do know that the family joined the pre-famine immigration that brought some 351,000 Irishmen across the Atlantic between 1838 and 1844. After initially settling in Montreal, the family moved to Rochester sometime during the early 1840s; at that time it was a town with a population of about 20,000. Like many other new immigrant families in Rochester, the O'Rorkes settled in one of the city's Irish areas, in a neighborhood called "Dublin."' After initially settling Dublin in 1817 when it was a forest, the immigrant inhabitants developed the area during the city's infancy, and the neighborhood grew during the 1840s, especially with the influx of the famine immigrants of 1846-51. Community focal points included St. Bridget's Church, built in 1854 to serve this growing Irish Catholic community, and the Dublin "castle," a three-story barrel factory. While a nostalgic inhabitant of Dublin said, "Dublin without its castle would be like London without her tower," a non-Dublin Rochesterian referred to the neighborhood as "populous and untidy."2 Irish Catholic immigrants such as the O'Rorkes suffered from illiteracy, poverty, and discrimination in their new country. Predominantly on the bottom of the American economic ladder as unskilled laborers for canals and railroads, the Irish were stereotyped as dirty, drunken brawlers. American nativists used the contemptuous term "Paddy," or "Paddy-boy," to embody the stereotypical Irishman. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination took many forms, from employers hanging "no Irish need apply" signs to formal nativist political movements such as the American or "Know-Nothing" party of the 1840S and 1850s. The nativist movement, though not as strong in Rochester as elsewhere in the North, alienated Irish Catholics from mainstream society and heightened a sense of Irish patriotism. Irish Catholics also possessed a distinct cultural mentality, including an...

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