The Irish and the Lost Cause: Two Voices

The Irish and the Civil War

When the Irish and the Civil War come to mind, one thinks of the Irish Brigade at Antietam and Fredericksburg; of Rev. William Corby, C.S.C., standing on the rock at Gettysburg imparting general absolution to the Catholic troops about to go into action; of angry Irish laborers rampaging through the streets of New York in protest of the draft, of Sisters of Mercy and Charity comforting the wounded and dying on battlefields and in hospitals; of Archbishop John Hughes's European mission to defend the Lincoln administration's prosecution of the war; of the Irish immigrants recruited in their native land to swell the ranks of the Union's armies. In other words, one associates the Irish involvement in the war with the Union, with the North. Randall Miller implicitly accepted that common association when he focused on the Irish Catholics in the Union army in his path-breaking essay.¹ Certainly the raw statistics underscore the predominant Northern affiliation of the Irish Catholics during the United States' deadliest conflict. At least 150,000 Irish ethnics fought for the Union and more than fifty priests served as chaplains of regiments or brigades in Union armies.

This instinctive conflating of Irish Catholics and the Union, however, overlooks the significant Irish Catholic contribution to the Confederacy's quest for independence. The war, as David Gleeson and others have argued, proved a catalyst in assimilating Irish Catholics within Southern society.² The 20,000-30,000 Southern Catholics of Irish extraction who fought under the Stars and Bars represented a greater proportion of the eligible Irish Catholic cohort in the South than did their Northern Irish Catholic counterparts within their respective populations, the far greater absolute numbers of the Irish Catholics under Federal arms notwithstanding. Within the Army of Northern Virginia alone, the Irish predominated in at least forty-five companies, and more than thirty Catholic chaplains, most of them Irish, served the Confederate armies. While fewer in number than those within the units of the Federal forces (31 to 52), Confederate Catholic chaplains comprised a higher proportion of the total chaplaincy than priest chaplains in the North. Furthermore, the favorable opinion of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States toward the Southern position, especially before the outbreak of hostilities, influenced positive attitudes toward Catholics in the South. Even after the fall-out from Fort Sumter had shifted the thinking of Irish nationalists like Francis Meagher, the sentiment, if not outright commitment, of a large proportion of those dedicated to seeking Irish independence remained with a South that seemed to share so much in common with the Irish.

In Ireland itself, sympathy for the Confederacy emerged strongly from the outset of the war as a consciousness of the parallels between Ireland and the South, both dependent regions of imperial powers, and the perception that Irish emigrants faced more hostility in the North than in the South. Economic pain reinforced pro-Confederate opinion among the Irish. In Ireland, the loss of remittances from the United States as Confederate raiders disrupted the Atlantic commerce normally carrying monies from America to Ireland, as well as the lack of jobs, through unemployment or military service, brought economic difficulties. The appalling casualties the Irish Brigade and other Irish Union units suffered at Antietam and Fredericksburg in the latter part of 1862 only strengthened the pro-Confederate feelings in Ireland or hardened opposition to the war aims of the Lincoln administration, particularly after those aims expanded to include the abolition of slavery.³ Within the Irish-American communities in the North, their soldiers' horrific losses suffered in the 1862 campaigns, plus the introduction of abolition as a war aim, made many question whether the costs justified their continued support of the war effort. The imposition, at the same time, of a conscription policy seemed to renew the traditional discrimination against Irish Catholics in the North and only aggravated their alienation.⁴ By May of 1863 the Boston Pilot pronounced that "the Irish Spirit for the war is dead—Absolutely dead."⁵ The New...