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10 chapter 1 Reluctant Secessionists The Irish, Southern Politics, and the Birth of the Confederacy Irish immigrants were active participants in the politics of southern cities. They generally supported the Democratic Party, attracted to its rhetoric of the common man as well as its pro-immigration platform. The relationship between the Irish and southern Democrats became even closer during outbursts of political nativism. The fact that many southern Democrats were slave owners did not upset the Irish. Indeed, their experience with slavery, albeit, for the most part, second-hand, brought them closer to the proslavery position. Although the vast majority of Irish in the region did not own slaves, they did not object to slavery itself, and when they could afford it, had no compunction about purchasing slaves. With the endorsement of slavery by the likes of Irish patriot John Mitchel and Irish immigrants’ own general dislike of “Yankee” and British abolitionists, Irish Catholics became safe on the most important issue to white southerners. Yet, despite this support of slavery, during the tumultuous sectional tensions of the 1850s, the Irish remained steadfast for the Union, declining to support early southern efforts to secede. Even as late as 1860, many remained loyal to the national Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Stephen Douglas of Illinois . It was only upon Abraham Lincoln’s election that the Irish began to heed southern nationalists. They were indeed reluctant secessionists, but ultimately they did abandon the United States for the new Confederate States of America. When news reached Charleston, South Carolina, of Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election, many in the city were elated. The election of a “Black Republican” to the presidency of the United States would finally motivate those white southerners who had been reluctant to break from the Union to now do so. There could be no protection now of slavery with the party of “abolition” about to take over the executive branch. Ardent secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett’s newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, put a secession flag in the window of his office and stated loudly that “The Tea Reluctant Secessionists / 11 has been thrown overboard.” At last, it continued, “The Revolution of 1860 has been initiated.” For almost thirty years Rhett had thought that a slave owning people had to have complete control over their political destiny, and the only sure way to do that was as a separate nation. Long a critic of the national Democratic Party, which he saw as unsafe on the question of slavery , he now felt vindicated and expected a lot of support for his call for “immediate secession.” South Carolina could not wait for other southern states to act. It had to lead. Those who thought like him made immediate plans to achieve this secession and fulfill the dream of creating a southern republic.1 Rhett had an unlikely ally in this newly charged quest for secession. A. G. Magrath, whose father had come as a political refugee from Ireland, was a federal judge in the Charleston district. When he heard the news of Lincoln’s victory while presiding in court, he reportedly took his robes off, folded them on his chair, and announced his immediate resignation from the bench. Now, he argued, South Carolinians had to support their state over the Union. A prominent leader of the Irish American community in Charleston, as an active member of the Hibernian and St. Patrick’s Benevolent Societies, as well as a former captain of the Irish Volunteers Militia company, he had been nominated to the bench by President Franklin Pierce for his loyalty to the national Democrats. Magrath had stood by the party in the early 1850s when fire-eaters such as Rhett had tried to pull the South out of the Union in their opposition to the Compromise of 1850. He had forcefully opposed the secessionists then, earning their eternal enmity. Indeed, a vicious article in Rhett’s Mercury questioning his integrity eventually led to a duel between Magrath’s younger brother and Rhett’s nephew in which the latter was killed by a bullet to the head on the third exchange of shots.2 By 1860, however, Magrath had become disillusioned with the national government and the Democrats. In his Irish politics he had always advocated radical action. An active supporter of every Irish national movement, he was often called upon to make fiery speeches against British rule in Ireland. His father had participated in the 1798 United Irishman rebellion against the...

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