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112 chapter 4 Hard Times The Irish on the Home Front Support for Irish Confederate soldiers from home was vital both for encouraging them to stay in the army and to highlight to native white southerners that the entire Irish community was behind the Confederacy. Civilian leaders of the Irish in the South did embrace the Confederate national project and most became advocates of a “hard-war” policy. They accepted that state and individual rights could not stand in the way of victory over the enemy. Prominent Irish spokesmen, such as John Mitchel, were ardent Confederate nationalists, having learned the bitter lessons of defeat in Ireland. Even the most reluctant Irish Confederate of them all, John Maginnis, eventually rallied to the war effort. Nevertheless, as the war became increasingly costly, and Irish civilians began to suffer directly the deprivations and hardships of conflict, Irish support for the Confederacy waned. It declined to the point that many accepted with ease the occupation of the victorious Federal forces, clearly indicating the equivocal nature of their new Confederate identity. It was different, however, at the beginning of the conflict. In July 1861 the students and faculty of St. Vincent’s Academy in Savannah, Georgia, changed their graduation festivities. That year the graduates from the city’s Catholic secondary school for girls, operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, enacted a “Secession Conference” pageant as a part of their commencement ceremony. The event began with the local Irish Catholic pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah O’Neill, crowning a girl representing South Carolina with a garland of flowers. She then in turn crowned Mississippi and so on and so forth until every state in the Confederacy had been recognized. In 1862 they repeated the exercise and sang the pro-Confederate anthem “Maryland, My Maryland,” and in Catholic wishful thinking crowned Maryland a Confederate state as well. They also included speeches on “Southern Patriotism” and “Sewing for the soldiers.”1 In Charleston the young, mostly Irish, students of the local Catholic schools, made the flag of the Irish Hard Times / 113 Volunteers. Their sewing of it was to remind the Irish soldiers of what they were fighting for, not just for the Irish tradition and the Confederate cause but also for their community at home. Young Ellen Lynch and her sisters of Cheraw, South Carolina, made a flag for the Emmet Guards of Columbia at the suggestion of the Volunteers’ local, but native-born, commander. The Irish women of New Orleans gathered to collect clothes for one of their units heading for the front in Virginia.2 All of these examples of support for the Irish Confederate soldiers indicate how the Civil War also provided civilian immigrants a chance to “prove” their loyalty to their new home.3 Most Irish in the South were not soldiers but were still important to the Confederate effort. The fact that the majority of Irish civilians lived in towns and cities, which often were strategic railroad junctions, ports, and/or centers of Confederate industrial production , made their support more important than their relative numbers might suggest. These civilians, however, could not perform the ultimate overt act of patriotism, fighting and dying for the Confederacy. Their loyalty would have to be expressed in other ways.4 Confederate leaders knew that civilian support, native and foreign, was vital to the military effort. Authorities thus took the new national project seriously. They quickly sought to construct a national identity for their new country. Most scholars agree that the Confederates did create a nationstate , but whether this state had a coherent national ideology is debated. Despite all the trappings of a functioning government, was the Confederacy a nation without a nationalism?5 Others interested in understanding “why the South lost the Civil War,” believe that the lack of a strong cultural nationalism “made the Confederacy more vulnerable to the demoralizing effect of heavy casualties and hardships.” Soldiers at the front and civilians, women especially, on the home front faced these “demoralizing effects.” Ultimately, whether through a crisis in confidence at the battle front, or a “crisis in gender” on the home front, the Confederacy’s “lack of will constituted the decisive deficiency in the Confederate arsenal.”6 Some historians have recently made a renewed case for Confederate nationalism . They point out that the traditional debate has focused too much on the politicians and the generals and not enough on the ordinary Confederates . “Confederates sustained their nationalism in the face of challenges not through...

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