The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876

Chapter 3. Green Americans

3 Green Americans Unmitigated Fenian Brotherhood support for the Union army became increasingly illogical as the Civil War progressed.All but relatively few expatriate soldiers and civilians were exploited and underappreciated in the early 1860s. O’Mahony and his colleagues would likely have had more success recruiting Irishmen who were frequently used as cannon fodder on the battlefield and as disposable employees in the workplace. Southern Irishmen who routinely fraternized across picket lines with fellow expatriates would also have been more inclined to establish Brotherhood chapters in their communities if Fenian leaders had called for Confederate independence. Although O’Mahony was opposed to slavery, expatriate civilians could have been recruited by aggravating their traditionally racist attitudes toward African Americans. The promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation after the September 1862 Battle of Antietam precipitated a protracted period of Irish American angst in the North that endured through the outbreak of several antidraft riots and the restoration of peace at Appomattox Courthouse. But O’Mahony never compromised his integrity and morals by using racist diatribes to win expatriate support; to the contrary, he remained openly loyal to a nation that he had often subtly criticized in his prewar newspaper, the Irish People. Widespread anti-Catholic discrimination in the Union and Confederate armies continued to surface as early assumptions of a prompt Northern or Southern victory proved unfounded.Largely unappreciated for their willingness to enlist, Irish American soldiers were routinely disparaged. Expatriate Union officer R. T. Farrell had written from Detroit in December 1861 that his commanding officer Green Americans 50 was “an inveterate Enemy of Catholicism.”1 T. C. Fitzgibbon of the Fourteenth Michigan similarly requested to be transferred to Colonel James A. Mulligan’s Chicago Irish Brigade so that he could serve “amongst our own race and people,” rather than for the “bigotedly Protestant” superiors he currently served.2 Tenth Ohio drummer boy Daniel Finn recorded in his journal that Protestant members of a sister regiment had ransacked a Catholic Church in Summersville, Virginia .3 New England troops later set a Jacksonville, Florida Catholic church on fire and converted a Savannah cemetery into a Union fortress despite vehement objections from the local bishop.4 The early war correspondence of Robert Gould Shaw, the future commander of the celebrated 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment , similarly revealed condescending Protestant attitudes toward Irish enlisted men. In a March 1862 letter to his parents, the Boston Brahmin boasted, “With the Irish left out, the other New England regiments are of as good material as the Thirteenth.”5 Almost as galling, many Protestant colonels, like their predecessors who had fought in the Mexican War two decades earlier, did not allow chaplains or visiting parish clergymen to provide pastoral guidance to their Irish troops. As a result, Catholic soldiers were often unable to confess their sins before risking their lives in battle.6 Nativist sentiment within the Union army had a significant impact on the expatriate civilian community in the North as well. Rising suspicions that Irish soldiers were deployed as human shields for Protestant infantrymen eventually incited an expatriate priest to accuse the Lincoln administration of prosecuting the war with the hope that “every Irishman [would] perish by rebel hands.”7 The August 1862 publication of a coward list in Davenport, Iowa, failed to shame certain expatriate civilians into enlisting, and the editor of a newspaper to the south in Keokuk commented: On account of the large number of our laboring classes, who have left the city and county for the army, our farmers and others needing help begin seriously to feel the want of hands at living prices. Many a “Patrick” who is cursing the administration and the war, but is sure to save his hide intact unless that abominable “dehraft” comes along is demanding and receiving better wages for his work than ever before .That’s the way it is ruining him.8 Scapegoating the Irish was an unwarranted affront that the Fenian leadership could have better exploited, even as countless men from other sociocultural backgrounds were reluctant to serve in the wartime military. The proportional difference between Irish and Protestant enlistments in the North was comparatively Green Americans 51 narrow. Civil War-era records from Concord, Massachusetts reveal that the number of Irishmen who donned Union blue uniforms only trailed Protestants by 9 percentage points (12 to 21 percent, respectively).9 Because four out of five Protestants in a consummate Yankee New...