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  • The Civil War Diary of Father James Sheeran, Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist ed. by Patrick Hayes
  • James M. Woods
The Civil War Diary of Father James Sheeran, Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist. Edited by Patrick Hayes. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. 2017. Pp. xii, 596. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-813-228822.)

This Civil War diary of a Confederate chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia, Father James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., is an important and invaluable primary source. Father Sheeran penned this 1656-page handwritten account of his travels, trials, and travails while serving as a Catholic chaplain from 1862 to 1865. He witnessed numerous battles, including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the bloody encounters of the Wilderness campaign in 1864. An observer, albeit from a safe distance, however he witnessed the brutality of battle and the horrific suffering of the wounded. [End Page 157]

He was born in County Longford, Ireland; two sources list the year of birth as 1819 but they cannot agree on the day. sometime in the 1830s, he migrated to New York City, where he married his wife Margaret. The couple moved to central Pennsylvania and from there to Monroe, Michigan, by the early 1840s. After undergoing a religious conversion, Sheeran had all three children baptized in the fall of 1845. His youngest child, Sylvester, died the next year, and his wife passed away soon thereafter. Once his remaining daughter and son were old enough to be placed in religious communities, Sheeran entered the Redemptorist novitiate on October 15, 1855 and was ordained a priest on September 18, 1858. About that time, his son John died at fifteen, and his daughter Isabella, now a nun, passed away in February, 1861. After assignment to a seminary in Cumberland, Maryland, he was sent to St. Alphonsus parish in New Orleans in 1860. In August, 1861, he left New Orleans to join the 14th Louisiana Infantry, the famed "Lee's Tigers" in northern Virginia, receiving his official appointment on October 2. This diary picks up on August 1, 1862.

As Professor Randall M. Miller of St. Joseph's University succinctly stated on a blurb for the book, the journal is "passionate, partisan, and pastoral." This Confederate chaplain passionately defended Catholicism against all comers; in addition, he enthusiastically and emphatically defended the Southern cause. He blamed the war on "Northern bigotry, that it was there that they burned our Churches, Convents, and Academies" (p. 76). As a priest, he pastorally heard confessions, said Mass, and gave the last sacraments to all soldiers, Union or Confederate. One cannot easily forget his description of the wounded and the dead after the Wilderness campaigns of 1864 (p. 359). Near the end of his diary, he poignantly writes that "here are men in battle array, armed with instruments of death, drilled in the science of murder, seeking the field of strife and anxious to imbrue their weapons in the blood of their fellow men" (p. 421). After crossing Federal lines in September, 1864, to care for the wounded, Sheeran was arrested on October 30, 1864, and imprisoned in Fort McHenry in Baltimore. He was released on December 4 after making his protest to Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. The diary ends in January, 1865, but he does provide a summary of the last months in just two pages.

Upon his release, Sheeran worked in parishes in Baltimore and New York City before returning to New Orleans in late 1865. Transferred to St. Louis in 1868, he departed the Redemptorists on March 20, 1871, over a dispute with his provinicial. Attached to the Diocese of Newark, he died on April 3, 1881, in Morristown, New Jersey, where he is buried.

In addition to the diary, the book includes an informative introduction by Patrick Hayes, who does a splendid job as editor. Father Sheeran's spiritual autobiography is also provided at the end. The Catholic University of America Press is to be commended for publishing this useful diary for students and scholars of the American Civil War. [End Page 158]

James M. Woods
Georgia Southern University
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