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2 99 2 3 2 “Ye Sons of Gr een Er in Assemble” Northern Irish American Catholics and the Union War Effort, 1861–1865 Susannah J. Ural Surrounded by rain-soaked roads and the brisk chill of a Minnesota March, Christopher Byrne struggled to understand the events whirling about him. It was early spring in 1863, a date that marked his tenth year in America and his six-month anniversary with the U.S. Army. Encamped along the Blue Earth River, Byrne composed a letter to his brother in Ireland, trying to explain to his sibling the causes of America’s Civil War, his personal involvement in the conflict, and what he hoped for his new home land and himself. Byrne’s letter offers a powerful example of how Irish American Catholics understood the war and their role in it, and how their personal and familial views evolved as the Northern war effort came to include emancipation , a federal draft, and increasingly high casualties. Byrne, like many Northern Irish American Catholics, contemplated the war as both an Irishman and an American, and the decisions he made regarding this conflict were shaped by these dual loyalties to his natural and adopted homelands. To understand Irish Americans’ actions and motivations during the Civil War era, historians must examine these shared and sometimes competing loyalties. “I am a soldier in the so called Union Army,” Christopher Byrne explained, “not from a conviction of Being fighting in a Just-cause but [from] the excitement of the time and the misrule of the administration.” These events “forced me and thousands like me into [the army] who never sympathized with the war[.] [T]rue I was not Drafted. I went voluntary, but the country got into such a wild state of excitement that a young man would be looked on as a traitor if he did not go.” Byrne believed the United States had “the best government 100 2 Susannah J. Ural that ever the sun shone on,” yet he feared he was witnessing its destruction. He bemoaned America’s “commerce ruined, her finance[s] crippled, a depreciated currency forced on the people, No specie in circulation, gold at a premium of from fifty to eighty percent and numberless hordes of officers monopolizing and consuming the wealth of the country whilst the Chickahominy, the Potomac, and the Mississippi Rivers are drinking the blood of her best citizens and still no signs of Peace.” Byrne blamed the Republicans, a party he saw dominated by abolitionists, for most of these problems. These “Hordes of Fanatics . . . regardless of the Constitution . . . used the most arbitrary means that ever was used by freemen to cause the people in general to come down to their views.”1 Byrne’s letter pours forth a frustration commonly seen in the letters and diaries of Irish Catholic volunteers in the Union army in 1863. That year had already brought the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation, war weariness, and the passage of a federal draft. Within months Irish Catholics like Byrne would give violent demonstration to their anger in the worst riots in American history. When many of them enlisted, however, especially those who joined the army in the first year of the war, most Northern Irish Americans maintained a tremendous faith in the Union cause; indeed, it is what often inspired their service. These soldiers proudly proclaimed their decisions to enlist free from social pressure and cited a conscious choice to defend the interests of Ireland and America, as they understood these terms. This chapter will investigate the initial motivations behind Irish American Catholics’ enlistments in the early years of the war, how their views of the conflict, as well as the opinions of their communities, changed as the war evolved, and how this influenced the memory of Irish American volunteerism during the Civil War. Nearly 150,000 Irish Americans served in the Union army during the Civil War. Many served in nonethnic units, but the most well known include James Mulligan’s Irish Brigade (officially known as the 23rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry) and General Michael Corcoran’s Legion, which was composed of the 155th New York, 164th New York, 170th New York, and 182nd New York Volunteer Infantry Regiments. The most famous of all, though, was General Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish Brigade. Meagher’s men served in the 63rd, 88th, and 69th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 28th and, for a time, the 29th Massachusetts, and the 116th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiments...

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