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1 introduction The Fighting Irish Irish participation in the Confederate experiment represents a complex and imperfectly understood element of the American Civil War. Much less numerous than their countrymen who took part in the Union war effort, Irish Confederates still present serious questions about what it meant to be Irish and American in the mid-nineteenth century. Those Irish who lived in the southern slave states, especially the eleven that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, had to adjust to a third identity, that of Confederate. Though very few had any direct connection with slavery, thousands supported a new republic that had the explicit aim of preserving that “peculiar institution.” Their reasons for doing so complicate our view of national identity in this era of the nation-state. This book then is an attempt not merely to outline the Irish involvement with the Confederacy but to analyze its significance, for both the Irish and the Confederacy. The war experience and its aftermath were crucial to the integration of Irish immigrants into white society in the South. Wars in general, and the commemoration of them, provide great opportunities for scholars to understand better the process of immigrant acculturation. And that process can tell us a lot about the values of the host community. Along with a better understanding of the Irish experience of the South, then, this study will add to our comprehension of the Confederacy and Irish America in general, ultimately challenging popular images of each. One of the most widely held ethnic stereotypes of the Irish in America is that of the “Fighting Irish,” always willing to fight and die for causes domestic and foreign. During the Civil War there were numerous Confederate examples of the insanely brave Irish “Johnny Reb.” Dominick Spellman of Charleston, South Carolina, who fought with the “Irish Volunteers,” Company K of the 1st South Carolina Infantry Regiment (Gregg’s), is a classic example. His Confederate career in some ways personifies the complicated nature of Irish participation in the war. An Irish-born immigrant laborer, the illiterate Spellman never came close to owning any real property, never mind a slave. Nevertheless, he and his fellow Irishmen in the Volunteers 2 / Introduction joined the Confederate army immediately after Fort Sumter, enlisting “for the [duration of the] war” rather than the typical twelve months. His personal reasons for doing so are unknown, but he seemed to display an amazing ardor for the cause. In the regiment’s first serious action in Virginia at the Battle of Gaines’s Mill in June 1862, Spellman bravely picked up the battle flag to rally his regiment after three previous bearers had been shot down. His commander, Colonel D. H. Hamilton, mentioned the Irishman’s bravery in his report, and Spellman earned the great, if dangerous, honor of becoming the permanent regimental color sergeant.1 A few months later Spellman confirmed himself as a fine Confederate soldier. At the Second Battle of Manassas in August, the Volunteers found themselves pinned down by enemy sharpshooters. Spellman had carried the flag with distinction that day, exposing himself to being wounded or killed. Having faced hazardous fire on his feet throughout the battle, he did not take kindly to having to find cover from sharpshooters. After the war, his commander, Edward McCrady Jr., recalled the situation: Spellman apparently grew tired of hiding and gave “the colors to the corporal next to him and seizing his musket quietly walked out in front of the regiment.” The Irishman proceeded to aim and shoot at the enemy, casually turning to his fellow Confederates to say, “‘dropped that one.’” He then reloaded and shot again, and to “the astonishment of his comrades” hit another Union opponent . Finally, as he reloaded to fire a third time, the stunned Federal soldiers returned fire. One bullet removed “the butt of his musket from his face” and another “felled him.” Spellman survived but was severely wounded, and he spent the rest of 1862 and all of 1863 recuperating. He recovered, however, to return to the Volunteers in January 1864.2 In this incident at Manassas, Spellman fulfilled the commonly held view of the Irish soldier in nineteenth-century America: the brave, but often foolhardy, fighter. He had also displayed a degree of Confederate loyalty that impressed many natives of the South who might have been skeptical of the commitment of nonslaveholders and immigrants to the southern cause. Company commander McCrady, whose father had signed the South Carolina secession ordinance, certainly...

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