CHAPTER 5

Irish Americans in Arms

In March 1863, an Irish-born sergeant in the Ninth Massachusetts presented his young lieutenant, an Irish American born in Boston, with a sword on behalf of their company. Sergeant Frank Lawler anticipated that the recipient would “tarnish its bright hue in the crimson tide of those recreants who would rend to pieces our beloved adopted country.” A notion of agency pervaded that phrase commonly used by Irish American leaders, “adopted country,” in contrast to the harsh realities of the Famine which forced most of the Irish to migrate in the first place. Irish Americans and the native-born embraced each other in the 1860s in bonds strengthened by the shared experience of war. Participation in the Civil War intensified the demands of Irish Americans for inclusion and equal treatment but also their sense of American allegiance, even as they maintained facets of their ethnic culture and an enduring concern for Ireland’s liberation. Many Irish Americans increasingly came to recognize during the Civil War an American identity in addition to an Irish one.1

Most Irish American volunteers enlisted for a mixture of reasons, which combined in different proportions, including, prominently, money. On the other hand, Civil War soldiers, including Irish Americans, were highly ideological. Even where influenced by money, Irish American soldiers understood that their service had importance other than bounties and salaries. Moreover, while keeping in mind the individual backgrounds and motivations of Irish American soldiers, it is important to consider the communal meanings of their service. Individuals did not explicitly declare that their enlistment made them a true American at the moment they signed the muster roll. Nonetheless, aggregate wartime experiences, and the public pronouncements of Irish American leaders and newspapers, reveal intensification in the ethnic community’s understanding that its choice of allegiance to the Union consummated membership in the nation.2

Soldiers in the field most immediately experienced this wartime development, and they transmitted their perspective to a wider audience by writing to families and for newspaper publication. Other individuals, unable to serve in the armed forces, participated in it by contributing time, offering money, or enduring the absence of loved ones engaged in the war effort. Irish American leaders made public pronouncements to interethnic audiences on behalf of their community, while government officials articulated in speeches and policies a new understanding of Irish America’s place in the United States.

On one hand, examining the Irish American military experience highlights the distinctiveness of the African American experience in the Union’s armed forces. Major differences in status and treatment are easily apparent, and at first glance, the two groups shared little in common during their service. On the other hand, the shifts in Irish American identity that took place during the Civil War bear striking resemblance to those of African Americans in terms of how they developed. These changes also served as a catalyst for the expectations both groups expressed about change in the legal concept of citizenship during the later 1860s.

Pageantry and Calls for Legal Change

Flag presentations to Irish American regiments early on emphasized recognition by the native-born and members of the ethnic community that Irish Americans could have an American identity along with their Irish one. Both communities reciprocally used wartime pageantry to solidify Irish America’s position within the American people. Symbols and ceremonies assist the formation of nationalist ideas by transmitting certain messages to an intended audience and bringing people together in expressions of public unity. Most Union regiments went through “standard rites of passage” shortly after organization. The presentation of silk regimental banners and American flags, held as sacred symbols of unit identity and coveted by opponents as battle trophies, capped off these rites by linking communities, the soldiers they sent to war, and the national cause for which they fought. Similar to what occurred for some African American regiments, flags and flag presentations joined in a visible public way Irish American service, identity, and wartime claims to inclusion.3

The regimental banners presented to the Irish American Ninth Connecticut and Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania in 1861 displayed the respective state seal on one side and Irish symbols on the other. Both states had a potent Know Nothing presence in the 1850s, and Connecticut had even disbanded militia companies comprised of the foreign-born. In December 1862, native-born New Yorkers donated a new set of flags to the Sixty-third, Sixty-ninth, and Eighty-eighth New York regiments of the Irish Brigade. One presenter proclaimed, “Here are your green flags and the Stars and Stripes. Allow us, American-born citizens, to present them in grateful commemoration of the gallant deeds of your Brigade,” before he announced his hope that soon would “old Erin’s harp be tuned afresh to the proud song of ‘The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’ Then shall we represent ‘one country, one constitution, one destiny.’”4

The regimental colors and sendoff of the Ninth Massachusetts, comprised of Irish American volunteers recruited from around Boston, illuminates the public culture of wartime Irish American patriotism. In late June 1861, the Ninth Massachusetts received an American flag and an emerald silk regimental banner bearing the inscription, “THY SONS BY ADOPTION, THY FIRM SUPPORTERS AND DEFENDERS, FROM DUTY, AFFECTION AND CHOICE” above the American coat of arms. On the reverse, thirty-four stars and a shamrock wreath surrounded an Irish harp with red, white, and blue strings. Along with two wolf dogs emblematic of Ireland read the mottos, “Gentle when stroked, but fierce when provoked,” and “As aliens and strangers thou didst us befriend, As sons and true patriots, we do thee defend.” The Ninth Massachusetts’s banner thus publicly acknowledged Irish and American identities under the rubric of the United States.5

The day before the Ninth Massachusetts departed for the seat of war, Bostonians greeted the men as they arrived at Long Wharf via steamer from their training camp located on a Boston Harbor island. Similar to a later sendoff for the black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, Gilmore’s band and an escort seven hundred strong preceded the regiment as it marched through the heart of Boston to the approbation of throngs of onlookers who crowded the streets. At the State House, Governor John Andrew presented the Irish American regiment with another flag, this one bearing the seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A color sergeant, flanked by two others holding aloft the Stars and Stripes and rich green banner, received this flag after Andrew assured all present that “the United States of America knows no distinction between its native born citizens and those born in other countries,” and requested the men to always “remember that you are American citizens.” Andrew’s words emphasized the inclusion symbolically consummated by the flags and probably made the meal provided for the men by the city of Boston taste even more savory.6

It was not entirely a day of solidarity between native and immigrant, and one person in the crowd exclaimed on the Ninth Massachusetts’s departure, “There goes a load of Irish rubbish out of the city.” Nonetheless, the Courier noted that the cheering onlookers included both Catholics and “Old native Americans,” and the Atlas and Bee offered that whatever “complaint may be made of the clannishness” of Irish, German, and French immigrants, “they are clannish only as Americans in London, Paris and Florence are clannish; they love their native country. But when foreign war or domestic rebellion lifts its head against our government and threatens our national life, they are equally ready, with native-born citizens, to rally to the public defense.” For itself, the Pilot noted that the impressive appearance of the Ninth Massachusetts caused the “narrow and dark spirit of Know-nothingism,” to shrink “back abashed in the presence of the splendid civil and military Celtic procession.” Moreover, according to the newspaper, a fusion of nationalities took place in the United States to create a new one: all those who “waved their flags” along the route, declared the Pilot, were “unconscious of any distinction between the loyalty of the Anglo Saxon and Celtic races, which make up the American people.”7

A few weeks later, the Pilot recalled the disbandment in 1855 of the Irish American Columbian Artillery militia company that now formed the core of the Ninth Massachusetts. Just as later articles contrasted the Twentieth USCI’s march through New York City with the Draft Riots there, the Pilot proclaimed, “Boston forgot her ancient prejudices as she gazed upon the noble column presented by the ‘Irish regiment,’” while Know Nothing ex-Governor Gardner, who disbanded the Irish American militia companies, “hid his diminished head.” For soldiers such as Colonel Thomas Cass, who had commanded the Columbian Artillery when it was disbanded, the flag presentation held particularly potent meaning.8

To the men of the Ninth Massachusetts in the field, the emerald banner served as a dual symbol of remembrance of Ireland and service to their new country. According to one officer, “We always carry our ‘Green Flag.’ We shall never abandon it, even though it should go to atoms. It is the emblem of all our hopes and the source of all our pride. Whilst we behold it before us, exhibiting to our gaze the Harp and the Shamrock of Ireland, we cannot forget the glorious memories associated with these emblems of our nationality.” The green flag illuminated the Irish American identity of the men during reviews and in battle, while simultaneously showing that they served alongside native-born troops with equal station and bearing. In his report of the regiment’s first action, Colonel Cass described how the “starry banner of the Union, side by side with our green flag throughout the fight, came out of it unscathed, while the latter was pierced by eight buck-and-ball shots.”9

A new spirit regarding Irish American inclusion pervaded the Bay State in the weeks following the departure of the Ninth Massachusetts. The city of Boston honored the Irish flag for the first time by having it raised, along with the flags of other nations, during July Fourth celebrations. Harvard in July 1861 honored a Catholic prelate for the first time by bestowing on Bishop Fitzpatrick an honorary doctorate in divinity. The state legislature compromised on the issue of requiring Catholic children in the public schools to read from the Protestant Bible. New legislation required daily reading of the Bible but without written or oral discussion. Furthermore, students would not be compelled to read from a version of the Bible that contravened the religious faith of their parents.10

The Irish American press, as well as soldiers in the field, vigorously called for additional changes in the law. Perceiving shifts as early as October 1861, the Pilot proclaimed the triumph of “the sons of St. Patrick,” who “trampled” over the “worst insult ever offered to human freedom”: the principle “that political liberty should be confined entirely to those born” in the United States. While the Pilot here conveniently forgot about slavery, it cast Irish Americans as the dedicated defenders of true American ideals, in contrast to the exclusion and false patriotism preached by Know Nothings. The Pilot identified “the squelching out of ‘nativism’” as an Irish American triumph that “removed from republican freedom its most scandalous foe,” and redeemed America amongst other nations. “The very citizens,” the Pilot announced, “those same liars reviled the most, and charged in every possible way with treachery to the Union” now filled army regiments, demonstrating “the devotion of our people to their oaths of citizenship.”11

Noting that many Irish Americans served in the Bay State’s regiments, the Pilot viewed Massachusetts’s November 1861 election as an opportunity “when the repeal of the ‘two years’ amendment’ may justly be urged…. The adopted citizens have shown their devotion to the stars and stripes, and now is the time to demand all the rights and privileges to be enjoyed under them.” By mid-December 1861, the newspaper reiterated how Irish Americans had become “wedded” to the “glorious Stars and Stripes,” and starting in September 1862, called attention to the point by beginning to publish a column entitled “Records of Irish-American Patriotism.”12

Meanwhile, soldiers’ letters published in the Pilot underscored the demand for an end to nativist exclusion. In October 1861, Michael Finnerty of the Ninth Massachusetts rhetorically asked, “What would the government do in this crisis without her naturalized citizens, or who will ever again dare to point the finger of scorn against the humblest of them?” Demanding the promotion of Irish American officers that winter, Captain John W. Mahan of the same regiment claimed that casualties formed a “record proof that everywhere, fighting side by side with their brethren, ‘to the manor born,’ Irishmen have shown themselves not only worthy to have confided to them the honor of the American flag, but also, forgetting the ‘two years’ amendment, forgetting the past prejudices and errors of Massachusetts, have in the heat of battle proudly borne aloft the banner of the old Bay State, and shed their blood in its defence.”13

Members of the Ninth Massachusetts also used the green banner to make their point. Although some members of the regiment wanted to keep the old colors on receiving a new green flag in October 1862, its colonel sent the tattered banner to Governor Andrew for display in the State House, where “it can be pointed to with pride, and must forever stifle the voice of bigotry and Know-nothingism” in the legislature’s halls. Colonel Guiney used his tender of “these shreds” to emphasize the change in Irish American status that came as a result of their service, and he thanked Andrew for his “efforts to expunge from the Constitution of Massachusetts that provision [the two-years amendment] which would make political distinction between us and our brothers in hope, conviction, disaster, and victory.” Andrew responded to Guiney’s gesture by complimenting the bravery of the Ninth Massachusetts, and placing Irish Americans within the fold of all of Massachusetts’s soldiers. More concretely, by 1862, popular sentiment had shifted and the successive 1862 and 1863 state legislatures made the legal point by passing an act of repeal of Massachusetts’s two-year amendment. A slim majority of voters approved the measure in a spring 1863 referendum.14

Wartime Experiences

Outside of legal change, such as the “fast-track” to naturalization offered by the Act of July 17, 1862, and repeal of nativist state-level legislation, other experiences during the war nurtured a sense of American identity among Irish Americans. Military journeys afforded Irish American soldiers in blue access to important American landmarks and inspired in some of them a nationalizing sense of communion with the heritage of the United States. Just as it does for tourists today, Mount Vernon left an indelible impression on Irish Americans who passed by it. Traveling with his Ninth Massachusetts aboard a steamer, Irish-born Michael Finnerty felt “awe and reverence” when gazing, “on the spot where repose the ashes of the great and illustrious George Washington.” Finnerty believed that Washington’s spirit “smiled benignantly” on the Irish American regiment, and his comrades uncovered their heads as the ship’s bell tolled to honor Washington’s memory. Irish-born shoemaker Daniel Crotty of the Third Michigan felt that he and Washington were of the same country while he walked on the land where the “great man” lived and paid his respects at the First Couple’s tombs.15

Defending the federal capital early in the war similarly afforded Irish Americans an opportunity to feel that they comprised part of the country. Five of the Ninth Massachusetts’s officers visited the White House and cheered from the congressional gallery, with “all the fashionable of Washington and elsewhere,” on announcement of Lincoln’s call for men to crush the Confederate rebellion. One of the party afterward described the Capitol as “the most magnificent building I have ever seen,” reminiscent of “ancient Rome or Greece in the days of their greatest splendor.” Daniel Crotty watched Congress open in special session on July 4, 1861, and slowly walked around the Capitol to savor its beauty. A singer who spontaneously broke out into the “Star Spangled Banner,” and seeing Lincoln and his cabinet outside the White House, capped off the patriotic day and steeled Crotty to fight for the United States.16

Sharing in the tribulations and triumphs of supporting the Union cause also nourished such nationalizing sentiments. Despite a torrential February 1862 rainstorm, the Ninth Massachusetts drew up in a hollow square so that its adjutant could announce the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson and on Roanoke Island. Cheers rent the air while a band played patriotic music, and one man stepped forward to sing the “Star Spangled Banner.” Irish Americans played a prominent role at several critical sectors of the Union line at Gettysburg: the Irish Brigade charged the Wheatfield, Irish-born colonel Patrick O’Rorke died while leading the ethnically mixed 140th New York in helping secure Little Round Top, and the Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania helped blunt Pickett’s charge by holding the Angle. The role played by these loyal Irish American warriors remained well-known in future years, especially as Gettysburg’s prominence in America’s memory increased.17

As it did for African Americans, the Irish American experience of gathering to support a common American cause, even if temporarily defined by sectional realities, helped melt parochialism. Geographical proximity enabled frequent visits between men of the Irish American units and allowed them easier communications within their own community. The war’s first winter quarters also afforded an excellent opportunity for men of the Irish American regiments to spend time together.18

Serving in the army also fostered contact between immigrants and the native-born, and energized a sense of Irish American unity with the larger national community. Shared allegiance to the Union, and experiencing privations in its service, served as a unifying force between the groups. Near Washington, D.C., in the early days of the war, members of the Fifth Massachusetts went to the Sixty-ninth NYSM’s camp on the grounds on Georgetown College and saluted the Irish Americans, before both regiments drew up in line and cheered each other. One correspondent recalled the “exciting scene…[of] Puritan New Englanders and Catholic Irishmen thus fraternizing.” Praising the military courtesies shown toward the Sixty-ninth NYSM by Colonel Abram Vosburgh of the Seventy-first NYSM, a regiment of native-born Americans, Brigadier General Theodore Runyon noted that “common danger appears to have made native and foreigners common friends.”19

In some instances, which show marked contrast with the experience of black solders, native-born soldiers even identified themselves as Irish Americans and sought inclusion in a group identified with martial prowess. During the war’s first Christmas, members of the Ninth Massachusetts decorated their camp with evergreen and adorned tents with crosses and green wreaths. That evening, the unit’s officers hosted a Christmas banquet furnished by a Washington caterer, and officers from the entire division joined in the food, dancing, and speeches that lasted long into the night. Afterward, Patrick R. Guiney of the Ninth recorded that the others “all confessed that they were Irish,” though he believed it “Blarney” of some of them. Such statements reveal that shared service slowly began to erode the liability associated with being identified as an Irish American, even before major combat operations, and the bonds that it generated, began in earnest.20

The army high command’s participation in Irish American or Catholic festivities, including Christmas and Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, helped reinforce and sanction interethnic camaraderie. In September 1864, generals Hancock, Miles, Birney, Gibbon, Mott, and DeTrobriand joined the Irish Brigade first in the celebration of Mass and then a special luncheon to commemorate the anniversary of the brigade’s formation. The biggest laughs of the day went to DeTrobriand’s statement that the Irishmen in his command claimed him as one of their own by stating that his name was but a Frenchification of O’Brien.21

The realities of service made it inevitable that interethnic contact went beyond the officer corps. Likely almost all federal regiments included at least some members of Irish descent, and even ethnically identified federal regiments were amalgams of men with different backgrounds. Although mostly comprised of men of Irish Catholic heritage, the Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania included men of native-birth and other nationalities in its ranks, as well as representatives of various religions including several Quakers and Jews. Native-born Americans and Germans helped fill the ranks of Connecticut’s Irish American Ninth regiment. Nearly half of the volunteers who in July 1861 formed the Twentieth Massachusetts, the “Harvard Regiment,” hailed from abroad (though less than one quarter of the officers did), with the Irish, at 23 percent, comprising the largest group of the unit’s foreign-born. Rochester’s 140th New York went off to war with Irish-born Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, German-born Lieutenant Colonel Louis Ernst, and native-born Major Isaiah Force at its head, a reflection of that unit’s interethnic composition.22

Good interethnic relations did not always develop easily. Reports of vandalism by federal troops against Catholic churches in the South made clear that nativism survived among some native-born soldiers. Officers of the Eighth Maine reportedly stole sacramental vessels from a church in Fernandina, Florida, and during the firing of Jacksonville, Florida, in spring 1863, soldiers from the regiment ransacked a church and wore vestments in a mocking fashion before the entire building burned to the ground. An Irish American from the Fourth New Hampshire angrily wrote in April 1863 about the “petty insults” he witnessed by “New England bigots” against members of his ethnic community. The member of the Fourth asked, “Are we at war with traitors or with Catholicity?” and he declared that, while “Catholics are ever ready to offer our lives on our country’s altar…we did not enlist to see our Churches burned and robbed by a horde of miserable scoundrels,” adding simply, “We saw plenty of that at home.”23

For their part, Irish Americans could show insularism. One non-Irish officer of the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts complained that “an American is entirely out of place in an Irish Regiment, and they make this hard as possible for me.” Irish Americans also sometimes displayed rivalry not only with African Americans but other European immigrants as well. Colonel Guiney of the Ninth Massachusetts ascribed the defeat at Chancellorsville to the “cowardice of the 11th Corps.” Despite his own background as an immigrant, Guiney showed no sympathy for the heavily German corps and instead condemned it for leaving the Army of the Potomac beaten by “want of numbers, and the disgraceful flight of the flying Dutchmen.”24

Generally, however, close proximity and shared experiences helped dissolve interethnic tensions. A particular friendship developed between the Ninth Massachusetts and the Sixty-second Pennsylvania, comprised of industrial workers, miners, and farmers from around Pittsburgh, during their service in the same brigade. At Hanover Court House, Virginia, early in the 1862 Peninsula campaign, one Pennsylvanian called out, “How will we take Richmond[?],” and another replied, “Why, the Sixty-second will fire, and the Ninth will charge,” before both units swept the field. The Ninth’s regimental historian recalled, “They joined in our little festivities and we engaged in theirs.” A Boston recruit who described celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in the Irish Brigade in 1863 as outlandish participated in the merriment the following year. Meagher in June 1863 complimented New York’s German American soldiers, in contrast to his friend Guiney’s criticism. Even Irish Americans and African Americans sometimes found camaraderie on the battlefield: on June 16, 1864, the 116th Pennsylvania passed by a black division whose men “liberally shared” their hardtack and pork with the exhausted Pennsylvanians.25

On the home front, supporting the Union included an economic component beneficial to Irish Americans. Army service offered a relatively profitable option for struggling laborers, something that provided one of the most compelling reasons many Irish Americans enlisted. In addition to drawing rations for themselves, army salaries, enlistment bounties, and local assistance programs for soldiers’ families provided much needed support. After one pay day, the men of the Irish Brigade sent more than thirty-five thousand dollars to their families. Investing in the war cut across national and class lines and also helped link economics with nationalism. Moreover, as the army drew more men into it, and the industrial stimulation provided by the massive Union war effort increased the demand for laborers, conditions improved in slim but meaningful ways for even some of those on the bottom rungs of the Irish American community. For example, predominantly Irish Catholic South Boston hummed with vibrant wartime manufacturing producing guns, cannon, ammunition, and helping construct warships.26

The Civil War failed to deter immigration from Ireland, particularly as its blighted land continued to generate poor crop outputs. Lincoln’s administration, meanwhile, encouraged immigration as a potential source of soldiers and labor. In July 1862, Consul Henry W. Lord wrote Seward that many British subjects sought to serve in the federal army and suggested that “these would become perhaps all the better citizens of our country for having exposed their lives to sustain its integrity.” That August, Seward asked consular officers abroad to publicize the demand for labor in America caused by so many men serving in the armed forces. Although Seward avoided any mention of military service, and qualified that the government could not offer “any pecuniary inducements” to attract “industrious foreigners,” for fear of angering foreign governments, recipients of it understood the military implication of his dispatch, especially after he sent a copy of his statement to Secretary of War Stanton. The number of Irish coming to the United States increased in 1863 to fifty-six thousand and the following year to sixty-four thousand, the highest total for any year after 1854 and higher than in any year before 1847. Some of these immigrants blended into civilian society and sought jobs in industry or agriculture, while others enlisted in the army.27

Articulating and Appreciating an American Identity

Similar to the way African Americans interpreted and made use of the meaning of their service, Irish Americans took the lead in affirming during the war that the glory earned, and sacrifices endured, by Irish American soldiers powerfully reinforced the ties of American identity and inclusion as citizens. Irish Americans continued to maintain their ethnic culture but, under the leadership of Thomas F. Meagher and others, placed this culture within an American context and emphasized an American allegiance alongside support for Irish nationalism. Public arguments articulated by Meagher, Charles G. Halpine, and Michael Corcoran helped to define the meaning of Irish American service to the ethnic community, as well as assert it to a more-accepting native-born population. Yet personal changes also took place during this time. Some Irish Americans gained a greater appreciation for their American identity, as revealed in personal letters written by Peter Welsh to his family, and Irish-born Colonel Patrick Guiney to his wife.

Through newspaper columns and two popular book compilations of his work, Charles G. Halpine publicized the communal meanings of Irish American service. An Irish-born Episcopal educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Halpine broke from his father’s views to sympathize with Irish revolutionaries and respect Catholicism. Halpine became involved in the Young Ireland movement in the late 1840s and immigrated to the United States in 1851, where he became a newspaper correspondent and an ardent Democrat. Halpine’s early derision of Lincoln vanished once the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Although he remained a partisan Democrat, Halpine enlisted in the army and wrote regular columns for the New York Herald urging vigorous prosecution of the war and professing to care more about the American flag than whether blacks were slave or free. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley later identified Halpine as having “done more than any other man to popularize and strengthen the War with the Irish Democracy” in New York City.28

Halpine employed the fictional character of army private Miles O’Reilly as his vehicle to weigh in on political issues and pronounce the meaning of Irish American support for the Union, as well as to provide an appealing Irish American figure to the larger public. With his simple but good-natured personality, O’Reilly grew popular among both Irish Americans and the country at large, and the first book collection of Halpine’s writings sold three thousand copies on the first day of its release in early 1864.29

Echoing black correspondent Thomas M. Chester, Halpine focused on the Americanizing, communal experience of military service as one of his primary themes:

Camps, in their own queer way, are places of very thorough national instruction. Regiments of men from all quarters of the loyal states are aggregated and mixed together in the larger organizations of our armies. They march, fight, and sleep under the same banner. No matter what their former habits or stations in life, the same food is served out to all. Equal promotion awaits their merit; and if struck down by weapons or disease, they lie side by side in one general hospital, their attendance the same, and their nursing as affectionate. Falling on the battle-field they have common graves, and living they will have a common destiny.30

In “Song of the Soldiers,” Halpine recounted that marches, danger, wounds, and illnesses “bound” those who served together, and his final stanza, frequently recited at Grand Army of the Republic gatherings into the 1880s, resoundingly concluded,

By communion of the banner,

Battle-scarred but victor banner,

By the baptism of the banner,

Brothers of one church are we;

Creed nor faction can divide us;

Race nor language can divide us;

Still, whatever fate betide us,

Brothers of the heart are we!

Using the metaphor of having “drunk from the same canteen,” Halpine in another poem argued that soldiers did so in the communion of military service—the sharing of hard marches and empty stomachs, the excitement of battle and the doldrums of camp life, and most sublime of all, crawling to a wounded comrade on the battlefield to give him a drink.31

In late November 1863, Halpine had O’Reilly pay a fictional visit to the White House. As with other O’Reilly columns, the Herald published the story as if it had actually happened, and some historians have believed erroneously that the column recounted a visit of Halpine to the White House. Halpine had Thomas F. Meagher present O’Reilly to Lincoln and argue a claim to equality of citizenship in the process: one of the most powerful motivations for the “Irish soldier” in the field, Meagher told the president, “was the thought that he was thus earning a title…to the full equality and fraternity of an American citizen.” While Lincoln concurred, Meagher continued that “ugly and venomous as was the toad of civil strife, it yet carried in its head for the Irish race in America this precious, this inestimable jewel. By adoption of the banner, and by the communion of bloody grave trenches on every field…the race that were heretofore only exiles…are now proud peers of the proudest and brave brothers of the best.”32

Michael Corcoran’s capture at First Bull Run afforded the Irish American community a hero early in the war as well as another prominent vehicle through which to publicize the meaning of their service and assert an American identity. Like Meagher, Irish-born Michael Corcoran enjoyed excellent credentials as an Irish nationalist. After emigrating to the United States in 1849, Corcoran joined the Sixty-ninth NYSM as a private and became its colonel by 1860. Corcoran faced a quandary, however, when the Civil War erupted: as one of Fenianism’s founders, he recognized that too many Irish American recruits for the Union might jeopardize manpower for Ireland’s own liberation movement. Before he went off to war at the head of an Irish American regiment, Corcoran told fellow members of the Brotherhood in New York City to stay out of the army unless already in it.33

After his capture at First Bull Run, it seemed Corcoran would never have the opportunity to fight for Ireland. Shortly after the Confederates took him prisoner, the federal government sentenced to execution the crew of a Confederate privateer. The Confederates retaliated by selecting Corcoran to likewise face execution. Instead, on exchange after thirteen months of captivity, Corcoran found himself the Union’s newest brigadier general. Corcoran dined with Lincoln in Washington, D.C., before addressing a massive gathering outside of the Willard Hotel on August 18, 1862. Gaslights arranged to spell the word “Union” backlit the speaker’s stand, and the uniformed men of the Sixty-ninth NYSM proudly displayed their green regimental flag. Republican congressman Alfred Ely, himself taken captive during the rout of First Bull Run and imprisoned with Corcoran, introduced the hero to the crowd, honoring Irish Americans for their zeal for the Union before he welcomed the “chieftain of our adopted citizens from the Emerald Isle” to “the capital of your country.”34

Mirroring statements by Thomas Meagher, Corcoran pled with Irish Americans to fight for the United States until it defeated the Confederacy. While he looked forward to fighting for Ireland in the future, Corcoran urged that the “work…here” needed successful resolution first. Rejoicing at the sight of the Sixty-ninth’s green flag next to the Stars and Stripes, Corcoran wished to take the field again “with more of my countrymen, to endeavor to preserve this country for our people.” Corcoran concluded his speech with the touch of a Fenian, deeming the Union army “a splendid school for military training,” and alluding to Irish Americans fighting abroad after the Republic’s victory.35

Corcoran attended similar receptions and delivered comparable orations as he traveled northward to New York. In Philadelphia, crowds wearing badges bearing Corcoran’s likeness thronged through flag-festooned streets to cheer the new general and watch a parade, which included Hibernian and Fenian chapters. After lunch, Corcoran marched to Independence Hall, where he embraced the symbolism of his stage, “where our patriotic fathers met and deliberated.” Although he vowed to fight for the restoration of the Constitution and Union “just as it was”—an obvious swipe at abolitionism and the Republican agenda—Corcoran in another speech that day declared himself a Democrat who supported Lincoln no matter what the president needed to do to quash the rebellion, even to the extent that Lincoln infringed on the Constitution, so long as the effect could be repaired after the war. Corcoran vowed that he would even shake the hand of any nativist or abolitionist who stood with him in the fight for the Union.36

From Philadelphia, Corcoran traveled through cities in New Jersey, which all honored him with ceremonies, before he reached New York City and the throngs that packed Broadway waiting to see him. The day after the festivities, the New York Times hailed Corcoran as a patriot hero, but it also placed the event in the context of the city’s ethnic politics. The day proved “peculiarly one of exultation to the Irish,” wrote the Times, because “never were nationalities more entirely forgotten,” and the “spontaneous enthusiasm of the masses fused all hearts and united them in one glowing expression of honor to him who had proved worthy of the cause of Freedom.” Moreover, argued the editorial, the native-born realized an even greater appreciation of the event because it illuminated the devotion Irish Americans had shown the American government and its republican principles. The Times declared Corcoran a paradigm of American civic virtue, standing as both a “hero” and a “General of the Republic.”37

Abandoning his early advice for Fenians to avoid the war, Corcoran now raised four New York regiments to form the Corcoran Legion. The Irishman also wrote a memoir of his imprisonment, a carefully crafted public pronouncement of Irish American loyalty that offered as one of its primary themes the “gratification” Corcoran felt in leading “his men into battle bearing side by side the Star Spangled Banner of his American home, and the Emerald Standard of his Native isle.” Corcoran recognized both sides of the phrase Irish American, declaring that “one half of my heart is Erin’s, and the other half is America’s.” Corcoran recalled leaving his “native isle in sorrow” and experiencing “a stranger’s anxiety” on arriving in the United States, but he also appreciated that America “gave me all the opportunities I longed so for.” Moreover, Corcoran proclaimed, in the United States he had the freedom to embrace his ethnicity. “I am happy because I have achieved the honor of being counted a representative of Irish nationality,” he declared, and “it now increases my pleasure tenfold when I hear loyal Americans, in refering to me, say, ‘Michael Corcoran is an Irishman.’”38

While he embraced his Irish heritage, Corcoran also easily referred to “our Republic” with a sense of belonging and membership. In global terms, Corcoran “prayed that, like that distant dome above, the azure field of our own Starry Standard would in the future be studded as thickly with stars, each representing some nation or people of the earth.” For Corcoran, loyalty recognized but trumped ethnic background, and while he remained fiercely devoted to Ireland, he just as powerfully argued that nationalities could come under the rubric of the United States and the ideals of “the best and mightiest Republic that earth has ever seen.” Corcoran proclaimed to all Americans that suffering for the United States, whether by wounds, time spent languishing in captivity, or other service, linked that individual to the country’s heritage and generated a living connection to its ideals. Corcoran emphasized that allegiance, not ethnicity, defined one’s identity and standing during the war.39

Corcoran ended his account by vowing never to sheathe his sword “until victory perches upon the National banner of America, or Michael Corcoran is numbered among those who return not from the battle-field.” Sadly, Corcoran did not return. Not fated to fall while leading a desperate charge on the field of battle, Corcoran tumbled from his horse on December 22, 1863, lost consciousness, and died. Much as Meagher had, Corcoran revised his views through the experience of Civil War, and it would have been fascinating to watch the direction of these transformations in the postwar period had he lived. Corcoran did not undergo the political conversion Meagher did, and he stands as an exemplar of the conservative nature of Irish American loyalty, but that adds a further cast to Corcoran. Corcoran’s words and actions illuminate how a diehard Irish nationalist transformed his focus to argue that serving and suffering in the Civil War linked Irish immigrants to America’s Founding Fathers and earned them a place as American citizens, but also supported Ireland at the same time by bolstering the great international hope of republicanism and providing an asylum for future Irish immigrants.40

Patrick R. Guiney’s letters home reveal an embrace of Corcoran’s public message on a personal level, and they show a private individual’s evolution to have a greater appreciation for his American identity alongside his Irish one. Born in County Tipperary in January 1835, Guiney emigrated to Maine at age seven. After working in factories and machine shops in boyhood, Guiney attended the College of the Holy Cross for a year before studying law. In 1858, Guiney relocated to Boston where he practiced law and wrote for the Boston Times. Guiney married in January 1859, moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, and won a seat on its town council (a striking deviation from Massachusetts nativism at the time), and soon had his only child, the future poet Louise Imogen Guiney. Guiney parted from his young family to enlist in the Ninth Massachusetts when the Civil War erupted, rising to lieutenant colonel in the coming months. During the June 27, 1862, battle of Gaines’ Mill, the Ninth’s Colonel Cass fell ill and relinquished command to Guiney. The “Fighting Ninth” formed the retreating federal column’s rearguard, and Guiney led multiple charges to stall the pressing Confederates. When Cass fell mortally wounded a few days later, Guiney received promotion to colonel, and he commanded the regiment until he suffered a bullet in the eye leading a charge at the Wilderness.41

Guiney remembered his Irish heritage, even though there is no evidence that he participated in the Fenian circle that existed in the Ninth Massachusetts. In accepting a sword from one of his companies in the summer of 1862, Guiney vowed to make his regiment “a testimony of Irish devotion to the vindication and establishment of human liberty.” In sending the regiment’s green banner, shredded in combat during the Peninsula campaign, to Governor John Andrew that fall, the young colonel informed him, “Sometimes when all else looked vague and battle-fortune seemed to be against us, there was a certain magic in the light of this old symbol of our enslaved but hopeful Ireland, that made the Ninth fight superhumanly hard.”42

Yet Guiney’s letters display how his devotion to the Republic, and recognition of his American identity, deepened with time. Almost immediately, Guiney feared for the welfare of his family and wrote his wife that he regretted the “possible rashness” of his enlisting. Nevertheless, he explained, honor and loyalty to the Union precluded his resignation. After reaching Washington in early July 1861, Guiney described both the beauty of the location of the Ninth’s camp and the glory of the cause for which its men volunteered. In another letter, Guiney acknowledged that his commission might result in his death, but explained that friendships within the regiment, the fact that military service would benefit his future ambitions, and his allegiance to a cause “that will entitle those who labor in the achievement of its success to the gratitude and remembrance of the present, as well as of unborn generations—one that of itself compensates by its sublimity and goodness for all which may be sacrificed in its defense,” foreclosed him from leaving the service.43

4. Irish Americans of the Ninth Massachusetts Infantry before celebrating Mass at Camp Cass, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., in 1861. Patrick R. Guiney is seated third from the left in the first row on the right-hand side. Thomas Cass is the first man standing nearest the cross on the right-hand side. Courtesy Library of Congress.

By August 1861, Guiney replied to his wife that he could not oblige her pleas to return home because resignation would blight his honor, and he stood in defense of a “cause bright and grand as the Sun.” While Democrats criticized the war, Guiney observed, “The cause is to me the same as it was when I left Boston. Not a hue of it is changed. I care not who becomes corrupt, the cause is pure.” A sense of honor, personal opportunity, and friendships within his regiment reinforced Guiney’s underlying loyalty to a Republic which he recognized as worthy of preservation, even at the cost of his blood.44

During a low ebb in the Army of the Potomac’s morale in the winter of 1862–63, Guiney revealed the intensity of his deepened devotion to the Union cause. “If we could only be successful how proudly I could live afterwards in the knowledge of my humble participation. If we fail I never can be half the man,” Guiney confessed to his wife, “The charm of life will be gone.” Within weeks, the Irish-born colonel declared that “if the country is to be broken—then we will have no country to love or serve.” After his near mortal wound at the Wilderness in spring 1864, Guiney proudly wrote, “God gave me an opportunity and of which I availed myself, to shed my blood for our beloved Republic. This is a source of great pleasure to me and one in which the pain and consequences of my wound are entirely lost.”45

In contrast to many Irish Americans, Guiney even grew during the war to openly support abolitionism and its more expansive idea of universal human rights, if not the nativist streak that ran through the movement. Similar to Meagher, Guiney, who started the war as a Democrat, staunchly supported the Lincoln administration and its Republican agenda, although this generated strong opposition to him from some of the Ninth’s officers and several Irish American civilians back in Boston. While campaigning for Lincoln during the 1864 election, Guiney maintained that he “was the only member of that regiment [the Ninth Massachusetts] who called himself a Republican,” likely an exaggeration but a revealing statement nonetheless.46

Maintaining Religious and Ethnic Identity in the Army

Experiences in the Union army strengthened in many Irish Americans a greater recognition of their American identity but at the same time permitted them to practice their Catholic religion and ethnic identity without apology. Some historians view this persistent ethnic culture as evidence of continued alienation from the rest of society and resistance to Americanization. More accurately, Irish Americans’ firmer placement as part of the people, cemented by their military service, allowed them to practice their religious and ethnic traditions more securely within an American context. In the aftermath of the war, the Pilot argued that “true strength, and our highest worldly interests as Catholics, rests in our becoming Americans.” Many Irish Americans embraced this idea while serving in the army, and transmitted it to families at home, but coupled it with more open celebration of ethnic practices.47

Spiritual devotion increased for many Irish American soldiers, as the consoling aspects of religion had a powerful allure to men enduring loneliness, privation, and possible death. Religious activities provided some soldiers with a sense of community and helped assuage their feeling of isolation from friends and family. Believing that God’s will prevailed helped soothe for soldiers the psychological trauma they suffered while facing the random nature of death in battle, as well as feelings of personal guilt for participating in combat.48

George Tipping, an Irish immigrant born in 1842, reported to his wife in October 1862 that about a thousand men received confirmation when New York’s archbishop Hughes visited the camp of his 155th New York on Staten Island. When the regiment relocated to Newport News, Virginia, the following month, Tipping wrote his wife that Mass was celebrated every morning and confessions heard every afternoon—something that no doubt comforted the devout soldier who wore an Agnus Dei and crucifix around his neck. The regimental priest gave his blessing to the kneeling men of the 155th New York before their first engagement, though Tipping honestly told his wife that despite the benediction, “there was terror in every heart.” By early 1863, the 155th New York’s priest baptized some men, and Tipping believed that combat had put “the fear of God” into a previously “wicked set of fellows.”49

As chaplain of the Thirty-fifth Indiana, Irish-born Father Peter Paul Cooney, C.S.C., heard confessions straight through one night, as he helped the men prepare for anticipated battle during the Perryville campaign. Every morning for five days during the Murfreesboro campaign, Cooney gave absolution to the regiment as it knelt in line of battle. Similarly, when battle loomed on November 30, 1863, the chaplain of the Ninth Massachusetts asked Colonel Guiney to form the regiment into a square. Catholics from other units broke from the ranks to participate as the priest led the kneeling men in making an Act of Contrition, and then roused them with his reminder that they fought for liberty, justice, and global human rights. The most famous absolution involved Father William Corby, an Irish Brigade chaplain and president of the University of Notre Dame after the war, at Gettysburg, and expressive statutes on both the battlefield and the Notre Dame campus commemorate the event. As Union soldiers prepared to charge into the maelstrom of the Wheatfield on July 2, 1863, everyone knelt to receive an absolution Corby intended for those of all faiths. Nearby, Major General Winfield S. Hancock bowed his uncovered head as well. A week later, a non-Catholic captain who observed the moment asked Corby to teach him about Catholicism.50

In the West, Cooney also noted the effect of this interreligious mixing while serving as brigade chaplain. A Protestant soldier spoke to Cooney about converting after one Mass and celebrated his baptism a few days later. Major General William Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland and a prewar convert to Catholicism whose brother became a Catholic bishop, attended Cooney’s Mass every Sunday in the summer of 1863. Rosecrans’s staff attended as well, even though none of them were Catholic. Cooney believed that “by the power of his noble example he [Rosecrans] has been the principal cause, under God, of almost entirely dissipating the unreasonable prejudice against our holy religion which the men of his army brought from home with them.” Cooney also felt that the example of Catholic soldiers, the work of Catholic chaplains, and the open practice of that faith in the Army of the Cumberland led to a lessening of prejudice. By April 1864, Cooney reported to his brother that Protestants attended Catholic sermons “by thousands,” that he baptized many of them, including division commander Major General David S. Stanley, and that “prejudice to the Church is gone almost entirely.”51

St. Patrick’s Day also afforded Irish Americans an opportunity to celebrate an ethnic holiday in the company of Protestant and native-born comrades, and openly embrace their Catholic culture in an American context. The Irish Brigade celebrated on a clear blue March 17, 1863, morning with a Mass followed by races and games topped off by a grand steeplechase horse race on a course that included hurdles, ditch fences, and two artificial rivers fifteen feet wide and six deep. Thousands of soldiers, including army commander Major General Joseph Hooker, observed the race, which had a five hundred dollar purse at stake. Afterward, an elaborate banquet featured thirty-five hams, pigs stuffed with chickens or turkeys, chicken, game birds, champagne, rum, and whiskey. Thousands of men gathered in the camp of the Irish Brigade from among the different corps of the Army of the Potomac, including generals Hancock, Slocum, Griffin, Sedgwick, and Franklin.52

Fenianism

Even Irish nationalism in America evolved during the Civil War into a context of loyalty to the United States. Some diehard Irish nationalists in the United States grew irritated at this development, but for the most part, the Fenian movement reveals a surprising level of Americanization within Irish America, even where dualism and great interest in Irish liberation persisted. Striking similarities existed between Irish nationalism and black nationalism in America at this time: members of both groups used the language of separate nationality as a means to gain inclusion and earn respect within the United States as a whole. Moreover, both groups espoused the expansion of republicanism, even where blacks focused on America while Irish nationalists included exportation of American values abroad as part of their mission.53

The impact of Fenianism was not confined to attendees to Fenian conventions. Whether explicitly or implicitly, many common Irish American soldiers, such as Peter Welsh, embraced Fenian ideals such as liberation for Ireland, and hostility toward England, and they placed their Civil War service in an American context as well as one of transnational republicanism. Moreover, rather than acting to hinder other Americanizing impulses, the Fenian movement helped reinforce and support loyalty to the United States even in the face of duality. That many native-born Americans went so far as to tolerate, even embrace Fenianism, during the 1860s shows that they accepted the new position that Irish Americans asserted.

Examining the Fenian movement reveals paradoxical impulses within it, considering the Brotherhood’s professed devotion to Ireland. Historian Thomas N. Brown found the overall Irish nationalist movement to be “riddled with ambiguities,” and he cites Fenianism as an example. While operating as an autonomous Irish government from a capital in New York City shortly after the war, the Brotherhood focused much of its energy on Irish American issues and served as a political “pressure group” within this country, even where many American Fenians did want to return to Ireland, liberate it, and reverse the consequences of the famine.54

Founded in New York as the Emmet Monument Association in the mid-1850s, the organization changed its name to the Fenian Brotherhood in 1858, after mythological warrior defenders of Ireland called Fianna, and sought the overthrow of British rule in Ireland. Ultimately, the Fenians achieved neither the numbers nor the goals to which they aspired. While the movement thrived within Irish American units, the Brotherhood never fielded the forces its commanders hoped would mobilize to liberate Ireland after the war. Even at its peak after the Civil War, the Brotherhood never numbered more than forty-five thousand members, and it probably numbered less. Of those members, only a fraction participated in any actual maneuver against British interests.55

It comes as little surprise that Americanism so thoroughly affected Fenianism: it developed as an American movement and flourished in the Union ranks. Large portions of some circles enlisted to defend the Union when the war erupted. The Milford, Massachusetts, chapter sent 80 out of 115 members into the Ninth Massachusetts. By November 1863, the Irish-born head of the Rappahannock Circle in that regiment believed that three hundred soldiers from the Ninth alone would subsequently fight in the Fenian ranks, though only “in accordance with our duties and obligations to the U.S. Government.” As of January 1865, Fenian circles met within several regiments and on certain naval vessels, as well as larger units such as the Corcoran Legion and federal forces on Morris Island, South Carolina. In addition to activity generated by Fenians already in the ranks, the Brotherhood dispatched delegates, sometimes bearing passes from the army, to address Union troops.56

Moreover, many prominent Fenian leaders served in the Union army. At an 1863 Fenian convention, Brigadier General Michael Corcoran and Colonel Matthew Murphy of the Sixty-ninth New York won election to a five-man central council, and several federal soldiers and veterans signed the convention’s resolutions in person or by proxy. At a January 1865 convention in Cincinnati, Irish Brigade commander Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth—already Centre of the Fenians in the Army of the Potomac after Corcoran’s death—won election to the central council. The convention also appointed thirteen federal army officers to a committee for military affairs, which it formed in its self-proclaimed capacity as a national assembly for Ireland.57

When the first Fenian convention met in Chicago on November 3–5, 1863, 82 delegates attended from twelve states, the District of Columbia, and the federal Armies of the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Potomac. Under Head Centre John O’Mahoney’s leadership, the delegates drafted a constitution mandating annual conventions and an elected leadership. These Fenians consciously tracked tenets of American republicanism to render themselves “in better accord with the democratic institutions of America, and thus secure for [the organization] a greater popularity…among our fellow citizens born in this country,” but also because most of the organization’s members expected the Brotherhood to have a democratic “system of government and direction in accordance with the institutions and customs of America.”58

Closely reading the proceedings of this first convention reveals the dual pull felt by some in attendance, a striking phenomenon in that the delegates comprised the most vocal members of the Irish American community in professing devotion to Ireland and its liberation. In welcoming the delegates, O’Mahoney set the convention’s agenda: to organize for the time “when we will have to strike a blow for the Independence of Ireland.” In another speech, O’Mahoney identified the Civil War as an impediment to Fenianism because so many Irish Americans enlisted in the Union army, though he simultaneously declared that the cause would benefit from their battle training. As expected, Fenian delegates at the convention gushed with “love of Ireland,” expressed their “longing for her liberation,” and declared the island’s people a distinct nationality entitled to all rights of self-government. While one participant proudly noted that so many Irish fought for their adopted country, he also assured that many in the Union ranks would fight and die for the “dear old land.”59

Yet, many of the convention’s resolutions focused on themes of loyalty to the United States, defining what wartime sacrifice earned them, and linking America and Fenianism in a global struggle for republicanism. The delegates explained that, while mostly composed of American citizens of Irish birth or descent, the Brotherhood remained open to all who sympathized with Ireland’s liberation by any “honorable means,” though disclaiming, “except such means as may be in violation of the constitution and laws under which we live and to which all of us, who are citizens of the United States, owe our allegiance.” Furthermore, the delegates argued, their overarching devotion to the Republic earned them every right to act under its laws: “We further boldly and firmly assert our unquestionable right under the said constitution and laws to associate together for the above named object, or for any similar one; and to assist with our money, our moral and political influence, or, if it so pleases ourselves, with our persons and our lives in liberating any enslaved land under the sun.” The delegates stated that they did not contemplate breaking any American law but argued that if they failed to exercise fully their “civic and social privilege as Freemen under the American constitution,” they rendered themselves “unworthy of participating in the great political privileges wherewith the naturalized citizens of America are invested.”60

Noting that “exiles of every country,” but particularly the Irish, “found a home, personal freedom, and equal political rights, in this American Republic,” the Fenians declared their unwavering allegiance to the United States. Placing their loyalty to America in a global context, members of the convention emphasized the “supreme importance” of the “preservation and success” of the Constitution not only for Ireland’s future but the “well being and social elevation of the whole human race.” The Fenians further argued that their objectives benefited not only the Irish but “all sincere lovers of human freedom,” and that Americans especially gained because Irish sons kept “watch and ward for the United States at the thresholds of the despots of Europe.” Believing that English sympathy for the Confederacy had caused an irreparable rift with the United States, the convention urged young Fenians to study military tactics and stand ready to offer their services to the U.S. government. As did other Irish Americans, the Fenians thus styled themselves as defenders of American interests through loyalty to the Constitution, antipathy to the English, and a desire to propagate the American mission of spreading liberty. The Fenians cast themselves as an elite guard crusading for American principles worldwide.61

The Fenian movement grew in popularity so that when its second convention opened in Cincinnati on January 17, 1865, 273 circles sent delegates, a substantial increase from the 63 circles represented at Chicago. This assembly again wrestled with the dualities of striving for Ireland’s liberation within the context of allegiance and service to the U.S. flag. Despite paradoxically deeming this Fenian convocation a national congress in exile for an Irish Republic, O’Mahoney inextricably linked its cause with that of the Union. Although he grieved at the losses Fenians suffered during the Civil War, O’Mahoney proclaimed that these “brothers have died for the Republic.” Noting that “thousands” of the “most ardent and best working” Fenians “rushed to the defense of the Union,” O’Mahoney now exaggeratedly described the Brotherhood as the bulwark that prevented Britain’s entry into the Civil War. Lamenting that the Union did not help the Fenians to the extent Britain assisted the Confederacy, O’Mahoney nonetheless declared that the Brotherhood served “the best interests of America” at the same time it worked for the liberation of Ireland. Moreover, in calling for Fenians to stand prepared to sail for Europe or attack Canada “at once,” he also cautioned that such movement should occur only “at the command of the United States authorities.”62

At the same time, the Fenian delegates realized the implications of straying too far from the Brotherhood’s Irish focus, and some of them sought to counter this trend by drafting an address to their “fellow-exiles in America” which highlighted devotion to the cause of Ireland. “Though forced by oppression and dire necessity into foreign countries, Ireland is still your faithful heritage,” the convention reminded its audience. “You are strangers wherever else you go, and no matter how fortune may favor you, if your hearts are true, upon your lips the bread of exile will prove bitter. You owe to that dear land your first and warmest love.”63

Furthermore, the convention criticized America in its address to the Irish people as part of its effort to stifle Ireland’s depopulation. In 1845–55, Ireland’s population plummeted from 8.5 million to 6 million. Irish nationalists feared that, in light of famine deaths and continued emigration, the Irish nationality would soon cease to exist, and the scattering of Ireland’s people would render it unable to take its rightful place as a nation. Calling for the Irish to remain “at your posts” and not “to forsake your country,” the Brotherhood portrayed a bleak life in America. “The fate of the emigrant is seldom an enviable one,” the convention proclaimed. “We who address you know by bitter experience that the instances are few in which men and women of Irish birth ever find themselves at home or happy in a foreign land. It is unnecessary to do more than remind you of the poverty, the misery, and too frequently the crime with which very many of the Irish people sink after their arrival in America.” The convention presented to the people of Ireland a far different picture than the honored and glorious republic it otherwise celebrated, and for which Irish American soldiers fell during the war.64

Diverging views, as well as the Brotherhood’s continued growth, led to dissension within the organization’s ranks. As chapters proliferated (67 new circles formed by mid-April 1865, followed by 67 more the following month), members called for greater democratization. More than six hundred delegates gathered in another convention held in Philadelphia on October 16, 1865, and they revised the Fenian charter so as to even more closely duplicate the American governmental structure. This new constitution mandated governance by a Senate, a House of Delegates with representatives chosen in proportion to the number and size of constituent circles, and a president advised by cabinet members he appointed with the advice of the senate. By the end of the year, O’Mahoney rejected this constitution, which increased the senate’s power at his expense, and a schism opened up between two wings of the Brotherhood. Another divergence motivated the split: while O’Mahoney’s faction emphasized sending arms and troops to Ireland, the Senate wing, under future American congressman William R. Roberts, supported capturing Canada and using it as leverage in order to obtain Ireland’s freedom.65

Meanwhile, helping to establish Fenianism as an American political group, Charles Halpine published a lengthy article about the organization in the May 5, 1865, edition of the New York Herald. Halpine’s two themes were justifying Fenian actions based on Britain’s dual hostility to Ireland and the United States, and the overarching loyalty Fenians felt for the United States. Halpine not only continued themes that pervaded his Miles O’Reilly columns, he emphasized the American loyalty and identity of all Irish Americans, including supporters of the Fenian Brotherhood. Halpine disclaimed descriptions of the Fenians as a secret society disloyal to the United States. Instead, Halpine used Irish American wartime service to gain acceptance for the organization, and he assured his readers that the “Fenian Brotherhood is loyal to the land of its adoption in every fibre; and none the less so because refusing to forget the land to which its members are bound by ties either of blood or birth.” Halpine asked Americans to consider whether “an organization which…has sent over twenty-eight thousand of its active members into the armies of the Union, [should] be condemned as unfaithful to the American cause, for no other reason than that it hopes yet to grapple with the tyrant of its native land, and to place ‘the Irish Green above the English Red,’ while at the same time aiding to avenge America’s quarrel with the government which permitted a swarm of pirates to be sent forth from its harbors to prey upon American commerce in the hour of our sorest need?” Halpine emphasized that Fenians “have been zealously and actively loyal to the cause of the Union,” and he cast as martyrs for the Republic such members as Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth and Colonel Matthew Murphy, who both died in the closing days of the war.66

Halpine further declared that Fenians did not sanction violation of American law in wanting to liberate Ireland. While they would “most gladly take advantage of any conflict between the Red Flag and Banner of Stars, at once to prove their fidelity and devotion both to the land of their adoption and that of their birth,” Halpine promised that Fenians would not cause the war or act outside of American authority. Instead, Halpine claimed, the Fenians intended to furnish arms, supplies, and officers, “matters perfectly open to legal private enterprise under the precedents established by the British government in favor of the Southern rebellion.” Halpine assured his readers that individuals in Ireland would do the rest, though, “let there be a war between the United States and England, and not a dollar in bounty would be required to enlist from seventy-five to one hundred thousand able-bodied and pugnacious Irishmen throughout the States in that holy strife.” Accordingly, in contrast to the revolutionaries in Ireland, Fenians in American were not required to be able-bodied, learn military drill, or swear to perform any military service.67

Halpine’s lyrics for a “Fenian Rallying Song” included two stanzas that identified Fenian readiness for war as a component of their loyalty to the United States. After asking God to smile on America, Halpine noted that Irish Americans did not “forget the isle” from where they came, and he looked forward to a day “When Yankee guns shall thunder / On Britain’s coast, on Britain’s coast / And land, our green flag under / The Fenian host, the Fenian host!” Moreover, in keeping with men such as Peter Welsh, Thomas F. Meagher, and Michael Corcoran, Halpine located his anti-English sentiments within a larger global context. Halpine argued that the reunited United States had every right to assert its defense of republicanism in the world, whether against French designs in Mexico under the Monroe Doctrine, or by allowing the Fenians to send arms and trained Irish American veterans to Irish soil. Above all, Halpine equated being a good Fenian with good American citizenship.68

Other Fenian lyrics often emphasized this American link as well. Some Fenian songs waxed eloquent about Ireland and lamented its condition as well as the Irish exodus, but others focused on the Irish American experience and emphasized dual loyalty to the United States. “The Irish American Army” linked Fenianism and Unionism, and celebrated soldiers from the ethnic community who helped quash the Confederacy, while another song, “To the Fenians,” proclaimed that “the Stars and Stripes, with your own flag, are with you to the death.” Some songs referenced American constitutional debate, such as the “Fenian Song,” with the lyrics, “Let ‘equal rights’ your motto be / Keep Liberty in sight,” or the “Fenian Battle Song,” sung to the tune of “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which called for Irish Americans to “assert your rights as freemen” and refrained that they were “fighting for liberty in Erin.” More explicit in terms of American loyalty, the “Fenian’s Hope of Independence” announced, “We’ll lower the pride of England, her yoke we’ll overthrow / Long she has persecuted, and kept the Irish low / But soon with her it shall be night—with us the coming day—/ In her place we’ll plant the Stars and Stripes of Sweet America!”69

Wartime Opposition and the Irish American Identity

Static political views among most Irish Americans complicated their relations with both the Union and some of the native born. These views greatly differed from those of blacks, who not only supported the Republican agenda but wanted it to move even faster and further. As the conflict dragged on, emancipation, conscription, and mounting casualties led to some opposition, and even violence steeped with racism, within the Irish American community at home, even while some Irish Americans began to recognize a deeper sense of their American identity. Cynicism about the Republican Party persisted in many Irish Americans: as Irish-born Jesuit, Bernard O’Reilly, observed in 1864, the “very same puritanical race” that caused the centuries of “oppression + prostration” in Ireland formed the “most energetic, + living, + controlling element” of the Republican Party. O’Reilly found “the spirit which blazed forth in the destruction of the Ursuline Convent” in 1834 difficult to forget.70

Historian Susannah Ural Bruce argues that, despite early rapprochement, native-born Americans grew frustrated at Irish American political positions during the war, exacerbating nativism and contributing to a stereotype of Irish Americans as “disloyal, violent, and threatening to all that was good in America.” Such resistance certainly comprises a major part of the legacy of Irish Americans during the Civil War, made more prominent because it sometimes erupted into high-profile violence such as the New York City Draft Riots.71

Yet the other side of that complicated legacy includes Irish Americans who pronounced support for the war effort, casualty reports from Irish American regiments, and funerals honoring fallen Irish American soldiers. As casualties mounted within Irish America’s ranks, the ethnic community honored such sacrifice but also used it to strengthen the American identity of its still living members, and show evidence of Irish American devotion to the Constitution in support of claims for all the rights and privileges granted to the native-born. Local governments and individual citizens joined to pay tribute to universal sacrifice in the name of the United States, further cementing in the process Irish Americans as part of the American people. For example, the American flag hung conspicuously in St. Bridget’s church in Rochester, New York, for the funeral of Irish-born Colonel Patrick O’Rorke of the 140th New York, killed at Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics alike attended the ceremony, and according to Rochester’s historian, much of any interethnic tension that existed between Irish Americans, German Americans, and the native-born diminished shortly afterward. On July 4, 1865, O’Rorke’s name hung from one of the banners that adorned a memorial arch Rochester erected, and a delegation placed a white lily atop O’Rorke’s grave as part of the city’s 1868 Memorial Day ceremony. Such moments visibly reaffirmed acceptance by the native-born ethnic community of Irish American pronouncements of covenanted patriotism.72

Moreover, while many Irish Americans resisted the Republican agenda and some of its wartime measures, many native-born Americans did as well. Many native-born Americans expressed horror at the motives behind, and racism displayed, during such outbreaks as the New York City Draft Riots, but so did many Irish Americans. Irish Americans serving in the field felt especially betrayed that members of their ethnic community participated in such atrocities. Enlisted laborer Peter Welsh equated the rioters with Confederate agents and lamented that “the Irish men of New York took so large a part in them disgracefull riots,” while attorney turned colonel Patrick Guiney more succinctly hoped that, regardless of ethnicity, “the artillery will exempt them from the Draft forever!”73

Wartime privations and mounting carnage dampened initial enthusiasm for military service across all strata of the community. The devastating losses of the Seven Days, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, all engagements in which prominent Irish American units suffered grievously, and an ensuing drop in enlistments necessitated a draft that applied to both the ethnic and native-born communities alike. In Massachusetts, between January 1 and October 17, 1863, only 6,353 volunteers enlisted and mustered, white and black. The increase in financial incentives offered as the war went on, as well as the need for conscription, indicates general diminution in enthusiasm for military service (a circumstance which made the late-war influx of black troops all the more critical to the Union victory).74

While hardcore nativists undeniably seized on reports of Irish American draft dodgers to bolster their arguments, native-born draft dodgers faced similar societal censure. Furthermore, many Irish Americans scorned draft dodging as well. Prominent Irish American businessmen in Toledo, Ohio, denounced “cowardly and treacherous” draft dodgers. The Pilot, in August 1863, urged that even non-citizen males, if healthy, without a family to support, and of military age, had a “moral obligation” to enlist or provide a substitute in support of the Union, although the newspaper rejected requiring an alien to enlist.75

Not surprisingly, discussions regarding emancipation led to some of the most paradoxical arguments within Irish America and helped define relations with African Americans. In June 1861, the Pilot declared its “abhorrence” for the “curse of America”: slavery. By late summer 1862, the newspaper identified abolitionists as having provoked the conflict, but argued that the North rightly wished to curtail slavery’s growth. Yet, a week after arguing that Northern opposition to slavery’s expansion hewed to the “fundamental law of the land,” the Pilot glumly contemplated the ramifications of “mad philanthropy for the African.” “The North is becoming black with refugee negroes from the South,” wrote the Irish American organ. “These wretches crowd our cities, and by overstocking the market of labor do incalculable injury to white hands.” Urging Northern states to forbid black entry across their borders, the paper admitted that the “negro…creature has the common rights of humanity living in his breast,” but justified exclusion by asking, “In the country of the whites where the labor of the whites has done everything, but his, nothing, and where the whites find it difficult to earn a subsistence, what right has the negro either to preference or to equality, or to admission?” The Pilot queried, “What has the African done for America?” and questioned, “What great or even decent work has his head conceived, or his hands executed?” before declaring, “To white toil this nation owes every thing; but to black, nothing.” Fears of competition sometimes erupted into racist violence, such as the New York City Draft Riots, or when Irish American stevedores in Toledo, Ohio, rioted along wharves on Lake Erie on July 8, 1862, to protest the use of African American strikebreakers against them. Longshoremen armed with rocks and clubs clashed with blacks brandishing knives and pistols, and the violence turned against homes and businesses in Toledo’s black district after one of the white men died.76

The same day the Irish Brigade made its forlorn charge at Fredericksburg, the Pilot declared to its readers that, because millions of blacks could not live peacefully side by side with whites, bondage of one race remained the “only cure” for the “common good of both.” The following month, the Pilot criticized emancipation as pushing the Confederacy further into “a new, direct, sweeping provocation of Southern treason” that, along with the “incompetent, fanatic, radical administration of Abraham Lincoln,” threatened to permanently rend the Union.77

Many Irish Americans opposed the radical changes that would be wrought by freeing the slaves because of racism, the links among nativism and abolitionism, concern regarding the economic impact emancipation might have on their already tenuous socioeconomic position, and a fear that the radical Republican agenda would irreparably damage the nation’s constitutionalism. In August 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation, the Pilot articulated an ambivalent view toward Lincoln: while portraying Republicans as nativists and “unconstitutional enemies of the South,” the Pilot described Lincoln as no “irrepressible Abolitionist.” After declaring, “We want no better President than Abraham Lincoln,” the editorial simultaneously feared the abolitionist element of the Republican Party and called for a Democratic return to power for the “safety of the nation.” After the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, the Pilot proclaimed about Lincoln in January 1863, “He has changed and so have we. It is now every man’s duty to disagree with him.” At a low point in Irish American (and national) morale on the heels of successive defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the Pilot grumbled in May 1863 that Irish Americans now found themselves “engaged in an abolition war,” and went so far as to declare that “the Irish spirit for the war is dead!…Our fighters are dead.”78

In 1864, Father Bernard O’Reilly in a private letter blamed both the “fanatics of the North as well as the Conspirators of the South,” for the war, and he could not decide “which my soul hates with a more thorough hatred.” While O’Reilly identified slavery as a “social evil” bequeathed to the South by “other generations & other Governments than our own,” he thought that abolitionists fomented a crisis when waiting for slavery to wither gradually would have been less cataclysmic. O’Reilly ascribed Irish America’s waning enthusiasm for the war by early 1864 on the restructuring of society proposed by Republicans: “Oh! to save the Union, we were willing, as willing as any to make any sacrifice…we loved the Union most dearly,” O’Reilly penned, but when the “radical clique of Puritans” put “the iron yoke of their own wills on that poor President who never knew his own,” and used Lincoln “as a tool for their own wild theories, + ferocious emancipation schemes,” O’Reilly argued, “surely the Irish Catholics throughout the Union might well pause before this Puritanical Juggernaut beneath whose wheels they were exhorted + commanded to cast themselves, their families, their fortunes, + their conscience to boot.” Coupled with the remnants of nativism, emancipation and the arming of blacks represented the final straw for Irish American morale. When the “puritanical detractors” of the “ancient + chivalric” Irish went so far as to “place the negro on a level with themselves,” O’Reilly explained, “no wonder the enthusiasm for the war cooled down,” and he added that “nor was it among the Irish alone [that] its abatement was sensible.”79

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, took practical steps to maintain the wartime loyalty of its Irish American base. After the New York City Draft Riots, for example, the Democratic majority in that city’s Common Council appropriated money to pay bounties for any men drafted. Republican mayor George Opdyke vetoed the measure (and lost in the next election), and in response, New York’s Board of Supervisors funded an Exemption Committee to purchase substitutes, especially for poor men supporting families and city workers.80

Complicating what Irish American wartime political affiliation meant, deep fissures marked the Democratic Party during the Civil War. Some Democrats became full-out Republicans, or joined the War Democrat/Republican coalition Union Party. Other Democrats, including Irish Americans, opposed the war as part of the Copperhead movement and urged initiatives to conclude, but not necessarily win, the war. Most Democrats embraced an intermediate position, supporting the war and restoration of the Union on antebellum terms but disapproving the Republican agenda. On the other hand, especially after resistance to the draft, many Republicans proclaimed that allegiance to their party simultaneously translated into allegiance to the United States. As Republicans energetically cast Democrats as traitors who shared party with those who governed the Confederacy, Democrats had a difficult time constructing their identity as a loyal opposition party. Ex-congressman Gerrit Smith thus wrote in 1864, “The Democratic Party is, in short, neither more nor less than the Northern wing of the Rebellion.”81

Republicans applied this argument to native-born and foreign-born Democrats alike. Even Irish-born Patrick Guiney exclaimed, during an 1868 speech supporting Ulysses S. Grant for president, “The great bulk of the democratic party therein went into rebellion against the country that received my father and his children.” Guiney declared, “The republican party have got all that was good for anything, all that was truly democratic, in the old democratic party.” In another postwar speech, Guiney argued that the chiefs of the rebellion still led the Democratic Party. While admitting that well-meaning men existed in both parties, Guiney criticized the Democrats for aiding the rebellion by rioting against the draft, and he intertwined the Republican Party and the federal army by claiming that there existed a “union of hearts between the two.” Guiney in this way scorned, regardless of ethnicity, anyone who failed to support the Republic(ans).82

Many Democrats countered such attacks by arguing that opposition to the Republican agenda did not automatically translate into support for the Confederacy. Boston’s and New York’s Irish American newspapers endorsed George B. McClellan’s 1864 presidential candidacy but justified doing so by arguing that only the election of a Democrat could restore the nation, on the conservative terms they desired. The Irish-American called on readers “to save their country” from lurching toward “despotism,” while the Pilot argued that Irish American opposition to Lincoln stemmed from their “desire to see the Union re-established, peace and prosperity return to bless the land once more, and the Constitution to be restored over all.” Democratic victory in 1864 likely would have proved disastrous for the objective of preserving the Union, but many Democrats, including Irish Americans, did not necessarily view their acts as ones of sympathy with Copperhead Peace Democrats. Lincoln received 2,213,665 votes to McClellan’s 1,802,237 during the 1864 presidential election. Northern civilians in general hotly debated the issues of civil liberties, the transformation of federalism, emancipation and what to do with blacks afterward, and changes to traditionally racially exclusionary policies. Irish Americans participated in this societywide debate by asserting largely conservative views.83

Moreover, for many Irish Americans, overall loyalty to the Union, even if it was conservative in nature, prevailed over fears regarding parts of the Republican agenda they opposed. Irish Americans mirrored the beliefs of many Northerners in the beginning of the war: they wanted to preserve the Constitution and Union as they were before the firing on Fort Sumter, although Irish Americans as a whole generally remained more resistant to legal evolution than did other groups as the war progressed. Few Irish Americans enthusiastically supported the full Republican agenda, but many of them did want the United States restored, and they did not necessarily see their opposition to the Republican Party as contradictory to having an American identity. In describing a fictional banquet given in honor of his literary creation, Miles O’Reilly, Charles Halpine urged that the issues of emancipation, conscription, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus stood subsidiary to overall loyalty to the country. Halpine declared that

To the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor,

And we ain’t for the nigger, but are for the war.

At a packed March 1863 Union rally at Cooper Institute in New York City, James T. Brady comparably assured the audience of the loyalty of Irish American Democrats: “I differ with many of you in regard to the causes, the conduct, the prosecution, and the probable results of the war in which we are engaged. But…I would be false to the Irish race…if I did not use my last breath, and employ the last quiver of my lips, in the utterance of a prayer to Heaven against all assailants, internal and external, for the preservation of the American Government.” Within days of Lincoln’s reelection, the Pilot called on its readers to support the administration, for “the integrity of the constitution, the preservation of the Union, and the restoration of peace.”84

Intense opposition by some Irish Americans to the Republican agenda, and hostility to African American aspirations for equality and citizenship, did not mean rejection of an increasing sense of American identity. The politicizing experience of military service caused some Irish American soldiers in the field to reconsider their former positions. Many Irish American soldiers held on to racist hostility against blacks, to be sure. Irish-born William Jones scorned the Emancipation Proclamation, vowing that he “did not enlist to fight for those black devils” and grumbling that a soldier’s salary was low enough without the injustice of now “fighting for blacks.” A soldier in the Irish American 155th New York likewise noted the dissatisfaction “one and all” of his comrades “because of the Nigger proclamation.”85

Yet other Irish American soldiers criticized slavery on encountering it. Michael Finnerty of the Ninth Massachusetts identified slavery’s “blighting influences” as the reason that the nation’s capital lacked the “bustle” of New York and Boston. While on picket duty near Big Bethel, Virginia, in March 1862, Patrick Guiney received five black females into his lines and proclaimed “In the name of old Ireland and Massachusetts, I set you free.” A few weeks later, Guiney sent his wife some “fragrant Virginia leaves” given to him “by the only Virginia lady I met on the march—she was black.”86

Writing shortly after the war, Michael Macnamara of the Ninth Massachusetts stereotyped African Americans, occasionally calling a black woman “wench” and referring to a black boy as having the “agility of a monkey.” On the other hand, Macnamara described an encounter with an eighty-year-old man who had worked his entire life as a slave, his strength sapped from a now withered body, and recounted, “We felt, more than ever, in heart and principle, an uncompromising enmity to human slavery.”87

Not all Irish Americans objected to arming blacks, moreover, although egalitarianism did not always motivate their position. In October 1863, Charles G. Halpine reminded his audience that “every black regiment in garrison would relieve a white regiment for service in the field,” and “every ball stopped by a black man would save the life of a white soldier.” In a poem, “Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt,” Halpine argued that whites could arm blacks for these reasons while disclaiming any admission of social or political equality. The poem included lines such as, “In battles wild commotion / I shouldn’t at all object / If Sambo’s body should stop a ball / That was comin’ for me direct,” and ended, “The right to be kilt we’ll divide wid him, / And give him the largest half!” Halpine argued elsewhere that military discipline would provide the “best school” in which the “elevation” of freedmen “to the plane of freedom can be conducted.”88

Moreover, a few Irish Americans even became Republicans. By October 1863, former Irish Brigade commander Thomas Meagher wrote another Irish American who faced opposition for his new Republican allegiance, Patrick Guiney, to condemn Irish Americans who blindly followed the Democratic Party. Meagher expressed his intense frustration that “to their own discredit and degradation, they [Irish Americans] have suffered themselves to be bamboozled into being obstinate herds in the political field,” and that “Democrats they profess themselves to be from the start—the instant the baggage-smashers and cut-throat lodging-house-keepers lay hands on them—and Democrats they remain until the day of their deaths, miserably and repulsively regardless of the conflicting meanings that name acquires through the progressive workings of the great world about them.” Meagher further asserted that “under the captivating pretexts of the States-Rights, Habeas Corpus, and the popular claims and rights of the kind,” the Democratic Party “would cripple the national power.” Meagher’s statements, and outspoken Republican support at the time, crippled his position within the Irish American community, and he sought a fresh start as acting governor of the Montana Territory after the war, a position he held until his death on July 1, 1867.89

Thus, while Irish American civilians and soldiers engaged in the same debates as native-born Northerners about the prosecution of the war, as well as freedom for the slaves, some adhered to racism while others embraced egalitarianism, or at least accepted a pragmatic approach so as to win the war. Many Irish Americans maintained devotion to the Democratic Party even where it became associated with slavery and secession. On the other hand, at this moment of intense debate and party fluidity, some former Irish American Democrats altered their views, and a few even went so far as to join the Republicans.

Conclusion

Nativism undoubtedly survived the war. Intractable nativists cited Irish American participation in the Draft Riots and their hostility to emancipation, and it seems certain that dissent from Irish Americans was more frequently linked to assertions of disloyalty than was the case with other groups. In March 1863, the Ladies Aid Society in Dubuque, Iowa, refused to help the wives of Irish Catholic soldiers, advising them to “look to Catholics” for assistance. In February 1864, a Protestant mob attacked a Catholic parish fair in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, damaging property before cursing the Irish Americans there and calling them traitors, while the mob’s leader, former probate judge and army chaplain Thomas W. Newman, cautioned “that every Catholic priest and Bishop in America prepare very soon to lose their heads.”90

Lingering criticism and isolated instances of anti-Irish action, however, do not amount to a widespread resurgence of nativism. The interaction of different groups united in support of the Union, as well as other changes wrought by the Civil War, crippled the nativist impulse of the 1850s. The largest nonpolitical nativist association at the time, the Order of United Americans, preached disdain of immigrants and Catholics across sixteen states in the early 1850s, but could not even maintain a quorum at its last recorded meeting in 1862. The Sons of America, which wielded great influence in Pennsylvania, crumbled with the outbreak of the Civil War, as did the Order of United American Mechanics.91

The decay of nativist organizations during the Civil War did not mean that nativism vanished, never to reappear in the United States. Nonetheless, the service of Irish Americans allowed for them to assert that they deserved greater inclusion in American society and equality of citizenship based on the proof of loyalty offered by their military service. The diminution of nativism eliminated the main challenge to Irish American inclusion and equal citizenship, in contrast to the challenges African Americans would face after the war, and allowed Irish Americans to assert claims for further legal change during Reconstruction.

More broadly, Irish American soldiers experienced acceptance, not hostility, in the ranks, as they more openly practiced their religion, celebrated their ethnic culture, and even continued to proclaim their support for Irish nationalism. Celebrating Irish American culture, practicing Catholicism during the Civil War, and remembering one’s native land or heritage did not indicate an unwillingness to Americanize, any more than Irish American celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day, Italian American feasts in Boston’s North End, or continued Catholicism does today. Instead, the openness with which Irish Americans held their ethnic identity and religion in the 1860s accompanied the corresponding shifts generated by the meaning of Irish American service and support for the Union. Irish Americans felt it increasingly possible to celebrate their ethnic identity within an American context, and they incorporated an American identity alongside their Irish one. These changes reveal that Irish Americans increasingly felt they could be considered Americans even where they did not completely abandon their ethnicity, or eschew Catholicism to embrace the Protestant majority, as some argue they would have had to do to assimilate. Instead, Irish Americans even placed Fenianism within the context of good American citizenship, identity, and allegiance.

Moreover, some Irish Americans reconsidered their political views based on their military experiences, and even Irish nationalists adjusted their focus. While many Irish Americans at home remained resistant to the Republican agenda, the Civil War nonetheless helped awaken for Irish America as a whole a new appreciation for the United States as a beacon of republicanism and a belief that its perpetuation would help Ireland and the entire world. In this climate, Irish Americans increasingly recognized the American component of their identity and allegiance, and these changes generated the potential to lead to growing calls, after the war, for a more nationalized and broadened understanding of what American citizenship meant.