CHAPTER 2

The Question of Armed Service

As the crisis of citizenship culminated with the Civil War, whether African Americans or Irish Americans would actively participate in the struggle for the Union remained uncertain in light of their prewar experiences and ambiguous allegiances. Yet many Irish Americans and African Americans seized on the opportunity provided them by the Civil War to work toward membership in the broader local and national community, and they entered a new phase in the debate about what American citizenship meant and who could partake in it. Both groups immediately linked any decision to serve in the armed forces with a new location for themselves within the American nation.

Irish American Support of the Union

In contrast to African Americans, few Irish Americans supported the Republican agenda in 1861. Many Irish Americans linked nativism and the Republican Party, which had largely absorbed the Know Nothing Party. Irish Americans overwhelmingly backed Democrat Stephen Douglas during the 1860 presidential election, and Boston’s Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, argued that no Catholic should vote for Abraham Lincoln because the Republican ranks included many former Know Nothings who advocated “hatred and prejudice and injustice to the Irish.” The Pilot urged its readers to “remember that every vote cast for a Republican is an endorsement of [Massachusetts’s] two year amendment. A naturalized citizen who would vote for a party who proscribes his race, does not deserve the rights of citizenship.”1

Some Fenians bemoaned involvement in a war that might kill warriors who would otherwise fight for Ireland’s liberation. Other Irish Americans in the North lamented the possibility of fighting their ethnic counterparts in the South. Some Irish Americans even expressed sympathy for the South, arguing that “the arrogance and fanaticism” of abolitionists “forced” secession.2

For their part, some nativists shunned Irish American offers to participate in words that echo rejection of early African American offers of service. During the summer of 1861, an Illinois recruiter warned that no one should trust Irish Americans to serve as soldiers. Though he later denied making the statement, Quartermaster General S. E. Lefferts of Wisconsin’s militia told an Irish American company offering its services, “There are enough young Americans to put down this trouble inside of ninety days and we do not want any red faced foreigners.” The company voted to disband.3

Yet the reasons why many Irish Americans joined the Union forces reveal much about their growing consciousness of having an American component to their identity, as well as their desire to have a place in the American people. Devotion to the Union and its Constitution inspired many Irish Americans to rally quickly to arms. In November 1860, the New York Irish American blamed the “unjustifiable aggressions of Northern Abolitionism” for precipitating disunion, but called on “every good citizen to stand firmly by the Union.” Within days of the surrender of Fort Sumter, the ambivalence of many Irish Americans in the North melted, and sympathy for the South crumbled. Thousands of Irish Americans attended a rally at Union Square in New York City on April 20, 1861, beneath buildings bedecked with American flags. Officers from Fort Sumter, including its commander Major Robert Anderson, stood on the speakers’ platform, while the colors hauled down from the Fort’s flagpole billowed from a perch in the hand of a nearby statue of George Washington. That same day, the Irish American reiterated its call for “the adopted children of this glorious nation,” to fulfill their duty to the Union, arguing that “our standing in this community, the freedom and equality we proudly claim, are due to no local or sectional concession, but come to us directly from the whole Union, to which our first allegiance is due, under the guarantees of the Constitution which we have sworn to uphold.” In June 1861, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a Philadelphia-based Irish American charitable organization, declared that Irish Americans “will yield not in loyalty to the country which they have adopted as their own.” In Boston, by November 1861, the Pilot argued that the “war of the North is a just one,” and viewed it as an opportunity to increase the spirit of patriotism in the general and Irish American community. “This same war has already made us love our country better than ever we did before,” maintained the Pilot, which predicted, “it will correct the corruption of all our political proceedings.” Many Irish Americans hoped that the sight of men from their community enlisting against the Confederate rebellion, standing “together,—no thought over party or sect, / But shoulder to shoulder, as brothers and men,” would vanquish nativism.4

Similar to the role ministers played in the Northern black community, bishops comprised a corps of leaders for Irish Catholics. Almost immediately, Catholic bishops in the North displayed their loyalty to the Union. New York’s archbishop John Hughes draped an American flag from his cathedral, the bishops of Chicago and Brooklyn had the national symbol hoisted over their residences, and Hughes, Cincinnati’s bishop John Purcell, and Bishop Clement Smith of Dubuque, Iowa, all spoke out for the Union. Boston’s bishop John Fitzpatrick supported Governor John A. Andrew’s immediate initiative of enlisting a regiment of Irish Americans from Massachusetts. The Catholic Church’s position of recognizing only lawfully established governments also helped energize Irish American disdain toward a Southern rebellion one early Irish American volunteer identified as standing “against law, order, and constitutional liberty.”5

England’s pro-Confederate stance further antagonized Irish Americans. In late spring 1861, the Pilot declared, “When we Irish are side by side with England in any quarrel we must be in the wrong. It is the natural instinct of our race to hate the English side, and take the other; and if the southern S[t]ates of America have England for their backer, they must look on it as a thing of fate to have Ireland for their foe.”6

On the other hand, Irish American willingness to support the Union did not include unbridled enthusiasm for all the changes potentially to be wrought by the war. Some Irish Americans in the North feared distortion of the antebellum Union, and the possibility that the North would impose on the South a relationship similar to the one England imposed on Ireland. One anonymous Irish American advocated action “to subdue the enemies of the Constitution” but cautioned in the summer of 1861 against abandoning the “glorious form of government established by our forefathers in 1787.” Writing under the pen name “A Constitutional Unionist,” he feared that subjugation of the South would render the region “provincialized,” and its population no longer self-reliant to “exercise the duties of citizenship.” Another author, from Minnesota, warned that “fanatical” Republicans and “nigger worshippers” sought to alter the nation’s political foundation. Both writers sought restoration of the Union, but only on terms as if secession had never occurred.7

These views generated paradoxical tensions that persisted through the war and complicated Irish American relations with the Union. In August 1861, the Pilot squarely blamed Republicans for bringing about the Civil War. The newspaper stated that Republican insistence on “subjugation of the slave States” and hostility to slavery “endangered the whole fabric of society.” In the same edition, the Pilot attacked Lincoln for treating Irish Americans “ungratefully and cruelly,” and impatiently called for promotions from among that community. Deeming a rumored commission in the federal army for the anti-Catholic Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi as an “insult upon the whole Catholic community,” the newspaper threatened that the “surest way to stop the war would be to prevail on the whole Irish force to withdraw from the field.” Yet, the Pilot’s editors still hoped “that by the cooperation of all true lovers of the country, native Americans and adopted Americans, we shall see the majesty of the Government of our fathers restored to its former splendor, and the bonds of the Union drawn together.” The Pilot thus integrated all Americans, native-born and newcomer, through conservative but nationalistic reunion.8

In the South, localism and the excitement of participating in the birth of a new country inspired Irish Americans there to support the Confederacy, just as those in the North embraced the Union. Yet, only 84,000 of the 1.2 million Irish immigrants in America as of 1860 resided within the Confederacy, a circumstance which validates generalizing about Irish America based on Northern experiences.9

In the end, overlapping and nonexclusive factors motivated Irish American Union enlistees despite their general hostility to the Republican agenda: the wave of patriotism that swept the North after Fort Sumter, devotion to the ideals of the Republic, a desire to conquer nativism, and a view that maintaining the Union assisted Ireland’s liberation and ensured the existence of a safe haven for future Irish immigrants. Local loyalties, friendships, and the need for money stood foremost in the minds of other volunteers. The calculation that led to enlistment differed for each man. Recognizing that a variety of factors inspired Irish American volunteers does not detract from the political importance of their service but acknowledges a finer-grained consideration of these individuals who fought for the Union. Ideology, belief in the cause for which they fought, a desire to serve the interests of the United States as well as Ireland, and matters such as personal reputation and financial responsibilities played intersecting roles in encouraging many Irish Americans who volunteered to support the Union.10

At the same time many of its members professed a conservative loyalty, Irish America as a community seized on the opportunities for change afforded by the war. Just as African Americans would, in the course of their determining whether to fight for the Union, Irish Americans recognized that military service validated a claim to equal inclusion. Irish Americans almost immediately coupled the question of whether to serve with demands for radical shifts in both society and legal doctrine: the abandonment of nativism, integration of immigrants into the national polity, and an affirmation that American nationalism could incorporate foreign-born newcomers who wished to embrace the Republic.

Irish American Debate about What Service Meant

Irish American soldiers in the field stood at the vanguard of this early wartime conversation about citizenship. Thomas F. Meagher became one of the most prominent voices on the public stage to state that members of his ethnic community had an American identity as well as an Irish one and to promote a concept of American nationalism that incorporated immigrants based on their devotion to the Republic.

Born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1823, Meagher early on established his reputation as an impassioned Irish nationalist. The British banished Meagher to Van Diemen’s Land after he helped lead a failed uprising in 1848. Tasmania could not contain the revolutionary, however, and Meagher escaped to arrive in New York City in late May 1852, where cheering Irish Americans greeted their newest hero. Meagher commenced a lecture tour that took him through New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and across the Deep South within a year of his arrival in America, gained admission to the New York bar in September 1855, and founded the Irish News the following April. Meagher endorsed James Buchanan’s candidacy for president, scorned abolitionism as hostile to republican government, and called himself a “Democrat in heart.”11

As the Civil War loomed, Meagher mirrored the conflicted opinions initially displayed by some Irish Americans. Just prior to the barrage on Fort Sumter, Meagher declared that his “sympathies” were “entirely with the South,” but his stance completely changed once hostilities erupted. Meagher joined the Irish American Sixty-ninth NYSM but nonetheless revealed a continuing attentiveness to Irish nationalism, and he hoped that the experience Irish American troops would receive during the war might assist Ireland’s future liberation. Meagher’s regiment fought at First Bull Run, even though its three-month term of enlistment had expired, and it suffered heavy casualties and lost its colonel, Michael Corcoran, to capture.12

The regiment arrived back in New York City on July 27, 1861, and within weeks, began recruiting to fight again as the core of an Irish American brigade that Meagher organized. An Irish revolutionary who had previously focused on the liberation movement for his native land, Meagher now embraced both sides of his identity, at once Irish and American. From his position as one of Irish America’s spokesmen, Meagher urged members of his community to defend the Union, and he declared to all Americans how this participation solidified Irish American status within the Republic. Meagher’s addresses comprised something more than simple recruiting speeches: they helped define an American identity for Irish in the United States.

On August 29, 1861, tens of thousands of people attended a fair held at Jones’s Wood in New York to benefit the widows and children of members of the Sixty-ninth NYSM lost at First Bull Run. There, various stands sold beer, watermelon, and ice cream amid music and dancing. During the keynote oration, Meagher reminded his audience that at the same time they enjoyed the festival’s merriment, there existed “little hearts that have grown big and heavy in darkened rooms,” while vainly waiting to hear their fathers’ footsteps. Meagher offered this sacrifice up on behalf of the entire ethnic community. Those “slain in battle” sealed “their oath of American citizenship with their blood,” Meagher declared, and those assembled at the fair claimed “these soldiers as our brothers,” who fell in support of the “most encouraging and beneficent” government that “the world has ever known.”13

Meagher saw glory devolve on all who fell, “wherever they may have been born, at whatever altar they may have worshipped, to whatever school of politics they may have belonged,” and he centered attention not on Ireland’s liberation but on the Union cause. Meagher resoundingly affirmed the goodness of American republicanism and the necessity of perpetuating it for the benefit of the entire world. To rousing applause, Meagher appealed for Irish Americans to stand by the Union at any cost. Meagher assured listeners of his Democratic credentials but declared that the president’s party became irrelevant in times of crisis because national needs trumped partisanship.14

Building to his concluding crescendo, Meagher incorporated a subject sure to arouse the passions of any good Irish American: England. Even here, Meagher used this topic to argue for the primacy of the American struggle. Meagher declared that the same English aristocracy that oppressed Ireland now opposed the United States government, and he vowed that the Confederacy, which enjoyed the “patronage” of such an aristocracy, can “never have the heart and arm of any Irishman who has learned the history of the Stars and Stripes…and who…foresees…the liberty of Ireland.” At his oration’s zenith, Meagher made his final argument, punctuated by frequent cheering, incorporating Irish Americans into the national polity while inextricably linking the fate of Ireland and the Union. “Every blow that, with the shout of ‘Feac an bealac’…clears the way for the Stars and Stripes,” Meagher proclaimed to his audience, discouraged the “English aristocracy” and deprived it of allies, “and thus so far avenges and liberates the island of which it has been the persecution.” With that being so, Meagher argued, “let us, who hail from Ireland…we, who have taken an oath of loyalty…not to any one isolated State, but to all the States…that built up the powerful and resplendent Union…stand to the last by the Stars and Stripes…the illustrious insignia of the nation that, of all the world, has been the friendliest sanctuary of the Irish race.” Deftly weaving through the arguments as to why Irish Americans should fight, Meagher asserted that doing so not only assisted the Irish cause but affirmed their identity as American citizens, even while the meaning of that status remained undefined.15

Meagher eagerly took his oratory beyond New York. On September 14, 1861, thousands of people gathered in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to attend a Union rally organized by P. T. Barnum. Placing the Civil War in an international context, Meagher described the United States as bestowing “a glorious future not only to my own native Ireland but to humanity at large,” and he emphasized that should the American flame be extinguished, so also would that of republicanism worldwide. Meagher explained that one became an American through the choice of embracing its republican ideals, and he vowed that he would have sustained even a Know Nothing if duly elected (though he did take the opportunity to celebrate the Know Nothing Party’s demise). Meagher argued that, regardless of state-imposed strictures, the oaths that Irish Americans gave to the United States created a duty “to the Union.” Moreover, according to Meagher, so many Irish lives had mixed into the United States since its founding, and ideological ties so deeply linked Americans and Irish in mutual devotion to the idea of liberty worldwide, that staying out of the war involved turning one’s back on both countries.16

Meagher delivered a similar speech in Boston a little more than a week later. The event was so popular that some people presented forged tickets in an effort to gain entry, while thousands of others were turned away at the door. Republican Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew introduced Meagher to the cheering crowd and, recognizing the reception he received in what had been a bastion of nativism a few years earlier, Meagher pronounced, “in the centre of the city where this insult to every Irish soldier was conceived, I proclaim it—know nothingism is dead!” Meagher declared that from that point forward “the Irish soldier…shall proudly stand by the side of the native born.”17

To be sure, in certain instances, Meagher tempered the American focus of his message, perhaps in order to persuade more recent arrivals in the United States. After the carnage of the mid-1862 Peninsula campaign, Meagher spoke at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City during a recruiting drive. There, sweltering heat and a cramped space led to a raucous crowd. Along with including his usual American themes, Meagher revealed his dual sense of identity by asking his “countrymen” to stand by his Irish Brigade, “true to the Republic…and true to the memories, the pride and the homes of Ireland,” and he spoke not of the American colors but of the green flag borne by Irish heroes. The New York Times interpreted the positive reaction of Meagher’s audience as proof of their loyalty to the United States, describing how the Irish Americans “adjourned amid the most earnest enthusiasm, evincing as determined patriotism and unswerving loyalty as ever was displayed in a public gathering, and practically demonstrating that the hearts of Irishmen throb with as pure devotion to our flag as ever animated the hearts of a free and noble people.”18

In contrast to his Seventh Regiment Armory speech, most times, Meagher proclaimed the primacy of the mission in America. In declining an 1862 invitation to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, Meagher addressed insinuations that Ireland’s plight remained forefront to Irish Americans: “You perceive that…the perils of another land…have been uppermost in my mind,” Meagher wrote, before he assured his correspondent, “The country must again be tranquil and united. We, adopted citizens, owe to her our first duty. Upon her destiny depends the fate of Democracy, the world over.”19

Meagher, who started the war as a pro-Southern Democrat devoted to Irish nationalism, came to articulate how Irish American service earned that community inclusion within the broader nation. By fighting and dying for the Union, Meagher argued, Irish Americans tangibly affirmed their naturalization by showing loyalty to its republican ideals. Moreover, Meagher announced, Irish Americans redeemed the Republic by defeating a nativist impulse that had tarnished America’s true values. Meagher consistently asserted that Irish Americans helped restore the United States to her position as a beacon of democracy for the entire world, and gave hope and help to Ireland in the process.

The concepts of equal citizenship, American identity, and inclusion based on military service also appear in private statements from less prominent Irish Americans. Despite coming slightly later than the period on which this chapter focuses, the 1863 letters of Peter Welsh address all three themes in a quintessential way. Welsh’s letters shed light on the ideological, as well as the mundane, reasons why Irish Americans joined the Union army. Moreover, the letters reveal Welsh’s swift sense of belonging in America and his consciousness of the importance of citizenship, prerequisites if Irish Americans were to press for continued legal change after the war. Welsh’s letters help us understand how an Irish American explored privately, in the course of rationalizing his decision to fight for the Union, the dual identity and concept of American citizenship that Meagher articulated publicly.

In contrast to Meagher, Welsh came from the Irish American working class, and he was devoid of political ambition. Born in June 1830 on Prince Edward Island, Welsh settled in the Boston area and married an Irish-born woman in 1857. The young couple moved to New York City, where Peter struggled to earn a living as a carpenter. During the summer of 1862, Peter returned to Boston to help resolve an argument between several family members, but when their wrath turned on him, Peter turned to the bottle. After a drunken spree, Welsh felt so mortified that he enlisted in the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts, and he participated in the Army of the Potomac’s battles from South Mountain until he received a mortal wound at Spotsylvania in 1864.20

Welsh’s unvarnished war letters to a small audience of family members reveal that public pronouncements made by Irish American leaders percolated through the entire ethnic community. Early on in his service, Welsh affirmed his Irish nationalist credentials through his bitter hatred of England, and he argued that helping the United States simultaneously assisted Ireland. Welsh scorned “that acursed harlot of nations England,” and claimed that for decades, it sought to divide and destroy the United States because of its republican liberalism and commercial power. Accordingly, Welsh linked the United States, and his own participation in its defense, to the global struggle for liberty, and he argued that the burgeoning influence of the American Republic forced Britain and other nations to treat their own subjects more liberally. Welsh viewed Union victory in the Civil War as indispensable to maintaining the hope of liberty in Europe, and especially in “poor old Erin.”21

Welsh’s wife disagreed with his choice to enlist, and she challenged him to justify further his reasons for volunteering. In response, Welsh placed provocation for the war at the feet of abolitionist fanatics but held that their actions did not justify rebellion. After reminding his wife Margaret that “rebellion without a just cause is a crime of the greatest magnitude,” Welsh reiterated the global importance of a Union victory: “People of all nations,” Welsh asserted, had a “vital interest” in the outcome of the “first test of a modern free government in the act of sustaining itself against internal enemys,” because failure would sound the death knell of republicanism across Europe.22

Welsh offered his wife another powerful reason which validated his service: his status as a citizen and American. “This is my country as much as the man that was born on the soil and so it is with every man who comes to this country and becomes a citezen,” Welsh proclaimed. Disclaiming any distinction between birthright and naturalized citizenship, Welsh added that he held a deep and vested interest in maintaining the nation’s integrity. To discount his wife’s anticipated arguments regarding nativism, Welsh reminded her that the United States provided them, and thousands of others who had experienced misery abroad, with asylum, food, and comfort. “What would be the condition to day of hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of poor opressed old erin if they had not a free land like this to emigrate to[?]” In contrast to tyranny in Ireland, Welsh reminded his wife, opportunities existed in America that gave people hope, so that even if starting from the humblest origins, one could aspire to receive all the honors that “a great nation” can bestow.23

Welsh embraced it as the duty of all Americans, whether native born or not, to support the Union because of the responsibilities that accrued with citizenship, as well as a moral obligation to help maintain for future generations the best government ever known. While Welsh felt “disgusted with the management of this unfortunate war,” and scorned the “imbecility of an incompetent administration and fanatical nigar worshippers,” he simultaneously staked his life to the national cause and viewed the war as a divinely ordained agent that could invigorate the United States for the entire world’s benefit. As Welsh’s assured his skeptical wife, “there is yet something in this land worth fighting for.”24

Welsh’s father-in-law in Ireland remained unconvinced, and the soldier wrote him directly to justify his decision to volunteer. In contrast with British tyranny, Welsh explained, “just laws and a Constitution which guarentees equal rights and privelages to all” governed the United States. Furthermore, Welsh argued, the United States not only served as a land of opportunity for thousands of Irish immigrants, the Irish had helped found the United States and had earlier served in its armed forces. Welsh fought to ensure that the work done, and blood shed, by his predecessors had not been in vain, as well as to preserve this “best and most liberal government in the world” for unborn generations of Irish refugees and oppressed people across the globe. Although Welsh believed that a “party composed almost wholy of native born citizens” agitated the abolition question that precipitated the war, he declared that nothing could negate his interest in its outcome or his duty to participate as a foreign-born citizen.25

Besides, Welsh justified to his Irish father-in-law, he was “striking a double blow” by fighting in America, because “while we strike in defence of the rights of Irishmen here we are striking a blow at Irlands enemy and opressor.” Privately echoing Meagher’s views that England hated the United States because of the threat its growing naval and commercial power posed, and the beacon of republicanism it provided, Welsh viewed preserving the Union as something which weakened Ireland’s enemy. Welsh in this way articulated the meaning of his carrying the green regimental flag, the “emblem of Irlands pride and glory” entrusted to him on St. Patrick’s Day 1863, in an American army. While displaying devotion to Ireland, Welsh fought for the Union, a compatible duality where Welsh hoped Ireland would someday attain American-style republicanism. Though he inextricably linked his service with striking a blow for Irish liberation, Welsh just as emphatically believed that his enlistment fulfilled a duty of citizenship, and he showed a remarkable sense of his equality and inclusion within America.26

It comes as no surprise that many Irish Americans remembered Ireland’s plight, or placed their decision to serve during the Civil War within its military tradition. Moreover, many Irish American volunteers argued that such service helped Ireland, whether as training for a future liberation movement or, more commonly, as a defense of republicanism on a global scale. Irish Americans naturally remained conscious of their ethnic heritage as an inextricable component of their identity, especially where most of them were either born in Ireland or had parents who were, and many of their leaders possessed Irish nationalist credentials. Yet, at the same time, Irish Americans linked support for the Union with calls for change in their legal, political, and social status. Ethnic leaders and the Irish American press began constructing potent arguments regarding the meaning of Irish American service immediately upon the outbreak of the war. Many Irish American soldiers in the ranks embraced these sentiments as well, as their decision to enlist began a process which accelerated their recognition that they had an American identity along with an Irish one.27

African American Service Rebuffed

In contrast to the generally immediate welcome into the armed forces received by Irish Americans, only a slow progression of events led to black inclusion in the army. Strikingly, although their discussions about whether to serve in the war did not engage with each other, African Americans and Irish Americans asserted some of the same early arguments linking military support for the Union with calls for legal and political change. Black men eagerly sought to participate in the patriotic wave that swept the North after the firing on Fort Sumter, and their efforts to join the military were extensions of prewar claims which sought to transform insecure rights in the North, and enslavement in the South, into a new legal order built on the bedrock of equal rights between races (in contrast to Irish American racism). African Americans in Philadelphia sought to raise two regiments of “Herculean defenders,” the “Hannibal Guards” in Pittsburgh offered their services, and for several months, hundreds of Pennsylvania blacks drilled for combat. Meanwhile, in the South, long-suffering slaves saw the war as the potential moment of their deliverance. As Elijah Marrs, a Kentucky slave who later joined the Union army, recalled, “ideas of freedom began to steal across my brain” once war broke out.28

Most whites, however, rebuffed black initiatives to defend the Union in 1861. The owner of one recruiting center for blacks in Cincinnati felt compelled to remove an American flag hanging above his door, while police told the proprietors of another such office, “We want you d—d niggers to keep out of this; this is a white man’s war.” Police stopped blacks from drilling in New York City and refused to protect them from any racist mob violence that might erupt if they continued to do so. Shortly after the Union disaster at First Bull Run, New York’s governor Edwin D. Morgan turned down the offer of three black regiments. Other blacks offered their service directly to the federal government, but they met with similar rejection.29

Even Massachusetts shunned its black population’s efforts to participate in defending the Union. After the Confederate barrage on Fort Sumter, Boston’s blacks thronged into a Baptist church to pledge fifty thousand soldiers for the Union. “If the Government would only take away the disability,” Robert Morris elsewhere pleaded, “there was not a man who would not leap for his knapsack and musket, and they would make it intolerable hot for old Virginia.” Nonetheless, Massachusetts’s legislature declined a petition to remove the whites-only exclusion from state militia laws.30

For its part, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act during the special summer session of 1861, authorizing seizure of property used to aid the rebellion and permitting discharge of certain slaves on those grounds. Congress recognized Southern blacks as valuable, but passive, assets of which the Confederacy should be deprived: they did not hold rifles, but they released white men for military service by performing the labor necessary for the South’s sustenance. While Republicans sought by the Confiscation Act to nudge the identity of slaves from chattel property to human individuals, blacks were not yet seen as worthy of explicit emancipation or military participation, much less citizenship and inclusion. The First Confiscation Act simply dismissed slaves from the employment of owners deemed to have forfeited their right to the slave’s labor as a result of disloyalty to the United States.31

White exclusiveness galvanized the separatist impulse in some blacks and, in contrast to the Irish American experience in 1861, early enthusiasm among many blacks gave way to ambiguity. Some African Americans called for their community to remain neutral. One man from Troy, New York, beckoned members of his race to avoid their fathers’ experience of serving in combat only to suffer the persistence of slavery and exclusion. Black schoolteacher William H. Parham recounted how the hearts of blacks and whites in Cincinnati beat in indignant unison after the firing on Fort Sumter but vowed that, after subsequent insults, the fight now solely concerned whites. In New York City, blacks considered whether to offer themselves as substitute firemen or a home guard to replace whites who had gone into the army. The plan came to naught after several of them recalled the scorn shown at their earlier offers to serve.32

Other blacks anticipated the moment when white Unionists would call on them, and even those who believed that whites would arm blacks only out of grudging necessity saw a moment of opportunity. Just as Irish Americans did, these individuals linked any military service they might provide with an assertion of inclusion and rights claims. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak, a vocal proponent of black preparation for service, Philadelphia’s Alfred M. Green, sparked a robust debate with those in his community who displayed less enthusiasm. Green called on blacks to set aside “past grievances” in their country’s “time of need,” and instead, ready themselves to capitalize on an “auspicious moment,” as well as participate in the moral contest to crush slavery. A writer identifying himself as “R.H.V.” countered Green’s call and contended that centuries of labor in bondage already entitled all blacks to citizenship rights and, for men, recognition of manhood. R.H.V. warned that the country stood far from ready to initiate a new era, and he balked at the “sacrifice of thousands of our ablest men to encourage and facilitate the great work of regeneration” for an unreceptive United States. Taking up the prewar debate between black integrationists and separatists, R.H.V. wanted to rely on internal black industry and education, not military strength, to open avenues to wealth, respect, and equality.33

R.H.V. challenged Green to respond with a fuller articulation of what he believed blacks could gain from military participation. Green, in turn, argued that war presented an environment conducive to change. Warning against apathy, Green called on blacks to prepare for inevitable service because “no nation” could be emancipated from slavery or prejudice except “by the sword, wielded too by their own strong arms.” Green saw war as an energizing force that could focus his people, afford them greater agency in their demands for equality, and eliminate divisions within the black community over colonization and other issues. According to Green, blacks “should all have our shoulders to the wheel in order to enforce…self-reliance, and ourselves striking blows for freedom,” grasping “as one man” this “most favorable opportunity” to make themselves “felt as a people” and as “part” of the United States. “If ever colored men plead for rights or fight for liberty,” Green counseled, “now of all others is the time. The prejudiced white men, North or South, never will respect us until they are forced to do it by deeds of our own.” Green did not suggest that success would come easily, but he recognized the opportune moment for blacks to act and seize not just freedom but inclusion and equality.34

The Acts of July 17, 1862

Two separate acts, both given final approval on July 17, 1862, profoundly affected the status of African Americans and Irish Americans by recognizing military service as a vehicle for the rapid naturalization of foreign-born immigrants and opening the door for military participation formerly prohibited to blacks. The legislation also underscored where European immigrants stood in contrast to blacks a year into the war. Neither act helped clarify citizenship as a legal concept, but one statute revealed willingness on the part of American society to fast-track into national citizenship European aliens serving as Union soldiers, while the other bill highlighted unreadiness to accord blacks similar inclusion. Whereas the bill concerning immigrants explicitly linked military service to citizenship, the act as to blacks did no such thing. Instead, the significance, in terms of citizenship doctrine, of the legislation that permitted blacks to serve in the army lay in its potential to create a transformative moment.

At the time, naturalization regulations required five years residence in America before an alien could become a citizen. On January 21, 1862, the Senate resolved that the Committee on the Judiciary should consider a bill to confer citizenship on aliens serving in the armed forces. On January 24, 1862, Connecticut Republican congressman Dwight Loomis introduced a bill to similar effect in the House, and on February 3, 1862, Ohio Republican Benjamin Wade submitted to the Senate a resolution from his state’s legislature that urged such a revision to the naturalization laws. During its consideration of the Senate’s version of an act to define the compensation of army officers in mid-March 1862, the House Committee on Military Affairs inserted an amendment stating that

any alien, of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, who has enlisted or shall enlist in the armies of the United States, either the regular or the volunteer forces, and has been or shall be hereafter honorably discharged, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States, upon his petition, without any previous declaration of his intention to become a citizen of the United States, and that he shall not be required to prove more than one year’s residence within the United States previous to his application to become such citizen; and that the court admitting such alien shall, in addition to such proof of residence and good moral character as is now provided by law, be satisfied by competent proof of such person having been honorably discharged from the service of the United States as aforesaid.

The House approved the amendment without debate on June 12, 1862, and the Senate concurred as easily on June 19, 1862. Both bodies continued to deliberate about other provisions in the bill, and ultimately approved it and sent it to the president.35

Accelerating the path to citizenship for European immigrants in the Union army generated little congressional discussion. Extensive deliberation about whether even to allow black participation in the war, on the other hand, reached a shrill pitch on both sides of the debate. By the first anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, northerners increasingly softened their earlier refusals of black service, and they wanted the federal government to prosecute the war with every available means.36

On July 9, 1862, Republican senator James Grimes from Iowa offered an amendment to the militia laws to eliminate any exemption from military service “on account of color or lineage.” Democrat senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware immediately railed against the measure. Saulsbury identified Grimes’s proposal as nothing less than an emancipation scheme, and he thundered to his colleagues, “No sooner are we engaged in civil war, notwithstanding the Administration and Congress announced that the object should be simply for the preservation of the Constitution and the restoration of the Union, than an attempt is made on every occasion to change the character of this war, and to elevate the miserable nigger, not only to political rights, but to put him in your Army, and to put him in your Navy; and while this policy is pursued, the Union never will be restored, because you can have no Union without the preservation of the Constitution.”37

Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio countered Saulsbury, asking whether only the Confederacy should benefit from black labor while “the people of the United States, struggling for national existence, should not employ these blacks for the maintenance of the Government.” Admitting that blacks would probably not serve as soldiers, but as “laborers, as servants, as guards, and spies,” Sherman declared that “gentlemen from the slave States ought not to feel so sensitive about this matter.” Sherman further assured the Senate that “the law of caste is the law of God,” and “whites and blacks will always be separate, or where they are brought together, one will be inferior to the other.” On the other hand, Sherman reminded his listeners that “blacks are in our country—four millions of them,” he recognized an inchoate allegiance by identifying them as “natural friends in subduing this rebellion,” and he urged that every resource at the Union’s disposal be used to suppress the rebellion. Republican senator Henry Wilson from Massachusetts recalled to the Senate black participation in past American battles during the Revolution and War of 1812. Unionist Party senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky feared that including blacks in any form of military service would humiliate the nation’s white men as an admission that “we cannot command white soldiers enough to fight our battles.” Davis then warned that the measure might unleash an uncontrollable situation, and he cited slave revolts to argue that the black man was generally “mild and gentle,” but “when he becomes excited by a taste of blood he is a demon.” Minnesota’s Morton Wilkinson rejected Davis’s condemnation of black inhumanity by having read by the Senate’s secretary Andrew Jackson’s proclamation complimenting the service of blacks at New Orleans.38

Over the next few days, the Senate continued debating in the same vein whether to authorize blacks to serve as Union laborers or soldiers. The Senate considered additional wrinkles as well: whether to compensate loyal slaveholders for the loss of the services of slaves employed under the bill, as well as New York Republican senator Preston King’s point that “when we take a slave to serve the country in this emergency…he should be made free, whether he belongs to a rebel or not.” The final bill passed by the Senate on July 15, 1862, included a provision that any slave who served the Union as a laborer or soldier became free, as well as his mother, wife, and children, so long as their owner was disloyal. The next day, the House passed the Senate’s bill without amendment or debate, and on July 16, 1862, Lincoln signed into law both the act that offered military service as a quick route to naturalization for foreign-born soldiers, as well as the bill that allowed blacks to serve as Union soldiers. The Senate declared both bills to be law on July 17, 1862.39

While the Act of July 17, 1862, did nothing to recognize the citizenship status of blacks, Charles Sumner perceived the revolutionary potential of this law. On July 16, 1862, the Republican senator from Massachusetts proclaimed to his colleagues, “The new levies which are now called for will be placed under the inspiration of an idea which cannot fail…the idea of freedom, and freedom’s battle once begun cannot be lost.” According to Sumner, “From this day forward the war will be waged with new hopes and new promises. A new power will be enlisted, incalculable in influence, strengthening our armies, weakening the enemy, awakening the sympathies of mankind, and securing the favor of a benevolent God…. The slave everywhere can hope. Beginning to do justice to the oppressed, we shall at last deserve success.” Beyond that, military service had explicit links to citizenship and inclusion as part of the American people. Created by the Union’s inability to achieve a quick victory, this measure opened the door for groundbreaking shifts in the law and afforded blacks an opportunity to assert an American allegiance denied them by slavery and the legal exclusion of Dred Scott.40

African American Service, Manhood, and Calls for Citizenship

Arming black troops was not an automatic given, though, and debate continued among whites about whether to actually do so. Proponents contended that arming blacks would help secure the Union, and some advocates additionally argued that military discipline would prepare freedmen for self-sufficiency. Other supporters declared in racist terms that the purported “obedience,” “servility,” and “ear for music” of blacks would render them useful soldiers. Some whites grudgingly supported arming blacks for the sake of their own self-preservation, admitting that they “would a little rather see a nigers head blowed of then a white mans.” Opponents articulated largely racist arguments as to why blacks should not be armed: some feared that black soldiers would commit crimes once in uniform, while the editors of Boston’s Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, argued that, “twenty thousand negroes on the march would be smelled ten miles distant.” The idea of arming blacks proved especially controversial in Border States such as Kentucky, where politicians, editors, and overall public opinion opposed the measure. On the other hand, recruiting for the First Kansas Colored Infantry began in July 1862, and the regiment mustered into service in January 1863. As for the Bluegrass State, by the end of the war, 23,703 black soldiers hailing from Kentucky served, a number second only to the 24,052 African American troops recruited in Louisiana.41

Two years after combat began, the fluidity generated by the Civil War permitted Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew to recruit black soldiers for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, entrust to them the American and Bay State banners, and review them on May 28, 1863, from the steps of the State House. Even then, some people opposed this policy. New York Democratic governor Horatio Seymour refused to follow Massachusetts’s lead, even after a committee of white New Yorkers argued that recruiting black volunteers to fight under the Empire State’s flag would save whites from an unpopular draft that Seymour opposed. The federal government followed Massachusetts’s suit in earnest, however, arming black regiments that bore the designation United States Colored Infantry (USCI), Cavalry (USCC), Artillery (USCA), or Heavy Artillery (USCHA). Not until the federal government began recruiting for the United States Colored Troops (USCT) did New Yorkers have the opportunity to raise black regiments.42

It also remained to be seen if blacks would enlist in light of earlier rejection of their offers of service. Once recruiting for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts began, though, the reaction of James Henry Gooding of New Bedford, Massachusetts, was typical: he quickly enlisted and offered an active vision of black participation and its potential fruits. A former cook on a whaling ship, the new soldier unified the separatist and integrationist impulses by challenging fellow blacks to participate in the war and embrace in that way “the only opportunity that will ever be offered them to make themselves a people.” Gooding argued that blacks “will have to be the means” of their improvement and exhorted his readers that “there is more dignity in carrying a musket in defence of liberty and right than there is in shaving a man’s face, or waiting on somebody’s table.” For blacks to attain equality, Gooding announced, “they must forego comfort, home, fear, and above all, superstition, and fight for it,” deciding to “become something more than hewers of wood and drawers of water.” In a revealing jab at the antebellum black convention movement, Gooding challenged African American leaders as well, noting that through military service, blacks had “a chance to obtain what they have ‘spouted’ for in ‘convention assembled.’”43

Frederick Douglass agreed, declaring to blacks at a July 6, 1863, Philadelphia rally that “the speediest, and best possible way open to us to manhood, equal rights and elevation, is that we enter this service.” Douglass recognized the “revolution” as “tremendous” after the government and army united “in giving us one thunderous welcome to share with them in the honor and glory of suppressing treason and upholding the star-spangled banner.” Douglass also acknowledged the nationalizing moment of the Civil War, arguing that regardless of local prejudices, “the State is not more than the nation. The greater includes the lesser. Because the State refuses [to arm blacks], you should all the more readily turn to the United States…. Citizenship in the United States will, in the end, secure your citizenship in the State.”44

Even emigrationists joined the war effort. Martin Delany accepted a commission as a major in the Union army late in the war, and the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet recruited black troops, blurring the boundaries between Douglass’s integrationism and the separatism that they espoused before the war. African American military service supported the agenda of both impulses by demonstrating black ability and power on one hand but also extending the prewar arguments asserted by Nell and others about the value, extent, and identity gained by black participation in American life.45

In mid-July 1863, federal troops quelled Draft Riots in New York City, which had turned violently against blacks and resulted in, among other things, Irish American violence against African Americans, lynchings, and the destruction of a black orphanage. At the same time, blacks gathered in Poughkeepsie, New York, to articulate what their community expected in return for its military service for the Union. The Poughkeepsie convention deemed the present war “combat for the sacred rights of Man against the myrmidons of Hell,” a struggle between “anarchy, misrule, barbarism, human slavery, despotism and wrong” versus “self-government, true Democracy, just Republicanism, and righteous principles.” As all had a duty to struggle for the right, the delegates resolved that “warm lead and cold steel” should be “duly administered by two hundred thousand black doctors” against the South. Yet the same delegates also pressed forward prewar arguments to demand changes if they served. One delegate vowed that blacks would fight only on terms of equality with white soldiers, while another one announced that military service automatically transformed each black enlistee into a “Citizen Soldier of the Union.”46

The Poughkeepsie delegates cast black soldiers as defenders of the true ideals of 1776 at a hopeful juncture in history for both the United States and the world. Reminding blacks that no one stood ready for liberty who would not fight for it, the convention also claimed for blacks a place among the American people by including “fighting for the land that gave them birth” as one of their “inalienable rights.” The delegates proclaimed that the moment had arrived for African Americans to strike “as men and heroes” while Liberty’s “benignant eye” gazed upon millions of blacks who held the balance of power in the present struggle. More than 34,000 Northern blacks embraced the convention’s message and served in the Union army, a number that comprised about 15 percent of the total 226,000 free blacks in the North, and 7 percent of the total 487,970 free blacks in the United States, as of 1860.47

Whites early on took notice of black assertions. By September 1863, Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis echoed African American statements by identifying blacks as the loyal population of the South, and he rejected the idea that white Union soldiers would shun their assistance, evoking black participation in the Revolution and War of 1812 as evidence. Pushing further, Davis maintained that slaves would take “title to freedom” through military service in a manner far more real than any presidential proclamation could grant them, and he rejected talk of colonizing blacks as a “humiliating and unworthy” idea after these champions of the Republic “fought the battles of liberty, and have aided us to win back our territory.”48

Linking military service with claims of citizenship, even as that concept remained undefined, merged with one particularly personal issue which also prompted black resolve: their blazing desire to deliver slavery’s death blow. The Act of July 17, 1862, freed any black man who labored for or served in the United States armed forces, along with his mother, wife, and children, but only if each one’s owner bore arms against the United States or otherwise assisted the Confederacy. In February 1864, the freedom granted by the July 1862 legislation and the Emancipation Proclamation expanded to include black conscripts or volunteers (though not their families) owned by Southern unionists. Congress also provided that in slave states that remained in the Union, the hundred dollar bounty payable to each black conscript would go to loyal owners, as well as compensation in an amount not more than three hundred dollars, as determined by state-level commissions. Not until March 1865 did Congress hold “forever free” the wife and children of any person mustered into the service and, acknowledging the difficulties slavery posed for validating marriage, required only evidence that the soldier and his wife lived together or “associated as husband and wife” at the time of enlistment, regardless of any form or ceremony and whether recognized by law or not.49

While legislation slowly evolved to link black military service with freedom, black soldiers knew that in practice they would free individual slaves by pushing forward the Union lines, and that in helping achieve overall Union victory, they assisted in the destruction of slavery as a whole. In training camp with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, James Henry Gooding anticipated the symbolic power of uniformed blacks liberating slaves and hoped that all Americans would realize that “a slave can be made a soldier, to fight for his own liberty.” White supporters also recognized this powerful motive, as Columbia University’s president, Charles King, pointed out to the Twentieth USCI early on: “To you, then, in addition the appeal suitable to every soldier, lies in a higher and holier sense, an appeal as emancipators of your own race, while acting as the defenders and champions of another. You are in arms, not for the freedom and law of the white race alone, but for universal law and freedom.”50

Conclusion

Irish American soldiers became the vanguard for those of their community who argued that service to the Republic defeated nativism, served as a communion between Irish Americans and native-born Americans, and earned Irish Americans an identity and equal inclusion as American citizens. Irish Americans argued that they established their place as full members within the polity, despite their lack of birthright citizenship, based on their choice to embrace and support the same political values that native-born American citizens held dear.51

Moreover, in contrast to Know Nothing contentions that they did not wish to accept American values and political practices, Irish American leaders and soldiers cast their persistent concern for Ireland’s liberation as a desire to export American ideals abroad. Irish Americans argued that they not only embraced and wanted to preserve American republicanism here, they wanted to replicate it in Ireland. Irish Americans also associated themselves with the Founding generation by virtue of their defense of the Constitution. In so doing, Irish Americans began to broaden American nationalism, rejecting nativist definitions of it to instead promote the idea that anyone could become an American on embracing common American principles.

Even more striking, more than 178,000 blacks, four-fifths of whom (if not more) had been slaves, served in the Union army. Another 10,000–18,000 blacks served in the Union navy. Approximately 36,000 black soldiers died in the army (disease caused 80 percent of those deaths in contrast to about 60 percent of white Union soldiers’ deaths). William J. Watkins’s prewar advocacy, claiming for blacks their place as American citizens and soldiers but pronounced in the deliberative calm of a legislative committee room, now thundered across the country in both word and action, and consummated a point of no return in American race relations. Participation in the Civil War helped unify the nationalist/separatist and integrationist wings within the Northern black community, just as it helped blur the boundaries between Irish nationalists and those who advocated sloughing off all characteristics of ethnic culture. Blacks advanced toward equality simply by enlisting in the armed forces, but they also linked Civil War service to demands for major change and began to define and celebrate how it impacted them as individuals and as a community even before the Union’s victory. Especially for blacks, military service had profound personal and political meanings that not only hastened the death of slavery but accelerated and helped determine the direction of the transformation of American citizenship.

Both groups quickly linked their support for the Union with an expectation of inclusion and equal standing in the American people, although neither group at this time promoted a more robust definition of what national citizenship meant. On the other hand, arguments for inclusion had been articulated before without permanent success. Whether this service would lead to permanent changes remained yet to be seen.