DAMIAN SHIELS
LSU Press
$50
ISBN 9780807183700
REVIEWED BY
Daniel Mulhall
Daniel Mulhall is a former Irish ambassador to the USA whose latest publication is Pilgrim soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his time (New Island Books, 2023).
The American Civil War was a hinge in US history, dividing the staider antebellum period from the effervescence of the ‘Gilded Age’ when America was made great through the turbulent interaction of tooth-and-claw capitalists and myriad immigrant workers, many of whom were Irish. The Civil War was also a watershed for Irish America, which crystallised into a potent political force in the century’s closing decades when its New World financial muscle began to influence the politics of the ancestral homeland.
The Union’s war against the Confederacy broke out just after the peak years of Famine-induced emigration, which saw 1.5 million Irish cross the Atlantic to America between 1845 and 1855. In 1860, 26% of the population of New York and Boston were Irish-born, while the figure for Philadelphia was 18%. As a consequence, a significant proportion of potential recruits in the most populous Northern cities were Irish. Far fewer served in Confederate uniform, reflecting the much smaller Irish immigrant pool there.
The usual estimate of the number of Irish and Irish Americans who fought in the Union Army is 150,000, but in Green and Blue Damian Shiels argues for a higher figure of 250,000—or even more if those born in Britain or Canada as children of Irish immigrants are included in the tally. This allows him to conclude that the Irish were proportionately overrepresented in the ranks of the Union military.
Green and Blue builds on Shiels’s earlier work, The Irish in the American Civil War (2013), which described that war as ‘Ireland’s great forgotten conflict’. Here he argues that it rivals the First World War in the scale of Irish participation. His prime source is the correspondence of 395 Irish-American soldiers extracted from the Union army’s voluminous pension files. He points out that, while we understandably tend to focus on the exploits of the Irish Brigade (as indeed Irish soldiers in other regiments did too), far more Irish served in non-ethnic units.
Shiels insists that their identity was genuinely important to the Union Irish, even if it was more exuberantly articulated in explicitly Irish regiments. The Irish who served in non-ethnic regiments tended to band together, taking comfort from their shared backgrounds. That was natural in an environment where nativist and anti-Irish sentiment, which had peaked in the 1850s, remained rife, although Shiels suggests that its rougher edges were smoothed over by the regimental camaraderie that evolved amidst the mortal dangers of wartime service.
Shiels’s research reveals the importance of class in the Irish experience of the Civil War. Examination of the pensions archive gives him access to the lives of working-class Irish Americans, which augments the picture provided by the memoirs of Irish Americans from the officer ranks. He points to the tensions that existed between the better-off ‘lace curtain’ Irish and the ‘shanty’ Irish.
What motivated so many Irish to enlist? Shiels concludes that economic considerations and patriotism dwarfed all other factors. He cites cases where Irish emigrants were lured to the United States by the economic opportunities of military service. Many found enlisted life to be better-provisioned than they had been accustomed to as civilians. They looked to the opportunities they hoped would open up for them in post-war America.
This book maintains that the patriotic impulses driving Irish Americans had America rather than Ireland as their focus. That view parts company with the classic study of the Irish contribution to the Union cause (Susannah Ural Bruce, The harp and the eagle: Irish-American volunteers and the Union army, 1861–1865), which concluded that Irish Americans’ ‘first loyalties were to Ireland and to their Irish communities in America’. Shiels insists that even those who had recently arrived in America felt a commitment to the defence of the Union in which they and their families planned to make their lives. He goes on to challenge the notion that the Civil War entailed a transition for combatants from ‘Irish’ to ‘American’, suggesting that many had acquired a ‘distinctly American identity prior to the Civil War’. It was ‘a hybrid identity concurrently Irish and American’.
Green and Blue delves into Irish-American attitudes to race highlighted during the anti-draft riots in New York (1863), when African Americans were set upon in an explosion of racial violence. Irish Americans were among those alienated by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was absolute, which put them at odds with the Republican administration. Although there were some Irish desertions after emancipation became law, the vast majority served on loyally until the war’s end. Shiels challenges Frederick Douglass’s contention that Irish-American racism developed when immigrants set foot in the United States. Douglass’s view was probably shaped by his positive experience in Ireland when he arrived there as a freed slave in 1845, but Shiels suggests that immigrants’ unshakable notions of white supremacy had been brought with them from Ireland.
While New York’s Archbishop Hughes saw enlistment as an opportunity for the Irish to prove themselves to be patriotic Americans, historian David Gleeson, writing in The Routledge history of Irish America, observes that, even a decade after the war’s end, the Irish remained ‘not completely American’. The Civil War was indeed a watershed, but the water remained coarse for immigrants.