The Harp and the Eagle

Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865

Susannah J. Ural

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814709184
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

On the eve of the Civil War, the Irish were one of America's largest ethnic groups, and approximately 150,000 fought for the Union. Analyzing letters and diaries written by soldiers and civilians; military, church, and diplomatic records; and community newspapers, Susannah Ural Bruce significantly expands the story of Irish-American Catholics in the Civil War, and reveals a complex picture of those who fought for the Union.

While the population was diverse, many Irish Americans had dual loyalties to the U.S. and Ireland, which influenced their decisions to volunteer, fight, or end their military service. When the Union cause supported their interests in Ireland and America, large numbers of Irish Americans enlisted. However, as the war progressed, the Emancipation Proclamation, federal draft, and sharp rise in casualties caused Irish Americans to question—and sometimes abandon—the war effort because they viewed such changes as detrimental to their families and futures in America and Ireland.

By recognizing these competing and often fluid loyalties, The Harp and the Eagle sheds new light on the relationship between Irish-American volunteers and the Union Army, and how the Irish made sense of both the Civil War and their loyalty to the United States.

1
“An Irishman Will Not Get to Live in This Country”
The Irish in America, 1700–1860

The history of the Irish in America is both long and complex, involving the immigration of Protestants and Catholics, skilled laborers and peasants, rebels and farmers. Understanding why Irish men volunteered for the Union Army in 1861 and why their families supported or challenged this decision requires an understanding of the generations preceding them. In achieving this understanding, one can examine what the Irish hoped to find in America, how they went about accomplishing their goals, and how these factors influenced their actions during the American Civil War.

In the decades before the war, most Irish immigrants settled in or near the cities of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. Irish immigration from before the Great Famine of 1845 through 1855 involved Irish Protestants of varying means, but few fit the destitute image so commonly associated with the “huddled masses.” Even so, they did not always find life in America as successful as they had hoped, nor did many colonists, and later Americans, find the Irish a particularly positive addition to their “city on the hill.”

Ulster Irish were the backbone of Irish immigrants to the British colonies in America and the late-eighteenth-century United States. In the early seventeenth century, Presbyterian Scotsmen had settled in Northern Ireland, encouraged by an English government hoping to pacify rebel Ireland and encourage the development of a Protestant ruling class. Some of these Ulster Scots or Ulster Irish, as they came to be known, chose to continue their westward journey and traveled to North America as part of the “Great Migration” of 1717–1775. Sharp fluctuations in the Irish linen industry, combined with industrial depressions and the resulting changes within Ulster society, inspired some of the departures. Increasing rents due to rising prices or competition for land were also to blame, and Irish farmers looked toward America for better opportunities. For others still, Anglican discrimination against the Ulster Irish Presbyterians’ belief drove them to the United States. Motivated primarily by these economic and religious factors, nearly 250,000 Ulstermen migrated to the American colonies.¹

When the Ulster Irish arrived in America, large numbers of them settled in New England, especially in the growing town of Boston, where they soon became the focus of hostility. Puritan city leaders resented the Ulster Irish loyalty to Presbyterianism while other Bostonians focused on economic issues, primarily the number of destitute immigrants depleting the town’s limited charitable resources that, many believed, should not be wasted on noncitizens. The 1730s brought an economic recession to the already tense ethnic situation and witnessed several riots as Bostonians organized to harass the Ulster Irish and encourage a second migration—out of Boston. City leaders even went so far as to forbid one ship’s captain from landing his Irish “Transports.”²

Ulstermen who settled in Pennsylvania and areas farther south found more success, usually due to their ability to dominate sparsely populated areas or to their settling in colonies with greater religious tolerance. The western hills of Virginia and the Carolina backcountry had plenty of free land and economic opportunities. Even here, though, the Ulster Irish had difficulties with colonial governments, most commonly regarding the Irishmen’s relationship with the local Indian peoples. Colonial leaders frequently complained of their endless efforts to mend relations with Indians as the Ulstermen pushed farther and farther into the frontier and onto lands that colonial governments had secured for the Indians. All was not perfect in Pennsylvania either, as Ulstermen complained that the Quaker-dominated assembly was corrupt and tyrannical and enforced excessive taxation. In protest the Ulster Irish led a march on Philadelphia while their fellow Ulstermen in North Carolina voiced opposition to the colonial government’s tyranny, as Ulstermen saw it, in the “Regulation” movement that dominated the backcountry in the 1770s. Neither group found much success, though, especially the Regulators, whose defeat at the battle of Alamance in 1771 included the execution of their leaders.³

Despite these conflicts, by the time of the American Revolution most Ulster Irish were successfully adapting to American society, and many of their children defined themselves as Americans with little interest in celebrating their ethnic heritage.⁴ In fact, the rare moment when they sought to document their lineage occurred only when they sought to differentiate themselves from later-arriving groups of Irish in America. Ulstermen adopted the title “Scots-Irish” to demonstrate that unlike the destitute Irish Catholics pouring into mid-nineteenth-century America, the Ulster Irish were skilled Presbyterian Scotsmen and were only Irish by virtue of a brief period of settlement in Ireland before they moved on to the United States.⁵

The number of Irish Catholics entering America was limited during the “Great Migration” of Presbyterian Ulstermen. Most Catholics lacked the money for the journey from Ireland and the majority of those who did come arrived as indentured servants or convicts. After serving out their time of servitude or bondage, these Irish Catholic laborers and convicts migrated to the frontier, settling in the Appalachian Mountains where land was inexpensive. Unlike among the Ulster Presbyterians, religion was not an essential component of these immigrants’ identity. Many had left Ireland as nonpracticing Catholics, having been born into the faith with little understanding of it and no real devotion to it. For that reason many Irish Catholics settling on the Appalachian frontier in the eighteenth century converted to the Protestant evangelical faiths popular during the Great Awakening or adapted to the traditions of the Ulster Presbyterians on the frontier.⁶

Irish emigration to America slowed during the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815) and the War of 1812. Both conflicts made transatlantic travel dangerous, and Irish emigration to the United States between 1783 and 1814 is estimated at only 100,000 to 150,000.⁷ The next wave of Irish immigration occurred between 1815 and 1845, bringing nearly one million migrants to North America. This nearly doubled the total Irish emigration of the previous two centuries, and by the mid-1830s the majority of this group was arriving in the United States. The primary catalyst for this movement was the economic recession following the Napoleonic Wars that led to the consolidation of estates and the evictions of thousands of Irish tenants, sparking a period of social and economic upheaval as small Protestant landowners and the Irish Catholic tenancy sought control over their increasingly chaotic lives.⁸

News from America also contributed to this rise in immigration. Ulstermen living in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas spoke of the plentiful land and opportunities, and increasing numbers of Irish, Catholic and Protestant, were listening to what emigrant John Bell called the “whisperings of ambition.”⁹ One Ulsterman living in Philadelphia advised his friends that the “young men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as soon as possible. . . . [T]here is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America.”¹⁰ Some Irish Catholics would make this journey, too, but they hesitated to leave home. The peasants were tied to the land by traditions of history, religion, and language, and it would take the dramatic events of the next few decades to convince them to break their economic and cultural ties to Ireland.¹¹

The 1820s marked a turning point in the demographics of Irish emigration to America. Although the linen industry improved in the late 1820s and 1830s, it did so in ways that decreased the cottage employment on which spinners and weavers in southern and western Ireland had come to depend. With the additional pressures from declining prices for farm products, an increasing population, and continued religious persecution, Irish Catholics joined those searching for work in England and then moving on to opportunities in America, and between 1820 and 1850 they came to dominate the migration from Ireland.¹²

The reception the Irish received was not welcoming, though not quite as hostile as it would become by the 1840s and 1850s. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, nativism existed in America, but it was not the organized national movement that it would become by mid-century. Anti-Catholic sentiment, however, existed throughout the young nation, especially where immigrants settled in large numbers and seemed to threaten the Protestant traditions that dominated American life. By the mid-1820s and 1830s, native-born American frustration with the growing Catholic population had increased dramatically.

In 1824, for example, New York City was wracked with the violence of the Greenwich Village Riot of July 12. This was Orange Day, when Irish Protestants celebrated the triumph of the armies of Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James II at the Battle of Boyne in 1690. The day began with Irish Protestant laborers marching through Greenwich Village waving orange flags to commemorate the anniversary, a tradition brought with them from Ireland. A determined group of Irish Catholic weavers confronted them and demanded that the Orangemen lower their flags. The ensuing riot injured dozens of Irish Protestants and Catholics, including a pregnant Catholic woman determined to play a role in the defeat of the Orangemen.¹³ Arrests and newspaper editorials indicated that each side shared blame, but the punishments handed down were unbalanced. Dozens of Irish Catholics were among those arrested following the riot, but not a single Protestant joined them in jail or at the subsequent trials.¹⁴ As nativism, which had always included a strong anti-Catholic element, intensified, the focus of the protest narrowed beyond the Irish generally to target Irish Catholics in particular.

The 1830s brought continued anti–Irish Catholic activities by the city leaders of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, who bemoaned issues ranging from the horrible burden of the Irish poor on the cities’ charity to the amount of urban property owned by the Catholic Church. In Boston, the famous artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse advised Americans that the only way to curb the flow of Catholics, most of whom were Irish, into America was to end immigration. “Awake! To your posts!” warned Morse. “Place your guards . . . shut your gates!” Joining him were radical Protestant ministers organizing associations to warn the public of the growing Catholic menace. The Boston Recorder, the New York Observer, and the Christian Spectator raged against what they deemed the blasphemy of the Roman Catholic Church, the immorality and idolatry it taught, the cruelty disseminated by its priests, and the submissiveness demanded by the Pope of his minions. Contributing to this was Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and leading northern abolitionist. Beecher raged against the growing Catholic threat to America, and he called on Protestants to rise and meet this menace within the nation.¹⁵

In 1834, tension erupted into a fiery inferno when a popular account appeared reporting torture and debauchery in a Boston convent. That year Rebecca Reed published Six Months in a Convent, which was a fabricated tale of harrowing experiences and escape from the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Nativists had long been suspicious of the activities of the nuns working in the convent school that educated the daughters of some of the city’s wealthiest families. In actuality, the young women were exposed to little Catholicism at the convent, where the Ursuline superior Sister Edmund St. George had adjusted religious services and classroom instruction to accommodate the largely Protestant student body.¹⁶ Reed’s tale, however, reinforced the nativist public’s worst fears, and it quickly became the year’s best-selling novel. Within the first week of publication, over ten thousand copies were sold. By the end of the first month a horrified and insatiable public had purchased two hundred thousand copies.¹⁷

In late July 1834 the events came to a terrifying climax. One Ursuline nun suffered a nervous breakdown and was found wandering through the streets of Charlestown until sisters from the convent located her at her brother’s home, where the nun agreed to return to the convent. As the story spread through the city, though, the events evolved into tale of oppressive Catholicism and compromised women. Anti-Catholic activists twisted the nun’s experience into a tale of capture and torture in their belief that her experience was like that of Rebecca Reed. Rumors circulated through Boston of the kidnapping of young innocent girls who were forced to remain within the convent against their will, ordered to accept papal doctrines, and subjected to unthinkable violations.

Into this tempest arrived Reverend Lyman Beecher on a speaking tour. In a series of sermons delivered on Sunday, August 10, 1834, Reverend Beecher called Bostonians to arms, demanding that they meet this Catholic menace with resolve and deliver innocent Americans from the papal conspiracy. The following evening a mob of nearly fifty laborers stormed the convent, smashing windows and doors and donning nuns’ habits until fire forced them into the gardens. There the men danced around the courtyard and watched, along with fire companies who refused or were too frightened to douse the flames, as the Ursuline convent burned to the ground. While many leading Bostonians later denounced the violence, they applauded the motivations of the mob and their determination to confront the Catholic threat in America.¹⁸

By the 1840s, similar violence was common in Irish Catholic areas of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. On May 6, 1844, Protestant community members met in the Irish Catholic–dominated Kensington district of Philadelphia to discuss their fears of the growing Irish Catholic burden on their community and the increasing influence of Catholics in America. The meeting turned violent as members confronted Irish Catholics in the area, and it erupted into a bloody riot lasting three days. The local militia brought an end to the fighting, but the destruction was staggering. Kensington was a mess of shattered glass, burning churches, and bleeding men. Two Catholic churches, St. Michael’s and St. Augustine’s, were destroyed, dozens of Irish Catholics had lost their homes in the fires set by the Protestant mob, and sixteen Catholics lay dead. Two months later, similar events occurred in Southwark, followed by smaller incidents in other Irish Catholic sections of Philadelphia. This violence was focused on Irish Catholics in particular. Protestants passed several German Catholic churches in the rioting in Kensington and left them unscathed, focusing instead on Irish Catholics, whom they viewed as the most impoverished, lazy, and criminal in America.¹⁹

Robert Smith, an Ulster Irishman living in Philadelphia, recalled the violence that year with outrage. He had found some success in America and by 1844 worked as a customs house official, one of only three Irish men to hold such a position among the two hundred officials employed, and he insisted that his position was the result of merit and his close personal ties to President John Tyler. That summer, the Protestant Smith witnessed the ethnic violence in Philadelphia and expressed outrage at the attacks because he saw them as a blow to all foreigners. “Our city,” he told his family in County Antrim, “has been nothing but the scene of bloodshed.” The root of the problem was “native [born] American citizens forming themselves into a body to deprive all the foreigners of their rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the Constitution.” Most of the nativists’ rage, Smith explained, was focused

upon the Irish Roman Catholics and at one of their meetings the Irish rose against them and there was a great number shot on both sides. There was a great many Roman Catholic churches and nunneries burned in this city and as many as fifty killed in one riot. There were 20 cannons discharged in one night by the military and mob, and the military was called in from every part of the state to the amount of 20,000, and a great many of them were shot like dogs. . . . [The violence] was horrible, and many a widow and orphan were left by the scene.²⁰

Despite attacks like these, or perhaps in determined response to them, many Irish Catholic immigrants remained loyal to their faith and their heritage and this turmoil, in Ireland and the United States, would influence the way they viewed the American Civil War. Survival taught them to protect their own interests, and their support for a cause would, by necessity, depend on how it affected their homes, their families, and their dreams for Ireland or America, or both. These lessons ...