Patrick Guiney was the colonel commanding the Irish 9th Massachusetts Regiment when he was badly wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness. He would suffer for the rest of his life from the wound to the head he received from a Confederate musket.
Guiney had begun the war as a National Democrat, but in 1864 he supported Lincoln and Emancipation. Four years later he backed Ulysses S. Grant for president. By the 1870s he began to drift away from the Republicans and towards the leftist Workingman’s Party associated with Wendell Phillips, as well as the more conservative Liberals of Charles Francis Adams. Although he was prominent enough that his endorsement was valued by politicians, by the 1870s he was a prematurely aged war veteran afflicted by the effects of his old wounds.
His daughter Louise Imogen Guiney became a widely published poet, but when Patrick went off to war she was a baby. Patrick wrote to her from the seat of war even though he knew she could not yet read, but he fostered an intense connection with his daughter through the letters his wife read out loud to her.
When Patrick was shot, his eye was shattered and he nearly died. His wife left Boston and went to Virginia to successfully nurse him back to something approaching health, although he would need her care for the rest of his life.
Although Colonel Guiney would recall his homecoming as a joy, his three year old daughter experienced it differently. As an adult, Louise Guiney recalled the scene: “It was my earliest glimpse of the painful side of the war, when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting for recognition with a weary smile at the door of the sunny little house we all loved.”
Instead of running to him, the little girl “slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the rocks, and disappeared under the table.” Louise wrote that she viewed the wounded man as a “most bewildering and appalling stranger.” She said that, “In vain my [father] called me by the most endearing names.”
Louise was convinced that the man was an imposter, a wasted ghost playing the role of her virile father. She wrote, “I shut my disbelieving eyes, and crouched on the carpet… What was this spectre… whose head [was] bound in bandages… What was he in place of my old-time comrade.”
Louise’s father had been “blithe and boyish,” she wrote, now he was replaced by this refugee from death.
When the teenaged Louise was away at school in the 1870s, Patrick resumed his letter writing to her. In 1876 he wrote to the daughter he addressed as “Dear Pet” about the election and his disenchantment with the Party of Lincoln as it had become increasingly involved in corruption. The Democrat, Samuel Tilden, had become a national hero for rooting out the corrupt Tammany Hall machine of Boss Tweed in New York City. Guiney hoped he would do the same in Washington. Guiney wrote to his daughter that “the monster of corruption will writhe under the lances of honest men.” [95]
On Election Day, Guiney sent his daughter this note right before he went off to vote:
The even-handed tone of the Election Day letter was replaced a few weeks later when Guiney saw the battle going on in three Southern states over who had received the most votes in each. Guiney’s letter to his daughter implies that he thought that the Hayes campaign was trying to steal the election. This November 23rd letter is suffused with disillusionment.
As the bitter electoral fight grew ever nastier, Guiney stopped writing to his daughter about it. He had immigrated to the United States from Ireland as a boy because his family wanted to be part of a democratic republic. He had given up his health to defend that republic and end slavery. Now democracy seemed tarnished by selfishness. On March 17, 1877 Patrick wrote to Louise not about Hayes and Tilden, but to tell her that he would celebrate his saint’s day, St. Patrick’s Day, “moderately,” but before the night was through he would surely “tip his tankard to the health and happiness of the girl I love,” his daughter Louise.
Four days later he would collapse on his way home from work, perhaps finally felled by the Confederate bullet fired thirteen years earlier, bless himself, and die.
Sources:
The Guiney Letters are held by the College of the Holy Cross. I found the 1876 letters reproduced in:
“Our Beloved Country Is In Danger”: Some Comments on the 1876 Election by William L. Lucey Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia Vol. 79, No. 2 (June, 1968), pp. 93-97 (5 pages) Published by: American Catholic Historical Society
Note: Photograph shows Patrick Guiney during the Civil War.
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Great article. I read Patrick Guiney’s letters (Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth), edited by Christian G. Samito, and published by Fordham University Press. Could not book the book down. A true patriot he was. His daughter was correct, he was
“the good knight of Boston.”