Category: Immigrants’ Civil War
Preliminaries to Emancipation: Race, the Irish, and Lincoln
Lincoln’s September 22, 1862, Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. It only announced that slavery would end in the Confederacy if the rebellion in the South…
Private Peter Welsh Joins the Irish Brigade
Peter Welsh was a married carpenter from New York when he went to Boston in 1862 to try to settle a dispute among his relatives. A…
The Irish Brigade at Antietam
Warning: This article includes historic photos of the dead at Antietam. The Battle of Antietam was the last act in the Confederate invasion of the North. After…
Immigrant Soldiers Chasing Lee Into Maryland
The Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August 1862 created a crisis in the North. Confederate General Robert E. Lee…
Cross Keys: A German Regiment’s Annihilation in the Shenandoah Valley
The 8th New York Volunteer Regiment was one of the first immigrant regiments to join the Union cause. Organized on the Lower East Side of…
Richmond Burning: The German Immigrant and Black Troops Who Saved the City
Join The Immigrants’ Civil War on Facebook Early on the morning of April 3, 1864, immigrant Major General Godfrey Weitzel wrote, “a little before two o’clock I…
Monument to the Immigrants Who Died in Long Island Shipwreck
Many of us have swum off Nassau Beach at Nickerson County Park in Long Beach. If you had been there in the second and third…
The Irish Regiment that Ended “Pickett’s Charge”: Gettysburg July 3, 1863
On July 3, 1863, as the Confederates of George Pickett’s Division closed on the stone wall near the top of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, they saw…
A Prayer Before Death for the Irish Brigade: Gettysburg July 2, 1863
In the days before the Battle of Gettysburg one soldier reportedly asked another the name of the regiment marching past. He was told “that’s not a regiment,…
The “German” XI Corps at Gettysburg July 1, 1863
After weeks of hard marching, when the “German” XI Corps reached Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, it was suffering from the scorn of many American nativists who blamed the “Dutch”…