Note: This article is incomplete. It should be finished by May 15, 2025.
Damien Shiels, the noted Irish scholar on the American Civil War, gave a lecture on May 8, 2025 at New York University in Manhattan. Dr. Shiels has a new book out Green & Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military 1861-1865 from LSU Press. He said that during the war and in historiography afterwards, Americans focused on the “Green Flag” regiments of the Union Army including the Irish Brigade, the 9th Massachusetts, and the 69th Pennsylvania. These were, he said, “the primary representatives of Irish ethnicity in the Union military.” However, Dr. Shiels said that by looking just at the Green Flag regiments you are excluding the vast majority of Irish who served in the war.
Most contemporary published accounts of Irish soldiers during the Civil War focused on the ethnic Irish regiments. Historians either ignored or could not find primary sources to document the common Irish soldiers outside the Irish regiments. However, with the digitalization of pension files, Shiels has found hundreds of letters from the soldiers to their families written during the war. These letters were submitted to the Federal government after the soldier died to establish eligibility for pensions by the men’s widows and orphans. Dr. Shiels has searched through tens of thousands of these “Widows Files” to find the letters that he used to write his book. He has collected more than a thousand letters from Irish soldiers over the last decade making it the largest source of correspondence from Irish Civil War soldiers in existence.
Shiels asserts that Irish Americans were not underrepresented in the Union Army during the Civil War. In fact, he says, that they were slightly overrepresented.
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