Damian Shiels, the noted Irish scholar on the American Civil War, gave a lecture on May 8, 2025 at New York University (NYU) 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 on the Irish in the Civil War 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” in histories in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 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. These units were self-consciously organized by Irishmen, most had green flags, and they kept alive Irish traditions like celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. 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 in his research over the last decade making it the largest source of correspondence from ordinary Irish Civil War soldiers in existence.
Shiels asserts that Irish Americans were not underrepresented in the Union military during the Civil War. In fact, he says, that they were slightly overrepresented. In the Navy, they were vastly overrepresented. He says that a “conservative estimate places the number of Irishmen who served at 180,000 and another 70,000 Canadian, British, and American-born children of Irish immigrants” who served. Roughly 250,000 Irish served in the Civil War.
The popular view today is of recently arrived Irishmen joining the Union Army. If you have ever seen The Gangs of New York, men getting off the boat from Ireland were immediately recruited in to the army by being hoodwinked. “But there were many who came before the Famine occurred…and there were many who grew to manhood entirely in the United States, Britain, and Canada” says Shiels. And while the majority were Catholic, thousands of Irish volunteers were Presbyterians and Anglicans. The backgrounds of these Irish Union soldiers were somewhat diverse and their experiences ranged from people who had only recently arrived from Ireland to those who had been in the United States for twenty years or more.
Most Irish were recruited in East Coast urban centers, with New York being the largest source of recruits. New York had almost three times the Irish recruits of the next largest state of Pennsylvania. What is often forgotten, says Shiels, is that even though many Irish were recruited into the volunteer regiments, they were also the dominant immigrant group in the Regular Army. “During the bombardment of Fort Sumter…there were more Irish-born soldiers than there were American-born soldiers in the garrison,” said Shiels. “Almost 40% of the United States Regular Army at the start of the Civil War had been born in Ireland. 20% of the United States Navy had been born in Ireland.”
Because of where the Irish had been recruited, most Irish soldiers served in the East, in the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James. Since most Irish did not serve in the “Green Flag” regiments, most were concentrated in diverse units recruited in Eastern urban centers.
Shiels says that while much of modern scholarship focuses on the Irish soldiers ethnic background, their class status is also important. The Irish volunteer was overwhelmingly from the working classes. Within Irish units there was a class difference between the officers and their men even though they shared the same ethnicity. Shiels says “they did not share the same social position.”
The vast majority of Irish American troops were Catholic. However, there were only 53 Catholic chaplains known to have served with the Union Army. Up until 1861, the army did not accept Catholic chaplains. Even when the army began enrolling Catholic chaplains, “If you served outside a ethnic regiment, you would not encounter a priest during your time at the front,” Shiels said.
Social class was more than just an identity for the working class Irish soldier. The Irish soldier had varying degrees of regard for the United States and Ireland, but nearly all showed great attention to their families, whether a wife or children in the United States or parents back in Ireland. “The economic precarity of many Irish families consistently shines through.” Irish families were poor. They often did own land or even their dwelling place. When soldiers’ pay was held up, it meant that the soldiers families could not pay rent or buy food. One of the most common topics in the letters home from the soldiers is worrying about their families surviving when pay was held up for months.
Shiels found letters in which he found that wives and children had died or been reduced to great suffering because soldiers had not been paid for many months. Among native-born soldiers, a family could turn to a wealthy relative for loans when pay did not come, but among the Irish there were no wealthy relatives or no relatives at all. When a wife died, a soldier might find out that his children were then placed in orphan asylums since no relatives could take care of them. The economic hardship of their families led to far more desertions from Irish volunteers than any of the ideological reasons often given in modern histories.
While Shiels used the letters home as one of the primary sources for his book, he notes that Irish immigrants had the most illiteracy of all Northern white ethnic groups. This meant that many Irish immigrants did not write home or that they used scribes to write the letters back to their families. This meant that a soldier using a scribe might not want to disclose troubling facts to that third-person. While the letters provide a valuable resource, at least 20% of Irish recruits had to use a scribe to communicate with their families. And, of course, their families at home may not have been able to read the letters, which means that the soldier knew that the letter would be given to a neighbor to read to his wife or parents.
The Irish volunteer soldiers had come from a society in which Nativism was common and the newly-formed non-ethnic regiments incorporated anti-immigrant officers to rule over them. While Shiels found some cases where the immigrant soldier formed a close bond with the native-born men in his unit, he also saw many cases in which nativist officers prescribed harsher punishments for their Irish troops.
“Even in a racist society, Irish Americans were noted for their antipathy towards Blacks as displayed in the events of the New York City Draft Riots,” says Shiels. “Many Irish men regarded Black men, and especially enslaved Black men, as their inferiors,” he found. Shiels says that many Irishmen carried white supremacy from before they even came over from Ireland. However, warns Shiels, the antipathy towards African Americans has been overvalued in looking at how it influenced their support for the war. Shiels says that many historians see the New York City Draft Riots as the result of a broad turn against the war by the Irish community after the Emancipation Proclamation. “Neither is there any compelling evidence that Irish American soldiers abandoned the war after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared,” he says. Contrary to many historians, Shiels says “What evidence we do have is that Irish Americans were more willing to enlist late in the war than native-born white Americans were.” In fact, due to the bonuses being paid in 1864 and 1865, we see Irish immigrants coming to the United States to enlist and collect the bonuses.
When modern Civil War history readers look at the Irish during the Civil War, many of them imagine that all the Irish thought about was Ireland. However, as Shiels points out, many also thought about America. They celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day, but they were just as enthusiastic celebrators of the Fourth of July. As they campaigned through the South, they wrote home about visiting Washington’s grave or where Cornwallis surrendered, and other locations where American history took place. “We see that fused identity everywhere,” says Shiels. Many Irishmen came to see America as their country. With Ireland, many of the men saw remitting money back to their families in Ireland to continue the process of their families coming over to the United States where they could join the Irish American communities in the United States. “They were committed to the United States, to the Union,” he says. This chain migration would build the Irish community in the United States.
Next week I’ll have a review of Shiels new book.
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