Fr. Abram Joseph Ryan was one of the most visible Catholic priests in the South. A firm Confederate, he served as an army chaplain. After the war he published The Banner of the South, a weekly on religion, politics, and literature. The paper strongly opposed Radical Reconstruction and championed the Lost Cause. In fact this article uses the term “lost cause.”
There were few Irish immigrants in the South at the time of the Civil War, but most of them supported the Confederacy when the war came. After the war, however, many Irish appear to have accepted the reimposition of Federal control more readily than other whites. Fr. Ryan’s ire was ignited when some Irish in Richmond formed a Republican club to support Ulysses S. Grant’s run for president.
Edgefield Advertiser
Wednesday, Sep 09, 1868
Edgefield, SC
Vol: 33
Page: 6
So, let us recall that while these benighted Irishmen are essentially damned by Ryan for starting a “Radical Club,” they were not advocates of free-love and communism. They were campaigning for Grant.
A few notes on Ryan’s denunciation:
1. He makes a pretty standard Democratic appeal to Irish Catholics in tying Republicans to the Know Nothings. Grant had briefly flirted with Know Nothingism and there are some manifestations of a hostility to both Catholicism and Judaism in his history.
2. Ryan can only conceive of the Richmond Irishmen joining the Radicals in order to secure jobs.
3. Ryan connects Grant to the persecution of Catholics in Ireland. Southern publicists repeatedly connected 1860s Republicans to the atrocities of Cromwell two centuries earlier in their messaging to Itish Catholics.
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