Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damian Shiels published by LSU Press 318 pages (2025)
Damian Shiels has been researching Irish participation in the Civil War for more than fifteen years. He has two previous books that rely on his work at uncovering the stories of working class immigrant men who were caught up in the war. Now he has a new volume that advances scholarship in this field significantly.
During the war and in historiography on the Irish in the Civil War after Appomattox, Americans’ focused on the “Green Flag” regiments of the Union Army, including the Irish Brigade, the 9th Massachusetts, and the 69th Pennsylvania. These openly Irish units contained less than a tenth of the Irishmen in the Union Army. Because of newly available sources, Shiels breaks away from this limitation 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.
The book’s primary contribution comes from studying the letters. Shiels writes:
“This is in large part due to the richness of the primary material discussed, which furnishes unparalleled access into 1860s tenement Irish communities in places like New York’s Five Points and Boston’s North End, offering a window on how those within identified, interacted, and survived. The perspectives this material provides on the men who left those communities for the seat of war challenge a number of our existing concepts of Irish American soldiers and sailors. Not the least of them is the emergence of evidence that thousands of Irish Americans marched off to battle in the firm belief that the United States, not Ireland, was now their home and their country—and a place they were willing to die to defend.”
Shiels also consults newspapers published during the war to both get additional letters that were submitted by families to their hometown newspapers and to study the reaction of the native born population to Irish soldiers. So, for example, the Daily Richmond Examiner in the Confederate capital condemned the use of immigrants in the opposing Union army who were called the “hateful Dutch and Irish scum that infest the North.” Northern newspapers sometimes did worse.
The influx of Irish during the Great Hunger or Potato Famine led to changes in United States demographics as the North became much more populous than the South. It also led to changes in the Catholic Church, which had just 663,000 members in 1840 but saw an increase to 3,100,000 by 1860. The Irish immigrant population helped fuel the growth of industry and expansion of cities in the North. Since nearly 90% of immigrants went to the Free States they gave a decided industrial advantage to the North.
Shiels makes a convincing case that the influence of the Irish was augmented by the facts of the 19th Century diaspora. Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the 1840s and had children here would see their sons join the Union Army and be recorded as Native-Born, even though everyone in their community saw them as Irish. This was also the case for people born in other countries as well. Peter Welsh, whose poignant letters to his wife get quoted so often in Civil War histories today, was seen as a quintessential Irishman. Well, he was not. He was born in Canada to parents escaping their homeland. As Shiels says, many people recorded as born in Canada, England, and Scotland were part of this Irish diaspora.
Shiels gives an accounting of the underappreciated Irish contribution by telling the story of Fort Sumter. The defense was a heroic world changing incident, but most histories, while talking about Major Anderson and Abner Doubleday, do not tell who the men in the ranks were. Shiels says that out of eighty-six soldiers defending the fort, 38 were born in Ireland and only 23 were born in the United States! At the start of 1861, 37% of the Regular Army was born in Ireland. While Confederate propagandists correctly identified Irish as being overrepresented in the standing army, Republicans, some of whom were former Know Nothings, often ignored the immigrants.
The author also takes up the question of how many Irish born soldiers who served in the military during the Civil War. The common consensus is 150,000, slightly less than their proportion in the total United States population. Shiels writes that when army volunteers, Regular Army soldiers, and the Navy are all included, there were almost 190,000 Irish born in the Union military. They were overrepresented.
Of these, only 16% of the men whose records Shiels examined were in “Irish” regiments. The rest were non-ethnic units. Shiels also offers a caution. of the American-born men he found that a sizable percentage were earlier recorded as Irish-born. These may have been Irish immigrants seeking relief from discrimination by registering as American-born.
The book also looks at why so many Irishmen joined the Union military. Shiels found that for men enlisting in non-Irish units very few of them said that they were preparing to make war upon Britain after the Civil War was over. Historians have speculated that the Irish would get training they could use in a war on England, but there is little evidence of that. Shiels finds that a number of reasons were cited by enlisted soldiers and sailors for joining. Preservation of the United States was important. Many Irish-born soldiers thought of themselves as American. Also, Irish living in working class neighborhoods would often join when large numbers of fellow workers enlisted, whether their fellow workers were Irish or not. Finally, economic salvation could prompt enlistment if the Irish worker was in an industry hit hard by a downturn in employment because of the Civil War.
While the men in the ranks were proud of their service and contemptuous of those who avoided service, Shiels finds that many men wrote letters home advising the young men in their own family to avoid enlisting. On the other hand, the Irish soldiers were not contemptuous of “bounty hunters” enlisting for the biggest possible payoff, as long as they did not desert.
The book also explores the religious beliefs of the Irish military men. While Lincoln made provisions for Catholic chaplains as early as 1861, very few Irish outside of ethnic regiments had regular access to them. Instead, they collected physical objects that they could carry on their persons like scapulars and Agnus Dei. Many could be worn around the neck, not taking up room in their knapsack. Shiels does a good job of describing how Irish working class men who had left a country where they were discriminated against because they were Catholic, could preserve Catholic worship in an Army that up until 1861 never allowed Catholic chaplains.
While the soldiers and sailors could maintain contact with their religious faith, they had a harder time staying in touch with their families. The military men had families in both Ireland and the United States and may have also had family members in Britain, Canada, and a host of other countries as well. And, while natives of the United States were 5% to 6% illiterate, the Irish seem to have been 20% illiterate. This means that the soldier might well not know how to write or his wife might not know how to read. Soldiers might turn to another member of their unit to write the letter and their wives would hire a reader to find out about her husband’s condition. Of course this meant that the couple could only include things that their assistants could safely read.
Shiels also delves into less savory topics. Did the Irish drink too much? Yes they did. Were the Irish more likely to desert? It depends. They were more likely to desert mixed units and less likely to desert Irish units. Irish were also more likely to desert based on home conditions. If a man lost his wife, an Irishman was more likely to desert than a native-born man because it meant that his children were less likely to be cared for by extended family who might be in Ireland.
Shiels also looks at Irish racism towards Blacks. While many modern historians have concluded that the Irish only absorbed racism as a price of becoming American, Shiels believes that many Irish immigrants already had racial animosities towards Blacks before they entered the United States, even before they ever met a Black person. While some Fenians supported the Emancipatory goals of the United States after 1862, many outside of that militant minority did not.
The book delves into the politics of Irish soldiers as well. While about three-quarters were Democrats, they were split between War Democrats and Peace Democrats. Many, after the election of 1864, seemed to lessen their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
There are many other topics that Shiels examines and he does so with statistics and first hand stories drawn from the letters he has collected.
This volume is an excellent book on Irish in the Union Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as other units. As someone who has been reading about this subject for over twenty years, there were a lot of new insights here. it is also a good introduction for the neophyte. Damian Shiels’s writing is lively and his expanse is so broad that a newcomer will be rewarded with a novel way of looking at such a significant part of the Union forces.
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