The Irish Brigade: Emigrants in the American Civil War

In the autumn of 1862, casualty lists from a battle fought beside a creek in Maryland were awaited as anxiously in the west of Ireland as in New York. The news crossed by steamship, ten days old before anyone in Mayo could read it, and it mattered in Mayo because the men it named were the parish’s own. The Irish Brigade of the American Civil War was recruited from the emigrants of the Famine generation and their sons, and no unit of that war gathered up the meaning of Irish service, its pride, its politics and its terrible cost, quite like the brigade that fought under a green flag.

Who were the Irish Brigade in the American Civil War?

The brigade was organised in New York in the autumn of 1861. Its heart was the 69th New York, a militia regiment already famous among the city’s Irish; its colonel, Michael Corcoran, had faced court martial the year before for refusing to parade the regiment in honour of the visiting Prince of Wales. Corcoran himself was captured at Bull Run in the war’s first summer and spent a year in Confederate hands, and on his release he raised a second Irish legion of his own. Around the 69th were raised the 63rd and 88th New York, and later the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania, regiments filled almost entirely by Irish immigrants and their children.

Their commander was Thomas Francis Meagher of Waterford, a Young Ireland rebel of 1848 who had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land, escaped to America, and made himself the most celebrated Irish voice in New York. The regiments marched under green silk flags worked with a gold harp, carried their own chaplains, and heard Mass in the field. They fought as Americans, but visibly, deliberately, as Irishmen too, and the point was meant to be noticed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Why emigrants fought

The historian Ella Lonn, who made the fullest count, put the number of Irish-born soldiers in the Union armies at about 150,000, with perhaps 20,000 more wearing Confederate grey. Behind that number the reasons were braided tightly together. A private’s pay and the enlistment bounty mattered in a city where dock work and labouring came and went. Belonging mattered: men enlisted beside their brothers, their workmates, their whole street. And respect mattered most of all, because the 1850s had been the years of the Know-Nothings and their open contempt for Catholic immigrants, and the war offered public proof that an Irishman’s loyalty to his adopted country could be written in something stronger than words.

For a committed minority, the Fenians, the war was also an apprenticeship. An Irish brigade, armed, drilled and blooded, looked to them like the beginnings of an army that would one day fight a different war, at home.

For the families in Ireland, an enlistment was news that arrived already made, in a letter, with no chance to argue against it. Every battle that followed stretched the wait for the next envelope, and taught households in Mayo and Galway to dread the sight of an American newspaper before a letter had come.

Antietam and Fredericksburg

At Antietam on 17 September 1862, the bloodiest single day of the war, the brigade was sent against a sunken farm lane held by Confederate infantry, remembered ever after as Bloody Lane, and lost heavily in the fight for it. The lists from that day are the ones that reached the west of Ireland in the letters and papers of that autumn.

Fredericksburg, three months later, became the brigade’s epitaph. On 13 December 1862 it was ordered up a long open slope towards a stone wall at the foot of Marye’s Heights, a position no Union attack broke all day. The green flags were away in New York being replaced, so the men fixed sprigs of green boxwood in their caps to be known by. Of roughly 1,200 men who went up the slope, 545 were killed, wounded or missing by nightfall, and the 69th New York lost sixteen of its eighteen officers. Among the Confederate riflemen behind the wall stood Irish emigrants of the 24th Georgia, a fact the survivors on both sides carried with them. After Fredericksburg, the enthusiasm that had filled the Irish regiments in 1861 was gone, and recruitment never recovered.

The thinned brigade fought on at Chancellorsville in May 1863, after which Meagher resigned his command when he was refused leave to rebuild it. Two months later, on the second day of Gettysburg, its chaplain, Father William Corby, stood on a boulder and gave general absolution to the kneeling regiments before they went into the Wheatfield. The scene became one of the most remembered of the war, and a statue of Corby stands on that spot on the battlefield today.

July 1863: the Draft Riots

By 1863 the volunteers were spent, and Washington turned to conscription. The new law allowed a drafted man to buy himself out for 300 dollars, close to a labourer’s earnings for a year, and in the crowded Irish wards of New York that exemption read exactly as it sounds: a poor man’s war, chosen by lottery. When the draft wheels began to turn in July 1863, the city broke. For four days, mobs in which Irish labourers were prominent fought police and soldiers and burned draft offices, and then, most shamefully, turned on the city’s Black residents, killing men in the streets and burning the Colored Orphan Asylum. Well over a hundred people were dead before regiments marching straight from Gettysburg put the city down.

There is no honest telling of the Irish war that leaves this out. The same community gave the Union the boxwood sprigs of Marye’s Heights and the mobs of July 1863, seven months apart, and any account of the emigrant experience has to hold both in the same hand.

In Ballycastle, the riots arrived as pure fear. A letter took ten days or more; a family with people in New York read of the city burning long before any line could come to say their own were safe. It was not until the transatlantic cable was completed in July 1866 that the ocean stopped being ten days wide.

What the war sent home to Ireland

The war reached back across the Atlantic in more ways than grief. Soldiers’ pay and bounty money travelled the same road as every other remittance, part of the American money that kept the small farms of the west going. For years afterwards, United States pension money followed some of the dead home, a few dollars a month paid to bereaved mothers and widows at Irish addresses, the bleakest kind of American letter.

And the war sent home men. Fenian veterans of both armies, trained, confident and organised, mounted a raid into Canada in June 1866 and a rising in Ireland in March 1867. Both failed, but they carried the Civil War’s aftershocks directly into the townlands the soldiers had left as children, and into the fireside talk of families who had thought the war an American affair.

In our series, these are the years of Book Two. A Ballycastle neighbour serves with the brigade, the casualty lists of September 1862 are read with dread, and the Draft Riots arrive as a frightened letter asking after a household in the middle of them. You can follow the war in Book Two’s letters, part of a century of letters told across eight Books.