Many Irish “saw slave ownership as the way to success in the South”
A group of Confederate soldiers-possibly an artillery unit captured at Island No. 10 and taken at POW Camp Douglas (Chicago)
Photo by D. F. Brandon
A new book on the Irish on the Confederate
side in the Civil War claims that Irish emigrants to the south saw
slavery and owning slaves as their passport to wealth.
“The
Green and the Gray” by British-based historian David T. Gleeson also
states that “Irish participation in the Confederate experiment,remains a
“complex and imperfectly understood element of the American Civil War.”
Irish immigrants, Gleeson observes, “saw slave ownership as the way to success in the South.”
Among
the slave owners was Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, S.C. who
Gleeson says “saw himself as a good Confederate paternalistic
slaveholder,” and was “willing to sell slaves” through an
Irish-American slave trader.
Bishop
Lynch was later sent by Confederate leaders to meet with Pope Pius IX,
as Jefferson Davis and others had become convinced “that papal
recognition of the Confederacy might encourage other Catholic countries”
to come to the aid of the South.
The pope met Lynch but told him slavery was “a major sticking point.”
The pope met Lynch but told him slavery was “a major sticking point.”
Most Irish had arrived earlier than Irish in the North and were prosperous in the main.
Frederick Stanton arrived in Natchez Mississippi in 1812 and soon had six cotton picking plantations and owned 333 slaves.
Other Irish were active in politics, owned newspapers; and there were Catholic bishops and cathedrals in the largest cities.
Gleeson,
an historian at Northumbria University in Britain says 20,000 Irish
served in Confederate units and bore names such as the Irish
Volunteers, Emerald Guards, and Shamrock Guards. The men “earned a
reputation for bravery,” Gleeson says, but were known “for being
difficult to manage.” “Irish men fought hard but also deserted . . . in
larger numbers than native Southerners,” he says.
There
was apparently only one Irish vs. Irish battlefield clash at
Fredericksburg, Va., in December 1862 when Thomas Francis Meagher’s
Irish Brigade“charged up Marye’s Heights toward certain death,”
Confederates — including the Lochrane Guards, an Irish unit from Georgia
— “ensconced behind a stone wall poured fire into the charging
Irishmen.”
In the south Irish-owned machine shops “were an integral part of the Confederate military complex.”
But
in the end, “Irish loyalty was shallow,” writes Gleeson as they were
unwilling to “sacrifice everything on the altar of the new nation as it
disintegrated before their eyes.” He describes them as “ambiguous
Confederates,” and “when the Yankees finally came,” most Irish were
ready to rejoin the United States.
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