A Damn Yankee, Am I? Thanks!: Portraits of the Irish in the era of the American Civil War

A Damn Yankee, Am I? Thanks!

Portraits of the Irish in the era of the American Civil War

Aidan O'Hara

Anam Communications

A Damn Yankee, Am I? Thanks!

Copyright © 2022 by Anam Communications

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

Cover Art: Return of 69th (Irish) NYSM New York Historical Society

Original Artist: Louis Lang

Photos and illustrations: Except where noted, photos and illustrations are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive.

Maps: Laurent Pavesi

The author and publisher have made every effort to secure permissions for reproductions of the images in this book. Please contact the publisher in case of any unintentional errors.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7395997-0-6

BISAC:

HIS036050 HISTORY / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)

HIS018000 HISTORY / Europe / Ireland

HIS027110 HISTORY / Military / United States

A Damn Yankee, Am I? Thanks! is available in print and e-book format 

Published by: Anam Communications. www.anamcommunications.com

First Edition, 2022

First Printing, 2022

Reviews

The book goes beyond the story of the war itself and gives us valuable insights into the Irish in America in that period. It also considers the conditions in Ireland that precipitated emigration in the first half of the nineteenth century. In that context, accounts of foreign travellers, who witnessed the poverty of the people, are especially compelling. 

Martin Morris, history lecturer and archivist

Thoroughly researched and admirably written and organised. This book will grace many a home on either side of the Atlantic. It includes a wonderful panoply of persons and a detailed account of a deadly conflict. 

James MacNerney, historian and editor of Teabhtha, journal of the County Longford Historical Society

Historians will find here the depth and breadth of scholarly research analysed with perception and insight. Readers with a more general interest can enjoy what this gifted storyteller reveals about human – and the Irish – nature ensnared in a hardscrabble war.

Mary Reike Murphy, author and former editor of Outlook Magazine

You don't have to be a historian to appreciate this very readable book. Aidan O’Hara’s extensive research in the U.S. and Ireland, combined with his flowing style of writing, illustrated by numerous photographs and illustrations, makes this book both enjoyable and enlightening. Reading it will give you a renewed sense of pride in the contribution of Irish emigrants and exiles – many long forgotten, some perhaps your own relatives – to The Land of the Free. 

Sr. Elizabeth McNamee, PhD, former secondary principal and environmentalist

Contents

Counties of Ireland

The Civil War - The Bloodiest of Wars

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1 The State of Ireland That The Emigrants Left

2 Emigration To The New World

3 To Protestant America, The New World

4 The Irish in Politics

5 The South and Secession

6 The Civil War Starts

7 The Irish Respond

8 Irish Regiments In The Civil War

9 Battle Of Bull Run, 21 July 1861

10 Seven Days Battles

11 The Irish In Western Regiments

12 Shiloh - The First Big Battle

13 The Battle of Antietam

14 Mathew Brady, Father of American Photojournalism

15 Devastation Of War

16 Civil War Diaries

17 Battle Of Fredericksburg, December 1862

18 The Irish And The Music Of The Civil War

19 1863 – Desperation North & South Part 1

20 1863 Desperation North & South Part 2

21 General Philip Henry Sheridan (1831-1888)

22 Women And The Civil War

23 Grant Plans A Knockout Blow

24 1865 - The South Surrenders

25 Before the Irish had ‘arrived’

26 The Irish post-Civil War U.S.

Endnotes

Bibliography

About The Author

This book is dedicated to Con Howard who wanted the story told.

Counties of Ireland

Our Irish fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.

(George Templeton Strong – Northerner, mid 1800s)

Ever since the war, I have kept in my heart a place sacred to these generous exiles, who, …. wearing the grey as if it had been the green, giving in defence of the land of their adoption …. unfaltering courage, and the earnest devotion of hearts glad thus to give expression to the love of liberty and hatred of oppression which filled them. So, company after company, composing many regiments, appeared on fields of glory bearing names dear to every Irish heart, — names which they meant to immortalize, and did.

(Fannie A. Beers – Southerner, late 1800s)

I am of Irish descent and in America a hundred years ago we were refugees; my family, Irish people were treated terribly for a period of time and were not treated well.

Actor George Clooney has been to Ireland (Kilkenny and Laois) to meet with his Irish cousins. He spoke about the intolerance his Irish ancestors experienced in the US when emigrating.

The Civil War - The Bloodiest of Wars

At 4:30 a.m. on the 12 April 1861, General P. G. T. Beauregard directed his Confederate gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. Just thirty-four hours later a white flag over the fort ended the bombardment. It was the opening to the bloodiest war in American history. And the first shot in the war from a Union cannon was fired by a gunner named James Gibbons, an Irishman.

Entirely unimaginable before it began, the war was the most defining and shaping event in American history – so much so that it is now impossible to imagine what the United States would have been like without it. To understand America today, it is necessary to understand the Civil War. More than three million Americans fought in the war and more than 600,000 men died in it. Not only the immensity of the cataclysm but the new weapons, the new standards of generalship, and the new strategies of destruction – together with the birth of photography – were to make the Civil War an event to live ever since in the American consciousness.

The Civil War is not simply the story of great battles and great fighting men. We also need to know: why did Americans kill each other? How did it happen? Who were the people who fought and died? What did it do to America and Americans?

The Irish

It is widely known that in the North, native-born Irish along with the Germans, played a major role in every aspect of the war effort, but it is not generally appreciated that in the South the Irish were the most numerous foreign-born group in all the states of the Confederacy, and more than any other group, contributed a greater number of men to the struggle.

Regardless of which side they fought on Irish soldiers earned the praise of generals for being good soldiers. Southerners liked to assert that only Americans fought for the Confederacy. One southern general who claimed that there were no foreigners in the ranks felt obliged to qualify his observation by adding, Except for the odd Irishman here and there.

In fact, Ella Lonn in her highly acclaimed work, Foreigners in the Confederacy, states that Irishmen were to be found in nearly every regiment and there were many units composed almost entirely of Irishmen. Men of foreign birth or descent seemed to be drawn to a company composed of men of similar background. Such special organizations seemed to hold a particular attraction for Irishmen; the green flag seemed to exert a magnetic control over the brawny sons of the Emerald Isle. Their fondness for their own companies is explicable: the Irishman fights better shoulder to shoulder with Irishmen as comrades, and always yearns to reflect honour on ‘Ould Ireland’.⁰⁰¹

Because of racist stereotyping of the Irish by American Nativists who promoted the interests of native-born people over the interests of immigrants, the Irish expected that their participation in the Civil War would help diminish the malicious prejudices from which they suffered. They hoped that the sacrifices they made could prove themselves to be good Americans, worthy of respect and acceptance.

Foreword

Aidan O’Hara came to live in Longford, his late father’s native county, in 2004. Once settled, he immersed himself in the local scene and, amongst other things, he became an active and valued member of County Longford Historical Society. His writings and lectures reflect his passion for history, traditional music and culture, and the Irish language. Another abiding interest of Aidan’s is Irish emigration, especially to North America. This book brings together most of those strands.

The Irish in the United States of America participated in, and were shaped by, the Civil War (1861-1865), which was such a traumatic episode in that country’s history. In fighting in large numbers on both sides of the conflict, soldiers who were Irish-born, or of Irish heritage, helped to change their community and how it was perceived. Many of the young men who fought – and died – were part of the wave of Famine and post-Famine emigrants who went in search of a life of opportunity in a country that was still relatively new. Often, they encountered prejudice and discrimination.

Recent scholarship on the Irish in the First World War has argued that that conflict was very much ‘our war’, given that perhaps 210,000 men from this island served in the British forces alone. Aidan’s work makes it clear that the American Civil War should be seen in a similar way, with close to the same number fighting, overall.

The book goes beyond the story of the war itself and gives us valuable insights into the Irish in America in that period. It also considers the conditions in Ireland that precipitated emigration in the first half of the nineteenth century. In that context, accounts of foreign travellers, who witnessed the poverty of the people, are especially compelling.

Likewise, Aidan examines the aftermath of the Civil War and how perceptions of the Irish changed. Of course, it was a gradual process, and as he makes clear, one that was more nuanced and complex than we might assume.

This book is highly readable and written with the assurance that comes from years of research and reflection on the subject. The author brings together a remarkable range of primary sources, including first-hand accounts from combatants and contemporaries, thus allowing much of the story to be told in voices from the era.

This work is required reading for anyone seeking to learn about Irish-America and how it was formed.

Martin Morris, Co. Longford County Archivist

May 2022

Acknowledgements

In December 2001 I was on an early research trip to the United States and on the train from Boston to New York, my wife and I discussed plans about what lay ahead. After a while a woman in the seat ahead raised her head over the headrest and said, I’m sorry to intrude but I couldn’t help overhearing you talking about your Civil War researches. I expect you will be familiar with the Civil War historian, Bruce Catton. Well, I just had to let you know that I was his secretary. I was absolutely amazed at the coincidence and we had a quite a chat about the great man and his writings, some of which I had been reading. She assured me that Bruce was not only a great writer but also a lovely man to work for.

I had no secretary to help me with my researches, but I received support and encouragement from many people, most of all my wife, Joyce, without whom I could not get very far and am forever in her debt for her unfailing belief in me and my efforts.

The man who got me interested in the first place was the late Con Howard, former Irish diplomat and widely known as a colourful character with a deep and genuine interest in all things cultural. He was the founder of the famed Merriman Summer School, was Irish consul in Boston and Washington and became a close friend of the Kennedy family. In the early 1990s, he and I with a few other friends discussed the possibility of doing a mini-TV series with an accompanying book on the subject of the Irish in the era of the American Civil War. However, a key member of the group became seriously ill and we waited quite a while for him to recover. Sadly, he never did and the idea, too, died. But I could not let go and so, over the years, continued my readings and researches into the subject while continuing my work in media and communications.

I am grateful to Walter Kirwan and Paul McGarry of the Department of An Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) for the Commemoration Initiative funding I was given to carry out preliminary research in the United States.

Among those who guided and assisted me then and in the years following were: Dr. Arthur Mitchell who showed me great kindness and forbearance in guiding this untried student in Civil War researches; also, his wife, Marie, who was hospitality itself on my visit to South Carolina; Steve Griffin, Boston; Mary McGonigle and Steve Davis, New Jersey; Kelly O’Grady, Fredericksburg.

I am most grateful to my son, Brian Ó hEadhra, who read the book in draft form and did the layout and design work in preparation for publishing. Míle buíochas leat, a Bhriain. I received great advice and assistance from Robert Heuston and for that I am most grateful.

The following individuals and archival bodies provided invaluable material and assistance in my researches: National Archives of Ireland; Dr Máire Kennedy, of Dublin City Archives; the National Archives, Washington DC and their Widows’ Pension Files; the Virginia State Archives, Richmond Va; Jerome (Jerry) E. Anderson, Reference Librarian, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston; the Arts Council of Ireland; the Boston Public Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; Tom and Mary Sullivan, and staff at the Co. Cavan Library; the late UCD historian Dr. David Noel Doyle; Dr. Patrick Fitzgerald and staff at the Centre for Migration Studies, Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh, Co. Tyrone, Damien Sheils whose web site https://irishamericancivilwar.com/ has provided readers with useful sources containing information on Irish immigrants in America. And the San Francisco–based non-profit digital library, Archive.org; the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Many other people were supportive in so many ways include, Denis and Carol Bergin, Jim and the other ‘Kelly boys’ who pushed and prodded me on over the years, as did Mary and Mike Murphy. Members of the Hodgers family in Ireland. Fr. Tom Murray, and James MacNerney who gave much useful advice along the way. Laurent Pavesi for his work on the maps. I am in debt, too, to my own children, my extended family, and many more friends who were always encouraging. There are many others who encouraged and advised me over the years, and although not acknowledged by name, I thank them, too.

Of course, when all is said and done, all the conclusions and treatment of the subject matter of this book are my own as are any errors for which I accept sole and total responsibility.

Preface

My aim in writing A Damn Yankee, am I? Thanks! is to share with readers the fruits of my research into what happened Irish people who were caught up in the rapidly changing political and social life in America during of the turbulent era of the American Civil War. That era began with abolitionism and the struggle to end slavery in the 1820s and ended with the fall of the Confederacy at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865.

In newspaper articles and broadcast documentaries marking the centenary year of World War 1, a younger generation of Irish people were amazed to learn that more than 200,000 Irishmen fought in the Great War. And yet, just half a century earlier, that many Irish-born men and boys fought in the American Civil War (1861-65), and as many again and more of the sons of Irish immigrants also fought.

This commitment on the part of the Catholic Irish in particular, was made in the hope of proving themselves fit to be regarded as good Americans, having suffered from discrimination and negative stereotyping at the hands of nativist Americans who were suspicious of all foreigners, Catholics especially, and sought to marginalise them at every opportunity. In the great wave of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics in particular had to struggle hard to force open the doors of American life so zealously guarded by those who had first settled the land.⁰⁰²

In learning about these Irish and how they fared, extensive use is made of personal accounts as well as major historical works that treat of the people and the times in which they lived. In writing about the past, one could choose to write a standard history or alternatively a popular work of fiction, or a historical novel, to tell the story. The historical novelists have their valued place. But in dealing with the era of the American Civil War, the numerous letters, diaries, journals, memoirs and war reports, provide the reader with the very stuff of novels, material that is engrossing for anyone interested in the subject. I have drawn on all these sources to tell the story.

Early on in the era of the Civil War when the world saw the birth of photography, the Irish were to the fore in developing its techniques and use, and we are fortunate that many of the immigrants took the opportunity of having their ‘likenesses’ taken. We get to see the people who emerged out of poverty and deprivation to make a success of their lives in the New World. Mathew Brady, whose parents emigrated from Co. Cavan, is regarded as America’s father of photojournalism, and perhaps his greatest achievement was hiring teams of camera men to photograph the Civil War.

The effect of the Civil War experience for the Irish in America and at home in Ireland is just starting to be fully examined and explained, not only for the impact made at the time but in the following years when Ireland’s growing nationalist independence movement was largely funded and directed from America.

In these pages, we learn about the men and women who found a new home in America, who wrote about their experiences and were in turn described and commented upon by others who were intrigued by a people different in culture, in their manner of speaking and very often in religion, too.  

It is often assumed that the influx of large numbers of Irish immigrants began at the time of the Great Famine of the 1840s. In fact, Irish immigration was in full flow decades before this. Before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, observers in America were referring to ‘the swarmings’ of the Irish who seemed to be everywhere and regarded as a threat to Protestant freedoms in the new republic where they would plant the papal heresy in this land.⁰⁰³

There is an impression that almost all of the Irish ended up in the big cities, but not so; initially, yes, but later they spread throughout America. Writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) wrote about them in his most famous work, Walden, and saw them in their shanty dwellings – what he referred to as ‘sties’ – along newly-laid railway tracks and on the shores of Walden Pond where he lived in rural Massachusetts. They were indeed the ubiquitous Irish, and Thoreau often wondered if they would ever rise out of their inherited poverty.⁰⁰⁴ He knew about the oppression of Irish Catholics that made them second-class citizens in their own land.

Some historians writing about the Irish in eastern cities like Boston and New York – main ports of entry for European immigrants in the nineteenth century – noted that they were over-represented in the unskilled categories. But the eastern cities were not America, and studies now show that in the expanding American Mid-West, Irish Catholics were among the highest achievers and were already achieving high social status by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An awareness of an Irish presence in America was established early on as individual men and whole families followed work where they could find it in the growing economy of the new republic and its expansion westward. An Irish-American distinctiveness emerged that became a key weapon in the fight against economic exploitation and political nativism, so that the Irish gradually steered themselves towards the centre of American public and political life. In spite of the many obstacles, it can be regarded as their most signal achievement.

For too long, studies of the Irish in America focused on the immigrants as victims, and the Irish themselves often bought into that view – until recently. Now they take credit for actually being in charge of their own fate; it is no longer a case of history being something that happened to them from outside, the emphasis was now more on what the immigrants did than on what had been done to them.⁰⁰⁵

Even before the Irish began emigrating in large numbers early in the 19th century, awareness of their state of poverty and deprivation was proverbial. Their esteemed leader, Daniel O’Connell, known as the Counsellor and Liberator, was regularly mocked by his enemies as ‘The King of the Beggars’. The massive influx of Irish Catholic poor in America in the early 1800s and right through the catastrophic famine years 1845-50, left such an indelible impression that for generations later, even when the Irish had made it to the top, native-born Americans still saw them – or chose to see them – as having failed to make it. The fact is that in spite of prejudice and denigration, by the start of the 20th century, they were above the average for other whites in their attainments in education, occupation and income. But it was only by mid-century their successes were beginning to be recognised, to be followed soon afterwards by the election of Kennedy to the Presidency.⁰⁰⁶

This then is a portrait of how the Irish fared in the era of the American Civil War, and their gradual progress in ‘making it’ in America by proving themselves in the fight for the Union. Their story is more complex and nuanced than some popular versions might allow.

Introduction

On 22 June 1864, County Cork man Michael Scannell, Colour Sergeant in Co. A, 19th Massachusetts Regiment, was in a pit dug for him and another colour bearer so that they and the flags would be hidden from the attacking Confederate soldiers. Suddenly, the enemy was upon them and they were captured. Later, Company Captain John Adams met Mike among the prisoners being marched to the rear.

How came you to lose the colours, Mike? he asked. I’ll tell you, said Mike. We lay in the pit dug for us, and the first we knew the rebels came rushing over and said, ‘You damned Yankee, give me that flag.’ Well, I said, it is twenty years since I came to this country, and you are the first man who ever called me a Yankee. You can take the flag for the compliment.⁰⁰⁷ On being called a Yankee, Mike Scannell’s succinct response summed up vividly the experience of the poor immigrant Irish who longed for acceptance in the New World having lived with a legacy which encompasses poverty, prejudice and a very long hard struggle to achieve economic competence and some degree of respectability.⁰⁰⁸

Mike spoke for the thousands of Irish soldiers and their families who hoped their participation in the War would help diminish the negative stereotyping they had experienced for so long in America. Even at a supreme moment of crisis on the battlefield Mike’s sardonic if light-hearted words of thanks for the compliment for being called a Yankee, graphically illustrates the longing for respect and equality felt by him and Irish immigrants generally. Mike was a prisoner for the rest of the war and was paroled in May 1865.The story, A Damn Yankee, explores what happened Irish people who were caught up in the rapidly changing political and social life in America during the turbulent era of the American Civil War (1861–65).

That era began with abolitionism and the struggle to end slavery in the 1820s and ended with the fall of the Confederacy at Appomattox in April 1865. How well or otherwise the Irish did in realising their aim of gaining acceptance following the four years of blood, sweat and tears, will form the conclusion of this story.

The great majority of people from Ireland that were described as ‘swarming’ into the United States early in the 19th century, were mostly Catholic and poor, and their presence caused much comment and debate. Americans were presented with a challenge on what to do with a people they saw as strange, ignorant and even brutish.⁰⁰⁹ It would all take time, not only for them but for the poor Irish who were entering a world that was as strange and alien to them as they were to their hosts.

English and European visitors to Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries expressed their astonishment at seeing the poverty-stricken state of the people who were ill-clothed and make a wretched appearance and are much worse treated than the poor in England, are talked to in more opprobrious terms, and otherwise very much oppressed. Almost inevitably, visitors to Ireland did not hesitate to lay the blame where it belonged, as did Englishman Arthur Young: How far it is owing to the oppression of laws aimed solely at the religion of these people, how far to the conduct of the gentlemen and farmers, and how far to the mischievous disposition of the people themselves, it is impossible for a passing traveller to ascertain.  I am apt to believe that a better system of law and management would have good effects.⁰¹⁰

In the 1770s Arthur Young was one of the first visitors to Ireland to draw attention to the plight of the Irish labourers. The eminent agriculturalist described them as the most impoverished class that he had seen in Europe. This illustration of his shows naked children and their parents eating outdoors in front of their windowless and chimneyless one-roomed cabin. Smoke issues through the door and the thatch. The farm animals –horse, goat, pig – are spancelled or tethered, and chickens and geese are feeding nearby. The background shows the all-important ridges or ‘lazy- beds’ and their rows of potatoes.

Original drawing pasted into N.L.I. (National Library ofIreland) copy of Arthur Young, A Tour of Ireland (Dublin1780).

The Penal Laws instituted under King William in 1695 is a term applied to the body of unjust and oppressive legislation directed chiefly against Roman Catholics but also against Protestant nonconformists. The majority population was Catholic, and the laws were designed to restrict their rights to education, ownership of land, tenancy rights, the practice of their religion, and their exclusion from parliamentary representation.

Their clergy were expelled en masse, but this had the paradoxical effect of strengthening the people’s regard for their clergy and ensuring a lasting resentment of the Anglican establishment and government. In their Irish language poems and songs poets expressed bitter resentment at how the people were treated by the ruling elite of the Established Church and their landlords.

In his valuable 2-volume work on Ireland at the end of the 1700s and early 1800s, Englishman, Edward Wakefield noted: …nothing astonished me so much as the multitude of poverty-struck inhabitants, from whom I could learn very little more than that the estate belonged to ‘My Lord’ whom they loaded with imprecations.⁰¹¹

The Co. Armagh Irish-language poet, Art Mac Cumhaigh (c. 1738-73), observed in one of his poems: "Luther’s offspring who are in court and coaches say I’d have a vote in their own religion, freehold land and accurate guns, and my hat adorned with a cross cockade; wine and a feast laid out on the table for me throughout my lodgings and to the end of the day, and wouldn’t it be a better course for me to join up with them than to be a Gaelic-style waster."⁰¹²

In his diary for 13 April 1827, schoolmaster and part-time draper Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin asked the question, Tír shaibhir agus daoine bochta. Ceist agam ort. Cad as so? (A rich land and a poor people. I have a question for you. How can this be?")⁰¹³

Numerous Irish language poems deal with people’s hopes for relief from their abject state of poverty and that help would come from a Stuart King, or from France and Spain. In one such poem, written in the 1820s, the poet encounters a beautiful woman who identifies herself as Síle Ní Ghadhra, a common personification of Ireland. He asks her if she knows if support would come from those who would end our cruel slavery and help the Gaels who are crushed, wretched, tormented.

Well before the Great Famine of the 1840s, Ireland’s burgeoning population was reaching pressure point and there were warnings of catastrophe if ever there was a widespread failure of the potato crop, such was the extensive dependency on that one food. And already in the years before the Great Hunger, an estimated 1 million had emigrated, mostly to North America. Before the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, observers in America were writing about the Irish who seemed to be everywhere. 

It is important to note that this account’s emphasis on the Catholic Irish immigrant story stems from the fact that it was largely because of their religion they experienced discrimination and oppression at home and later in America.

The immigrant Irish Catholics came in for harsh treatment even before the Famine and churches were burned and convents attacked. America’s Anglo-Saxon Protestants had made sure that in their New World their religious practices were forever free of Papist forms of worship and control. Some of them actually saw the Irish as a sort of advance guard sent by the Pope to set up a new Vatican territory in America.

The Know-Nothing Flag – a stunning example of the jingoism that pervaded the Native American party, founded in 1841 at a state convention in Louisiana. Its general tenets were based on the philosophy that foreigners (and especially Irish Catholics) were anathema to the great American democratic experiment. Party members adhered to the belief that foreigners should not be allowed to hold any office of public trust in the government, whether federal, state, or local. In1854, the party adopted the policy that even United States citizenship should be granted only after an emigrant had lived in this country for 21 years – thus the symbolism on this flag.

N. American Vexillological Association, accessed 16 December 2014 www.loeser.us/flags/mexican.html#top,

But the struggle for acceptance was long and slow and with the onset of Civil War in April 1861, the Irish in America were presented with an opportunity to prove themselves as worthy citizens of the New World Republic. The War itself is dealt with here only insofar as it reflects something of the Irish experience and how it affected the views of native-born Americans.

Timeline

1800-1850

State of Ireland up to the time of the Great Famine (1845-50)

What surveys and visitors said about the condition of the people.

Famine and emigration.

1

The State of Ireland That The Emigrants Left

Asenath Nicholson (1792-1855)

The bespectacled woman who disembarked from the Liverpool packet vessel at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), County Dublin, in mid-June 1844, wore a Polka coat, India-rubber shoes, a formidable bonnet, and a shawl. She was Asenath Hatch Nicholson, a 52-year-old American widow, reformer and bible Christian, who had come to Ireland for the purpose of personally investigating the condition of the poor.⁰¹⁴

Apart from the clothing that marked her out as a visitor to Ireland, the short-sighted Mrs Nicholson would hardly have drawn anything more than a passing glance from her fellow passengers or the people on shore. They could hardly be expected to know that this otherwise ordinary-looking woman would leave a lengthy account of her stay in Ireland during the momentous Famine years. The record she left was uniquely intense and compassionate and remarkable for the insight she provided into the lives of those hundreds of thousands of the poorest of the poor that were virtually wiped out in the years of the Great Hunger.

Mrs Nicholson was just one of a great many foreign travellers in Ireland over the previous hundred years and more who had written at length and in some detail about the poverty-stricken Irish and the swarms of ragged beggars they encountered everywhere they went.

The state of Ireland from the late-1700s to the Famine of the 1840s has been described by the historian of Irish emigration, Kerby A. Miller, as being ubiquitously and hopelessly destitute and hundreds of travellers’ accounts, private reports and government investigations provide us with a wealth of information on the subject.⁰¹⁵

From her earliest years in the state of Vermont, Asenath Nicholson had heard stories from her god-fearing and upright Congregationalist father about Napoleon, the French Revolution, the secession of the colonies, and the Irish Rebellions. Remember, my children, he would often say, the Irish are a suffering people. When they come to your doors, never drive them empty away.⁰¹⁶

When she got married and lived in New York, Asenath visited the poor Irish in districts like the notorious Five Points where she became fascinated with them because of their obvious poverty on the one hand, and their seemingly irrepressible good humour and cheerfulness on the other. Often when seated at my fireside, she wrote, I have told those most dear to my heart that God will one day allow me to breathe the mountain air of the sea-girt coast of Ireland; to sit down in their cabins, and there learn what soil has nurtured, what habits have disciplined a race so patient and so impetuous, so revengeful and so forgiving, so proud and so humble, so obstinate and so docile, so witty and so simple.⁰¹⁷

In focusing on the apparent contradictions she saw in their make-up, this Yankee Protestant woman was reflecting the curiosity of many Americans – their preoccupation, even – with these strange Irish who had been coming to their shores in ever-increasing numbers since the economic decline in Ireland following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. But while thousands of her compatriots would be content to rely on popular narratives and prevailing stereotyping to inform their views of the Irish, she would go to the very source itself, the Emerald Isle of the ocean, and having lived among them for as long as it took, set down in writing all that she saw and heard.

And what an amazing piece of timing on her part for such an investigation. She arrived in Ireland on the eve of the Famine, stayed nearly three years, traversed the country up and down, and talked to anyone and everyone, the poor in particular; she slept in the cabins of the most destitute, set up her own programme to feed the starving poor of Dublin at the height of the Famine, and left as a record two extraordinary volumes.

One could hardly dream up such a scenario for a work of fiction. It is remarkable that so striking and unusual a narrator has been neglected for so long, Irish-American author Peter Quinn pointedly observed on the occasion of the republishing of her Famine book in 1998.

For a respectable woman of the period to travel about on her own was regarded as very odd indeed and simply not the done thing; but Asenath Nicholson was a fiercely independent and determined woman, and she went everywhere alone, by coach, train, side-car, canal-boat, and donkey cart, but mostly on foot. There were those who thought her to be some kind of red revolutionary and others who said she must have been quite mad. But she was neither bad nor mad. Eccentric, yes, and determined to emulate her mother’s example of working hard and hating oppression, and her father’s habit of speaking his mind.

She herself admitted that she succeeded rather too well in taking on her father’s trait of plain-speaking, and in her self-deprecating way, wrote to one of her correspondents about these ‘offensive points’ in her make-up that regularly got her into trouble; it was her blunt candour in criticising what she called the enslavement of the Irish that earned her the contempt and disdain of respectable people in so-called polite society. On the other hand, Dubliner Richard Webb, the Quaker abolitionist, temperance advocate, and relief organiser during the Famine, said of her that there was no one more impartial-minded, scrupulous, (or) truth-loving than her.⁰¹⁸

One of the sharpest ripostes to writers and commentators who blamed the Irish peasantry themselves for their miserable state came from the pen of the distinguished Irish chemist, Robert Kane (1809-1890). He gave his blunt rebuttal to those who blamed the people: We were reckless, ignorant, improvident, drunken, and idle. We were idle, for we had nothing to do; we were reckless, for we had no hope; we were ignorant, for learning was denied us; we were improvident, for we had no future; we were drunken, for we sought to forget our misery.

Mainland Europeans, the French and the Germans in particular, were fascinated with the rise to power of the British nation, and in the 19th century many came to see at first-hand what it was that made the United Kingdom the most powerful nation on earth.

When they were finished travelling around Britain, the visitors crossed the Irish Sea to see for themselves what life was like in the other large island of the Kingdom. The contrast between the progressive and modern society of Britain and the distressed and oppressed state of Ireland astounded them. On their journeys around the country, travel writers commented regularly on the ragged state of the people and noted that in remoter rural districts they were often half-naked. The German nobleman, Prince Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau travelled to Galway in early September 1828 and described what he saw en route. The suburbs and all the villages through which we passed on our way, were of a kind which I should vainly attempt to liken to anything ever seen before: pigsties are palaces in comparison; and I often saw numerous groups of children (for the fertility of the Irish people seems to keep pace with their wretchedness), naked as they came into the world, roll and paddle about with the ducks in the filthy drains with the greatest delight.⁰¹⁹

Yankee Protestants like Mrs Nicholson saw their new American republic with all its freedoms and laws as being a distinctly Protestant creation, having been born of what they regarded as a Protestant sense of what it was to be free. They feared and despised European despotism for keeping people in thrall to corrupt and oppressive regimes. One of the most hated of the ‘foreign potentates’ was the Pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church and temporal leader of the Papal States, the capital of which was Rome. The state of poor immigrants arriving in America was confirmation enough for many of them that they had positive grounds for their beliefs and fears.

Cabin, West of Ireland

The Illustrated London News, 12 August, 1843

The poverty and religion of Irish immigrants marked them out for special attention in some towns and cities, and when they sought employment or accommodation, they did not always get the welcoming sort of reception Asenath Nicholson’s Congregationalist father had urged upon his children.

Not all doom and gloom

Of course, it would be giving a false picture if one were left with the impression that all was unrelieved poverty and misery among the people, because although want and deprivation were widespread, poets still wrote their poems and songs, people sang them, and played music on fiddle, flute and pipes for dancing at gatherings on all sorts of occasions. Whatever about travellers’ observations on Ireland’s ubiquitous beggary, they often remarked on the wit and good humour of the people and their capacity to enjoy themselves and have a good time – as Asenath