Patrick Coffey was a labourer in his 30s when he went to war. In the summer of 1861, he marched off to Virginia as part of Company D, the “Fitzgerald Guard” of the famed 69th New York State Militia. Like...
The Battle of Gettysburg is by far the most famed clash of the American Civil War. It is also an engagement of significance for the Andersonville Irish Project, as it is among the earliest points of capture for men who...
Within the files of Irish Americans who died during the American Civil War, certain engagements crop up again and again. As a general rule, the very worst battlefields of the war for Irish Americans were those that took the greatest...
John Dineen was born in Cork around 1846. Somtime during the 1850s he emigrated with his parents to Lawrence, Massachusetts, a town which provided employment to large numbers of Irish immigrants in its textile mills. On 5th June 1862, when...
The citations that accompanied Civil War era Medal of Honor awards tend to provide us with precious little detail. Regularly restricted to one or two lines, they often lack description, and do little to transmit the horrors of the sights...
The Civil War world has been captivated in recent weeks by the identification of a previously overlooked burial map of the Antietam battlefield, prepared by Simon G. Elliot in 1864. The staff of New York Public Library first recognised the...
Historically, we have tended to view the Irish American experience of the Civil War through the lens of ethnic formations such as the Irish Brigade and Corcoran’s Irish Legion. Yet of the c. 250,000 ethnic Irishmen who donned Union blue...
There is only one week until our free tour of the 69th New York State Militia at the Battle of Bull Run. I have arrived Stateside, and will be spending this week researching Union Irish at the National Archives in...
Thoughts of the 69th New York State Militia’s leadership at Bull Run immediately conjures images of Michael Corcoran and Thomas Francis Meagher. Yet there were many others who held important command positions in the regiment on that fateful day in...
The 1913 Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg witnessed the largest Civil War veteran’s reunion that ever took place. Although thousands of former Union and Confederate soldiers attended the event, the numbers of those who had fought through the war...