In advance of St. Patrick’s Day I joined John Banks and Tom McMillan of the Antietam and Beyond Podcast to chat about the Irish Brigade and other Irish at Antietam, and Irish participation in the Civil War more generally. It...
One of the notable outcomes of our ongoing Andersonville Irish Project is the identification of concentrations of Irish servicemen in non-ethnic regiments, including largely Irish companies. A lot more work is needed on such Irish company level formations, exploring how...
I have recently returned from Georgia and Tennessee where I was on the trail of Irish in the American Civil War. A lot of my posts over the next period will relate to that trip. One of the opportunities I...
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...