The Battle of Fredericksburg is best known from an Irish perspective for the doomed advance of the Irish Brigade. But a number of Irishmen faced their more famous countrymen from behind the stone wall at Marye’s Heights, dressed in Confederate...
The photograph below shows Battery M of the 1st Missouri Light Artillery during Sherman’s Meridian Campaign of February 1864. One of the men in this image is Sergeant Peter Cavanagh, from near Tullamore in Co. Offaly. Peter had a remarkable...
Captain John H. Donovan of the 69th New York went into action at the Battle of Fredericksburg already bearing the scars of war. While serving with the Irish Brigade at Malvern Hill in July 1862 he had suffered the loss...
John Hines was a Private in Company F of the 34th Massachusetts Infantry. He was described as a ‘rough, coarse, uneducated Irishman, with a keener nose for whisky than any other man living.’ He would be able to seek out the...
150 years ago this week the Battles of Second Bull Run and Chantilly were fought in Virginia. The engagements are amongst the least well-known of the 1862 clashes in the Eastern Theater, overshadowed as they are by the battles...
Previous posts on the site have explored the stories of remarkable Irish women such as Jennie Hodgers, who served as Albert D.J. Cashier in the 95th Illinois Infantry, and Mary Sophia Hill, who accompanied her brother to the front and...
On 23rd March 1862 Stonewall Jackson entered into his first serious clash in the Shenandoah Valley, at the Battle of Kernstown. The fight was part of what became known as the 1862 Valley Campaign, a series of engagements that would make...
In the late morning of 17th September 1862, the first elements of Major-General William B. Franklin’s Sixth Corps, Army of the Potomac arrived on the Antietam battlefield after a forced march. The bloodiest day in United States history was already...
The Georgia Daily Constitutionalist received permission in July 1861 to publish a letter received by one of its Irish readers. It was a note from the Georgia Irishman’s brother, who had fought with the 69th New York State Militia at Bull Run...
As the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fair Oaks approaches, it is interesting to note the contribution of one Irish woman to the battle, which was remembered long after the war. New York newspapers in 1899 carried the obituary...