Posted on Mar 18, 2016
Why did Irishmen fight on both sides of the Civil War?
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Yesterday, in honor of St. Patrick's Day and my Irish heritage, I posted a picture of Mort Kunstler's "Rebel Sons of Erin" as the Colonel on horseback in the print was a distant cousin of mine. My direct ancestors served in the Armies of the north, but I did have relatives on both sides.
One of my cousins posted the following comment, "I cannot understand how Irish immigrants who were abused for hundreds of years by the English could fight for a army which wanted to preserve slavery. I know the Irish fought on both sides, seems strange to me." Here is my reply:
Makes perfect sense to me.
I suspect if you mined the diaries and letters of Irish soldiers from both sides you'd find their reasons for joining and fighting were very similar. They are the same reasons man throughout his "civilized" history has taken up arms against his fellow man:
In some cases it was because leaders, or strong men, whom they respected told them it was right and their duty.
Perhaps they went along with the crowd as they saw their friends and relatives take up arms.
Perhaps it was because they feared being thought of by their women as cowardly or unmanly if they did not take up arms.
Perhaps it was because their native or adopted sympathies lay more with the city or state in which they lived than in the ideal of a nation comprised of states that they did not know of or care about.
Perhaps in some instances it actually was because they believed men of color were not on the same plane was white men and should be subjugated and used for manual labor.
Perhaps they gained some personal self-worth by seeing others as less than themselves, particularly since so many saw and treated them as the bottom rung.
Man is born with inalienable rights. But, man is also born with an enormous capacity to do horrendous, evil things to his fellow man, especially if he feels justified in doing them. The slave and the enslaver are common to all races, ethnicities, and religions.
Da'esh enslaves Christians and Yazidis in the name of Allah and his prophet. In the 17th and 18th Centuries black Africans on the western coast of that continent ventured inland, captured other Africans, and sold them to the Portuguese for want of power and riches. The list of enslavement, genocide, atrocities, etc., etc., spans all cultures and all centuries.
If our generation, or our culture, or our nation, believes that we have moved beyond such horrendous capacities for evil, than we are arrogant, egotistical, naive, and doomed.
Duty, Honor, Country, is our call to arms. But it has been such for millennia.
Thucydides writing of the Peloponnesian Wars 2,500 years ago famously stated, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
It is still true today.
One of my cousins posted the following comment, "I cannot understand how Irish immigrants who were abused for hundreds of years by the English could fight for a army which wanted to preserve slavery. I know the Irish fought on both sides, seems strange to me." Here is my reply:
Makes perfect sense to me.
I suspect if you mined the diaries and letters of Irish soldiers from both sides you'd find their reasons for joining and fighting were very similar. They are the same reasons man throughout his "civilized" history has taken up arms against his fellow man:
In some cases it was because leaders, or strong men, whom they respected told them it was right and their duty.
Perhaps they went along with the crowd as they saw their friends and relatives take up arms.
Perhaps it was because they feared being thought of by their women as cowardly or unmanly if they did not take up arms.
Perhaps it was because their native or adopted sympathies lay more with the city or state in which they lived than in the ideal of a nation comprised of states that they did not know of or care about.
Perhaps in some instances it actually was because they believed men of color were not on the same plane was white men and should be subjugated and used for manual labor.
Perhaps they gained some personal self-worth by seeing others as less than themselves, particularly since so many saw and treated them as the bottom rung.
Man is born with inalienable rights. But, man is also born with an enormous capacity to do horrendous, evil things to his fellow man, especially if he feels justified in doing them. The slave and the enslaver are common to all races, ethnicities, and religions.
Da'esh enslaves Christians and Yazidis in the name of Allah and his prophet. In the 17th and 18th Centuries black Africans on the western coast of that continent ventured inland, captured other Africans, and sold them to the Portuguese for want of power and riches. The list of enslavement, genocide, atrocities, etc., etc., spans all cultures and all centuries.
If our generation, or our culture, or our nation, believes that we have moved beyond such horrendous capacities for evil, than we are arrogant, egotistical, naive, and doomed.
Duty, Honor, Country, is our call to arms. But it has been such for millennia.
Thucydides writing of the Peloponnesian Wars 2,500 years ago famously stated, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
It is still true today.
Military History
Civil War
American History
Command Post
Edited >1 y ago
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 17
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Great question! Every nation has had it's civil wars, and with America having a melting pot of immigrants and their generations, I suppose it would be natural that there would be Irish on both sides. It also proves that, in general, human nature does not always learn from history.
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My wife is from Eastern North Carolina. That part of the country was originally settled by Irish (and Scotts) who fled the UK for cheap land. They mainly fought for the King in the revolutionary war. By the time the civil war came around these same Irishmen in the south owned land, and in many cases slaves, so fighting for the south was the natural course of events. During the 1840's and 1850's the Irish immigrants mostly settled in larger cities in the North They were fleeing religious persecution and saw the south as a bastion of protestantism. Kinda simplistic, but that is an explanation.
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Irishmen were torn between Two Lovers (Faith and Loyalty) Their Faith made them fight against slavery, while those that lived in the South their Loyalty made them fight for their community. So what do you know of Los Patricios?
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CPT Pedro Meza
COL Sam Russell - The Irish are Catholic and were opposed to slavery, but those that lived in the south although opposed to slavery were loyal to their kin. The question should be how many Irish owned slaves.
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CPT Pedro Meza
COL Sam Russell - Catholic Priest Bartolomé de las Casas, 1515 he advocated the use of African slaves instead of Natives in the West-Indian colonies; Catholics learn to recent the the priest as well as he too.
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CPT Pedro Meza
COL Sam Russell - I do not question their Faith, I understand it, because of how the African slave trade started here, Catholic held higher dislikes for owning slaves then protestants.
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COL Sam Russell
CPT Pedro Meza Great points. Of course, there certainly were Irish Protestants as well. Following the Napoleonic wars, most of the Irish emigrants to America were from Northern Ireland and were Protestants. My gr-gr-grandfather, who served in the 6th U.S. Cav. during the war, was an Irish Protestant. He married a Tennessee belle after the war who was also an Irish Protestant. Lt. Col. Randal McGavock, the officer on horseback in Kunstler's "Rebel Sons of Erin" was her cousin and was also Protestant. With all those Protestants in may family, alas, I'm Catholic. The next generation of my Irish-American ancestors intermarried between Irish Protestants and Catholics. Those Irish Catholics in my family emigrated later, during the potato famine. Irish names in my tree include McGavock, Whitside, Dolan, and Rigney, the former were Protestant and the latter, Catholic.
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I'm pretty sure they did. Great bit of History. Thanks for Sharing.
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That was really great COL Russell I had family that fought on both side also I am from Mass and the Irish have always been thought of as less that is what my uncles have told me but we could fight and that is what the Army liked one uncle a history teach at my high school told us in class that the Irish never really like the black. In the move 54th MASSACHUEST all black Reg there training SGM really showed it and one of the white officer even said it to the COL saying the Irish hate the blacks. So I feel they all had there reasons for fighting on both sides like you said.
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Jim Webb gives a partial answer in Fields of Fire. Why he retired from the Senate to leave VA with Timmy Kaine was a political criminal!
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Well considering that the first slaves in this country were Irish, we were suffering from ptsp of a nationality. Which takes 3 generations to get through. This had not happened as of 1860.
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