When I visited the battlefields at Gettysburg some years ago, I noticed that more than a few of the many monuments covering them were inscribed with dedications to one or another Irish regiment. I speculated that perhaps there were so many because the Irish were unable to find gainful employment when they reached New York, for various reasons, not the least of which was the prejudice against poor Catholic immigrants. I thought perhaps joining the army was not only a way to get fed, but maybe thought of as a possible way to gain acceptance.
While Paul Craig Roberts is not writing about the Irish in this week's post, he offers a possibility I hadn't thought of for why there were so many Irish units in the Northern Army of the American Civil War.
It had not occurred to me that maybe the Irish immigrants never had an option.I have always been intrigued by the Battle of Bull Run, the opening battle of the US Civil War, known to southerners as the War of Northern Aggression.
[...]
Republican politicians and their ladies in their finery rode out to Manassas, the Virginia town through which the stream, Bull Run, flowed, in carriages to watch the Union Army end the “Southern Rebellion” in one fell swoop. What they witnessed instead was the Union Army fleeing back to Washington with its tail between its legs. The flight of the northern troops promoted some southern wags to name the battle, the Battle of Yankee Run.
[...]
Historians report that the flight back to Washington left the Union Army and the US capital in a state of disorganization for three weeks, during which time even a small army could have taken the capital. Historians inclined not to see the battle as a victory for the South claim that the southerners were exhausted by the effort it took to put the Yankees to flight and simply hadn’t the energy to pursue them, take Washington, hang the traitor Lincoln and all the Republicans, and end the war.
Exhausted troops or not, if Napoleon had been the southern general, the still organized southern army would have been in Washington as fast as the disorganized Union. Possibly the southerners would have engaged in ethnic cleansing by enslaving the Yankees and selling them to Africans, thus ejecting from the country the greed-driven northern imperialists who, in the southern view, did not know how to behave either in private or in public.
It was not southern exhaustion that saved the day for the North. It was southern hubris. The Battle of Bull Run convinced the South that the citified northerners simply could not fight and were not a military threat.
Perhaps the South was right about the North. However, the Irish immigrants, who were met at the docks and sent straight to the front, could fight.
Paul Craig Roberts
I'm too lazy to research the answer as to the large numbers of Irish soldiers. But I also saw while in Caracas, Venezuela, a very prominent monument in Plaza O'Leary dedicated to an Irishman who fought with Simon Bolivar for independence from Spain, which if I recall, was during that same period, so I'm still left wondering if the Irish, forced to leave their homeland due to famine and English oppression, were great lovers of freedom or great lovers of fighting. Perhaps both. (Here's a site devoted to the Irish in other country's wars: http://www.illyria.com/irish/iowa.html)
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