Despite the wide-spread famine striking over three million rural Irish, the British government did not cease calling on Ireland to export food to England. Throughout the whole famine period, Ireland was a net food exporter despite the starvation of its people. When faced with this hopeless starvation and evictions when, without crops to sell, the rural Irish farmers were unable to pay their rents, many emigrated to countries around the world. Of the approximately three million Irish suffering starvation, it is estimated that one million or more left their country, many of them bound for the United States.
Of those that remained in Ireland, one million starved to death or died of disease brought on by their malnutrition. These new Irish immigrants entered the country and found that the New World had as many challenges at the Old. Coming from rural backgrounds, many Irish found themselves without the necessary skills for the new industrialized, urbanized economy that was springing up in the United States. Many Irish had to seek jobs as laborers to make ends meet, paving the streets and digging the canals of an expanding New York City while the women were forced into jobs as maids and laundresses.
Unfortunately, the Irish faced another major challenge in the United States - racism. Much of the same prejudices against the Irish, for their race and their religion, followed them to the New World. American politicians, fearful of the Irish, sought to marginalize them and created a political party, the Know-Nothing Party, whose major focus was anti-immigration xenophobia. This party believed that the Irish could not be trusted because of their "allegiance" to the Pope in Rome and because of their insular "clannish" tendencies to look after each other.
While thousands of Irish were looking for work, many places would put up signs looking for help that read "Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply. As a new political powerhouse of Irish voters began to coalesce around the machinery of Tammany Hall, many Irishmen looked for another path to acceptance in their new country - military service. Men from Ireland looking for work often joined the U. Army, for income and in order to find acceptance amongst Americans. Recruiters waited outside Castle Clinton, an immigrant processing center, and offered bounties to immigrants for their service.
Many potential soldiers hoped to send money back to their families in Ireland, and so signed the recruitment papers and entered military service. Many Irishmen in New York City also joined the militia, a state-run military organization that trained part-time and whose troops could be mustered into federal service in times of war. He found work as a clerk but felt that he could do more, hoping that what he did and learned in the United States could be used to help free Ireland from British rule.
This movement, led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was known as Fenianism, from the Irish word fianna meaning "band of warriors. These units would form the core of what would come to be called the Irish Brigade.
Ethnic units were a way for the Union Army to help win Irish support for its cause. Also, many Irish and Irish Americans were not against slavery. On the contrary, they favored a system that kept blacks out of the paid labor market and away from their jobs. He escaped from Australia in and came to the United States, where he became a well-known orator and activist on behalf of the Irish nationalist cause. He joined the Army early in Meagher was ambitious, and he knew that if he could raise an all-Irish infantry brigade, Union Army officials would have to make him its commander.
He also hoped that an Irish Brigade in the U. In the spring of , Union Army officials added a non-Irish regiment, the 29th Massachusetts , to the Irish Brigade in order to beef up its numbers before the Peninsula Campaign for the capture of Richmond, Virginia , the capital of the Confederacy. The next month, officials swapped the non-Irish 29th Massachusetts Regiment for the Irish 28th Massachusetts.
This meant that they suffered disproportionate numbers of casualties. At the Battle of Antietam , in September , about 60 percent of the soldiers in the 63rd and 69th New York regiments, almost men in all, were killed in battle. There is a monument to the Irish Brigade on the battlefield there: a green malachite Celtic cross with a trefoil, an Irish harp and the numbers of the three New York Irish regiments rendered in bronze on its front.
It was also the turning point for the Irish Brigade. By the summer of , the tragically high numbers of casualties in the Brigade led many Irish soldiers and their families to believe that the Union Army was taking advantage of their willingness to fight by using them as cannon fodder. These tensions boiled over in New York City on July 13, about a week after the Battle of Gettysburg, when thousands of Irish immigrants took to the streets for five days in violent protest against the draft law—and, more generally, against the black people they blamed for the war.
Federal troops arrived in the city on July 16 to quell the disorder. At least people, most of them African-American, died in the violence. The images of the bloated and disfigured brought the war home to thousands of people in a way unimaginable only a year previously. They remain some of the most powerful images recorded in US history. Only weeks before the battle Union soldiers donated thousands of dollars for the relief of the starving in Ireland.
These were men like Michael Cuddy, Hugh Murphy and Dennis Brady, who despite being in the midst of unspeakable horrors found time to remember those at home. All three died at Gettysburg. Despite the scale of the Irish sacrifice in the American Civil War, it receives little attention here today.
There is no national memorial and there have been no efforts by the State to mark the anniversary. Just as men like Michael Cuddy, Hugh Murphy and Dennis Brady took the time to remember their homeland before giving their lives for the United States, perhaps it is time that Ireland now takes time to remember her 19th century emigrants and one of the most important conflicts in Irish history.
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