Booknotes: Green and Blue

New Arrival:

• Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damian Shiels (LSU Press, 2025).

From big-picture narratives to biographies, unit studies, and edited officer and enlisted soldier writings, the Irish American contributions to Union victory in the American Civil War have been well documented. Of the first variety is Irish historian Damian Shiels's new book Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865.

While influential recent studies such as Susannah Ural's The Harp and the Eagle and Ryan Keating's Shades of Green use men from particular locations and units as lenses through which to draw broader conclusions about attitudes, ideological beliefs, and motivations of these Union volunteers, Shiels has long been determined to a craft a more broadly representative picture of Irish American war service "through the microanalysis of individuals and family groups" (pg. 8). The pension record part of that research underpinned Shiels's 2016 book The Forgotten Irish, and Green and Blue is the result of Shiels's fuller investigation of the written connection between Irish American soldiers at the fighting front and their families and friends back home.

From the description: Green and Blue "explores Irish American service in the United States military by analyzing the written correspondence of ordinary rank-and-file soldiers drawn from across the Union’s armed forces. Using a vast and largely untapped collection of letters penned by Irish American combatants to their families during the war, Shiels explains how these enlisted men navigated their duties from multiple perspectives, including how they adapted to and experienced military life, how they engaged with their faith, and how they interacted with the home front."

Using the pension records as his starting point for gathering information about these soldiers and their families, Shiels eventually gathered a body of 1,135 letters from 395 Irish soldiers and sailors (supplemented by hundreds of other correspondence documents associated with those persons). In Shiels's estimation, his sampling of writings [from individuals who served in 260 units raised from "twenty-two different states and districts" and who fought in every major theater of war], is "the most fully representative group of Irish American servicemen ever gathered together for analysis" (pg. 9).

Based upon that unprecedented sample breadth and depth, Green and Blue "offers the most detailed and intimate picture yet of Irish Americans’ service in the United States military during the Civil War." Grab a pint of Guinness and give it a read!