Review - "Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865" by Damian Shiels

[Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damian Shiels (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Hardcover, illustrations, graphs, tables, biography appendix, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,176/314. ISBN:978-0-8071-8370-0. $50]

Typically, scholarly studies of Irish American contributions to the Union armed forces during the Civil War possess a very selective geographical (ex. the urban Irish of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston) and unit focus (most prominently the famed Irish Brigade). Thus, it is high time for revisiting the big picture with a proper investigation of Irish volunteer demographics, motivations, beliefs, and attitudes that are more representative of the whole. A powerhouse study housed in a compact and highly accessible package, Damian Shiels's Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 succeeds in doing just that.

In researching this project, Shiels consulted an abundance of primary sources while also thoughtfully engaging with the secondary literature (including influential recent works from Catherine Bateson, Ryan Keating, Christian Samito, and Susannah Ural), but the gamechanger was his access to the recently digitized widow's pension files housed at the National Archives. The author's extensive review of those records (first used in creating his 2016 book The Forgotten Irish) unearthed a treasure trove of letters written by or for Irish soldiers during the Civil War, all being supporting documentation to bolster widow or dependent claims. Kept by the government in the files were 1,135 letters (singly or in bunches) from or for 395 soldiers along with almost three hundred additional supporting letters from other sources. That body of wartime letters provides invaluable information on 568 Irish American soldiers, an unprecedented gathering for investigation of this sort. Additionally, in bringing together individuals from 260 units raised from 22 states and districts, this large sample represents by far the widest breadth of Irish volunteer service yet studied. An appendix also compiles brief biographical profiles of those individuals featured in the main text. 

The volume begins with an informative summary of eighteenth-century immigration and settlement patterns from Ireland to the United States, noteworthy for the concentration of Irish immigrants into northern urban centers east and west. There is also some brief background on pre-Civil War Irish contributions to the armed forces, which included disproportionate enlistment in the antebellum Regular Army and a heavy presence in the U.S. Navy.

Early-war enlistment dominates the pension records, with almost three-fourths of the correspondents volunteering before the end of 1862. The overwhelming majority were drawn from the working class (92% were either farm laborers, unemployed, or worked in blue-collar occupations). As expected, the eastern states dominate, with just over 40% of the sample coming from New York alone. Just over a third were born outside the Emerald Isle to Irish parents in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K, and the average age of the Irish American enlistee was over a year and half younger than the average age of the Union volunteer overall. As the author explains, his finding that nearly two-thirds of these volunteers were single was expected given that Irish men tended to marry later than other ethnic groups.

In terms of what Irish American soldiers wrote about their soldier experience, Shiels finds that they expressed themselves in the straightforward, non-sentimental descriptive manner that was much the same across the lower classes of all white ethnic groups. Their written reactions to combat, marching, and camp life also closely matched others. One noteworthy difference among Irish volunteers was a higher than average desertion rate, which the author primarily attributes to the exceptionally precarious financial position of Irish families (a distinction from other ethnicities that's well explained in the book).

The commonly accepted total of Irish who served in the Union Army is, in round numbers, 150,000 men, but Shiels reveals why that figure should be considered much too low. The traditional number excludes certain geographical regions as well as the U.S. Navy and Regular Army. Including those numbers raises the total to over 180,000, and, if you add the children of Irish immigrants to the total, the author believes the best conservative estimate to be at least 250,000. Shiels feels that the implications of this are critically important, as, in addition to simply being more accurate, the amended total upends the long-held conclusion that ethnic Irish were underrepresented (which Shiels questions even when using the old numbers) in the Union volunteer forces. Instead, the revised numbers suggest that the Irish were truly overrepresented. The impact of this on assessing Irish loyalty and duty toward their new country, both of which were sullied by the Irish's heavy role in opposing conscription (especially during the infamous New York City Draft Riot of July 1863), is important to consider.

The great many acts of deadly violence perpetrated during the aforementioned civil unrest in New York City, in which a predominantly Irish mob specifically targeted black residents, has been commonly used as a reference point to gauge Irish American attitudes toward blacks in general. In addition to reminding readers that only a small proportion of New York's Irish participated in the bloody riots, Shiels's research into how Irish soldiers described their interactions with free and enslaved blacks encountered during their service reveals a complicated range of attitudes. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the vast majority of Irish soldiers deeply opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and the war's new direction, their attitude grounded in both racism and economic fears. Interestingly, Shiels's research directly challenges the viewpoint of those contemporary abolitionists (among them Frederick Douglass) who maintained that it was immersion into American society that produced Irish beliefs in black racial inferiority. Instead, Shiels's work strongly suggests that most Irish already held such opinions before they arrived on American soil.

In the arena of Irish American political identity, it is noteworthy that not a single letter in Shiels's sample expressed support for the Republican party. As the author explains, this is understandable given that party's evolution from nativist and anti-Catholic roots, and the Irish's position as the white ethnic group most vulnerable to the economic implications of emancipation and possible mass migration of freedpeople into heavily Irish urban centers. Also pointed out by the author is the Irish's generally conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Shiels does not dismiss the likelihood that many soldiers, in particular the early volunteers most personally invested in finishing the war, voted Republican in 1864 or declined to vote at all in protest of the Peace Party wing of the Democratic Party, but in his opinion it remains highly likely that the Irish cast the largest block of Democratic votes in the Union Army. Given that opposition to emancipation and Democratic affiliation in general both came to be widely viewed as evidence of disloyalty during the mid to late-war period, Shiels acknowledges that the ethnic group's voting patterns contributed mightily, and unfairly, to broad anti-Irish feeling.

Interwoven with nativist doubts about Irish loyalty were issues and perceptions related to chosen identity. From the letters Shiels examined emerged a dual Irish American identity that few among them were uncomfortable with by the 1860s, it being clear that these men were proud of their ethnic heritage but also strongly identified with being an American. Of course, those 1830s and 1840s immigrants and their children were more tightly bound to their American identity than those who arrived during the 1850s wave of new immigration. It is noteworthy that the soldier correspondents of Shiels's sample routinely elevated the Fourth of July holiday above St. Patrick's Day. Additionally, most of these soldiers did not pine for the old country in their letters home but rather expressed deep attachment to their local communities. They also more often than not preferred to get their news from non-ethnic newspapers.

Shiels challenges enduring negatives stereotypes of Irish soldiers as uninhibited rowdies and street toughs who were just as hard drinking as they were hard fighting. There were certainly large numbers of individuals in the Union Army (Irish or otherwise) who were just like that, but Shiels counters that his research reveals that the majority of Irish American soldiers, like their comrades of other ethnicities, valued duty and restraint within a generally more moderate form of what recent scholars term "martial manhood." On the matter of alcohol, the author acknowledges the significance of Irish drinking culture, but notes that all societal classes and ethnicities in the Union service struggled with alcohol abuse, and the nativist stereotyping of the Irish as exceptional offenders often led to harsher punishments than might otherwise have been imposed by officers.

Of course, any investigation into the religious identity of Irish Americans is readily confronted with the cultural dominance of the Catholic Church and its sacramental teachings. However, Shiels's research path also meaningfully encounters the much smaller Protestant Irish identity and outlook that many prior investigators tended to ignore as materially insignificant to the Irish American experience. Perhaps remarkable is that the letters he examined evinced very little in the way of sectarian division between the two groups when they served together.

In examining the crossover between identity and ideology when it comes to enlistment motivation, Shiels finds no evidence to support the popular contention that many Irish joined the Union Army primarily to gain military experience needed to free Ireland from British rule. Among the soldier correspondents, there was widespread sympathy for the Fenian Movement (the individual expression of which Shiels describes as often being "performative" in nature), but the primary focus of their attention was on the practical matter of doing their part to achieve Union victory and secure their own future in their adopted homeland. Rather than dream of returning to the "Old Sod" to free it from British imperial oppression (an aspiration that some individuals certainly did articulate), the far more common cross-Atlantic intention expressed by the sample correspondents was a determination to entice more family members and friends to join them in a reunited post-Civil War America full of promise and opportunity.

If Fenianism wasn't a major enlistment motivator, economic considerations and patriotism certainly were. The role economics played in early-war volunteerism in general has been examined at greater depth in recent years (William Marvel's detailed work being among the most pointed in tone and analysis), and it is clear from Shiels's sample group that the prospect of regular pay and other financial incentives were important considerations for the working-class individuals who formed the vast majority of Irish American volunteers. They, especially the urban workers, were especially vulnerable during the national economy's sharp late-antebellum and secession-period downturn. Whether expressed overtly or with more subtlety, patriotism was also widely expressed in the Irish soldier letters, especially from those who had spent their youth into adulthood years in the United States. Their words and sentiments related to duty and commitment to the preservation of the Union were similar to those of Union volunteers in general, and that evidence collectively reinforces the author's views in regard to the preeminence of local and national American identity over ethnic insularity.

In addition to being the first of its kind in terms of providing a comprehensive profile and analysis of Irish volunteers, Damian Shiels's deeply impressive Green and Blue ranks as one of the most important of all Civil War ethnic soldier studies. One might hope it could be used as a model for studying other large groups of ethnic volunteers such as German American soldiers, both for intrinsic value and for comparative purposes. This book is very highly recommended.