An Unequal Duel: Union Recruiting in Ireland, 1863-1864

Abstract

AN UNEQUAL DUEL: Union Recruiting in Ireland, 1863-1864 Charles P. Cullop A dramatic and intriguing yet largely unheralded episode in the Confederate-Union struggle arose over the apparently innocent issue of Irish emigration to the North. The Federal government encouraged this trans-Atlantic movement not only to relieve labor shortages but to replenish the ranks of the Union army, which by 1863 had been seriously depleted by casualties and desertions. The Confederacy, for various reasons unable to match northern attractions, made a determined counterattack to block the flow of newcomers. While numerous military and labor recruits came from elsewhere in Europe, most notably from the German States, from the beginning the Emerald Isle offered the greatest prospect to Union recruiters. Indeed, for many years Ireland's primary exportable resource had been her manpower, despite its small nineteenth-century population of some eight million.1 Largely to escape the potato blight, nearly one million Irish came to the United States between 1850 and 1860, about one-third of all immigrants to this country during that period.2 The highwater mark was 1851 when 221,000 came, but the tide receded by 1855 when only about fifty thousand immigrated. This general level was maintained until 1858 when it dropped to thirty-five thousand and then finally to about twenty-four thousand in the years 1861 and 1862.3 But increasingly poorer crops during those years once again caused the Irish to look toward the United States, despite the dangers and uncertainties of the war. According to the London Times, during 1861 and 1862 the losses to Irish farmers in oats, wheat, and potatoes amounted to twenty-six million pounds, or the equivalent of two 1 Thomas Z. Lee, Secretary General, The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society (Providence, R.I.), IX, 114. 2 Ibid., 114. 3 United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to the Present (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 57. Hereafter cited as Historical Statistics. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY years' average rental to landlords.4 The Liverpool Daily Post declared that cereals production from 1861 to 1862 dropped nearly seventyfive thousand acres, with the greatest loss in wheat, which alone amounted to nearly forty-four thousand acres.5 As a consequence, Poor Law expenditures increased by sixty-two thousand pounds, or 12 per cent, and the number of Irish recipients by seventy-three thousand, or 22 per cent, from 1861 to 1862.' The crime rate also moved upward.7 Accordingly, emigration increased sharply in 1863. Official United States immigration statistics for that year included fifty-six thousand Irish and in 1864 the number increased to sixty-four thousand, the highest total for any single year after 1854 and more than had come to the United States in any year before 1847.8 Contemporary newspaper accounts strongly support the official statistics. The London Times, on April 6, 1863, expressed the belief that a "tide of immigration has set in." It quoted the Cork Examiner's report that "the number of persons who have left Kerry for the United States during the last fortnight exceeded all who have emigrated the last two years." The Liverpool Daily Post reported that in March, 1863, twenty-three passenger vessels carrying nearly nine thousand Irish had left Liverpool enroute to the United States and that emigration of all nationalities from that port had increased by about eighteen thousand during the first quarter of 1863, as compared with the corresponding period in 1862.9 The same paper quoted the New York Times as reporting that forty thousand immigrants had arrived in New York by June, 1863, or about three times the number that had disembarked there in the same period in 1862. Moreover, the Times stated that the "greater part of those who have arrived this year are from Ireland ." Statistics showing monthly totals of Irish emigration during the first seven months of 1863 reveal that during that time over eighty thousand people left Ireland, most of them for the United States.10 American consular reports from Ireland provide additional evidence of renewed Irish emigration. In April, 1863, Henry B. Hammond wrote to Secretary of State William H...