Charleston's Irish labourers and their move into the Confederacy

Abstract

In 1861, thousands of recently arrived Irish immigrants marched off to battlefields like Petersburg, Sharpsburg, and Cold Harbor carrying Confederate flags and Irish banners. Most, like those from Charleston, South Carolina, were not slave holders but young, impoverished, unskilled workers. Their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Were they hapless pawns of the powerful slave-owning elite? What were they fighting for? What was it in their view of the world that brought them to the decision to join the Confederate forces? The answer is embedded in their past experiences, current social relations, and sense of identity. In part, Charleston's Irish workers brought the memory of social exclusion with them to America and struggled to write a different history on Southern soil. Their position as free, white workers in a slave society and their constructed and publicly reinforced identity as exiled patriots and dutiful sons of their new homeland influenced their actions on the eve of the Civil War. In this essay, Irish workers' motivations and sense of identity are revealed through an analysis of the toasts and charters of Charleston's Irish fraternal organisations, the doctrines of the Southern Catholic Church, and the characters and songs of the theatre.