Irish American Civil War Songs : Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood by Catherine V. Bateson

Author:Catherine V. Bateson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2022-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

7

Irish American Loyalty

and Identity in Civil War Songs

No individual Irish American Civil War song ever centered on a single issue—lyrics about volunteering, fighting, home-front matters, and occasional nationalist sentiments combined to form verses covering multiple themes. Through their words and lyrical emphasis, however, one attitude kept coming to the fore and underlined every opinion and articulation discussed in this book. Above all other sentiments in Irish American Civil War song lyrics, wartime ballads were infused with messages of inherent loyalty and entrenched nascent patriotism to the United States, to ideals of freedom and liberty, to the Star Spangled Banner, and to the American home nation where the diaspora resided. Songs often concluded with strong statements that reinforced Irish support for the United States as citizens that shared in the nation’s beliefs and reconciled future, encapsulated by fixing on the Stars and Stripes as the emblem of their American identity association. This was demonstrated in “Battle of Bull Run” (1861), which explained that in the aftermath of the conflict’s first engagements, Irish regiments and “gallant soldiers” had “gone to fight a glorious cause” and to “defend the glorious Stars and Stripes.” Soldiers and the home front upheld the right “to defend the Flag and Union, the Government and its laws.”1

In other words, the Irish in America served to defend the very structure of the nation they now inhabited. Irish American Civil War songs articulated patriotic allegiance to the nation through singing about how the diaspora shared in the ideals of liberty, democratic republicanism and freedom, and how these were bound up in American national symbols and anthems associated with devotion to the Star Spangled Banner. Instead of continuous laments about Ireland and anti-British feeling from this past, the sentiments of the diaspora’s songs focused first and foremost on defending the United States of America and adopting the Stars and Stripes as their own flag. The Irish who fought and sung in the Civil War thus cemented their commitment to the American Union and articulated their allegiance to the nation as Americans.

Even in fewer existing Confederate songs about the Irish fighting for the seceded Southern states, a pervading sense of loyalty to the American side of dual Irish American identity comes to the fore. The fact that these songs circulated in home-front society through publications and performances in music halls ensured Irish lyrics about American sentiments permeated wartime culture. They stressed to the diaspora and wider society that the United States was central to the Irish experience of living, working, and fighting in the country to which many had emigrated, resided in, and were raising their families in. What such lyrics demonstrate is the manner in which the diaspora expressed its sense of participatory American citizenship as naturalized citizens in the 1860s.

The concept of “national citizenship” was “vague . . . prior the Civil War” and, for the most part, “largely functioned to determine whether one owed allegiance and certain obligations to the United States.” Additionally, “even the meaning of naturalization remained unsettled” at this time.

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