The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America by David T. Gleeson

Author:David T. Gleeson [Gleeson, David T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00ZVEBKD6
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2013-09-01T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Another “Lost Cause”

The Irish after the Confederacy

In the commemoration of the Confederacy after the Civil War, the Irish in the South rediscovered a Confederate spirit they had lost during the conflict. After the surrender of the major Confederate armies in April and May 1865, all, including the most patriotic of them, accepted defeat and a return to the United States. The decision made by prominent Confederates such as Judah Benjamin, who chose foreign exile rather than face the reality of “Yankee rule,” was not one for the Irish.1 But would they accept the “reconstruction” that came with defeat? Initially they did, especially the lenient version implemented by Abraham Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. A few were willing to give Radical Reconstruction a chance. Ultimately though, the Irish became implacable opponents of the Radicals and efforts to integrate African Americans into southern politics. In this opposition and through active participation in the “Lost Cause,” the Irish helped seal their position as full members of the “Solid South.” Familiar with the lost cause of Ireland’s independence, they quickly learned the rituals of the new one developing in the former Confederacy. By embracing this important “civil religion” of the New South, the Irish could claim to be just as much “true southerners” as native white citizens. In the long run then, for the Irish Confederates and their descendants, their commemoration of the war was more important than their actual participation in it.

In May 1865, Confederate “ambassador” Patrick Lynch suddenly found himself a citizen without a country. Stationed in Rome when his diocesan seat fell to Union forces, he learned of the Confederacy’s collapse there. With his country now defunct, and his task for its recognition moot, he believed he could just return to the United States to set about rebuilding his diocese. Proportionally, in terms of physical destruction, it was the worst hit diocese in the Confederacy. He knew he faced a desperate situation when he got home, because he even had to replace his “episcopal wardrobe, which General Sherman [had] kindly reduced to ashes.” In one letter to a Catholic group in Vienna, Austria, he listed his tragic circumstances: “The diocese of Charleston is now truly desolate. During the cruel civil war . . . I have seen almost everything that my two predecessors had accomplished or that I had undertaken gradually perish.” Overall, Lynch estimated the cost of the war to his diocese at $252,000, but, with prewar debts added in, he reckoned it was $316,500 in the red.2

The reality was, however, because of his prominence as the South’s most public Irish Confederate, he would not be allowed to just pick up with American citizenship where he had left off in 1860. Although an official Confederate commissioner, Lynch did not feel he could be classified as “among the ‘heads of Secession,’” those most likely to face the scrutiny of the victorious northerners. He had hoped that the lobbying of Archbishop Spalding, along with President Andrew Johnson’s general amnesty of May 29, 1865, would get him back to the United States with no restrictions.

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