Sir, – Ronan McGreevy reminds us of the thousands of Irishmen who served and died in the British army during the first World War (“The Great War: ‘The heroic dead of Ireland have every right to the homage of the living’”, An Irishman’s Diary, September 10th).
But there is another Irish military contribution that receives little attention in Ireland.
During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, approximately 200,000 Irish-born men served in the Union and Confederate armies, with more than 35,000 believed to have died. Many of these men were survivors of the Great Famine.
Their story represents a remarkable and largely forgotten chapter of Irish history. Men who crossed the Atlantic and built new lives in America found themselves fighting in one of the defining conflicts of the 19th century. For some it was a double tragedy, having escaped famine in Ireland, they died on the battlefields or in the prisons of the American Civil War.
The war itself had enormous historical consequences. The Union victory preserved the United States as a single republic and resulted in the abolition of slavery. Had the Confederacy succeeded in establishing an independent nation, the political and economic history of the United States – and consequently the history of the modern world – would have been profoundly different.
The Irish contribution to that struggle is recognised in the United States with monuments, regimental histories, museums and memorials to commemorate the Irish men who fought and died there. Yet in Ireland, where they were born, they remain largely unknown.
Their story is part of the history of Ireland’s diaspora, and of the extraordinary generation that fled the Great Famine and built new lives for in the republic they helped preserve. – Yours, etc,
BEN WRAFTER,
Crecora,
Co Limerick.