Sons of Leitrim
Deaths
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The Price They Paid: Deaths Among Leitrim's Sons
Of the 196 Leitrim men who fought in America's Civil War, we know the date of death for ninety one. Of these forty-five died between 1861 and 1865, their lives cut short thousands of miles from the land of their birth. The true number is almost certainly higher. The 105 men whose date of death has yet been found, some undoubtedly fell during those terrible years.
At least23% of the men in this database died from wounds or disease during the war far exceeding the estimated 14% death rate of the First World War—a conflict we remember as industrial-scale slaughter.
HistoricalÂ
Gettysburg Harvest of Death
Photograph by Alexander Gardner July 1863
​When They Fell
The pattern of deaths tells its own story. The graph reveals an anomaly in 1862: only six recorded deaths during a year that included two of war's bloodiest days. At Antietam on September 17th, the single deadliest day in American military history, and at Fredericksburg on December 13th, where Meagher's Irish Brigade lost 545 of 1,200 men in a futile charge against Marye's Heights, the true toll among Leitrim men was almost certainly higher than records show.
Then came 1864. The spike in deaths that year tells of Grant's Overland Campaign—those six weeks of hell from May to mid-June when battles weren't discrete events but one continuous bloodletting. The Wilderness. Spotsylvania Court House. Cold Harbor. Entire companies ceased to exist in minutes, blown apart in futile frontal assaults that in most cases achieved nothing. The killing was industrial, relentless, and Leitrim men died in those Virginia woods and trenches alongside their adopted countrymen.
The Cruelest Fate
Among all these deaths, six stand apart in their tragedy. Six men died in Confederate prisons—officially from "disease," though starvation likely played its part. Think of the bitter irony: they had fled Ireland during the Famine years, survived coffin ships and established new lives, only to die of hunger behind prison walls in Georgia and Virginia.
These men embodied what this research calls "the double tragedy"—the intersection of Ireland's Great Famine and America's Civil War. They had already endured extreme poverty and hunger before they ever heard a musket fire in anger. That they should die of starvation after surviving Ireland's starvation is almost too cruel to contemplate. For their full stories, see Deaths in Confederate Prisons.
The Larger Context
Recent scholarship has revised Civil War death estimates upward from 620,000 to nearly 700,000, with some studies suggesting 750,000 total deaths. These Leitrim men were part of that staggering toll—400,000 Union dead, many of them Irish-born, many of them famine survivors who thought they had found safety in America.
They hadn't fled death in Ireland. They had only postponed it.
See the complete record of known deaths of our soldiers here. Each name listed represents a life begun in Leitrim, transformed by migration, and ended on American battlefields or in prisoner-of-war camps far from home.