Leitrim's Civil War Soldiers
Leitrim's Missing Thousands in the American Civil War
In 1841 County Leitrim had a population over 155,000 people. Ten years later it had lost more than 43,000 of them to hunger, fever and the emigrant ship. The county never recovered. By the 1996 census the population had fallen to 25,000, just 16% of what it had been before the Famine.
An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people emigrated from Leitrim during the Famine years, and emigration did not stop when the Famine ended. Most went to America, to the cities of the Northeast and beyond. They took hard, poorly paid work and lived in crowded districts where "No Irish Need Apply" was a reality. Then in April 1861 the country they had come to went to war with itself.
Why they fought
The American Civil War was a pivotal moment in U.S. history, and it also marked a significant chapter for Irish Americans, including those from County Leitrim. Irishmen joined the Union army for many reasons, and few of them were simple. Some felt real loyalty to the country that had taken them in. Some believed in a republic. Some needed the pay and the enlistment bounty, which could be more money than a laboring
man saw in a year. Some saw service as the way to prove they belonged, and from 1862 an honorably discharged soldier could become a citizen after just one year's residence. Others had Ireland in mind: men who learned soldiering in America might one day use it at home.
Whatever the reason, they came in huge numbers. Estimates of Irish-born men in Civil War ranks are 200,000, 180,000 in the Union Army and about 20,000 in the Confederate army.
How many were from Leitrim?
This is the question at the heart of this site. In the decades before the war, Leitrim held approximately between 1,7% and 1.9% of Ireland's population. This indicates that between 3,400 and 3,800 Leitrim men may have served in the American Civil War. It could well be more, since emigrants from the western counties enlisted in greater numbers than their share of the population.
My own research, carried out for a master’s thesis at the University of Limerick, has so far identified 196 of them by name. So most of Leitrim's Civil War soldiers are still unaccounted for.
The ones we have found served in more than 90 different regiments. They were scattered right across the Union army, not gathered in one Irish unit. Some did serve in the famous Irish formations. One famous regiment in which many Leitrim men served was the 28th Massachusetts Infantry which became part of the Irish Brigade on 23 November 1862, just three weeks before The Battle of Fredericksburg.
What they faced.
With men spread across so many regiments, it is safe to say that Leitrim men fought in every major battle of the war.
At Antietam, on 17 September 1862, the Irish Brigade advanced on the sunken road that became known as Bloody Lane. It was the bloodiest single day in American history.
At Fredericksburg, on 13 December 1862, they charged up the open ground below Marye's Heights into Confederate troops firing from behind a stone wall. The attack could not succeed, and the Brigade was cut to pieces.
At Gettysburg, between 1 and 3 July 1863, the much-reduced Brigade went into the Wheatfield on 2 July the second day of the battle, after receiving general absolution from their chaplain, Father William Corby.
The battles were only part of it. Disease killed roughly two men for every one killed in combat. Men who had survived the Famine died of dysentery and typhoid in camp. Some, having escaped the horror of the Irish Famine, died of starvation and malnutrition related diseases in the hell holes of the Belle Isle and Andersonville Confederate prisons. Men sent letters home, and some of those letters still exist, in family drawers and archives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Why it matters.
These men helped change how America saw the Irish. A people treated with suspicion in 1860 had, by 1865, a record of sacrifice that nobody could easily dismiss. More importantly they helped preserve the republic and unity of the United Staes. But in Leitrim itself they were mostly forgotten. They left, they fought, and many never came home. Too often, no record of what happened to them made it back to their families.
This site is an effort to put right, one name at a time. If your family has a story about a relative who went to America and fought in the war, or letters, photographs, or a name you've never been able to trace, please get in touch. Every man we find is one more who is no longer missing.
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