The most terrible deaths recorded on this site are those of the eight men who died as prisoners of war in Confederate camps. Six perished in Andersonville Prison in Georgia — a place remembered not simply for neglect, but for calculated human destruction. Two others died in prisons near Richmond, Virginia, victims of the same system of deprivation.

Andersonville:

Andersonville opened in February 1864 and rapidly became a landscape of suffering. Nearly 45,000 Union soldiers were confined within its crude stockade; approximately 13,000 died. There was no shelter from heat or cold, no sanitation, little clean water, and never enough food. Men wasted away in full view of one another, reduced to bone and skin, their bodies failing long before death was officially recorded. Many were listed as dying of disease, but disease was merely the final symptom. Starvation was the underlying cause, imposed daily and deliberately.

Two Catastrophes

For the Irish-born prisoners, the horror carried a devastating familiarity. Some of these men had already survived the Great Irish Famine. They had known hunger before. They had watched neighbours die for lack of food while grain and cattle left their homeland under armed guard. To escape that world, they crossed the Atlantic. To defend their adopted country, they went to war. That they should end their lives once again starving — this time behind prison walls — is a cruelty that borders on the unbearable.

They died having endured two catastrophes: famine at home and war abroad. Their bodies bore the consequences of extreme poverty, forced migration, and institutional indifference on both sides of the ocean. The men who died in Andersonville and Richmond were not simply casualties of the American Civil War; they were also survivors of Ireland’s nineteenth-century famines, finally broken by a system that offered no mercy.

Colonial Rule
Their emigration was no accident. Between 1810 and 1852, Ireland was systematically impoverished under colonial rule. Land, power, and wealth were concentrated in the hands of a largely absentee Protestant Ascendancy, while British policy continued to extract food and profit from Ireland even as its population starved. The resulting economic ruin left millions with no real choice but exile. These men were driven from their homeland by hunger, not ambition.

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Sacrifice Written into History

Their deaths demand remembrance — not only as soldiers, but as victims of a longer history of dispossession. In honoring them, we also honor the nearly 200,000 Irish men who fought in the American Civil War. Many were refugees from famine and colonial neglect, yet they fought to preserve a republic founded on principles denied to them at home. Their service was born not of comfort, but of suffering — and their sacrifice remains written into both Irish and American history.