When we wrote our original observations and questions about the Dick Dowling monument, I considered the discrimination with which Irishmen were viewed in the Civil War era and asked,
“Just as people find it fascinating to imagine why blacks might want to fight for the Confederacy, as we have just discussed, it is also interesting to debate why ethnic minorities, especially recent immigrants, would want to fight for a country that their family had not long inhabited and which did not always treat them with respect. Why would Irishmen fight under a climate that often did not recognize them as ideal Americans?”
Browsing through the Houston Public Library’s archives have given me some food for thought on an answer to this question, for the Irish at least.
During his adult life, Dowling was a citizen so popular that the Houston Daily Telegraph reported on his sickness and recovery and cautioned, “Houston cannot afford to lose such men as you” (Muir 207). Yet over time his memory has faded to such an extent that people have to be constantly informed and reminded of his identity and history, as many documents in the archive attest. His great-great-grandniece, Ann Caraway Ivins, found that even at a Houston middle school named in his honor, only one faculty member knew anything about him (SC1268-f1-19).
The people who have kept Dowling’s memory alive over the years seem to be Confederate and other historical societies and Irish heritage societies. However, the former have fallen significantly from public repute after the Civil Rights movement. Yet in today’s United States culture of political correctness and multicultural celebration, it makes sense that cultural societies have thrived, and their influence over memory of Dowling as an influential Irish Houstonian rather than just a Civil War hero has been allowed to prevail.
Thus we see two different sides of the Dowling memory which, if not exactly competing with each other, have allowed people to focus on what they find most admirable about the hero as well as what is most socially acceptable to the general public at the time. But the fact that Dowling was Irish is not just incidental to his involvement in the Civil War. He signed up with a group made up heavily of his fellow Irish and led by an Irishman, his uncle-in-law (Muir 181). Ivins believes that “it wasn’t ideology that decided which side they [the Irish] fought for. It was where they lived” (SC1268-f1-19). Nevertheless, ideology cannot be ignored, as these men were alive and full of thoughts and opinions, and doubtless would not have fought with their much-lauded bravery if not for what they deemed a good cause. Here I am reminded of Manning’s plea that we no longer can view soldiers as hapless victims of politics and circumstance, but movers and shakers of history in themselves.
I find clues as to why an Irishman would want to fight for the Confederacy, at least, in the history of what was going on in Ireland at the time. Dr. John Anthony Claffey, in his speech at the monument’s rededication ceremony in 1997, paints a picture of the political climate of the Emerald Isle at the time Dowling emigrated. He notes that Ireland was being subjugated by England in various ways, including taxation to support a church they had no loyalties to, unjust control by absentee landlords, and removal of the Irish parliament (SC1268-f1-22). An Irishman who had immigrated to the South would certainly understand the sectional conflict and sympathize with secessionists, having just come from a climate where their home country was being externally controlled and sought to break away.
But I still have less clear ideas on why an Irishman might want to fight for the Union, as heavy immigration patterns in the North led to heavy discrimination there. Remember the strength of the nativist Know-Nothing party in the North, as mentioned in the Kornblith article:
“‘By 1855,’ Holt observed, ‘[Know Nothings] controlled all the New England states except Vermont and Maine, and … were the major anti-Democratic party in the Middle Atlantic states and California.'”
Could it be, as Ivins suggests, that Irish would sympathize with the “underdogs in the world,” that is, the slaves (SC1268-f1-19)? Is there a counterpart Irish Union hero who could provide a starting point for looking into these questions?
Courtney, you raise some very good points with this post. After reading Edward Cotham’s “Sabine Pass,” I might be able to offer some responses that hopefully answer some of your questions. With regards to why an Irishman might want to fight for the Union, Cotham offers an explanation that does indeed have to do with heavy immigration patterns. There certainly was heavy discrimination against Irish immigrants in Northern cities, however Cotham asserts that significant anti-Irish sentiment prevailed in the South as well. It was so extensive that the Davis Guard’s (comprised mostly of Irish dockworkers from Houston and Galveston) victory at Sabine Pass did little to reduce widespread discrimination against the Irish in the Confederacy.
As a result, Cotham proposes that such a large amount of Irish fought for the Union because most Irish immigrants landed in Northern cities such as New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Cotham labels many of these immigrants as “easily-impressible,” who would have been attracted to a position in the Union Army, a job that offered steady pay and three square meals a day. This would have been enticing to an Irish immigrant in a foreign land that housed discrimination on the streets.
I can only offer my perspective on your question, but after reading Cotham’s book it seems that Irish participation in the Civil War was less influenced by which side they sympathized with and affected more by factors such as where they were located (primarily the North) and the fact that the Union Army offered a guaranteed job in a society that reserved few others for Irish immigrants.
Thanks, Ryan! That sounds like a sensible explanation to me. It seems quite ironic and sad that immigrants often had to join the army, which was full of hardship and danger, to feel secure and be fed. I suppose the army might be more egalitarian then mainstream society, too.
Nice discussion, Ryan and Courtney.
In answer to Courtney’s suggestion that perhaps the Irish sympathized with the slaves as fellow “underdogs,” I can say that this was usually not the case. While there were many abolitionists in Ireland, Irish American immigrants tended to oppose the abolitionists, despite several attempts by American abolitionists to bring Irish immigrants over to their side.
There were a variety of reasons why Irish Americans tended not to be antislavery. For one thing, as the quote from Kornblith points out, the Democratic Party stood opposed to the nativist Know Nothing party, so Irish Americans often favored the Democrats’ pro-immigrant platform. But that meant they aligned themselves with a party that was officially anti-abolitionist and, in the South, often pro-slavery. Other historians have argued that Irish immigrants supported slavery and opposed the abolitionists partly to show how American they were; as people marked by nativists as outsiders, Irish Americans could prove they were insiders by joining in the attempts to silence abolitionists, both in the North and the South. Sometimes Irish immigrants in Northern cities competed with free black workers for low-skilled jobs, which meant that there was often tension between the two groups. And Irish Americans could see value in defending slavery for many of the same reasons that white non-slaveholders in the South had: as long as there were slaves, there was a level of degradation to which not even immigrants could sink.
In short, for these and other reasons, Irish Americans often came to hold the same prejudices about race as other Americans, and as a group they largely opposed abolitionists. Indeed, so vehement was their opposition that Irish Americans played a big role in the Draft Riots in New York City in 1863; despite the fact that, as Ryan points out, many Irish Americans had enlisted in the army for jobs, some historians have suggested that they reacted against the draft partly because by then the Union was fighting to free slaves–a goal Irish Americans had not signed up for.
Still, Courtney may be right that some Irish Americans saw connections between the Civil War and their home country’s struggle with England, though the connections they saw may not always be the ones we’d expect. On p. 151 of Manning’s book, for example, she quotes an Irish immigrant in the Army of the Potomac who said he was fighting for the Union because he wanted the republic of the United States, “the best Government the world ever new [sic],” to survive. The anti-monarchical feelings of Irish immigrants towards England may have inspired some of them to want to fight to save republicanism and democracy in the United States.
If you’d like to read more about all this, there is a growing literature by historians on this subject, including a recent book by Angela Murphy and a book on the Irish in the South by David Gleeson. Both of these are available in the library.
Based on my own research, I’ve also published an article on the subject of the relationship between abolitionists in the Irish which is available online.