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UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Peasants Into Patriots: The New York Irish Brigade Recruits and Their Families in the Civil War Era, 1850-1890 bv Marion A. Truslow A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History New York University May 1994 Approved / Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © Marion A. Truslow All Rights Reserved 1994 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter I: Work, Religion, and Pre-Civil War Politics Before Brigade Patriotism: The Irish of New York ..................................................... 19 Chapter II: War and Recruitment—Peasants as Patriots .............................................. 66 Chapter III: Courage in Combat, Entitlement, Recruiting—1863-1865 .................. I l l Chapter IV: Peasants, Patriots. Irish-Americans: Pension and Family .................... 162 Tables - Chapter IV ............................................................................................... 197 Chapter V: Conclusion .................................................................................................... 300 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 307 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Peasants Into Patriots: The New York Irish Brigade Recruits and Their Families in the Civil War Era, 1850-1890 Author's Name: Marion A. Truslow Advisor's Name: Robert J. Scally ABSTRACT The Civil War and things associated with it made the New York Irish Brigade recruits and their families (who received the Civil War Pension) Americans. In a slow process between 1850 and 1890. various institutions helped to bond immigrant Irish Catholic peasants to New York, then to the United States. The workplace was the first institution connecting these Irish to the city, state, and nation. Builders of the New York State and eastern seaboard transportation network, the Irish transformed the infrastructure and were, in turn, transformed by it. They had a niche in their adopted homeland-however onerous and oppressive the work was at the bottom of the social scale. Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party connected them to local and national political institutions. This second place of refuge provided needed social services, political education, and the vote. The Roman Catholic Church then coddled the Irish by its parish church organization in New York City, its establishment of parochial schools, and its founding of social service agencies for the needy. When war came. Irish and American flags flew from every New York City Catholic Church. Irish Brigade recruiting officers schooled Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. prospective recruits in covenanted patriotism: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were the covenant; responsibility to defend them in a war for the Union, the arc of the covenant. High Irish Brigade casualties sustained by these brave warriors created a sense of entitlement to be Americans, regardless of what nativists said. Receipt of the Civil War pension ended the long assimilation process as the Pension Bureau's red tape glued the soldiers and their families to the social structure. The Irish had become Americans. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 INTRODUCTION What made the New York Irish Brigade recruits and their families Americans? Arriving in alien urban New York at mid-nineteenth century, these Irish collided with the new metropolis' modernizing infrastructure. City railways, street cars, and ferry boats moved the newly arrived peasants amidst tenements, slums, and stores. The urban workplace, the Catholic Church and its ancillary charitable and educational facilities, and Tammany Hall (Chapter I), all coddled the immigrant Irish, providing desperately needed social services. The Union Army continued the process of assimilation by recruiting ethnic regiments, intermingling those regiments into larger corps and division levels (Chapter II). Recruiters schooled Irishmen in democratic principles for the solidarity of the Union. The effectiveness of the Irish Brigade as a fighting force in the Army of the Potomac endeared the Irish soldiers to its Anglo-American leaders (including McClellan and Hancock) and to the citizens of the Union (Chapter III). At this point, parallels between studies by three major scholars and this dissertation need amplification. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization o f Rural France, 1870-1914 (Palo Alto. 1976). Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins o f Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge. MA. 1992). and John Schaar's Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick. NJ. 1981). provide useful insights into a method, a source, and terminology clarification for this dissertation's major theme, the impact of the U.S. Civil War on the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. assimilation process of New York Irish Brigade recruits into American society. Weber's study provided the overall approach and some of the categories; Skocpol's suggested the larger social policy context of the American Federal Government enacting Civil War pension legislation; Schaar's defined patriotism. Weber's book examines the various forces of modernization in France from 1870-1914 which transformed backward and illiterate poor French peasants from rural isolation into the central stream of French life. While administrative unity had been achieved in the early nineteenth century, moral, mental, and cultural unity occurred in the early twentieth century. The acculturation process in rural France which transformed peasants into patriots dealt first with the various manifestations of misery and poverty in the material life of French peasants; and secondly, with how these (poor diet, poor transportation, ignorance, squalid living conditions) fell, one by one, in the face of urban forces. Roads and railways changed material life. Schools and the Army fostered urban values, such as patriotism, to the peasants. The transportation revolution, education, and universal military conscription, then, made peasants Frenchmen. What, though, is the influence of Skocpol's study? First, her study validates this one. A well-respected Harvard sociologist whose book stirred much controversy and debate at the 1992 American Historical Association meeting in Washington. DC, Skocpol located the origin of the welfare state idea in this country in the era of the Civil War rather than in the progressive era or the New Deal. Most veterans aged 65 or over were pensioners in 1910; as were Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without

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