The start of the American Civil War

Originally, the name “The Irish Brigade” referred to the Wild Geese who fought for different European countries on the continent. Names like Cremona, Flanders and Ramilles are remembered in song and poetry. In later years it referred to the Irish who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War.
The Fighting Irish, the Fighting 69th or Meagher’s Irish Brigade with their green banner and battle cry of Fagh a’ Bealach, played a prominent part in that war. Not all Irish involvement was on the Union side. About 150,000 Irish-born soldiers were in the Union army.
In the Southern states, Irish involvement in the army of the Confederacy would have been mainly descendents of the earlier Presbyterian emigrants from Ulster but there were as many as 50,000 Catholic Irish-born immigrants. These were Irish people who, because of their background here, felt more at home in the agricultural South than in the industrialised cities of the North. 
Both sides raised forces by organising special units. These usually carried the names of their locality and were composed of neighbours and relations. At the start of the Civil War there were over one and a half million Irish born people in the United States. These newer, mainly Catholic, Irish immigrants were not trusted or tolerated by the Protestant majority. It was very much a time of “No Irish Need Apply” signs and policies being commonplace. Because of this, when they did join up they formed their own Irish companies and regiments.
The Irish, in turn, did not trust the African Americans because they feared that freed slaves would come north in large numbers and take what limited jobs were open to the immigrants. In 1863 this led to wide scale rioting in the larger cities that was only controlled by the return of troops after the battle of Gettysburg.  In the south parishes organised Hibernian units but these were generally integrated into different regiments.
The government were reluctant to sanction separate brigades but an Irish Brigade served some purposes. It ensured Irish support for the Union in the Northern states. England were contemplating supporting the Confederacy but the presence of a large Irish contingent on the Union side led by many who had been involved with the Young Irelanders warned them against it. For the Irish it was a step towards acceptance and recognition by their new country. Their own Catholic chaplains ensured this. Their head chaplain, who gave the troops absolution before Gettysburg, was Fr William Corby who went on to become president of Notre Dame University.
The leaders of the Irish Regiments were always conscious of the situation in their native country. At the outbreak of the war, Corcoran, who founded the Irish Brigade was awaiting court marshal for refusing to allow his troops form a guard of honour for the visiting Prince of Wales and Meagher, who took over from him had been deported from Ireland for his part in the rising of 1848. Following the war, the attempted Fenian “Invasion of Canada” consisted in the main of Civil War veterans.
The American Civil War, which saw the start of Irish acceptance in the United States and in which almost 200,000 Irish born troops fought, started when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumpter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861, 150 years ago this week.