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Worth a Second Look The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865. By Susannah Ural Bruce. New York University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8147-9940-6. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 308. $22.00.
The Irish-American experience in the American Civil War has been the subject of numerous studies and "histories" since the smoke drifted from the battlefields in 1865. Nearly all of them, with the possible exceptions of Ella Lonn's Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (1950) and William Burton's Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union's Ethnic Regiments (1998), have dealt with isolated aspects of that experience or individual regiments. Although valuable, Lonn, Burton, and the more circumscribed works fail to accomplish individually what Susannah Bruce achieves in one well-written and tightly argued book: an analytical chronicle of Irish immigrants' service in the war. Her tome, however, is much more than simply a compilation of earlier authors' material on the Irish Brigade, its famous leader Thomas Francis Meagher, the Fenian leader Michael Corcoran, and their exploits in the Army of the Potomac. Instead, utilizing previously untapped sources from both North American and Irish archives, Bruce creates a lively narrative about the soldiers, their communities at home, and their interaction in the greater political and social milieu that comprised the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The battles of First Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg-where the Irish brigade and other prominent units such as the 69th Pennsylvania figured prominently-serve as informal focal points for the chapters, but political issues such as emancipation, the sacking of George B. McClellan, the New York City Draft Riots, and the 1864 presidential election receive equal, if not more compelling, coverage.
Bruce argues that Catholic Irish-Americans possessed a dual loyalty during the war,...