Green and Blue

"Damian Shiel's Green and Blue is the first book to explore Irish American service in the United States military by analyzing the written correspondence of ordinary Irish American rank-and-file soldiers drawn from across the Union's armed forces. Using the vast collection of widows and dependent pension files of Union Civil War soldiers and sailors at the National Archives, Shiels located over 1, 100 wartime letters from Irish American service members. Written by around four hundred men who went to war from twenty-two different states-ninety-eight percent of whom served in the enlisted ranks-they are the largest and most representative collection of Irish-American Civil War correspondence ever gathered together. Shiles uses the letter collection to reconfigure and reframe perceptions of Irish American service during the Civil War. He does so by defining precisely what constituted an "Irish American" serviceman, conducting the first detailed examination of the scale of Irish American service, which historians have greatly underestimated. He also demonstrates the importance of considering ethnicity and class in understanding wartime service, and through an in-depth analysis of the correspondence, he positions Irish Americans for the first time within the field of Civil War soldiers' studies. Much of Shiels's study focuses on the lived experiences of Irish American soldiers and sailors, explaining how these enlisted men navigated their service from multiple perspectives, including how they adapted to and experienced military life, how they engaged with their faith, and how they interreacted with and communicated with the home front. Shiels assesses the veracity of the negative traits often associated with Irish Americans, particularly their social standing, relationship with alcohol, desertion rates, political affiliation, and interactions with African Americans. Finally, Shiels answers two of the biggest questions concerning Irish American service-how did these men see themselves, and what drove them to enlist? Overall, the study builds from the bottom up the most detailed and intimate picture yet possible of Irish Americans' service in the United States military during the American Civil War"--