“Our Ironclads on the James River”: The Collected Correspondence of “Garryowen”

Irish in the American Civil War

During the Civil War, newspapersfrequently published correspondence written by soldiers and sailors at the front. Some servicemen took the opportunity to act as quasi-reporters for particular publications, ensuring that their views and opinions regularly appeared in print. In May 1864, letters from an Irishman who went by the pen nameGarryowen began to appear in the pages of the New YorkIrish-American. Over the course of the months that followed, he wrote at l...