‘Beyond the Power of My Feeble Pen’: The Fate of a Limerick Octogenarian’s Sons in the West, 1862

Irish in the American Civil War

Limerickman Patrick Vaughan had lived a long life by the 1860s. He was born sometime around 1783, the year that the conflict between the American Colonies and Britain had finally drawn to a close. Whenrebellion broke out in Ireland and French troops marched to their support in 1798, Patrick was a teenager.He was in his early twentieswhen Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor in 1804,and in his thirties by the time the ‘Little Corporal’had his last hurr...