But compared with those who had fought one or two years before, there was a subtle difference in the mood of the Irishmen who fought with the Federal troops in 1864. At the beginning of the war, before Emancipation had been proclaimed, the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, to be backed by the England they so loathed. Their motives in fighting were complex—but once again it is a complexity that is important to this story. They were new immigrants from a famine-racked Ireland, and they were fighting in
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