The Irish in the South, 1815-1877.

By David T. Gleeson. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xiv], 278. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4968-5; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2639-1.)

It has been sometimes said around Savannah that the town should erect a statue to General William T. Sherman for making it his Christmas present to Abraham Lincoln rather than putting Georgia's then-largest city to the torch. Perhaps another such statue should be raised for Father Jeremiah O'Neill for saving Savannah from an earlier Celtic invasion. In his new book, Irish-born historian David T. Gleeson describes a throng of unpaid, hostile, Irish railroad workers who marched on Savannah in 1846, intent on getting their wages by any means necessary. Fortunately, Father O'Neill successfully pleaded with them "in English and two dialects of Gaelic" to spare the city (p. 53).

Gleeson's account of the Irish in the South ably fills a real lacuna in Irish American and southern history. The Irish presence may have been small, yet it was not insignificant. Gleeson rescues these "forgotten people," presenting what it was like for them to make a living, keep their faith, participate in politics, and fend off nativistic attacks. By 1861 the Irish minority so identified with their adopted region that they enthusiastically joined their fellow southerners in the so-called war against Yankee oppression. Father John Bannon, Gleeson claims, was "perhaps the most important nonfighting Irish Confederate in the Civil War" (p. 163). Jefferson Davis sent him on a mission to Europe in 1863 to steer Irishmen away from the Union army and to help secure papal recognition for the Confederacy. He was far more successful in the former than the latter task. Father Abram Ryan earned the title "poet-priest of the Confederacy" with such famous works as "The Conquered Banner" and "The Sword of Robert E. Lee" (p. 182).

Gleeson maintains that war and defeat bonded the Irish so closely to their adopted region that by 1877 they no longer composed a separate entity within white society. So indistinguishable did being southern and being Irish become that, in her famous novel Gone with the Wind (1936), Margaret Mitchell was able to "create from her ancestry an entirely believable character" (p. 194): the archetypal southern plantation belle as Irish colleen. If there is an underlying theme here, it is not how the Irish became white, but how they became white southerners. Gleeson takes issue with Kerby Miller's belief that their sense of exile kept Irish immigrants from adapting to their new country, maintaining instead that southern Irish refused to "wallow in their exile but used it" to build "enclaves" (p. 6). Eventually these exiles from Erin saw the relationship between Ireland and Britain as comparable to the South's situation with the North. "Paradoxically, then," Gleeson writes, "their retention of a strong 'Irishness' actually advanced their integration" (p. 6).

I do wish Gleeson had provided more specifics on some of the more obscure episodes he relates; for example, the date for the O'Neill event related at the beginning of this review was neither in his narrative nor his endnotes but had to be ferreted out from his given sources. Such omissions aside, however, Gleeson's extensive research and the clarity of his writing make this book an invaluable contribution to the historical literature on the nineteenth-century South.

JAMES M. WOODS
Georgia Southern University