page_title: Irish Americans
section_title: Civil War through the early 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Irish Americans / Irish immigration to the United States / Mid-19th century and later / Civil War through the early 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Irish Americans in 1872. From The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census, 1872. Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.))
context_page_description: Irish Americans are Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Ireland. About 33 million Americans — 10.1% of the total population — identified as being Irish in the 2017 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. This compares with a population of 6.5 million people on the island of Ireland.
context_section_description: During the American Civil War, Irish Americans volunteered for the Union Army in high numbers, and at least 38 Union regiments had the word "Irish" in their titles. 144,221 Union soldiers were born in Ireland; additionally, perhaps an equal number of Union soldiers were of Irish descent. Many immigrant soldiers formed their own regiments, such as the Irish Brigade.
  General John McCausland was a notable brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the Civil War. He was the son of an Irish immigrant.
  However, conscription was resisted by many Irish as an imposition. Two years into the war, the conscription law was passed in 1863, and major draft riots erupted in New York. It coincided with the efforts of the city's dominant political machine, Tammany Hall, to enroll Irish immigrants as citizens so they could vote in local elections.  Many such immigrants suddenly discovered they were now expected to fight for their new country.  The Irish, employed primarily as laborers, were usually unable to afford the $300 "commutation fee" to procure a replacement for service. Many of the Irish viewed blacks as competition for scarce jobs, and as the reason why the Civil War was being fought. African Americans who fell into the mob's hands were often beaten or killed. The Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, which provided shelter for hundreds of children, was attacked by a mob. It was seen as a "symbol of white charity to blacks and of black upward mobility," reasons enough for its destruction at the hands of a predominantly Irish mob which looked upon African Americans as direct social and economic competitors. Fortunately, the largely Irish-American police force was able to secure the orphanage for enough time to allow orphans to escape.
  In the Confederacy, many Irish were initially reluctant to support secession; most of them voted for Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential election. However, there were notable amounts of Irish or Irish descended men who joined the Confederate Army. Interestingly, Gleeson wrote that they had higher desertion rates than non-Irish, and sometimes switched sides, suggesting that their support for the Confederacy was tepid. During Reconstruction, however, some Irish took a strong position in favor of white supremacy, and some played major roles in attacking blacks in riots in Memphis and New Orleans.
  In 1871, New York's Orange Riots broke out when Irish Protestants celebrated the British victory at the Battle of the Boyne by parading through Irish Catholic neighborhoods, taunting the residents who then responded with violence.  Police Superintendent James J. Kelso, a Protestant, ordered the parade cancelled as a threat to public safety. Kelso was overruled by the governor, who ordered 5000 militia to protect the marchers. The Catholics attacked but were stopped by the militia and police, who opened fire killing about 63 Catholics.
  Relations between the U.S. and Britain were chilly during the 1860s as Americans resented British and Canadian support for the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the war American authorities looked the other way as Irish Catholic "Fenians" plotted and even attempted an invasion of Canada. The Fenians proved a failure, but Irish Catholic politicians (Who were a growing power in the Democratic Party) demanded more independence for Ireland and made anti-British rhetoric—called "twisting the lion's tail"—a staple of election campaign appeals to the Irish Catholic vote.
   A second wave of post-famine Irish immigration, resulting largely from a changing rural economy and the lure of high-paying jobs in America, continued from 1855 to 1921, when the Emergency Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 imposed a "quota system" that significantly limited immigration. These later immigrants mostly settled in industrial towns and cities of the Northeast and Midwest where Irish American neighborhoods had previously been established.
  The Irish were having a huge impact on America as a whole. In 1910, there were more people in New York City of Irish ancestry than Dublin's whole po
caption: Concentration of people born in Ireland in 1870 Census
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