'To live and die [for] Dixie': Irish civilians and the Confederate States of America

Around 20,000 Irishmen served in the Confederate army in the Civil War. As a result, they left behind, in various Southern towns and cities, large numbers of friends, family, and community leaders. As with native-born Confederates, Irish civilian support was crucial to Irish participation in the Confederate military effort. Also, Irish civilians served in various supporting roles: in factories and hospitals, on railroads and diplomatic missions, and as boosters for the cause. They also, however, suffered in bombardments, sieges, and the blockade. Usually poorer than their native neighbours, they could not afford to become 'refugees' and move away from the centres of conflict. This essay, based on research from manuscript collections, contemporary newspapers, British Consular records, and Federal military records, will examine the role of Irish civilians in the Confederacy, and assess the role this activity had on their integration into Southern communities. It will also look at Irish civilians in the defeat of the Confederacy, particularly when they came under Union occupation. Initial research shows that Irish civilians were not as upset as other whites in the South about Union victory. They welcomed a return to normalcy, and often 'collaborated' with Union authorities. Also, Irish desertion rates in the Confederate army were particularly high, and I will attempt to gauge whether Irish civilians played a role in this. All of the research in this paper will thus be put in the context of the Drew Gilpin Faust/Gary Gallagher debate on the influence of the Confederate homefront on military performance. By studying the Irish civilian experience one can assess how strong the Confederate national experiment was. Was it a nation without a nationalism

First image revisited: human nature, original sin and international relations

In Waltz’s famous classification, human nature’s propensity to evil is catalogued as a first-image causal explanation of war. Ever since, human nature explanations of conflict have been attacked for resting on metaphysical assumptions and a priori pessimism. This paper argues that modern conceptions about the inherent wickedness of human nature or, equally, reductionist sociobiological explanations about its hard-wired conflict-proneness are impoverished secularised versions of Christian anthropological assumptions grounded in the doctrine of original sin. Itself a widely contested dogma, in its Augustinian formulation it was closely connected with a soteriological perspective, that is, a defence of its status as a corollary of the doctrine that all human beings are equally in need of salvation in Jesus Christ. However, its use was never entirely disconnected from the purposes of theodicy and Christian apologetics striving to reconcile the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God with the reality of evil and suffering in the world. It is this latter legacy – associated with the explanation of suffering and evil in the world but stripped of its salvific eschatological content – that is picked up by secularist theorisations of human nature which tend to reduce the paradox of original sin to the parody of man’s evil nature