New Hibernia Review

Jack Morgan's biographical study of General Thomas W. Sweeny, a hero of the American Civil War, sets out to "represent the historical period and Thomas Sweeny's life as they were intertwined . . . [and] as they are also related to the story of the Irish in the nineteenth century United States." Morgan's meticulous research has resulted in not only the first biography of Thomas Sweeny, but also a richer and more complex rendering of popular accounts of Irish, Irish-American, and American Civil War history. By teasing out the array of historical anomalies, incongruities, and surprises that surround the subject of his biography, Morgan challenges hallowed assumptions and broadens the scope of our understanding of critical events in the nineteenth century.

For example, whereas much of the history of nineteenth-century Irish America has concerned itself with the enormous impact of famine emigration, leading many Americans to overlook the many Irish immigrants who arrived prior to this time, Morgan's subject is a prefamine emigrant who left Cork in 1832 at the age of twelve with his recently widowed mother. In fact, the Irish preceded the Germans even in settling in St. Louis, where Sweeny was assigned in 1848 and again in 1861. Morgan writes that as early as 1663, the Franco-Irish Marquis de Tracy, based in St. Louis, was governor-general of all French possession in North America, and another Irishman, Joseph Charless, founded the city's first newspaper, the Missouri Gazette.

Likewise, of the Civil War, Morgan observes that most studies of the Irish during the Civil War tend to "emphasize the Potomac sector of the engagement . . . often to the neglect of the western theatre in which Sweeny and many other Irish officers and enlisted men served." Morgan emphasizes that in fact, among the first "Irish Brigades" to participate in the Civil War were Captain Patrick Naughton's dragoons and Colonel James Mulligan's 23rd Illinois Regiment, both in Missouri in 1861 at the battles of Wilson's Creek and Lexington respectively. [End Page 151]

And Morgan reminds readers that the often-ridiculed premise of Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon—an American invasion of Canada—is indeed recorded in American history. Sweeny was one of the organizers of an Irish-American invasion of Canada, when, in 1864 the Fenians "called for a Grand Army to be raised and sent forth 'by the shortest route to meet the common enemy of Ireland and the United States'." The "common enemy" was, of course, Britain, which had aided the Confederacy and thwarted Irish attempts to gain independence. The "shortest route" was Canada, which was "assailable at all points"—unlike Britain, whose troops were much greater than those of the Irish. In courses on Canadian literature, it continues to be difficult to persuade American students that such an event could ever occur (let alone twice, but that is another story). Morgan reminds us that at one time such an invasion seemed perfectly reasonable. With America's growing obsession with finding cheap sources for crude oil, perhaps we should even wonder how long it will take for history to repeat itself. There is an interesting irony, by the way, in the fact that the champion of Canadian identity and anti-Feminism in 1866, the year of the invasion, was another Irishman and a former Young Irelander, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, who had turned Canadian patriot.

One of the most intriguing ostensible incongruities, which likewise continues to have relevance today, is that Sweeny, like many Irishmen of his generation, "saw no conflict of interest between military service in his adopted country and offering leadership to a revolutionary movement focused on that of his birth. He was simultaneously an American patriot willing to suppress Mexican and Sioux insurgency and an Irish republican who promoted assault on British interests in Canada." Ruan O'Donnell of the...