Immigration Paper
Since the beginning of this nation there has been immigration. It is in fact what makes this country so great, and what it is today. If people weren't willing to take the already deadly trip across the Atlantic, America might not even be here today. The immigrants I will be focusing on, which were part of the first major wave of immigrants to ever come to America. They were also a major part of the American Civil War. The moment they got off the ship there were union recruiters. There is perhaps no other ethnic group so closely identified with the Civil War years and the immediate aftermath of the war as Irish Americans. Of those Irish who came over much later than the founding generations, fully' 150,000 of them joined the Union army. Unfortunately, statistics for the Confederacy are sketchy at best; still, one has but to listen to the Southern accent, and listen to the sorts of tunes Southern soldiers loved to sing, to realize that a great deal of the South was settled by Irish immigrants.
English: A Roman Catholic chaplain ministering to ...
English: Regimental Color,28th Massachusetts, Pres...
English: Catholic Chaplains of Union Army Irish Br...But because the white population of the Confederate states was more native-born than immigrant during the Civil War years, there did not seem as much of a drive in the Southern army to recognize heritage in the names and uniforms of regiments as there was in the Union forces.
One main reason for the large scale immigration by the Irish was because of the potato famine. It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. As harvests across Europe failed, the price of food soared. Subsistence-level Irish farmers found their food stores rotting in their cellars, the crops they relied on to pay the rent to their...