Georgia cemetery holds hundreds of Irish who fought ‘war to end slavery’

ANDERSONVILLE — Owen Maloney was still a boy when the famine hit Ireland in 1845, a catastrophe that would kill more than a million of his countrymen and cause many more to flee overseas.

As blight destroyed his homeland’s potato crops, Maloney’s father, Myles, provided for their family by helping build a coastal road near their home in western Ireland. He became sick while laboring on the public relief project during the worst of the famine in 1847, dying days later. Just 14 years old, Maloney replaced his father on the job so he could support his destitute mother and five young siblings.

Years later, Maloney escaped Ireland’s deprivation by emigrating to the United States. He joined the Union Army during the Civil War in 1861, fighting in historic battles and sending his pay back to his mother. And then he disappeared.

Maloney, his mother would ultimately learn, was captured by the Confederates and held at Camp Sumter in southwest Georgia. Overcrowded and undersupplied, the stockade is where Maloney would die amid some of the same desperate conditions he escaped during Ireland’s famine, also called the “Great Hunger,” or An Gorta Mór.

Researchers pieced together Owen’s story, using U.S. pension files and census and military records. So far, their Andersonville Irish Project has identified more than 900 other men — either born in Ireland or born abroad to Irish parents — who are buried at the site of the former stockade, now called Andersonville National Cemetery.

The researchers say the cemetery could be the final resting place of more Irish American casualties from the Civil War than any other place in the United States. They are sharing their findings online, including a database listing the names of the dead, their military units, their grave locations and a map showing their Irish hometowns. The website features photos and links to primary documents used in the project, which has been funded partly with private donations as well as Irish and U.S. government grants.

The website also traces people buried at Andersonville to all of Ireland’s counties and all of its major religious denominations. The youngest was 16. The oldest was 64.

ExploreExplore the Andersonville Irish Project's records here

Damian Shiels, an archeologist and historian now based in Finland, created the project, which is based partly on crowdsourcing. The work is personal for Shiels, who grew up in Limerick and who worked as a curator for the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. He was struck by how little awareness there was in Ireland about how many of its people fought in the Civil War.

While visiting national cemeteries in the United States and sifting through public records, Shiels discovered that many Irish Americans were buried at Andersonville. Soon, the research about the war began “to take over my life,” he said.

“You feel a responsibility to them when you are looking at such intimate documents in relation to all of these people,” said Shiels, an author who also created the Irish in the American Civil War website. “It is impossible not to get personally invested in these people, particularly when you know what happens to them.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Layers of trauma

Some of Shiels’ work draws on research by Christine Kinealy, the founding director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. An expert on the famine, Kinealy was struck by the layers of trauma Shiels has illuminated with his findings.

First, the Irish suffered from poverty, starvation and hunger-related diseases amid the famine. Then, Kinealy said, they fled their homes for the United States, where they faced xenophobia. Many joined the Union Army to support their families back home and then experienced brutal, hand-to-hand combat.

ExploreWhere to visit military cemeteries, memorials and museums in Georgia

In 1861, Maloney joined the 6th New Jersey Infantry Regiment in Trenton, serving as a private. His regiment fought in some of the war’s bloodiest battles, including Seven Pines, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, losing nearly 200 men to combat and diseases along the way, according to the National Park Service.

Two years after Maloney enlisted, according to Shiels, Confederates captured him during a skirmish at McLean’s Ford in Northern Virginia, first imprisoning him in Richmond before sending him to Camp Sumter in March of 1864. He died there four months later.

Maloney’s cause of death is unknown, though nearly 13,000 other prisoners died there from malnutrition, diseases, exposure and other related causes. Sumter was designed for 10,000 prisoners. But, at one point, it held 33,000, many of them wounded.

Irish Americans who died in the war, Kinealy said, “gave the ultimate sacrifice, and they gave it for a country that was not their native country. In some ways, that was their way of showing they were good Americans — by fighting in this war.”

She added: “It is almost a universal sacrifice, a war to end slavery.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Honoring the dead

Shiels returned to Andersonville in October to attend the unveiling of a plaque honoring the Irish Americans buried there. Written in English, Irish and Ulster Scots, it reads: “In memory of all the sons of Ireland who suffered here, and their families. May they hear the music of the angels.” It also quotes from “Donegore Hill,” a famous piece by Irish poet James Orr: “Wives baked bonnocks for their men, with tears instead of water.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

The Irish government and the Northern Ireland Bureau funded the monument and sent representatives to speak at its dedication. Among them was Ireland’s minister for housing, local government and heritage, Darragh O’Brien. His appearance was particularly meaningful, said Nicholas Allen, a driving force behind the monument.

“It was really quite an incredible thing to think, ‘God, these fellas left in the famine when there was no independent Irish state. And here we have an Irish government minister remembering them,’” said Allen, an author who grew up in Belfast and who directs the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia.

“We did have a Northern Ireland Bureau representative there, so it was an all-Ireland thing,” Allen said, adding: “If those men could have seen this moment. It is amazing, really.”

Credit: Jason Thrasher

The ceremony at Andersonville in October was “intensely emotional,” said Caoimhe Ní Chonchúir, Ireland’s consul general in Atlanta.

“We were all just so struck by the idea that this was probably the first visit from home that these men had ever had ... the first Irish connection, save maybe for Damian, who had visited the graves there,” she said. “When we visited to dedicate the plaque, it was a visit from home.”

ExploreWatch the ceremony dedicating the plaque at Andersonville National Cemetery

The monument sits in front of the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville. Hanging on a wall inside the museum is a large, detailed map of Camp Sumter. It depicts the “deadline” inside the stockade. Guards were ordered to shoot prisoners who crossed it. The map also features a portrait of the stockade’s commander, Capt. Henry Wirz, who was convicted of conspiracy and murder and hanged in Washington, D.C., after the war.

Irish immigrant Thomas O’Dea, a Union soldier who survived being held as a prisoner in the stockade when he was just 16, created the map from memory, according to the Fifth Maine Museum on Peaks Island, where a copy of the lithograph is also on display.

“Ah, my friends, had you been there and experienced the suffering ... you too would have the whole panorama photographed in your memory to remain there to your dying day,” O’Dea said of the stockade, according to the National Park Service.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Like O’Dea, Dorence Atwater, a Union cavalryman, survived captivity at Sumter. He surreptitiously copied a list of those buried there and smuggled it out. Atwater later joined American Red Cross founder Clara Barton on an army expedition that established Andersonville National Cemetery and identified graves there. He also joined Barton in writing letters to the families of the dead. Atwater’s work helped Shiels’ research.

A soldier’s prophetic letter and his final word

During his visit to Andersonville in October, Shiels read from a letter Anne Hand sent the U.S. military in 1864. She was asking about the status of her husband, Lawrence, a fellow Irish immigrant who was captured during the Gettysburg Campaign in July of 1863. He served with the 5th New York Cavalry Regiment, according to her letter, and she had not heard from him in months. They had a son, James, who would have been about 12 years old.

“I never heard from him but once since he was taken prisoner and, for the love of God, let me know whether my husband is dead or alive, for I have a family to support and the... streets of New York will not support us,” she dictated in her letter, the second she had sent that year.

But her husband had died of pneumonia months earlier at Sumter. He is buried in grave 1104 at Andersonville, not far from Maloney, who is interred at grave 3284.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

After helping unveil the plaque, Shiels led visitors to Hand’s and Maloney’s graves, as well as the final resting place of another Irish immigrant, George Bell. Shiels has uncovered documents detailing the final harrowing days of Bell’s life.

Bell, who was married with a son, served as a private with the 5th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment. That regiment sustained the greatest losses in battle of any Union army unit, with 1,051 wounded and killed, according to the National Park Service.

The day before his regiment was scheduled to march to the front, Bell wrote his wife, Lucy, a prophetic letter. He mentioned their son and enclosed some money he had taken from a fallen Confederate soldier.

“I always thought the Lord would give the pleasure to see you again,” Bell wrote on May 25, 1864. “But now I begin to think it is too late.”

He concluded: “May the god of heaven spare and bless you and be my son’s guide and keep him from a soldier’s fate.”

Credit: Courtesy of the Andersonville Irish Project

Bell was captured days later during the Battle of Cold Harbor near Richmond. He was imprisoned at Sumter, where he died of scurvy in September of that year, according to the records Shiels has gathered, including a letter a fellow prisoner wrote to Bell’s widow. The letter said Bell was sick for about six days and that the last word he uttered was “Davey,” perhaps his son’s name.