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Text Box: It was the greatest war in American history. Three million fought – over 600,000 died. It was the only war fought on American soil by Americans. The Civil War, between the northern and southern sections of the United States, which began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter on the 12th of April 1861, and came to an end, in the last days of April 1865, at Appomattox, with the surrender of the Confederates, was one of the greatest struggles known to history. Its field of operation spread over thousands of miles, and not only were the number of men deployed in the warfare vast so too were the numbers of battles, with some two thousand four hundred recorded. It stood on the border between old and modern warfare. “More that 150,000 Irishmen served in the US army, most notably with the Irish Brigade, and some 50,000 more worn the grey of the Confederacy. During the American Civil War, six grandsons of George McCook, a United Irishmen, were Union Generals and another six were field officers. Irish-born Meagher, Corcoran and Shields were Union Generals and for the Confederacy, Corkman Patrick Cleburne was one of their finest commanders.” 1. Some 1,008 officers, on both sides, were appointed to the various ranks of general during the Civil War, of these there were 425 Confederate generals and 583 Union generals. Patrick Ronanye Cleburne would rise to the rank of major general and thus become the highest ranking Irishman on both sides as well as the highest ranking officer of foreign birth in the Civil War. Fighting on the Western front Cleburne would achieve less glory and recognition than other Confederate generals, despite this he would become the most respected of all Confederate generals, after Robert E. Lee, and would earn the accolade “Stonewall of the West” from Jefferson Davis. Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was born on 16th March 1828 in Ovens, Co Cork. He was the second son of Dr Joseph and Mary Ann Ronanye Cleburne and was named after his maternal grandfather, Patrick Ronayne. The Ronayne heritage in Cork and Waterford dated back to before the Norman invasion while the Cleburne’s had arrived in Ireland during the early 1600’s. William Cleburne bought land in Tipperary, in the early 1600’s, where the Cleburne family estate would remain until the death of William Cleburne, Patrick’s grandfather, in 1833. Joseph Cleburne was born in Rock Cottage, Co. Tipperary, in 1792, the son of William Cleburne. While still a very young physician Joseph moved to Ovens, near Ballincollig, and here he met and married Mary Anne Ronanye the daughter of Patrick Ronanye of Great Island, Cobh. Dr Cleburne became the contract surgeon for the army barracks and Royal Gunpowder Mill at Ballincollig as well as the local physician. When he was a year old Patrick’s mother died, but his father remarried soon after to a Miss Stuart. Patrick was to gain not only a mother’s love but soon another four siblings – one of whom, Christopher, was to fall at the battle of Cloyd’s Farm, West Virginia, on 10th of May 1864 aged only 21. Educated at home, by a tutor, until the age of twelve Patrick was then sent to a private school which was run by the Reverend Spedden of the Church of Ireland ( the Cleburne’s themselves were of Quaker stock ). When Patrick’s father died in 1844 Patrick became apprentice assistant surgeon to Mr Justin a physician in Mallow a neighbouring town. Having failed to pass an entrance exam to enter Trinity College, in February 1846, a disheartened Patrick immediately joined the 41st Regiment (Welch) of Infantry, which was stationed in the Royal Barracks, at Ship Street in Dublin having just returned from a tour of India. Omitting to mention that he had several relatives who were surgeons in the British Army or that he was from the landowning class, Pat signed up for life and found himself #2242 Private Cleburne. Stationed, not as he had hoped in India, or some other far flung post of the Empire, but in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and with Ireland in the harsh grip of the Potato Famine the regiment would be seconded to aid the civil powers to quell the riots and civil disorder that wracked the country. Finding himself in the ranks of what was nothing but an occupying army, as the potato famine worsened, and with the daily routine of army life proving monotonous, Patrick wearied of the whole experience, and so with part of his inheritance, he purchased his discharge, in September 1849, for the princely sum of £20. This was not before Patrick had been demoted from the rank of corporal, to which he had been promoted in July 1849, a rank he held only for a very short while, for one day having been ordered out on yet another drill he had filled his knapsack with pillows. Hours later he would be horrified to hear the order “inspection knapsacks” and the pillows being found he was once more a private. After nearly three and a half years in the army Patrick along with his brothers, Christopher and William, and sister, Anne, set sail on the vessel Bridgetown arriving in New Orleans on Christmas Eve of 1849. Irish immigration into America began as early as the seventeenth century and by 1720 it could have been deemed a mass emigration with some 150,000 to 200,000 Irish, mainly young Catholic men, having arrived. Most, being rootless and single, would swiftly be absorbed into the American way of life with no separate ethnic group being established during this early period. The first big wave of Ulster Scot emigration was in the period of 1717 to 1719. “Between 1717 and 1775 alone, an estimated 250,000 Ulster Scots left Ireland for the American colonies.”2. Unlike previous emigrants to America, from Ireland, these were not single young men but rather families and even whole settlements. America offered the Ulster Scot Presbyterian much, but most especially it offered the promise of economic and religious freedoms. While these Ulster Presbyterians had suffered religious persecution this factor alone did not push them into emigrating. What was the determining factor was the level of poverty these men and women lived under. In the early eighteenth century extremely bad weather conditions had seen the failure of all types of crops and famine was rife. By the late eighteenth century the decline in the linen industry meant hardship for most in Ulster, affecting as it did almost every person from tenant farmer to those working in the mills. Most Presbyterians worked the land, renting this from landowners as under the Penal Laws they were barred from owning land. The amount of land that these farmers could rent was minute as rents were high and profitability low, so farmers from the same family group or even the same church group would amalgamate their land farming it in one large unit which was certainly more viable but still they just eked out a living. Thus it was that the lure of land and of religious freedom drew the Presbyterians of Ulster to America, seeing whole families and even whole communities leaving together. Arriving in Boston they soon became known as Scots-Irish and found that their strict brand of Protestantism wasn’t popular with the Puritans. “The Scots-Irish quickly became almost as unpopular among New Englanders as their Catholic counterparts would be in the nineteenth century. The principal sources of conflict were religion and the manners, lifestyle and frequent poverty of the newcomers.”3. Unwelcome they moved on with Pennsylvania becoming a centre for settlement but it was the South and the more remote backcountry areas of Kentucky and Tennessee that would see the majority of Scots-Irish settlement, the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains regions. Wherever the Scots-Irish settled they would quickly distance themselves from less respectable Irishmen and by the early nineteenth century were being accepted as American, this often due to the role they had played in the American Revolution where they had sided with the Americans against the British. “While Irish emigrants to America in the eighteenth century had been mainly Protestant, the emigrants of the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly Catholic. By the 1830’s, Catholics exceeded Protestants in the transatlantic migration from Ireland for the first time since 1700. As mass emigration from Catholic Ireland got underway in the pre-famine era (1800-44), Irish Americans of Protestant descent loudly proclaimed their difference from the newcomers, calling themselves Scotch-Irish rather than Irish and assimilating rapidly into the mainstream of Protestant America.4. Even before the stream of Catholic Irish emigration to America became a torrent, the issue of religion had come to the forefront in American politics. The Aliens Act of 1798 had attempted to curtail the rights of immigrants who were not naturalised. In the 1830s, however, nativists began focusing their attacks on Catholic immigrants, asserting that America's republican form of government could not be sustained with a large Catholic population. Pamphleteers, such as Samuel Morse, began linking immigration with Catholicism outweighing the benefits of immigration with the potential threat to Protestantism by Catholicism. Nativists began to transform this anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment into a political movement and the Know-Nothings soon became the largest of such movements. The dramatic rise in immigration, resulting from the Irish potato famine and German economic distress, disputes between Protestants and Catholics over the use of the Protestant King James Bible in public schools, attracted more than 1 million members to the Know-Nothing party. Changing their name in 1855, to the American Party, they would have by the end of that year carried elections in a dozen states and elected more than one hundred congressmen. Many believed they would elect the next president, but their 1856 presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, carried only Maryland. Patrick CleburneStonewall of the West