Post by Jocelyn Wright
[Note: The author of this post is a student in HIST 300, an independent study group that has been reading historiography about Dowling, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the contested memory of the Civil War. To satisfy one of the requirements for that course, Kat did some additional research about the context for the re-dedication of the Dick Dowling monument.]
Dick Dowling’s statue is the product of collaboration between two groups with seemingly very different agendas: the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the United Confederate Veterans. Why would a society aimed at preserving and celebrating Irish heritage ever find a reason for collaborating with a group aimed at doing the same for Confederate heritage? As we learned in Dr. Murphy’s discussion last Thursday though, the concept of a Confederate Irish man during the Civil War was actually quite common. Several other Irish men, including John Mitchell and Patrick Cleburne, made equally important contributions to the Confederacy’s war effort. In fact, Irish Confederates were not exceptional during the Civil War.
Irish in the South tended to support the Confederacy for a variety of reasons. The Irish in the antebellum South were already near the bottom of the social hierarchy; they supported slavery in the hopes of preserving the reminder that they were not the lowest class in the South. The Catholic Church, to which nearly all Irish would have subscribed, was anti-slavery but urged their constituents to obey the laws of the country they were in and to wait for God to address the issue. The North’s invasion of the South also reminded the Irish of Britain’s continued refusal to give Ireland its independence. The biggest reason the Irish fought in the Confederacy, though, was their desire to fit in with and be accepted by Southern society. While they were not completely ghettoized in the way other immigrant groups were at the time, the Irish still tended to live in separate communities from the rest of the South, and many had a much lower standard of living and quality of life (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 187-188). Although they did not win the war, in the wake of the war, Irish Confederates won a much larger victory. When they could not find unity on the terms of the antebellum South, they successfully integrated into the post-war South by sharing their concerns and supporting their polices.
The foundation of this bond between Irish and these white Southerners was, unfortunately, a dislike of African Americans, who they feared were taking away their jobs. Before the Civil War, most of the South’s Irish were so poor that they did many of the same tasks as slaves, be it plantation work considered too dangerous for slaves or helping wealthier women with domestic chores (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 187-188). After emancipation, though, there was an abundance of African Americans who were more than willing to do these Irishmen’s jobs for even less than the Irish would accept. A striking example of this change in the workforce can be seen with New Orleans’s port labor force. Although the Irish dominated this work force in the 1850s, in the wake of the war, these jobs were taken over almost exclusively by blacks (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 173). Economic concerns such as these led Irishmen to elect former Confederate officials to government who would enact racist measures to disenfranchise blacks in the hopes that this would drive blacks out of the cities and allow Irishmen to take back these jobs (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 175).
The Irish further bonded with Southerners by overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic party, in spite of the Republican party’s best efforts to woo the Irish. Many Irishmen remembered the racism they suffered before the war, and saw the Republican party as a revival of the “Know Nothing” Party, while others were aware of the anti-Irish prejudice in the North, which they associated with the Republican party. Finally, many of the Republican party’s political maneuvers reminded the Irish too strongly of their own negative history with Britain. The Irish balked at the Republican party’s decision to restore order in the South through the use of military force as well as their disenfranchisement of certain ex-Confederates, as they were both tactics the British used in Ireland (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 180-181). Actions such as these led some Irishmen to develop stronger pro-Confederacy sentiments in the wake of the war than they possessed prior to it. Patrick Murphy, for instance, “displayed far more rabid Confederate thoughts in the 1870s than he had in 1861” (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 185).
Although Irish and other white Southerners may not have had the same reasons for supporting the Democratic Party and the Lost Cause ideology in the wake of Reconstruction, they still bonded over these mutual viewpoints. Southerners recognized the Irish’s solidarity with their political beliefs and the Irish finally achieved the acceptance into Southern society they had craved for so long. As the Civil War grew more distant, Irish identity melded into Southern identity to the point where the distinction between the two became blurred and irrelevant. Perhaps the best-known example of the way in which this took place was the wildly popular Gone With the Wind, where a woman with Irish heritage is portrayed as the epitome of the Southern belle (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 194).
Another representation of this new-found bond between Irish and Southerners with more immediate relevance to our purposes is our favorite Dick Dowling monument which, as we all know, was erected in 1905. The statue began as a Confederate war monument in the 1890s, but when the UCV failed to obtain the funds they needed to complete the statue, they reached out to Irish heritage groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The statue as it stands today represents the marriage of these two groups’ goals to the point that, in the words of the Houston Chronicle “‘God Save Ireland’ and ‘Dixie’ were blended in one harmony today” (Gleeson, Irish in the South, 68). UCV wanted a Confederate war memorial to match every other major city that was receiving one at the time, while the Ancient Order of Hibernians seized on a chance to shed light on Houston’s relatively small Irish community (Gleeson, “Another Lost Cause,” 68-71).
As we have seen by examining the Houston Public Library Archives and through our Library Assignments, this initial collaboration set the tone for Dowling’s dual identity as an Irishman and Confederate war hero. Just as important, though, is that this collaboration marked an acceptance of a triple identity: Irish, Confederate and Texan. On a broader level this statue can be seen as an accomplishment of the very goal for which Dowling and his men were fighting: acceptance. Over fifty years after they fought in the Battle of Sabine Pass, these men and the rest of the Irish community had a tangible and highly visible representation of the acceptance and celebration of the Irish as important and positive contributors to Houston and Southern society.
Works Cited
Gleeson, David. “Another ‘Lost Cause’: The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy.” Southern Cultures. (2011): 50-73.
Gleeson, David. The Irish in the South: 1815-1877. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.