ABSTRACT
About 3,525,000 Irish-Catholic immigrants landed on America's shores between the years 1845 and 1860. These Irish Americans would fight in both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Then, throughout the subsequent "Gilded Age" Irish Americans became an increasingly potent voting group, most memorably demonstrated in the presidential elections of 1884 and 1888. In April 1865, the Civil War ended in a Union victory, but President Lincoln, the victim of assassination, became the conflict's final casualty. The most virulently anti-British group of Irishmen regarded the Civil War as an opportunity to advance their own cause. These men hoped to obtain, through Civil War service in either the Union or Confederate armies, the military training they would need for a future attack against the British. These Irishmen belonged to the American Fenian Organization—the US branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) that had been organized by John O'Mahoney and others in 1858.
