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The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (review)

Hoping to recover the story of “the forgotten people of the Old South,”David Gleeson helps reintroduce ethnicity into the way we look at the region’s white population, too often thought homogeneous. The Irish are a good case with which to complicate that picture, even though their percentage of the South’s population was never very large. Concentrated in cities like their Northern cousins, they faced a more complicated assimilation, having to become American and Southern at the same time. They largely succeeded, though to call this an example of “integration” is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words in this context. Through detailed research in an impressive array of archival sources, however, Gleeson has done more than any previous historian to track down Irish immigrants and what became of them.His discussion is orderly, framed by such obvious subjects as occupational patterns, family and community life, religion, and Irish participation in the war and its aftermath. The writing is clear enough, with only occasional bits of left-over dissertationese. He does not engage the “whiteness” studies of the recent literature (though they appear in footnotes), and his treatment of slavery, that elephant in the room of the antebellum South, is curiously confined to a single chapter, as if that were just one more topic among many. Still, as a work of compensatory history, this book makes a contribution to the scholarly discussion.