Sisters of secession: the unclaimed legacies of two Southern American Irish women

Abstract

Mary Austin Carroll (1835–1909) and Florence Jane O'Connor (dates unknown) were both Irish American women of fervent religious belief who are unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The first objective of this piece is to introduce them and to give an account of their work. As a nun, and later a superior in the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, Mary Austin Carroll's work has sometimes been lost to her own preference for anonymity. Her literary production and importance arguably eclipse more celebrated male pro-Confederate contemporaries like Father Abram J. Ryan. For her part, Florence O'Connor's singular work, The Heroine of the Confederacy, provides critical insights into how Irish American women naturalised Catholicism in the South and reconciled it to Lost Cause remembrance. This essay attempts to place these women within the larger context of Southern Irish Americans with Confederate sympathies and argues for the lasting significance of their literary and rhetorical legacies within American Irish histories.

Keywords:

• ‘Lost Cause’ remembrance
• Mary Austin Carroll
• Florence Jane O'Connor
• Civil War reconstruction
• Irish American Catholics

Notes

 1. Indeed, one part of her propaganda purpose seems to have been to interdict Union conscription efforts in Northern Ireland. Her tactics seem much of a piece with the shadowy work of John Bannon, Henry Hotze, and sundry other Confederate agents working in a London underground to stem Union efforts in Ireland. The London publication of the book suggests that Hotze may have had a hand in its release.

 2. Gleeson, ‘“To Live and Die [for] Dixie”: Irish Civilians and the Confederate States of America’, current issue.

 3. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 111.

 4. Rugemer, ‘The Southern Response to British Abolitionism’, 222.

 5. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 329.

 6. Dawes and Nolan, Religious Pioneers, 153.

 7. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 578.

 8. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 290. She also stood out as a Southern correspondent in a Catholic literary web that connected to ‘Patrick O'Shea [Catholic Publishing House], The Sadliers, John G. Shea, M.H. Phelan, James McMaster [New York Freeman's Journal], Lawrence Kehoe [Catholic Publishing Society], Orestes Brownson, and John Francis Maguire’, and she befriended journalists in many other outlets including The Boston Pilot, where she came to know Patrick Donahoe, John Boyle O'Reilly, and Katherine E. Conway.

 9. Many religious men basked in the reflected glory of the book, however. Its imprimatur came from Archbishop Kenrick (who had ordained the stern-faced Father Abram Ryan, and its sprawling twenty-page introduction was penned by another man of the cloth, Father Richard Baptist O'Brien, also known as ‘Father Baptist’. Nowhere did it give the name of the woman who authored the book.

10. Carroll, Life of Catherine McAuley, 37.

11. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 10.

12. Carroll, Leaves, 3: 393.

13. Dennis Clark, ‘The South's Irish Catholics: A Case of Cultural Confinement’, in Miller and Wakelyn, Catholics in the Old South, 201.

14. ‘Where did the southern Irish …’: paraphrased from Beagle and Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan, 39, citing Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 154. As many as 144,000 Irish may have fought for the Union.

15. However, one could certainly be excused for confusing them, in so far as their orders had been established within a few years of each other, and both filled their American ranks with young women from Ireland. Both, likewise, modelled themselves after Mother Seton's Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, whose storied contributions to Civil War battlefields left an enduring legacy.

16. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 59.

17. Carroll, A Catholic History, 335.

18. Dawes and Nolan, Religious Pioneers, 154.

19. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 336.

20. Carroll, Life of Catherine McAuley, 52.

21. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 147.

22. The famed temperance priest ‘Father Matthew’ Theobald, ‘whom she had known in Cork’, had dedicated the original church, much to Carroll's delight. As it happens, this would later be the childhood parish of Anne Rice (born Howard Allen O'Brien). According to her website, ‘She was baptized in that church, attended school there, and part of the parish family until it was merged with St. Mary's across the street’ (http://www.annerice.com/NewOrleans-SaintAlphonsus.html).

23. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 36.

24. Dawes and Nolan, Religious Pioneers, 153.

25. Muldrey, Abounding in Mercy, 84.

26. Carroll, Life of Catherine McAuley, 51.

27. ‘Marriages and Deaths’. I am indebted to Donald Beagle of Belmont Abbey College for passing along this clipping to me.

28. The book is dedicated to an iconic veteran – ‘[Lt.] Col. Robert H. Barrow’ – whom she dubs ‘The Hero of Belmont’. The battle along the Mississippi in Missouri State marked the first test of Ulysses S. Grant's mettle. The scion of a prominent family, Barrow's home comprised 1500 acres tended by 144 slaves. An ardent Democrat, he fought with the 11th Louisiana at Shiloh before leaving the army in 1863, after which he would ‘spend the balance of the war in prison and at home’ (cf. Hughes, The Battle of Belmont, 42, 215). There are two photographs in O'Connor's book – a profile of O'Connor herself, and one of Robert H. Barrow – and we are left to wonder what the relationship between the two may have been once they were parted by the fortunes of war.

29. For Ossianic influence, see page 128 of O'Connor's novel. Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was extraordinarily popular among the American Irish, as he was in his native Dublin. His skill as a balladeer and his significance to Irish nationalists of all stripes earned him a reputation similar to that of Robert Burns among the Scots.

30. All parenthetical references in this section are to the London (Harrison) edition of 1864.

31. In an earlier scene, the unrepentant Confederate woman follows the ‘custom in New Orleans’ and scatters blossoms over veterans' graves on All Saints' Day (317).

32. Tardy, The Living Female Writers of the South, 148.

33. The comment is also a reminder that the Irish had been participating in American wars ever since there had been an America.

34. Gardner, Blood and Irony, 31–6.

35. For more on this see Haddox, Fears and Fascinations.

36. Knight, Biographical Dictionary of Southern Authors, 292.