Irish immigrants conscripted into U.S. military

[DelG]

Recently I listened to an interview with Irish author Sebastian Barry on NPR 'Fresh Air' discussing his book "Days Without End" with storyline set in the American Civil War. Among various general topics discussed he noted that many Irish immigrants (in the 19th century?) were conscripted into American military service often-times literally as they disembarked the ships arriving in America from Ireland. For those of you with Irish-American ancestors, this bit of information may assist you to uncover relevant historical records.

'...if you were of military age as a young person, a young man, from Ireland getting off the boat in America, you were immediately put into the Union Army if you're - if you landed in a Union port, and vice versa in a Confederate. This was to earn your citizenship. I mean, this was something I simply didn't know. So a person who has lost everything behind him - his future, the people who loved him, the people he loved, his whole possibility of meeting some girl someday in a, you know, a hawthorn-strewn country road and marrying her and having his babies, and all the rest of it, gone for all eternity - is then put straight into a uniform, given a musket and told to go and fight for something he didn't understand. Was he even speaking English?...'