“What are the Irish Catholics Fighting for?”: The Pilot’s Creation of An Alternative Archive to American Nativist Amnesia During the Civil War*
Abstract
An institution with its very own systems of remembering,
forgetting, memorizing and presenting, the Boston Pilot, an Irish
ethnic newspaper, directly and indirectly aimed to shape an identity
for the Irish community in the United States. Parallel to many
alternative systems of archiving, the Pilot distrusted the archive of the
hegemonic other and created an archival organization to avoid societal
and historical amnesia. In this sense, the series of “Records of IrishAmerican Patriotism” written by Michael Hennessy is an important
asset for the paper as the series documents the heroic acts of the
Irish Brigade and Irish American soldiers, and creates an alternative
archive of its own together with the news and editorials published in
the Pilot. Additionally, the Pilot’s racially motivated lexicon over the
course of the Civil War will be analyzed to understand further how
this alternative archive influenced its readers and their perception of
African Americans.
Keywords
The Boston Pilot, Archive, Michael Hennessy, Whiteness, Nationalism, Irish Americans
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