Long Island Wins

04/28/2026

IMMIGRANTS' CIVIL WAR: As immigrant regiments responded to Lincoln's call in April and May of 1861, they were called on to help fortify Washington. The first unit to complete a new fort was the 69th New York Militia from the Irish neighborhoods of New York.

Originally Posted May 20, 2011 by Patrick Young The Irish 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia may have earned the nickname “The Fighting 69th” during...

04/03/2026

Jews were barred by law from serving as chaplains in the Union Army. During the first year of the Civil War, Jewish soldiers from Pennsylvania decided to challenge this law the assistance of Abraham Lincoln. Happy Passover.

Originally posted October 21, 2011 in Immigrants’ Civil War. by Patrick Young, Esq. – Blogger The 65th Pennsylvania Regiment 5th Cavalry was not a “Jewish regiment.”...

04/02/2026

A soldier from Ohio found himself out in the field in West Virginia when Passover came around. He and twenty other Jewish soldiers made an appeal to their commander, Rutherford B. Hayes, to be allowed to celebrate with a seder. Find out how Hayes reacted and what the soldiers had planned. Chag Sameach.

Joseph A. Joel, a Jewish Union soldier, recounted his Civil War celebration of Passover in “The Jewish Messenger“ in April 1866. I saw this referred...

04/01/2026

The Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments today on whether children born in the United States will have their citizenship withheld based on the status of their parents. Here is a discussion of the Civil War background of that right among four historians and a lawyer, me.

Video is at bottom of article! A couple of weeks ago I was part of a panel discussion put on by Emerging Civil War on...

03/31/2026

The Justice Department is controversially citing an essay by a former-Confederate officer to interpret the 14th Amendment in the Birthright Citizenship case being argued at the Supreme Court tomorrow. The 14th Amendment, ratified three years after Appomattox, established that people of color are U.S. citizens has long as they were born inside the country.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Justice Department is citing a noted segregationist in its case to overturn the Birthright Citizenship Clause in the...

03/28/2026

03/03/2026

REVIEW: "The Gray House" is a new miniseries about the Van Lew spy ring in Richmond, Virginia during the Civil War. Eliza and Elizabeth Van Lew were two upper class slave-owning women who worked with enslaved Blacks to gather information on Confederate strategy and then to transmit it to Union lines. The series is over eight and a half hours long and contains a cast of hundreds in a careful recreation of Civil War Richmond. My review describes the story, identifies discrepancies from the historical record, and tells you whether I liked it or not. If you have seen The Gray House, leave your opinions here.

The Gray House is a gigantic miniseries of more than eight and a half hours that is set in Richmond during the Civil War. A...

02/25/2026

ICE is opening a new office in Woodbury for the higher-ups in Department of Homeland Security to intensify the anti-immigrant raids going on here. On Friday there will be a rally at 4:30 PM. Be there if you oppose the violence being done by ICE.

01/28/2026

As the governor of Missouri was agitating for the state to take up arms against the United States, German immigrants in St. Louis began organizing to stop him. When conflict started in the state, the immigrant community mobilized its men to disarm the Confederate uprising.

  Originally Posted May 6, 2011 by Patrick Young, Esq. Missouri was a border state. That meant that it was a slave state lying between...

01/25/2026

The Fighting 69th became the most famous Irish regiment of the Civil War. Yet at the beginning of the war their colonel was suspended, the men were largely Democratic who opposed Lincoln. and their community was under attack by anti-immigrant Know Nothings. Would this New York State Militia unit serve against the Confederates?

  Originally Posted April 29, 2011 by Patrick Young, Esq. When Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, it was not clear what New York’s best-known regiment...