Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

I’ve been honored to be asked to give a short talk at the annual Dick Dowling Statue Cleaning and Ceremony in Houston on Sunday, March 16 at 1 p.m. This event is now held in conjunction with the city’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration, but actually goes back more than a century, to 1905. The statue is believed to be Houston’s oldest public monument.

Last year, Houston writer and journalist John Nova Lomax spoke at the ceremony.  He also wrote that “today, Dowling the man is only remembered by Houston’s rapidly vanishing (if not downright extinct) coterie of Confederate apologists, military historians, and the local Irish community, who honor him at his statue every St. Patrick’s Day.” I’m not really sure where that leaves me, but I’m going to give it a shot. My working title is “Dick Dowling and the Immigrant’s Call to Arms.”

It should be fun. In the meantime, here’s a great profile by my fellow blogger Damian Shiels of John Thomas Browne (1845-1941), a native of County Limerick, who served as a Confederate soldier in his teens and went on to become Mayor of Houston in the 1890s. Damian has a new book coming this spring, The Irish in the American Civil War, that should be fantastic.

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Image by Flickr user Denaldo Dillo, under Creative Commons license.