James Sheeran left a remarkable record of his American Civil War service. Born in Ireland, his family left that country to settle in Canada. They eventually made their way to the United States where Sheeran grew up New York City. He married there and moved to Pennsylvania and eventually Michigan. When his wife died, however, he had to place his two children with religious orders for their education, and, in the process, felt that he had a vocation for the priesthood. He entered the Redemptorist novitiate in Michigan in 1855. Ordained in 1858, he was eventually assigned to a new parish in New Orleans, St Alphonsus, in what became known as (and still is) the ‘Irish Channel’. New Orleans contained over 25,000 Irish-born residents in the 1850s, most of them famine immigrants. Sheeran served there and when large numbers of his parishioners signed up for the Confederate army, he was commissioned as chaplain to the 14th Louisiana Infantry. The 14th was sent to Virginia and Sheeran would serve with them through the bloodiest parts of the war from 1861 to 1864. He kept an extensive diary from the late summer of 1862 through to the war's end in late April 1865.

By the time that he began his diary, Sheeran and his regiment had already seen combat during the Seven Days battles around Richmond and were chasing Federal forces northward. He would also accompany his Confederate flock into Maryland during the Antietam campaign and again for Gettysburg in 1863. He also witnessed the bloody battles of the Overland Campaign in the summer of 1864 before moving with his regiment to the Shenandoah Valley until he went into the Union lines to minister to captured Confederates. He eventually found himself under arrest, much to his chagrin, and was not released until the war was virtually over.

Sheeran's diary is very detailed, providing considerable insight into both the life of a chaplain during the Civil War and the opinions of Irish and Irish American Catholics on the conflict. He tried to say mass as often as he could, especially when he had missed doing so on ‘a military Sunday’ (p.173), and also preached to general congregations. As a Redemptorist he saw himself as a skilled orator and seems to have been popular with both Catholic and Protestant troops. Most of his clerical work, however, was focused on the former. The 14th served in the 2nd Louisiana Brigade with a large number of Catholics beyond Irish immigrants. Indeed, he administered the sacraments to any Catholic troops whom he found in the Army of Northern Virginia, Catholic Union prisoners and civilians with whom he stayed during his service. One lasting impression from his diary is of the strong networks that Catholics formed in the American South, an area, apart from south Louisiana, where they were in a distinct minority. Sheeran seemed to have met every important Catholic officer in the Army of Northern Virginia, knew every Catholic cleric in the eastern theatre of the conflict, and had enough connections among the laity always to find a place to stay or get a hot meal. With Union prisoners, however, most of whom were Irish, he usually added political lectures to religious ministering. He liked to point out that they were foolish for opposing the Confederacy. As he put it, he ‘endeavored to show them’ that rather than fighting for their faith and ‘the liberation of Ireland,’ they were actually on the side of those who ‘had burned our Churches, convents and Academies’ (p. 76).

Sheeran's ardent support for the Confederacy, and his constant desire to share that with Catholics on the other side, is somewhat surprising in that he had spent most of his American life in the northern states. Perhaps the war radicalised him as it did other Confederates who served in the army. Or perhaps he was overcompensating for his northern background. Whatever the reason, he still felt nostalgic for the pre-secession United States. During the Maryland campaign, for example, he travelled through some places of his earlier American life and commented: ‘I grieve to think that a Union, which was once the political idol of my soul, was now shattered forever.’ He quickly came to his Confederate senses, however, blaming this dissolution on ‘religious fanatics and political demagogues’ (p. 59), i.e. abolitionists and Republicans.

While Sheeran's diary is rich, and has a feel of immediacy in his vivid descriptions of camp life, battles and the Confederate home front, there are parts where he has added extra information, perhaps well after the fact. There are some long sections dedicated to strategic and tactical descriptions of Civil War battles, the details of which he would not been privy to at the time. He did indeed meet General Robert E. Lee once, and was close to his various brigade commanders, but not to the extent of the knowledge that he recorded here. Patrick Hayes has done a fine job in editing the diary, providing informative background on the campaigns that Sheeran lived through, the people whom he met, and the diary's provenance, but it would have been useful for him to analyse and/or speculate on which parts of the diary were composed in the field and which were embellished later, perhaps much later. An extended description of the manuscript diary, and some illustrations of its pages, would also have been helpful. Despite this issue, Sheeran's diary is very rich and provides valuable insight into the life of a military chaplain during the Civil War. It will be very useful to those researching the religious dimensions of America's bloodiest war, the Catholic Church's role in it, or the lives and experiences of military chaplains.