By Kevin Seabrooke

Those who served the Protestant spiritual needs of the fighting men of the Civil War, in both official unofficial capacites, faced numerous barriers, shortages and hardships—though they did receive a captain’s salary and horse, they were not identified as such by the government, nor were they provided with uniforms, rations or forage for the horse.

Conditions were most often much more difficult for their Catholic counterparts. The Catholic population had grown, but America was still largely a Protestant country. Attitudes such as those held by President John Adams—who wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that “If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of [Ignatius de] Loyola”—were still prevalent during the Civil War.

Ironically, there would be 21 American Jesuits involved in the war as official or unofficial chaplains, more than any other Catholic order. Eleven were formal chaplains, four for the Confederacy and seven for the Union. The other 10 served as occasional chaplains.

The stories of what these men saw and did during the war, as it was for most who fought in it, stretch to the limits of pathos.

Father John Ireland was 24 and had only been a priest for a year when he was given permission to join the Fifth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry in 1862.

“On one occasion, an officer was dying—shot in the face—blood pouring out. He wrote on a slip of paper: ‘Chaplain,’ and the slip, red with blood, was carried around by a soldier, seeking for a chaplain. It was handed to me,” Ireland wrote later. “I hurried: the man was conscious—dying fast. ‘Speak to me,’ he said, ‘of Jesus.’ He had been baptized—there was no time to talk of the Church. I talked of the Savior, and sorrow for sin. The memory of that scene has never been effaced from my mind. I have not doubted the salvation of that soul.”

Accounts of the priest’s work at the well-documented horror that was Georgia’s Andersonville Prison is especially moving, with none more poignant than that of Father Peter Whelan, a native of County Wexford, Ireland, who, at 62, was the oldest of all the Catholic chaplains who served.

He arrived at Andersonville in June of 1864 there were 25,000 men in the 26-acre stockade meant to hold 10,000. Near the end of his time at the prison, he secured funds to buy 10,000 pounds of wheat flour to be baked into what became known as “Whelan’s Bread” and fed to the prisoners for several months.

Though he was only at the prison for four months, he made a lasting impression. One prisoner later described Whelan’s work, “kneeling down by the side of decaying bodies, in the stench and filth of gangrene wards … many a time I have seen him thus praying…. His services were sought by all, for in his kind and sympathizing looks, his meek but earnest appearance, the despairing prisoners read that all humanity had not forsaken mankind.”

But not all of the accounts are as grim. As with all chaplains during the war, the Catholic priests would also struggle for recognition and acceptance, which they ultimately earned through their own courage and dedication.

Chaplains were usually chosen by a vote of regimental officers. In September of 1861, the 73rd New York Fire Zouaves, made up of tough firemen from New York City, elected Father Joseph O’Hagan as one of the first, and youngest, Jesuit chaplains.

“Most of them were the scum of New York society, reeking with vice and spreading a moral malaria around them,” O’Hagan wrote after his first encounter with the 73rd. “About half the regiment (perhaps two thirds) called themselves Catholics, but all the Catholicity they had was the faith infused into their souls by baptism.”

In September of 1862, President Lincoln personally asked O’Hagan to become a hospital chaplain, but he stayed with the 73rd, where he was, by all accounts, liked by the men and very involved.

Of his election, O’Hagan would recall that, “Over 400 voted for a Catholic priest, 154 for any kind of a Protestant minister; 11 for a Mormon; and 335 said they could find their way to hell without the assistance of clergy.”

Faith of the Fathers: The Comprehensive History of Catholic Chaplains in the Civil War (Rev. Robert J. Miller, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2025, 480 pp., 26 b&w illustrations and 2 tables, notes, bibliography, index, $45 HC) is an indispensable resource for those who also want the numbers—broken down by denomination, Union and Confederate, with ratios of chaplains to soldiers—and the history of early religious representation in the American military.

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