The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (P.S.) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Dictionary-contributor and murderer Doctor William Minor's madness resulted from wartime trauma, theorizes Winchester. His scene-setting explanation recounts the history of America's Irish during the Civil War. As their casualties mounted and "rival" African-Americans were emancipated, the Irish began to desert the North's army. During the Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864 they deserted in great numbers, according to Winchester. Amidst the ensuing carnage, Minor's commanders required the young assistant surgeon to fire-brand an Irishman's face with the letter "D" for deserter. This memory and delusions about revenge-seeking Irish Fenians haunted Minor in the following years. He was unable to escape them by moving to England, and in 1872 he shot an innocent passerby who he mistook for a pursuing Fenian. Her Majesty's government sentenced the clearly disturbed Minor to incarceration at the Broadmoor Asylum where he would await another extraordinary coincidence - his encounter with the Oxford English Dictionary.

There's one thing wrong with this story - apart from Minor being far from the only person in England and America obsessed with Irish goblins in 1872 - mass Irish desertions from the North's armies never happened.

"Back in the 1890s this charge was made and it elicited a sharp response from St. Clair Mulholland, an Irish-born soldier who commanded the 116th PA in the Irish Brigade. He contacted the head of the war department at that time and received an official response that the War Dept. had no statistics on which to base such a claim."

Contrary to the desertion stereotype, the Irish displayed a great deal of heroism during the Civil War. They were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in far greater numbers than any other foreign-born group. And in the year of the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864, their actions resulted in more of these awards than in any other Civil War year.

Congress awarded the Medal of Honor to more than 1500 soldiers and sailors for Civil War gallantry -- a sample of the fighting men so highly correlated with origins and combat deaths that it tells us a great deal about who fought for the North and when. And what it tells us about the Irish and other foreign-born soldiers, who made up a quarter of the North's army, is that they served as bravely, if not more so, throughout the war as any other Americans. Furthermore the Irish were represented in numbers consistent with their presence in the North's population, and, allowing for the demographic effects of the 1840's famine immigration, perhaps in greater numbers than should have been expected.

Data for the more than 300,000 New York State soldiers supports this analysis. Nearly half of those joining units organized at New York City were foreign-born, while units from the rest of the state had a much smaller immigrant presence. Remarkably, the combat mortality rates and Medal of Honor award rates for the city units are the same as for the upstate units. Contrary to its reputation for draft riot violence, New York City provided 43 percent of the state's army units and manpower. Consistent with this, city soldiers suffered 43 percent of state combat deaths and received 43 percent of the Medal of Honor awards.

Though Winchester contends that the Irish were more concerned with fighting "rival" African-Americans for the lowest rung on America's social ladder than fighting for the Union, the Irish were much more assimilated into American society than he realizes. Three of the North's four leading Civil War generals were raised in Irish-Catholic families: William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Gordon Meade. So was Dennis Hart Mahan, West Point's guiding light for thirty years prior to the war. Mahan gave America the mathematical engineering of France, and a professional officer corps with the capability to organize industrial war against the South. Sherman's principal rival was his Irish-Catholic wife, the daughter of Thomas Ewing, Ohio's powerful senator. And though myth credits Joshua Chamberlain with saving the Union at Gettysburg's Little Round Top, Colonel Patrick Henry O'Rorke, an Irish-Catholic immigrant who graduated first in West Point's class of 1861, actually led the reinforcements and the charge that saved the day.

Doctor Minor's military records supplied by the National Archives indicate that he was in New Haven, Connecticut in May of 1864 and that he reported to a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia on May 17, 1864. It is indeed possible that he somehow made it to the Battle of the Wilderness, which took place in Virginia from May 5 to 7. Anything is possible for those who believe in leprechauns. For doubting Thomases like me, though, the probably apocryphal story of the branded Irish deserter who haunted William Minor would be more convincing if the soldier and his unit were identified. He remains virtually the only anonymous character in an otherwise meticulously documented story.

Englishman Simon Winchester is entitled to publish whatever he wishes, even if it amounts to recyling anti-immigrant myths from America's nativist 19th century. But it's not "a superb job of historical research," as Times columnist William Safire called it. And if Mr. Winchester ignored his sources in the matter of the Irish, as it so appears, it's not good journalism either. -- James F. McManus III