Hon. A. D. Candler, secretary of state, is proud of his Irish descent. He writes:
“Col. Robert McMillan, of the Twenty-fourth Georgia Infantry, went from Habersham county and was a gallant officer. He was born in Ireland, as was his brother, a gallant private in a company commanded by my father, who was himself of Irish lineage.
“Col. McMillan’s son, Garnett, was born in Elbert county, Georgia, but was of pure Irish blood. He was major of his father’s regiment and a splendid soldier. He was elected to congress in 1872, but died before he took his seat.
“I am of Irish extraction on both sides, I am proud to say. I I was first a private, then a lieutenant and then a captain, and finally a colonel in the Confederate army.
“Captain and afterward Lieutenant-Colonel Neal, of this city, was an Irish-American and a good officer, who died in battle. He was a brother-in-law of Capt. John Keely, a gallant officer whom you knew. At this moment I recall no other officers who were of Irish blood.
“There were others who were privates in the ranks, and every one without exception was a good soldier. Indeed, I have a thousand times thought of, and with pride endorsed, the language of the King of Poland, who said of the Irish that ‘there is nowhere on the face of the earth a people among whom there are so few fools and cowards.’”
Captain John Flannery, a native of Ireland, who commanded the Irish Jasper Greens in the Civil War, writes:
“Savannah furnished to the Georgia regiment for the Mexican War one company of volunteers, something over ninety men, a very large majority of them natural-born Irishmen. That company was the Irish Jasper Greens, under Captain Henry R. Jackson, who, on being promoted, was succeeded by Captain John McMahon, a native-born Irishman.
“In the late war I estimate that Savannah furnished about 1,000 men of Irish birth to the armies of the Confederate states. Nearly three fourths of these served in distinctively Irish companies, of which there were seven. As to their services in the field, that would be too long a story, even if I had the data, to write in a letter. The Irish element held up their end of the line in every duty that devolved upon them on the march, in the battlefield, or elsewhere, during the four years of the great struggle.”
Gen. John B. Gordon writes: