General Tyler was wounded at Missionary Ridge and being unfit for field duty, was assigned to the command at West Point, Ga. He was in command of the fort there when the surrender of Generals Lee and Johnston’s armies took place. When General Wilson with his cavalry demanded a surrender of the fort, Tyler refused to give it up, though with but a handful of men against thousands, and fell while defiantly fighting against such odds rather than surrender.
Col. Grace, of the Tenth Tennessee, was an Irishman, a splendid soldier, and was killed at the head of his regiment at the battle of Jonesboro’, Ga. Lieutenant-Colonel O’Neil, of the same regiment, a brave soldier, survived the war but died since. Company E of the Second Tennessee Regiment was a company composed of Irishmen enlisted by Captain Casper W. Hunt and served most gallantly throughout the entire war. This company and the Tenth and Fifteenth regiments were all in Gen. Bate’s command and composed of Irishmen, and no command made better records than did they.
Senator Bate says the grandest and greatest Irishman in the Confederacy was John Mitchell. He who was banished in “Lurid—’48” and condemned to fourteen years’ imprisonment. He was sent to an English penal colony from which he subsequently escaped and came to the United States by the Pacific route and finally settled down near Knoxville, Tenn.
When the war broke out he was editing a paper in Knoxville, and was appointed an assistant secretary to one of the governmental departments at Richmond by Jefferson Davis. He had three sons, two of whom were killed in the armies of the Confederate states and one who still lives in New York City.
Mitchell was a brilliant writer and author and was imprisoned by the Federals at Fort Warren at the close of the war. He was finally released and after a few years returned to Ireland and was elected by the “Bloody Tips” to the British Parliament, but was denied his seat. He was reëlected and died during the pendency of his contest for the seat.
Thomas W. Wrenne, president of the Irish-American Centennial Association, has furnished me with information relative to the troops Tennessee gave to the Confederate cause and to the Union army:
To the Confederate states Tennessee gave (all volunteers), 108,000.
To the Federal government Tennessee gave (all volunteers), 31,092.
Possibly, excepting North Carolina, Tennessee gave more troops to the Confederate states in proportion to the population than any other.
It is worthy of note that North Carolina is populated in a great measure like Tennessee with Irish-American people. You know that most of the Tennessee early settlers came over from North Carolina and both have always been patriotic.