The life and adventures, songs, services, and speeches of Private Miles O'Reilly. (47th Regiment, New York Volunteers)

New York: Carleton, 1864. First edition, 12mo, pp. 237, [3]; frontis and 4 plates, illustrated chapter headers; full green cloth gilt; boards soiled and rubbed, upper free endpaper lacking, penciled-in owner's marks on frontis, some light spotting and staining to textblock, but largely clean and sound, good. Charles Graham Halpine was an Irish American journalist, soldier, and political operative. "Among the first to respond to Abraham Lincoln’s 15 April 1861 call to arms, Halpine served for three months with New York’s Sixty-ninth Regiment of Irish volunteers. Late in the summer he became an officer on the staff of General David Hunter..." (ANB) His (truncated) invention of Miles O'Reilly, an ignorant private who told it like it was, was first invented to drum up support for enlistment among the Irish population for the Union cause. "In widely reprinted comic poems and stories, 'Private Miles O’Reilly' evolved into an early representation of the Lovable Irishman, luckless but happy, unlettered but wise, boastful but innocent and affectionate. As a vigorously outspoken Union soldier, he helped change the image of the Irish in the North and gave the Irish themselves a sense that they had a future in the United States, that the country was worth fighting for." Wright II 1073; this copy with the song "Our Lady of the Hospital" omitted. (Inventory #: 69754)