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“. . . battle of Sabine Pass was more remarkable that the battle of Thermopylae, and when it has orators and poets to celebrate it, will be so esteemed by mankind.”

 

— The president of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis.

 

 

At the Battle of the Sabine Pass on 8 September 1863, some 47 men of the Davis Guard, under the command of Confederate Lieutenant Richard “Dick” Dowling, faced down General William B. Franklin’s Union force of 5000 infantry and five batteries of artillery on 27 ships.

 

Dick Dowling came from County Galway. He was six feet tall with blue eyes and a fair complexion. They called him “The Kid”. 

 

The Sabine Pass connected the Sabine Lake and the Gulf of Mexico. Repeated Union blockades underlined its strategic importance for the transport of military and civilian provisions. Dowling had taken command of the nearby Fort Griffin that summer, but with the looming threat of a Union invasion through the Sabine Pass into Texas, Confederate General Bankhead Magruder ordered Dowling to retreat. Dowling and his men decided to stay and fight.

 

Even though the Union side managed to botch a foolproof invasion plan, it is still remarkable that the Davis Guard, outnumbered 100 to 1, succeeded in repelling the attack while also disabling two gunboats and capturing 350 prisoners. The unlikely victory — the most one-sided Confederate success in the American Civil War — made Dowling famous.

 

The Confederate Congress passed a resolution commending their bravery, while the Confederate States Army promoted Dowling to major. In the southern states, the concept of bravery became synonymous with being Irish. Houston, the city Dowling called home, celebrated them as heroes.

 

The medal presented to the Davis Guard following the Battle of the Sabine Pass.

 

In fact, the Davis Guard had already earned a reputation as the finest artillerymen on the Gulf Coast. Having lost Galveston in October 1862, Confederate forces retook the city on 1 January 1863 with one newspaper reporting how the “artillery boys acted nobly and have covered themselves with glory . . . the Irish boys surpassed the expectations of their friends.”

 

In January 1863, off the coast of the Sabine Pass, the Davis Guard again saw action aboard a paddle wheel steamer with Dowling operating a rifle 64 pounder in a five-hour pursuit of two blockading Union vessels. The outmanned guard captured these enemy vessels and $100,000 worth of supplies.

 

40,000 Irish soldiers served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. People in Ireland were not dispassionate observers of the conflict. The Tuam Herald regularly reported on the military exploits of Confederate General Patrick Cleburne from County Cork, and Union General Philip Sheridan.

 

And yet County Galway’s own son, Richard “Dick” Dowling, the celebrated major in the Confederate States Army, received little enough attention in his local newspaper.

 

 

 

 

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“The people are threatened with starvation, while the provisions are exported from the country to feed others. The land is cultivated, and bears plentiful crops — for whom? Not for the persons who raise them . . . In coming to this town my humble vehicle was frequently stopped by carts carrying away the grain, to be exported from a country where the inhabitants are in imminent danger of starvation.”

 

— Archbishop John McHale, speaking at a political rally in Castlebar, 1846.

 

 

Pat and Bridget Dowling raised nine children on a farm in the townland of Knock, located eight miles north of Tuam in County Galway. Dick, their second eldest, was born in 1837. The Dowling farm was relatively large for the area, allowing the family to live comfortably in the years before the Great Famine. As an adult Dick evinced no lack of schooling — his uncle Thomas taught him to read and write and instructed him in arithmetic and bookkeeping, the latter two skills surely standing to him in his successful business dealings.

 

However, by 1845 The Tuam Herald increasingly reported the appearance of the potato blight that would devastate the country: “The most fearful consequences [which] must inevitably ensue . . . as yet nothing really practicable has been done for the salvation of the people.” And in February 1846, the same publication warned: “At the time there is a prospect of the country being overwhelmed with all the horrors and affliction of famine . . . that there is a certainty that within one fortnight thousands upon thousands will be without fire, without clothing, and without food . . .”

 

The Dowlings sent Dick and his older sister Honora to live in New Orleans in 1846, where they found an intensely stratified society. The descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers were on the top rung. Irish immigrants competed with free African Americans for jobs, the second lowest rung on the social ladder. Enslaved people were at the bottom.

 

Emaciated famine refugees were extremely susceptible to disease — yellow fever hit their community hard. Dowling lived with the Cunningham family, originally from Knock, who had emigrated in the early 1840s. Having entered the Tuam workhouse in 1850, Dowling’s parents mysteriously escaped that horror and joined their children sometime between 1851 and 1853. However, they both died from yellow fever in 1853 along with one of Dick’s younger siblings.

 

The Know-Nothing Party Flag. The Native Americans referred to here means people born in America, and not the continent's indigenous peoples.

 

In 1854 anti-Irish tension swept through New Orleans, much like in many other cities swamped by famine refugees. Following the passing of a vote to rid New Orleans of Irish city officeholders, American gangs targeted Irish businesses. In June 1856, the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party won the New Orleans city elections. They removed Irish workers from municipal payrolls, including the police department, which they had previously controlled. In 1857, Dowling worked as a barkeep. However, his time was up in New Orleans, so he headed for Houston, Texas.

 

 

 

Dowling arrived in Houston in 1857. Very much still a frontier town, opportunities abounded for the Galwegian. In October he purchased a two-storey building on Main Street where he opened a bar called The Shades on the ground floor and a billiards saloon upstairs. In November he married Elizabeth Odlum and likely started his business with financial assistance from his future father-in-law, Benjamin Digby Odlum. Born in Ireland, Odlum had fought in the Texas War of Independence.

 

The following year Dowling started to buy land in the centre of Houston, amassing substantial holdings. In July 1858 he became an American citizen. At this point he had an interest in several businesses including a steamboat and another importing liquor, and in 1860 he sold The Shades before opening an establishment called the Bar of Bacchus.

 

That same year the secession movement in the southern states gathered momentum. In September Dowling joined a predominantly Irish militia, the Davis Guard — named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis — commanded by his wife’s uncle, Captain Frederick H. Odlum. Dowling’s reasons for joining the Confederate States Army are unclear, but we must assume that he responded to the racist rhetoric around the evils of abolition to some degree at least.

 

Following the war Dowling returned to his commercial interests with vigour, establishing an oil company with John L. Fennerty, while his landholdings in Houston alone covered 22 blocks of present day downtown. But in late summer 1867, yellow fever, which had already struck Dowling’s family, came to Houston. Dick Dowling succumbed to the disease on 23 September 1867, only 30 years old.

 

 

 

 

3

 

 “Every time a Confederate monument controversy erupts, someone asks, ‘Were the monuments meant to be racist?’ The short answer is ‘yes’.”

 

— Greg Huffman, writing in Facing South.

 

 

In 1892, Houston City Council named two city streets in Dick Dowling’s honour: “Dowling” and “Tuam”.

 

In 1905 he became the subject of Houston’s first public monument. A statue of Dowling — clad in full Confederate uniform — originally stood in front of city hall. The statue now stands in Hermann Park, and was rededicated in 1997 with Dr Tony Claffey of the Old Tuam Society giving the keynote address at the ceremony.

 

In March 1953, the Dick Dowling Elementary School opened in Port Arthur, Texas, and in 1968 the Richard Dowling Middle School opened in the Hiram Clarke area of Southwest Houston — the latter had a 99% minority enrolment as of 2009.

 

In 1899 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) posthumously awarded Dowling the Southern Cross of Honour. Greg Huffman, writing in Facing South, sums up the pernicious nature of the organisation:

 

“Perhaps nothing illuminates the UDC's true nature more than its relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. Many commentators have said the UDC simply supported the Klan. That is not true. The UDC during Jim Crow venerated the Klan and elevated it to a nearly mythical status. It dealt in and preserved Klan artifacts and symbology. It even served as a sort of public relations agency for the terrorist group.”

 

 

 

There are several other monuments to Dick Dowling, but the most significant from an Irish perspective is in his homeplace of Tuam, where the local council erected a bronze memorial plaque at the town hall in 1998.

 

Following the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, the independent councillor Shaun Cunniffe proposed removing Dowling’s memorial. However, Cunniffe received no support from his fellow councillors on Tuam Municipal District Council.

 

Fianna Fáil councillor Donagh Killilea, spectacularly finding himself on the wrong side of History, told The Irish Times: “He [Cunniffe] was more or less a lone voice.

 

“We all felt that it was not a top priority for the town. There are more important things going on.

 

“It may cause offence to a small number of people who don’t live in the town. Our view is that it should be left where it is to celebrate a guy who got on well in business in the United States. He managed to survive like most people did 180 years ago by joining an army.

 

“He is not being celebrated in Tuam because he was a major in the Confederate Army.”

 

Mr Killilea either hasn’t read the text on the plaque or he is lying by claiming that the memorial only celebrates Dowling the businessman, because it explicitly celebrates his service in the Confederate States Army:

 

“Major Richard W. (Dick) Dowling C.S.A., 1837-1867 Born Knock, Tuam; Settled Houston Texas, 1857; Outstanding business and civic leader; Joined Irish Davis Guards in American Civil War; With 47 men foiled Invasion of Texas by 5000 federal troops at Sabine Pass, 8 Sept 1863, a feat of superb gunnery; formed first oil company in Texas; Died aged 30 of yellow fever. This plaque was unveiled by Col. J.B. Collerain 31 May 1998.”

 

Although the Texan city has much work to do, Tuam should look to Houston for guidance. On 11 January 2007, Houston City Council took the decision to change the name of Dowling Street to Emancipation Avenue.

 

The schools named after Dowling are also thankfully no more. In 2016 the Houston Independent School District (ISD) changed the name of Richard Dowling Middle School to Audrey H. Lawson Middle School. And in 2018 Port Arthur ISD renamed several elementary schools including the one named after Dowling in 1953 and another named after General Robert E. Lee.

 

Port Arthur ISD Board of Trustees President Debra Ambroise said: “General Lee and Lieutenant Dowling’s names will forever be in our school books; they will never be on our school buildings.”

 

Here’s the thing: The Dowling memorial in Tuam venerates a man who fought in a war to preserve slavery in the southern states.

 

In Ireland we are very quick to rightly remind our own oppressor of their wilful ignorance regarding the many, many atrocities they committed on this island, not least in Dowling’s time during the Famine. But we must also acknowledge our own part in the history of slavery, and the brilliant work by the historian Liam Hogan continues to be hugely important in this regard.

 

Pleading ignorance of this history is not an excuse.

 

 

 

 

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