Fr. Abram Ryan, Catholic Chaplain and Poet of the Confederacy

Father Ryan as Chaplain

He Was Under Fire in Fifty-Two Battles and Forty Odd Skirmishes.

Abram Ryan was born at Norfolk, VA.When Father Ryan was asked to become a chaplain in the Confederate army says a Southern journal, there was not a Corporal’s Guard, zero men of his own faith or race in the regiment, but he accepted the post, and served until the end of the war. He was under fire in fifty-two battles and in forty odd skirmishes. The stone of which his memorial cross is made was quarried from a place where, for ten hours, he was under fire while ministering to wounded and dying Federals and Confederates. To all appeals of the soldiers and officers to go to the rear during battle he turned a deaf ear. Wheresoever the fighting was the heaviest there was Father Ryan, with his well known rubber lined and canvas covered canteen, which held two gallons of water, and his pack containing lint, ligatures and medicines.

It never made any difference to Father Ryan whether the close of the day’s battle found him within or without the Confederate lines. He cared nothing for the political aspect of the war; he simply did his work as a priest of God. He was the faithful priest the good Samaritan first, last and always. The men of both sides loved him with a fervor which is undiminished to this day where wearers of the blue and the gray meet together to tell of the sad days when everything was topsy-turvy in Virginia. It generally turned out that the forlorn hopes sent to charge impregnable positions by the Federals were Irish soldiers. Father Ryan soon found this out, and therefore he was always present at the outer line of the Confederate defense in order to administer the last rights to the dying Irish Catholic.

He saw the desperate charge of the Irish Brigade at Marye’s Heights - a feat that dwarfs the glories of the Six Hundred “into the mouth of hell.” Amid the awful cannonading of General Burnside’s artillery aimed at those heights, after the Irish Brigade had charged into the very mouths of sixty-seven cannon, Father Ryan, with long hair flying in the breeze, knelt amid the bodies of more than a thousand Irish dead and ministered to the dying. This act of saintly heroism was observed by General Burnside, who immediately ordered his troops to cease firing whilst Father Ryan stood on the battle line.

Reprinted from the Connecticut Catholic Transcript 6/22/1900. Additional information added by JC Sullivan. Originally Courtesy Phillip Gallagher, CN