Tenant Boy to Union Officer

Michael O’Sullivan is a tenant farmer’s son who can handle a pen as well as his fists.

Facing eviction, starvation, and brothers in exile to keep alive, he walks to the Prince Street Armory and sells his skin to the Union.

Thrown into the Fighting 69th New York, Michael and his friends are made into soldiers under the blackthorn stick of Sergeant Patrick Kelleher, a veteran of the British regular army who knows that bullets care nothing for Irish pride.

From the malarial mud of the Virginia Peninsula to the smoke of Antietam and the gathering storm of Gettysburg, they discover that war in the New World is not a crusade.

It is an industrial slaughterhouse, and Irish blood is cheap.