A perhaps premature monument to American freedom in Savannah park Letter from America
On the last Sunday in February, I attended Mass at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia. I was visiting that city to attend the 2025 national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. The cathedral is sumptuously decorated, and inevitably that distracted me from my prayers.
Among the many beautiful things in the cathedral that I noticed was a stained glass window depicting St Patrick preaching to King Laoghaire. There is also a large statue of Ireland’s national saint in the porch of the cathedral.
I should not have been surprised by these discoveries. Savannah is a very Irish-American city, though we in Ireland are less aware of its Irish connections than we are of the Irish influence in New York, Boston, Chicago and the other ‘Yankee’ cities of the North. We are perhaps less willing to recognise the Irish Diaspora of the ‘Deep South’ – the old Confederacy, with its shameful history of slavery.
Yet Savannah boasts the second-largest St Patrick’s Day celebration in North America – second only to New York – with a parade that winds through most of the city’s many downtown squares.
They don’t dye the Savannah River green, but the city does dye the water in its iconic Forsyth Park fountain green. The fountain is the best known landmark of the city. Another park in the city is named for Robert Emmet and has a memorial to the Irish in the form of a stone Celtic cross.
Colony
The Irish began arriving in Savannah on some of the very first ships bringing settlers to the new colony of Georgia in 1734. There was a significant influx of Irish before the Great Famine to work on building canals and railroads across Georgia in the 1830s and 1840s.
Even greater numbers of Irish came in the wake of the Famine. Research conducted by Georgia Southern University indicates that by 1860 as many as one in three white households in Savannah comprised Irish immigrants. The first official celebration of St Patrick’s Day in Savannah was in 1824.
Moss hangs in profusion from the branches of the trees, creating an almost spectral ambiance in the squares”
Savannah is a very pretty city, with many beautifully restored eighteenth-century mansions. The streets are laid out in a classic grid pattern and interspersed with a myriad of small squares with mature trees and monuments or water features.
The most common tree in Savannah is the southern live oak – an evergreen native to the south-eastern United States – and it provides the perfect habitat for Spanish moss to thrive. Moss hangs in profusion from the branches of the trees, creating an almost spectral ambiance in the squares.
Ghost Story
Savannah is, of course, the setting for a real-life ghost story. John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, published to great acclaim in 1994, is a rich, quirky portrait of the city. Its focus turns eventually to the shooting dead of Danny Hansford in Savannah in 1981 and the saga of Jim Williams’ arrest and four trials for his murder, ending in his eventual acquittal.
Williams was one of the most prominent residents of Savannah. The shooting happened in the mansion that was his home. The house had been owned previously by the Mercer family – the family of the famed American songwriter, Johnny Mercer. The annual St Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah features briefly in the book, in chapter 19.
Given its Irish heritage, Savannah was a most appropriate location for the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. It is the premier gathering of Irish Studies scholars in North America, multi-disciplinary but with an emphasis on literature and history. A scattering of Irish-based scholars also attend each year. Apart from the opportunity it gives scholars to present their work to their peers and get some informed feedback, it is a wonderful networking opportunity for scholars at all stages in their careers.
This year it also gave me an opportunity to test first-hand how Americans are reacting to the already-controversial second Trump presidency. Obviously, those attending an academic conference are not a representative sample of the US population. Nevertheless, the mood among those I met was interesting. I detected a quiet, subterranean unease about Trump. Nobody was being very vocal about their concerns, but nobody was denying genuine concern.
In one of the beautiful squares in Savannah, I found an ornamental seat just recently – indeed, prematurely – erected by the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution “celebrating 250 years of American freedom, 1776–2026”.
It seems to me that celebration is problematic in present circumstances. Will “American freedom” survive under Trump for one more year? Sadly, I think the jury is out on that.