Tales of the fictional Scarlett O'Hara family to the contrary, there were never many Irish slaveowners.

The Scotch-Irish in the South (early immigants from Ulster) were mostly indentured servants who labored like slaves on the lowland planations unti they were able to head for the hills and become frontiersmen. These people didn't own slaves; they did all their work for themselves. A piddling small number may have risen to plantation-owner status, but they would have been the exception to the general rule.

The Gaelic (Catholic) Irish who came later were also poor folks, peasant farmers who became unskilled laborers upon arrival in the southern port cities, and they only began to arrive within a decade or two before the Civil War ~ hardly enough time for upward mobility.

I think Lighter is right on the money about all that cheering while gunning down the enemy. As a committed pacifist, I may be a bit jaundiced in my view, but I'm very skeptical whenever I read anything that romanticizes slaughter in such a manner. Like the man says, it was an era notable for highly idealized writing, and the authors are rarely men who were completely at risk in the front lines of a suicidal mission. They were officers, who of course were at some degree of risk, but not nearly so grave a risk as the men they ordered into battle.

Writings like Pickett's are of course part of the historical record ~ they were actually written at the time, and by actual witnesses to the events ~ but that doesn't mean that they do not reflect the prejudices and the wishful thinking of the writers who left them behind for us.