The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  In every town, neutrality was out of fashion. Meagher was with Irish friends in New York, who pressed him for guidance.

  “What do you think of affairs now?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” said Meagher. “I never saw such a change in public opinion. I feel like one carried away by a torrent.” Would Irish America’s best-known voice join the volunteers to defend the capital? Where, exactly, was his heart? Hadn’t he expressed sympathy for the South?

  “Damn them!” he snapped. “Damn them that didn’t let that flag alone!”

  “If you feel that way, perhaps you might think of coming with us,” a member of New York’s 69th suggested.

  “I’ll think of it.”

  He didn’t think for long. When Fort Sumter was shelled, the head of the 69th New York State Militia, Michael Corcoran, was still facing court-martial for turning his back on the British royal heir. The charge of disloyalty was immediately dropped, and Corcoran sprang into action, offering the services of his Irish-born troops to the president. He said he would provide 1,000 men; 5,000 applied. Meagher joined his friend from the 1848 rebellion. The choice had been easy, with his wife Elizabeth concurring. And it should be easy for the Irish, Meagher said. The country that “had given us asylum and an honorable career” risked falling apart, he told the doubters among his former countrymen. “It is the duty of every freedom-loving citizen to prevent such a calamity at all hazards. Above all it is the duty of us Irish citizens who aspire to establish a similar form of government in our native land.”

  Jumping into the fray, he pumped up crowds with daily speeches, cajoled the comfortable among his influential friends, roused immigrants in the tenements. His rallying cry was consistent: rarely a mention of slavery or Lincoln, but a fight for America coupled with the promise of an eventual fight for Ireland, using a battle-seasoned force to sail across the Atlantic. Meagher decided to lead his own charge, establishing a unit of Irish Zouaves, named after the fast-striking elite of European soldiers, with their flowing pantaloons, billowy tops and tasseled fezzes. He took out an ad in the Tribune, in huge type:

  YOUNG IRISHMEN TO ARMS!

  TO ARMS YOUNG IRISHMEN!

  IRISH ZOUAVES

  One hundred young Irishmen—healthy, intelligent and active—

  Wanted at once to form a Company under command of

  THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER

  Many in New York sneered at them. The Irish were criminals, drunks and quarrelsome—they couldn’t organize a parade without fisticuffs, let alone become soldiers in a modern army. But in barely a day’s time, Meagher was overwhelmed by volunteers. He was given the title of captain in the state militia, serving under Corcoran in the 69th. For this, the South could not forgive him, for many Confederates had hoped Meagher would join Mitchel in the rebel cause. “Never again shall the name Thomas Francis Meagher be united with any of our Southern institutions,” wrote one Virginia paper. If anything, such slights only hastened the transition Meagher had to make in order to kill Virginians.

  At age thirty-seven, Meagher was finally given the tools to do what the younger man in Ireland never got a chance to do. He drilled his men in Hibernian Hall, in city parks, on the streets. What did they know of fighting a war? Their muskets were musty and primitive, backfiring hand-me-downs, little better than the weapons used by farmers fighting the British in the American Revolution. They knew nothing of tactics, artillery logistics, treating the wounded. They could not march in a straight line, follow orders without dissent or sarcasm. They sang. They drank. They cursed. What carried them to battle was the zest to fight, the zest to belong to a country that had often mistreated them, the wish to prove their worth. A Whitman poem captured the mood:

  How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of

  peace with indifferent hand;

  How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and

  fife were heard in their stead.

  How you led to the war . . .

  Barely a month after the assault on Fort Sumter, Meagher paraded his Zouaves through lower Manhattan, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street, past Irish neighborhoods full of women waving flags from tenement windows, past the headquarters of the 69th on Prince Street. Meagher was at the front, his wife at his side, each on a horse. He scoffed at those who said a woman did not belong at the head of an army going off to war. The spring air was thick with pride and promise, with noble purpose and muscular words. No boy had yet had his shoulder blown open by a lead ball, no New Yorker had taken a bayonet to the face, no mother of seven had been left without a husband or a pension. Bagpipe music bounced along with Meagher’s jaunty Zouaves. Priests blessed them. Children cheered them. They were the living link to the Wild Geese of the past, those Irish soldiers without a country fighting in Europe’s conflicts, with a fierce reputation to uphold. The men left for Washington on a current of confidence.

  In the first days after Lincoln’s call to arms, the capital was empty and haunted. Neighbors sized up neighbors with suspicion. Sandbags were thrown in front of marble buildings. Food was hoarded. A handful of civilian volunteers patrolled outside the gates of the Executive Mansion. Across the river, the fires of Confederate camps burned at night. When would they strike? Meagher’s Irishmen walked past the nearly abandoned Willard Hotel, the forsaken White House, and out to Georgetown College, where the 69th was bivouacked. For several weeks, instructors from West Point attempted to make soldiers of the street cleaners, bricklayers and pig farmers from Ireland by way of New York City. They tried to teach them how to load a muzzle and shoot, how to charge and when to fall back. To detractors, these men were motley, laughable, immigrant garbage—“gathered from the sewers of the cities, the degraded, beastly outsourcing of all the quarters of the world,” as the Raleigh Banner wrote. On May 23, the Northern volunteers crossed the Potomac to the rebel state of Virginia and reclaimed Arlington Heights for the nation. They assembled a large, loud headquarters in the mud from May rains and named it for their commander: Camp Corcoran.

  The Confederacy had just moved its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia—a hundred miles from the White House. The city built along the upper braids of the James River was in full flower, with a leafy late spring on the high ground above water, while in the lowland, the massive Tredegar Iron Works geared up to produce the machines of war. Richmond was flooded with young men in mismatched uniforms, carrying their hunting rifles and pistols, their Bowie knives and the occasional sword of a distant relative. Among those soon to enlist in the militia would be another son of Young Ireland icon John Mitchel—James, in the 1st Virginia Infantry Company. Like his brother at Fort Sumter, he would kill for the slaveholding nation, in open treason of his adopted country. No Mitchel owned another man. What was there to die for? Home and hearth, of course, always a motivation. But something more was needed. Politicians urged poor whites to fight against equality; slavery would preserve their perch one rung from the bottom. “The only true aristocracy,” said one Southern governor, is “the race of white men.”

  At Fort Corcoran, the Union Irish were put under the larger command of General Irvin McDowell, who had an army of 35,000 men and a diminishing allowance of time to use them. The ninety days of duty that these citizen soldiers had agreed to in the upheaval of April would soon be up. The cry from all quarters—in Gaelic, in Brooklyn-ese, in the flatly drawn vowels of volunteers from the prairie states—was the same: “On to Richmond!” They would move first to Manassas Junction, about thirty-two miles away, and cut off key rail connections to the rebel capital. From there, the path would be clear all the way to the commode of Jefferson Davis. Quick and decisive. Joining McDowell was his old friend from West Point, William Tecumseh Sherman—bristle-bearded, red-haired, with no patience for Irish jollying. A tough man to like, Sherman wore a scowl and rarely made eye contact with the men from New York. He’d been in Louisiana, superintendent at the state military academy, when Southern states started to quit on the
Union. As a grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, it tore him up. “You people in the South don’t know what you’re doing,” he told a Virginia friend. “This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.”

  Meagher knew something of war, but only of the chase—he of the hunted in 1848. But as he read poetry inside his tent at Fort Corcoran, as he paced the heights over the Potomac in the days lengthening up to the summer solstice, he felt ever more strongly that he was at the dawn of a two-part epic: one to save the democratic experiment of the United States, the other to liberate Ireland. This was what his life had led up to, though it had taken a curious route to get there. It was laughable to think that gaunt-faced men wallowing in the dirt of their first war could force the British Empire to give Ireland its independence. But Meagher had no such doubts. “If only one in ten of us come back when this war is over,” he said, “the military experience gained by that one will be of more service in a fight for Ireland’s freedom than would that of the entire ten as they are now.” So, dual loyalties after all—and no hiding it now.

  Sherman treated Meagher’s men like farm animals, with a stench to go with them. They disgusted him, these excitable Micks, unfit for a grand army. Blacks were inferior to all whites, Sherman believed, but the Irish were just a notch above them. Look at their silly uniforms, a mishmash of blue and gray, and Meagher with his braided gold to go with his upgrade to a major. What buffoonery. The Irish played their fiddles at night, told drawn-out stories punctuated by laughter and prayed to a Roman Catholic God. At one point, a priest assigned to the 69th blessed a new cannon that was rolled into place. A cannon! And all the solemnity and ritual—the Irish could transform a flag-raising at Camp Corcoran into a High Mass. “No cohesion, no real discipline, no respect for authority,” Sherman wrote.

  Meagher expected the Irish to fight, he pronounced from a stump, “until the banner of the entire Union has been replaced on every fort and arsenal from which it has been improperly, illegally and nefariously torn down.” To this, Sherman sniffed. Words were nothing, a great speaker of words even less. Sherman himself was talky in a twitchy way, without having much to say. Adding to his disgust toward the soldiers from the ratholes of New York, he heard many complaints about the ninety-day enlistment period’s expiration date; some of these volunteers were ready to go home before they’d fired a shot, duty done. Meagher defended his immigrant troops, to little avail. He soon learned that the military was not a democracy. A man who’d never served a superior in any army, or for any government, was to do as he was told, without debate. No surprise, then, that Meagher developed a distinct distaste for his commander. William Tecumseh Sherman, he told a reporter, was “a rude and envenomed martinet.”

  Orders to move came on July 16, 1861. The men prepared to march and fight with three days of food and sixty rounds of ammunition. They broke camp in high spirits and with “an Irish cheer,” in Meagher’s words. They didn’t get under way until noon, in the heat, and then sweating through their irregular uniforms, feet blistering in ill-fitting shoes, fifty pounds on their backs. Many of the soldiers strayed, falling away to pick berries or sit under shade trees for a spell. “For all my personal efforts, I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries or anything on the way they fancied,” wrote Sherman. Meagher rode at the front of the 69th with his friend from 1848, Colonel Corcoran. One was tall, taciturn, long-faced, the other shorter, mustachioed, given to random observations framed in perfectly formed sentences. Often they laughed, happy to be going into battle. But more than that, they were happy to be together in a fight of real consequence. Arriving in a small village, Meagher was distracted by a two-story wood home, roses blooming in the front, a white picket fence all around. His mind drifted to domestic peace, sitting in a garden with a book and his wife with the dimpled smile.

  The next day they ran into their first rebels, a scattering near Fairfax. These Confederates retreated before a shot could be fired. But the Irish lost a soldier to an accident, a loaded musket discharging when it fell from a wagon. The wounded man bled and cried in pain. The Irish commanders pleaded with Sherman to let them take him back to Washington for treatment. Sherman insisted the man with the open wound stay with his unit, dragged along in a rear ambulance.

  On July 18, with the summer sun bearing down, the army arrived at Centreville, newly abandoned by the rebels. The town was a few miles from Bull Run, a frisky stream that skirted from amber-colored hills outside Manassas. Lincoln wanted a quick knockout: take the rail junction, then topple the capital. The big green flag of the 69th—a sunburst over a harp and a stirring Gaelic admonition, “They shall not retreat from the clash of spears,” specially designed in New York—was planted in a field where the Irish bedded down after a meal of tea and chalky biscuits. Meagher poked his head in and out of tents, studied maps, went over details with Corcoran, checking on the badly wounded man who’d been hauled along with them.

  Sunday, July 21, was the warmest day yet—hot and still, mosquitoes swarming, black flies biting. The clank of the Confederate Army, rebel horses and rebel soldiers, carried over the dead air of Virginia. From Washington came congressmen with field glasses and women carrying picnic baskets stuffed with bread and wine, dressed in Sunday clothes. Again the call: “On to Richmond!” The mood was festive among the spectators settled on blankets with a view—war would be good entertainment, and a shame to miss.

  The latest intelligence had it that the South had assembled 22,000 troops to defend its rail junction, led by General Beauregard, the man who had shelled the hungry men at Fort Sumter and launched the war. These Southerners were farm boys and fence menders, untrained, but confident of translating their rural skills into the execution of human beings. The other side would be no match. “You are green, it is true,” Lincoln had told General McDowell, but equal to the enemy because “you are all green alike.” Just hours before they would be ordered into organized butchery, Meagher and Corcoran’s Irish were unsure of their role in the large assault of Union soldiers. Would they be at the front? Or in the rear? As a spear, or reserves? Could they kill on close contact, looking into the eyes of men who may have survived the Great Hunger like them, who came across the Atlantic to live, not to die at the hands of a fellow exile? At Sherman’s call, speculation ended. It was time to move, time for volunteers to become warriors.

  13

  * * *

  First Blood

  They broke for battle at 2:30 a.m., fumbling for something to eat, for muskets and powder, buck and ball. Sleep, if it came, had been shallow and turbulent. In the dark, they marched with stiff limbs toward Bull Run, where two armies the size of cities were massing to clash. At 5:30, cannons cracked open a day unlike any other in the short history of the republic. In the largest assemblage of soldiers yet on the North American continent, men of common language and heritage would try to slaughter each other until one side gave way. The Union army split, with a diversion crossing a bridge over the stream—a feint—and the bulk going north, fording Bull Run and then coming at the rebels from behind. The Irishmen under Colonel Sherman were held back, late to the fight. They heard weak screams of a charge, and louder screams of agony, and always the clap of cannonade in the near distance. For almost an hour, they sat by the creek, hearts skipping, sweat beading off their brows, listening to war—“shot and shell, and every sort of hellish missile swept and tore, whizzed and jarred, smashed and plunged through the trees all about,” Meagher recalled. At midmorning, they splashed through the stream single-file and started to climb a low rise. “Everyone prepared for death,” said Meagher.

  Through white smoke, the men of the 69th crept close enough to see the fighting in flashes—a mashed face here, a broken gun there, an arm without a hand. It looked like a rebel retreat, scrawny men running uphill. In the heat of first combat, an Irish commander, Colonel James Haggerty, made his own charge without orders. He was a carpenter from County Donegal, Famine Irish like mo
st of his men. Haggerty ran after retreating enemy soldiers, getting close enough to smell them. A rebel turned, aimed his musket at Haggerty and fired. The officer fell from his horse, a ball ripping open a gash in his chest. One minute he had been Meagher’s chatty mate—“a constant play of humor and goodness.” Now Haggerty was a quivering body on the field above Bull Run, his insides spilled onto his shirt. He died where he fell. A fellow Irishman from a Louisiana unit had killed him.

  The Confederates regrouped above the stream, around a farmhouse owned by a widow, Judith Henry. The Union boys could sense it: the rebels were on the run and clustered for the kill. But one Southern brigade did not move, its forces commanded by General Thomas J. Jackson. He stood in the face of artillery and musket fire, said a rebel officer, “like a stone wall”—a name that Stonewall Jackson would carry from that point on. The fighting stalled at midday, allowing time for the South to move cannons into place around the widow’s house. The lull did not last. The Northerners hammered the Henry compound, killing the widow as she cowered in an upstairs bedroom. The Confederates sent an equal amount of iron and shot back down the slope. To poke a head up and pause for a gulp of summer air was perilous.