The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

“We will! We will!” But again, more cackles from the Lincoln haters. Meagher sensed the doubt and was quick to improvise.

  “I am a Democrat.” To this, the biggest cheers yet. “For my part, I ask no Irishman to do that which I myself am not prepared to do. My heart, my arm, my life is pledged to the national cause. I care not to what party the Chief Magistrate of the Republic has belonged. I care not upon what plank or platform he may have been elected—”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “The platform disappears before the Constitution, under the oath he took on the steps of the Capitol, the day of his inauguration—”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “The party disappears in the presence of the nation . . .”

  And then, a jab at the enemy of more than 500 years. “I should remind my countrymen that the English aristocracy—”

  “Boooooo! Damn them!”

  “—which is the dominant class in England, to which the navy, the church, the army almost exclusively belong. I should remind my countrymen that this aristocracy is arrayed against the government in Washington. And that it was dead against the Revolution . . . Every blow that clears the way for the stars and stripes deals to this English aristocracy a deadly mortification and discouragement.” He could have carried on against Britain, punch lines against punching bag, all afternoon. But he closed, after speaking for an hour in the August heat, with a nudge to get people down to a recruiting office at 596 Broadway, above the Metropolitan Hotel.

  “Let us who hail from Ireland stand to the last by the stars and stripes!”

  Meagher would refine the case against the South over the following months, a traveling rally-igniter for the Union cause. He was also a fire hose, putting out flare-ups of opposition. His strongest argument for the Irish was linking the Confederacy to the hated oppressor England, as he had done in New York. The Great Hunger was never far from Gaelic memory—loved ones “driven from their own land, their huts pulled down or burned above their heads, turned out by the roadside or into the ditches to die,” as Meagher said at several stops. His case linking the English Crown and the American South was only part hyperbole. Great Britain had outlawed slavery more than a generation earlier. But few nations benefited more from slave labor than England, with its looms, mills and clothing factories running full bore to outfit and enrich the aristocracy that Meagher had chastised at Jones’s Wood. The textile industry was the dynamo of England’s Industrial Revolution—one in five Britons was connected to the trade—and almost 80 percent of the cotton for that industry came from the slaveholding South. To keep the currency of cotton from crossing the Atlantic, the American navy set up a blockade of Southern ports. England was warned not to interfere. At the same time, the South worked diplomatic channels, seeking recognition of its sovereignty by the world’s most powerful empire. All of that gave Meagher plenty to work with.

  “It is a fact that after all her denunciations and horror of slavery, England is for the South, where slavery is in full blast, and against the North, where it has long been extinct,” he thundered in Boston’s Music Hall one night in September 1861. “In spite of Shakespeare and Bacon, England is no sentimentalist, no poet, and no philosopher,” he said. It is a nation where “cotton is more precious than political principle.”

  His case was buttressed when an American warship seized two Confederate diplomats from a British vessel off Cuba in November. The men were on their way to London in search of formal recognition of the breakaway nation. The Empire was outraged by the seizure. “You may stand for this,” Prime Minister Palmerston told his cabinet. “But damned if I will!” He ordered troops to Canada, a menace on the American border, and demanded an apology from Lincoln. A red-faced England, bullying and saber-rattling, making demands of the United States on behalf of the South: Meagher could scarcely have asked for better material.

  In Boston, in a hall so packed that 2,000 people had to be turned away, in a state where the Know-Nothings had won political control a few years earlier and disbanded Irish national guard militias, Meagher hit all his high points. Almost ten years earlier, anticipating Meagher’s arrival after his escape from Tasmania, a paper in Boston had predicted great things for the exile—as leader of the Irish masses in the New World. He was in town now to build the largest army yet of Irish in America. The nativists’ day was done, he said; the immigrants’ time was at hand. “Here at this hour I proclaim in the center of that city where this insult was offered to the Irish soldier, Know-Nothingism is dead!”

  He had to pause for several minutes to let the cascade of cheers subside. He praised the Irish laborers who built the railroads, who dug the canals and constructed the reservoirs, who cleaned the streets in their adopted country, who wiped the faces of the children of the wealthy. “This is the only nation where the Irish can reconstruct themselves and become a power . . . This, too, I know: that every Irishman this side of Mason and Dixon’s line is with me. If there is one who is not, let him take the next Galway steamer and go home.” He left Boston with commitments to fill two regiments in the Irish Brigade.

  His Philadelphia pitch was so effective it alarmed Confederate spies in the city’s midst. “He made a capital speech; I feared a telling one,” an informant wrote Jefferson Davis. “I worked night and day to neutralize his speech . . . his marriage with a Yankee girl was an admirable argument against him.”

  That Yankee girl had thrown herself fully in with her husband’s cause. She not only walked with him at the front of parades, but worked New York society behind the scenes and helped design one of the brigade flags. The fear of some Irish was that the marriage of a fiery Catholic Celt and Fifth Avenue Protestant would make Meagher more like a Townsend. The opposite was happening. It was an odd thing to see his “beautiful and gifted wife beside him,” as one officer recalled, while he drilled new recruits at Fort Schuyler, at the southern tip of the Bronx. She was his shadow, and he hers, in the low-angled autumn light glinting off bayonets moving in formation, the waters of Long Island Sound in the near distance. Drums and bugles and bagpipes—a soundtrack for soldiers yet to see conflict.

  Libby became so devoted to the Irish Brigade that one of the regiments was nicknamed “Mrs. Meagher’s Own.” When not at the fort, the couple worked on persuading immigrants to sign up in the headquarters of the Irish Brigade on Broadway. Young men with bruised knuckles and thin-soled shoes wandered in curious, unknowing of military matters, heads packed with half-truths about the “nigger-lover” Abraham Lincoln. In a room that was unfurnished but for a desk, a couple of chairs and a bench, the Meaghers tag-teamed strangers—soft-sell patriotism from her, high-minded appeals to Irish nationalism from him. Before long, he had nearly 3,000 men. “The name of Meagher,” wrote one journalist who watched him in the months following Bull Run, “is now more than ever a word of talismanic power.”

  He came to know many of his soldiers well, their families, their home counties, their losses in the famine. As autumn dragged on and fresh warfare approached, Meagher made a vow of fidelity to his recruits. “I promise you I shall be with you in every scene of hardship, of privation, and of danger,” he said in a speech at Fort Schuyler. “In the camp, on the march, in the battle, I shall be with you, close to you, true to you, heart and soul with you. With you in defeat, if such be the divine decree, and with you in death, if we have all to go down together.”

  In between heaping scorn on the South and trying to fill his Irishmen with a sense of national purpose, Meagher took a break to honor a close friend. Terence MacManus, the merchant who had abandoned his prosperous wool trade to take up revolution with Young Ireland, had died in California. Meagher took the loss hard. Both had been fated for hanging, drawing and quartering, both been condemned to a lifetime in Tasmania. Both found new life in America, though MacManus had kept a low profile. Meagher was ever grateful to MacManus for showing up at his wedding to the governess in the penal colony, when his other friends shunned him. As well, he remembered what a lift he got from the d
iversion of backgammon and fishing aboard the ship that took them to their exile, and how the escape of MacManus had spurred him to plot his own dash for freedom. At a large gathering in New York, prompted by the arrival there of MacManus’s body, Meagher recalled a man of wealth, fully settled in Liverpool, who gave it all up to help his people across the Irish Sea. “Radiant, hearty, full of pluck and teeming with brain, and having a proud, dutiful, chivalrous thought for Ireland all the while.”

  During the short days of December 1861, the Irish practiced at being soldiers just outside Arlington, Virginia, at Camp California. They wore Union blue now, a jacket falling just below the waist, pants held up by suspenders and a big cape of heavy wool that served as overcoat and blanket. Their weaponry was old-century: Prussian smoothbore muskets, arms suited for the slow-marching masses of European cannon fodder. The fate of the Union had been placed in the hands of a little man with a big opinion of himself, General George B. McClellan. Well credentialed, from a wealthy family, McClellan had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, proved himself a brilliant logistician in the Mexican War and run a railroad in the private sector—all before his fortieth birthday. But he never mastered the military discipline of keeping his nonmilitary thoughts to himself. He despised abolitionists. “Help me dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him,” he wrote one high-ranking political friend. “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union.”

  McClellan did not think much of his commander in chief. Lincoln, he said, was “a well-meaning baboon,” his inferior in class, breeding and intellect. McClellan’s task was to make the Army of the Potomac, soon to be the largest fighting force on earth, into a war machine that could conquer. Everyone from the president on down played nice to McClellan. “I find myself in a new and strange position here,” he wrote his wife from the capital. “By some strange operation of magic, I seem to have become the power of the land.” After Lincoln named him general in chief of all Union forces, as well as the commander of the Army of the Potomac, it occurred to the president that he might have put too much on Mac’s shoulder. The man some were now calling Young Napoleon shrugged. “I can do it all,” he said.

  Meagher liked McClellan, something in his swagger. As much as he despised the civilians above him, McClellan connected with the soldiers below him. And Mac treated the immigrants much better than Sherman ever did. The Irish Brigade was now outfitted with an artillery unit and several regiments. Meagher was the commander in all but title. Influential friends had pressed Lincoln to name him a general. His speeches, particularly at Jones’s Wood, had impressed the president. Lincoln knew Meagher was a Democrat and had not voted for him—all the better for unity’s sake. In some cases, Meagher stated the cause for the North better than Lincoln had yet done. His appeal also crossed the Atlantic, holding out the possibility that Meagher might recruit from the country he’d been prohibited from ever seeing again—though many in Ireland scorned him for siding with the Union. Lincoln would need every man he could get. “Let Thomas Francis Meagher be appointed a brigadier general,” he told his War Department secretary. Still, there were concerns. Meagher was a fugitive, an outlaw, a man whose best weapons were words.

  While Meagher waited for Congress to grant his commission, the Irish shivered through the winter in tents ripped by wind and sagged by snow. They slept on boards and boughs a few inches above the frozen ground, with heavy, foul-smelling wool blankets for warmth. Tents had a small stove for heat, the smoke vented by a pipe about the same diameter as Lincoln’s top hat. A persistent problem was finding dry wood. The men built fires of soggy green pine logs and needles still holding frost. The smoke was so thick that tent flaps had to be opened at night, losing the heat. Outside, after much drilling and horse-trampling, the byways were a porridge of mud on warmer days. An officer walking from one row of tents to another got stuck in the Virginia mire; he sank so deep that he needed the help of a soldier to free him with a shovel. In the long lockup of winter, between incessant freezing rains and face-lashing blizzards, hundreds of horses died.

  Meagher’s appointment came through in February 1862. Among the top brass in the army he was dismissed as a “political general”—one of Lincoln’s patronage plums, designed to bring an ethnic constituency to arms. No one expected him to be much of a warrior. But for the Irish, the new command lifted the gloom of winter camp. In celebration, soldiers lit an enormous bonfire, played music and honored Meagher with a dinner that stretched to the early hours. With a sense of style and vanity that dated to his upstaging of a Shakespeare play at Stonyhurst, Meagher was radiant in the costume of his latest role. He wore a uniform Libby had designed: a sash diagonally across the chest, a gold shoulder belt, a sword by his side, drooping to just above the ground. It was no small thing to have the patriot and revolutionary, a man still wanted by the British Empire for treason—one of us!—elevated to the highest ranks of the American military. In Meagher’s time, the Irish had been starved, bundled off to the penal colony and forced to flee to dank tenements in strange cities. But here, less than a decade after the end of the Great Hunger, a few years after the Know-Nothings had tried to deprive them of standing in their new nation, the Irish were ascendant in a conflict to save a halved democracy.

  When an Irish Brigade chaplain, Reverend William Corby, a college professor on loan from Notre Dame, met Meagher in the frigid muck of winter camp, he found a man whose uniform could barely contain him—“one of the finest looking officers in the whole army,” he wrote. “General Meagher was more than an ordinary gentleman,” the priest noted. “He possessed high-toned sentiments and manners, and the bearing of a prince. He had a superior intellect, a liberal education, was a fine classical writer, and a born orator. He was very witty.” And when the brigade got instructions to move—responding to Lincoln’s General War Order No. 1, to throw the huge expanse of men against the Confederate capital—the cleric saw another side of Meagher. It was while waiting to shed blood, certain that he would lose friends on his orders, that Meagher began to drink heavily again. As a brigadier general, he carried the hopes of the Irish in America on his gold-braided shoulders; the burden of grief was his as well. Though the prankster in him was finally tamed, he would do everything to find some joy at the margins of war.

  “At times, his convivial spirit would lead him too far,” said Father Corby. “But by no means must it be concluded from this that he was a drunkard . . . Besides, he was polite and gentlemanly even while under the influence of liquor, never sinking to anything low or mean beyond indulging too freely in unguarded moments.” He drank to elevate occasions, yes. But he also drank in the hours between bloodlettings, during numberless days of killing and dying, in moments when he felt weak and full of doubt.

  15

  * * *

  Summer of Slaughter

  By late May of 1862, the Irish Brigade was close enough to Richmond to hear the groans of a city preparing for siege. The sound of church bells appealing to God and of cannons clearing their throats of shot and shell had a desperate ring. The Confederacy was in a panic. Born amid boasts of liberty, it now suspended the writ of habeas corpus and put Norfolk, Portsmouth and Richmond under martial law. The rebel government enacted the continent’s first military draft, ordering all men from eighteen to thirty-five to join the fight against the United States. On a whisper or an anonymous note, people were thrown in jail for suspicion of Union sympathy. Shops closed. Barricades encircled the city. Women and children were sent away. The rebel nation’s gold was packed for shipment. Prices spiked. Hoarding put sugar and butter out of reach for all but the well connected. The sale and production of alcohol was outlawed. To further the misery, torrents of rain fell throughout the spring, flooding streets and homes, sending rivers over their banks and washing away bridges.

  After the humiliation of Bull Run, the Union had run up a string of victories. General Ulysses S. Grant captured key forts in Tennessee, and Federal ships conquered New Orleans, the biggest city in
the South, giving them free rein of much of the Mississippi. In Virginia, the Union had amassed 105,000 troops to attack the slaveholding capital, against a much smaller force, though neither side knew precisely what the other had. Everything was in line for a knockout punch. But McClellan held back, setting up camp on the lawn of a house once owned by Martha Custis, wife of George Washington.

  In the endless wait during a spring of fickle sunshine, General Meagher sought amusement for his boys and himself. He spent his days reading the Dublin Citizen (a month out of date), reciting the poems of martyred patriots, sharing whiskey with officers and infantrymen alike—all while Confederate cannons thundered in the near distance. “Heavy guns are opening their jaws every five or so minutes, right in front of us,” he wrote his brother-in-law Sam Barlow. The Irish Brigade was “doing nothing more dangerous than cleaning muskets, mending jackets and stockings, grumbling and drilling, and doing it all to the music of artillery.”

  His men had steamed down the Potomac, through Chesapeake Bay, landing at the Virginia Peninsula. For many in the brigade, it was the longest journey they had made over water since crossing the Atlantic in coffin ships. After laying siege to Yorktown, the Union Army moved up the big finger of land, closing in on Richmond. Laborers before they put on uniforms, accustomed to using their hands as claws and their backs as levers, the Irish were put to work cutting and stripping timber for the corduroy of spongy roads heading north. Fueled by black coffee three times a day, they had worked their way up the Peninsula only to squat in the stew of wet earth within six miles of the Confederate capital. There, they waited on McClellan, as did the president.

  “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or else give up the job and come to the defense of Washington,” Lincoln told his general in chief. Scouts in Union balloons, new to war in the Americas, had gone up in the air a few days earlier, giving the army a peek at more than 50,000 rebel soldiers south and east of Richmond.