The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  But weeks more passed without orders. Clothes would not dry, and the much-hated ankle-high boots the soldiers wore—brogans, from the Gaelic—seemed glued to webbed feet. The soles were flimsy; going barefoot was a better option for many. The food was wretched and moldy. Dysentery was common. You could stare at a mess plate, a tin cup, a haversack full of teeth-dulling hardtack, and it stared back without mercy or enticement. Nor could you think about what was ahead. More than a year into the war, it was clear that when armies clashed, losses were enormous. The shock of Shiloh in April, where at least 20,000 men were killed or wounded on both sides, was hard to fathom. The sight of piles of bodies, headless and legless, mangled in gore, “would have cured anybody of war,” one officer wrote. Shiloh, the surprise attack against Grant’s soldiers on the Tennessee River, had produced a deadly marker: more people fell in that one battle than in all the wars in American history up to that point.

  Time was spent cleaning smoothbores, the muskets that had been used by European armies since the seventeenth century. The guns were heavy—nine pounds without bayonet—hard to operate and inaccurate. When fired, a lead ball banged around the barrel and exited in the general direction of a target, an effective range of eighty yards, if lucky. After repeated action, the barrel heated up and could not be reloaded without risking explosion in the face of the shooter. Meagher preferred a shorter barrel, packed with buck and ball—.30-caliber pellets and a .69-caliber lead ball, which would spray out like the blast of a shotgun. This, and fixed bayonets. He left no doubt of the implication: the brigade intended to fight up close, in the faces of the enemy.

  As a nod to the Irish love of horse racing, he decided to stage a steeplechase at Tyler’s farm, their Virginia encampment. At the same time, he organized matches of Gaelic football, the ancient game once outlawed by the Penal Laws. The soldiers cut an oval in the wet grass and picked jockeys to ride their fastest horses. Uniforms were made of tablecloths. Bets were placed. Purses offered. Elemental grandstands were constructed. Top brass—Generals Israel B. Richardson and William French among them—arrived and took their seats. Meagher as maestro, with toasts and stories, egging on rivalries, was in high spirits. He loved a laugh; he was “overflowing with wit and humor of the raciest kind,” one officer wrote.

  If only Michael Corcoran could share the afternoon. Meagher’s fellow exile was wasting away in a Confederate prison, ill with typhoid fever. One day a fire had broken out, filling the jail compound with smoke. Corcoran, on his back, ordered an escape—bedding tied together as rope to flee. Guards caught the brigade prisoners just as they landed on the ground.

  Though he missed Corcoran, Meagher was boosted by the presence of another friend and veteran of Young Ireland’s fruitless struggle, John J. Kavanagh. That he had lived to fight again, or lived at all, was a small miracle, for Kavanagh had been the one shot in the thigh during the sad Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch of 1848. He bled profusely in the Tipperary garden; Smith O’Brien feared he would die then and there at the age of twenty. But here he was, an officer in the Army of the Potomac by way of France and New York, watching Gaelic football with a fellow exile.

  To music from the brigade’s pipe and drum corps, the races got under way. The steeplechase was just that—fastest horse around a track blocked by hurdles, ditches and a water hazard. Horses that did not clear the obstructions fell and tripped other riders. The brigade chaplain from Notre Dame had never seen such a spectacle. “It was the invention of wild Irishmen,” Father Corby observed, “who did not know what fear is.” A race of mules ridden by drummer boys followed, winner getting $30. In another part of the grounds, thespian soldiers rehearsed lines for a play, then distributed hastily scrawled fliers for the evening’s entertainment. Sport and theater—the Irish way of war.

  In a moment’s time, the merriment came to a halt. From leaden skies, a series of booms rattled the grandstands. This was close. In a bold move, the Confederacy had decided to rip a tear in the Union Army, which was on either side of Chickahominy River. Flowing eighty-seven miles from north of Richmond to the James River, the Chickahominy was usually little more than a creek without a plan. But the spring rains had engorged the river into a python of brown water. In parts, it was a mile wide. The water divided McClellan’s men—Meagher in a large group on the north side of the river, and about 34,000 soldiers on the other side. The rebels attacked the southern wing on that Saturday, May 31. Their plan was to save Richmond by destroying the smaller half of McClellan’s army.

  Thirty minutes after the last Chickahominy steeple race, Meagher had his men marching toward the river, to cross and reinforce the battered Union flank. They took no blankets, tents or overcoats. “It was a cold and gloomy afternoon,” he wrote. “The tremendous rain of the previous night had flooded the low grounds on both sides of the river to such a volume that only one bridge was found available for passage of the troops.” Stragglers from the day’s battle passed through them with grim news of bodies strewn just ahead. That one bridge meant to be the conveyance to the other side was tattered and sagging. While attempting to cross, men and mounts plunged into the river. Fording was the only reliable way. But then, horses were sucked into the muck, and the advance came to a dead halt. Soldiers who tried to move them sank up to their bellies. All the pushing and pulling could not get the big guns across the river. The artillery, and men to guard it, would have to stay on one side of the Chickahominy. Most of Meagher’s men waded through the floodplain, snakes all around them, toward the sound of the guns. Just before midnight, in shin-deep mud littered with the dead and the near dead, Meagher’s men came to a halt. The stench was awful, an open graveyard.

  “Not a star was visible,” Meagher wrote. “One vast cloud filled the sky, producing so dense a darkness you would have thought it was through a coal-pit in the bowels of the earth that we were marching. Here and there, you could catch the yellow glimmering—or at times the broad and sudden flashes—of the lanterns of the surgeons as they groped and stumbled over the field in search of the wounded. The saddest moans were heard on every side. A dull, heavy woeful murmur deepened the tramp of the regiments passing on through the darkness, over the slain and dying.”

  It was a good thing that the sky was so opaque, Meagher wrote. The shock of going from Gaelic games to a slurry of death was hard enough without having to see it in all its detail. They would try to get a few hours’ sleep before the baptismal battle of the Irish unit. “The horrors of the battlefield were buried in the depths of that impenetrable night. The wearied men of the Brigade lay down to rest upon the drenched and torn ground . . . hardly conscious of the ghastly companions who slept among them, bathed in blood.”

  They rose at 4 a.m. on Sunday, June 1. The dawn broke sunless and gravel gray. A putrid smell. Everything wet. Soggy biscuits for breakfast. No coffee. “We had been sleeping with the dead,” Father Corby wrote. “We saw the ghastly appearance of their bodies which had been, as it were, our bedfellows.” What had been a mud clump in front of Meagher as he rested during the night now was revealed to be a Confederate soldier from a Georgia brigade. His long hair, matted and dirt-encased, covered most of a face. White fingers clutched a broken musket. Meagher noticed a large splotch on the stiff’s uniform. Next to him was the body of a horse, eyes gouged, cemented in a clot of clayish blood. The last of the darkness gave way to more graphic gore. Blankets in wet bundles wrapped around dead men with their eyes still open. Mangled muskets. Body parts and horse heads. The ground itself moved—not an illusion. Meagher came upon another Confederate, this one alive and dazed, leaning against a tree stump, his insides ripped, bleeding. In talking to him, Meagher learned two things: the rebel was from South Carolina, and he was an Irishman.

  A soldier climbed a tree and shouted from a branch: he could see the church spires of Richmond. They were four miles from the capital of the Confederacy. Meagher’s query of the dying man was interrupted by a burst of musket fire from the woods just to one side. Another round
came from the opposite direction. The battle that had begun the day before on the outskirts of Richmond, between the Fair Oaks train station and the hamlet of Seven Pines, was reengaged.

  “To their utter astonishment the enemy found us within pistol-range of them,” Meagher wrote. “Nor were we less astonished at finding them, without any intimation or warning whatever, so close at hand.” Before the Irish Brigade could assemble, a Union regiment went into the woods on the attack. Not long afterward, they scampered back, minus half the force. Another Federal unit charged the woods. Meagher could hear them, but not see them. In the midst of the back-and-forth attacks, General Edwin V. Sumner rode up to Meagher. Hatless and resolute, with an eagle’s head of silver hair and a beard of the same tint, Bull Sumner at sixty-five was the oldest field commander of any Union Army corps. He’d fought against the Black Hawks and Mexicans, and still retained a lust for organized bloodletting. To make his voice heard in advance of an admonition, he removed his false teeth. His words for Meagher were short: he must not fail.

  “I want to see how Irishmen fight,” Sumner told him. “When you run, I’ll run.”

  Meagher went up and down his line, cajoling, backslapping, reassuring, the orator’s voice trimmed for war. They entered the fray on his command and quickly came under “a hurricane of bullets,” in Meagher’s words. There was nothing to do but scream louder and charge. With a Gaelic cry, the Irishmen ran toward incoming fire, unloading rounds into enemy bodies. Through mud and mire, through underbrush and downed timber, Meagher’s men pressed against the rebels. “The Irish Brigade met them with fixed bayonets and a sweeping fire, hurling their lines before them,” wrote Captain David P. Conyngham, who became an informal historian of the New York 69th. They never moved backward. The wounded in gray were not picked up along the way—a sign that Confederate will had been broken. Other regiments massed in the woods as well, flushing out the enemy. A small cabin was occupied by Union fighters, and served as a cover. Balls clanked off the roof and walls, the sound of a lethal hailstorm. Meagher saw the Notre Dame priest, with his black clerical garb and Mennonite beard, running astride the Irishmen, as much a part of the battle as the soldiers. The goal was a rail line near the river, leading directly to Richmond. By early afternoon, the Union owned the railroad. Other regiments reported a stalemate, but not the Irish.

  General Meagher leading the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Fair Oaks, June 1, 1862. This Currier and Ives print helped make the brigade famous when the Union was starved for heroes and positive war news.

  COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-USZC4-1619

  “We’ve got them on the run,” a sergeant from one of the New York regiments said. “Keep them running.”

  Now the Irish dashed past the sloughed-off weapons of the enemy, their wet coats and bedrolls. A soldier spotted a Confederate body, head and torso planted in mud, legs and feet sticking straight up, and made a mental note to return for the shoes of the corpse. The rebels ran as the Union men had run at Manassas. “Thousands of muskets were flung away—cartridge boxes, blankets, everything that ever so slightly checked or slacked the rabidity of that wild flight,” Meagher wrote. When the firing ceased, the Union Army was intact. About 35,000 soldiers of the South fell back to defend Richmond behind entrenchments of timber and earth.

  The Battle of Fair Oaks cost the Confederates 6,134 dead and wounded to the Union’s 5,031. More than that—it failed to break the Northern army in two, and left it at the doorstep of the rebel capital. Now was the time to push. The crux of the war was here. “The city of Richmond was ours,” Meagher wrote. McClellan hinted at what was ahead. “Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac,” he said in an address issued a few days after the battle. “You are now face to face with the rebels, who are held at bay in front of their capital. The final and decisive battle is at hand.” But Mac was full of doubt. Content to have his army united, to have repelled the largest charge of the rebels in the eastern theater of the war, McClellan decided to go no farther, for now.

  In Meagher’s official report, he recorded the loss of two officers and thirty-nine soldiers. McClellan personally complimented Meagher for how the Irish had performed in battle and asked him about the peculiar battle cry of his men. In the storm of musket fire, the soldiers of the brigade did not run. Meagher passed the compliment down to his mud-covered troops from the slums of eastern cities: the highest-ranking general in the Union Army had proclaimed that the immigrants could fight. They already knew that.

  Privately, McClellan was seething. Though he outnumbered the enemy by almost two to one, he feared that they had thousands more in reserve. And what he had witnessed, a two-day battle taking more than 11,000 men, had weakened the Young Napoleon’s appetite for carnage. “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded!” McClellan wrote his wife. “Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” On the other side, one casualty stood out: General Joseph E. Johnston, who led the Southern assault. He was hit twice, fell from his horse and was carried back to Richmond. The Confederate military would need new leadership. A day after the battle, as bone-rattled rebels stumbled back behind the barricades of Richmond, as the papers feared the fall of a nation barely a year into its existence, President Davis named a new man to guide the South. He appointed Robert E. Lee, a gray-bearded gentleman of fifty-five, as commander of the renamed Army of Northern Virginia. And, unlike McClellan, Lee preferred to attack.

  For all of the first week of June they waited. For all of the second week of June they waited. For all of the third week of June they waited. The Irish were joined by a regiment of New England Yankees, the 29th Massachusetts, on orders. The soldiers had the Union blue in common, but little else. The Micks were clannish, the Bay Staters complained, a tribe unto themselves; it was hard to understand what the hell they were saying. In battle, they shouted out a name unknown to most American soldiers—“To Fontenoy”—commemorating the French defeat of the English in 1745, with considerable help of Erin’s armed exiles. Fontenoy? The brigade was “a class of Irish exquisites,” one reporter wrote of the culture clash, “good for a fight, card party or a hurdle jumping, but extremely too Quixotic for the sober requirement of Yankee warfare.” As a welcoming gesture, Meagher gave the 29th a green flag; it was furled and packed away by an officer who was indignant at having to take orders from an Irish revolutionary. To break the tedium of June, the Irish had picket duty, guarding the rear outside Richmond, rounding up the occasional straggler and deserter. They could set their watches to the chimes of the capital city’s clocks, could overhear conversations of the Southerners—drawled out bits of demoralized talk. At times, they were fired upon and shelled. The pinpricks were annoying and fed the desire for a full invasion. Let’s take Richmond, the men told each other—get it over with. What did McClellan want? “He never seizes his opportunities,” Lincoln complained to his advisers. “That’s where the trouble is.”

  The rains slackened. Roads hardened in the summer sun. The fighting stopped, but the dying continued. On a quiet day, Meagher visited the field hospital, a laboratory of gore on the medical frontier. It was a swamp of moaning and thirsty men crying for relief from the saline-slop of blood in the mouth. He was overwhelmed by the damage that industrial-age warfare could inflict on a body. Better to die quick than to fester in agony. Severed legs, feet and arms piled up in corners, to be carted away in wheelbarrows and then fed to pigs. Men lost their eyes, their teeth, their noses, had their cheeks hollowed, their collarbones shattered, their fingers clipped off, their skulls cracked by fast-flying lead balls and shell fragments. Infection was the biggest killer. Wounds turned red in triage, white with pus, attracted maggots. Doctors with blood up to their elbows tried to carve out balls from muscles, a last measure before administering a dose of chloroform and taking to the saw.

  And now this: in the heat of the first week of summer at their camp near the mush of the Chickahominy, thousands of soldiers came do
wn with malaria. The shaking and chills, the spiked temperatures and profuse sweating, the vomiting, the intense headaches—it was as if the fever of the famine had followed the Irish to Virginia. The disease took hundreds of men. Funerals happened almost hourly, bodies buried to a band’s mournful tune, guns emptied and reversed, placed over the graves. The commanders did everything in their power to keep the premises clean, but sick horses dropped and swelled at such a rate that the brigade could not keep up. At one point, the men burned the dead animals—more than 400—in a massive fire. To quell the malaria, the surgeon general of the army ordered each soldier to take a dose of quinine mixed with a small amount of whiskey every morning.

  On June 25, the great battle that all had anticipated got under way. Except, a surprise: it was not McClellan moving to conquer Richmond, but the rebels on the offensive. Robert E. Lee would now try to drive the Northerners from the Virginia Peninsula, to destroy them with the largest Confederate attack of the year-old war. Lee had mapped a campaign to pummel troops north of the river, using Stonewall Jackson, who had come down from the Shenandoah, as his hammer, assisted by other divisions. Lee sent more than 50,000 men against a much smaller force that had been lazing through the month of June. Rising from the early summer stupor, General Fitz John Porter’s 35,000 soldiers tried to block the gray-shirted masses. Staggered, they fell back to Gaines’s Mill, took a position on a rise and threw together a wall of rocks and wood, allowing them to fight from the protected high ground. On June 27, Stonewall Jackson poured it on, confident as always that God was on the side of the slaveholders. “This affair must hang in suspense no more,” said Jackson. “Sweep the field with the bayonet!” Brigades from Georgia, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and a reckless unit out of Louisiana, the Tiger Rifles, rushed to overwhelm the Union men. Their pace forward was brisk, fifty, forty, twenty yards from Porter’s line, closing fast. Now the rebels broke through, crushing skulls and piercing chests. Porter’s men fell back, regrouping into another position. Not all stayed in place; hundreds of men scooted down the other side of the hill toward the Chickahominy, their backs to the enemy.