The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  So there it was from on high, without filter or equivocation: the Irish would not fight to liberate enslaved blacks. God himself may well have spoken. Line drawn. In his defiance, the archbishop had the support of the Irish American press. What Meagher did not know as he bounded to the stage on the night of July 25, what nobody in the armory could know, was that three days earlier Lincoln had drafted a proclamation that would eventually free four million people from their chains—at least on paper. The president showed an early version of an emancipation decree to his cabinet. Most of his aides were stirred. But a few cautious voices emerged, parsing the politics of something so consequential. Better to wait for a Union triumph on the battlefield, a knockout to cheer the North, and then let the slavery-freeing edict ride on the breeze of victory. On the other hand, what of England? This was the great diplomatic balancing act, its outcome equal in impact to any loss on a battlefield. Lincoln had returned those two Confederate diplomats seized from a British ship. “One war at a time,” he said. But Britain appeared closer to recognizing the South than ever before. If Lincoln broke the manacles that held millions to their masters in the American South, the war would be—explicitly—about a great moral cause. This would force the issue. Would England recognize the largest, perhaps the last, of the Western nations to defend slavery? Surely not. For now, the president set aside his draft.

  General Meagher in 1863. Hardened by war and facing criticism from fellow Irish, he continued to rally his countrymen to the Union cause despite suffering heavy losses.

  COURTESY OF THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CA

  On stage, Meagher sweated through his dress blues. He had dreadful news to impart, the latest casualties. Everyone in the room knew someone on the list. Solemnity was not Meagher’s strong suit, but he proceeded. The regiments of the Irish Brigade were decimated, he explained, some of them barely functioning. He needed 2,000 men to sign on for three years. To this, no applause, only a few insults from hecklers.

  “You’re a fool!”

  He unfolded a letter from Captain Donovan of the 69th, a prisoner in Richmond, later exchanged, now recovering in a New York hospital. Lost one eye, he did. Told his captors that even with half his vision, he would fight them. And if he lost that other eye, he would fight blind. With this, Meagher got a laugh and big cheers. Damn right—don’t mess with a blind Irishman. Donovan said that the rebels who interrogated him in Richmond had little fear of Union soldiers—except for the Irish. His captors told him if they knew of the brigade’s precise whereabouts during the Peninsula campaign, “they would have sent a whole division to take it and General Meagher prisoners, and hang the exiled traitor from the highest tree in Richmond.” Another government wanted to hang Thomas Francis Meagher. Imagine that.

  The story produced a hearty rumble of claps. The Irish loved being told they were fearless bastards, crazy and unpredictable. And Meagher loved being called reckless, half mad, a life of improbable invulnerability riding along on a white horse—let ’em talk down south. After the applause subsided, Meagher returned to the need for soldiers. He was interrupted by a shout from the floor.

  “Take the black Republicans!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why don’t you make the black Republicans go?”

  Red-faced, Meagher turned on the heckler who had used the derisive term for a Lincoln supporter. “Any man who makes a remark like that I denounce as a poltroon and coward.”

  The dissident was escorted out. Playing again to Gaelic pride, Meagher told a pair of anecdotes about his brigade’s banner: General Sumner, almost begging, when he asked, “Where are my green flags?” And the enemy: they knew about the North’s Irish warriors throughout the slave states. He quoted a Mississippi regimental leader, fear on his face when Meagher’s men charged: “Here’s that damned green flag again.” That line nearly brought down the armory. Even the cops laughed.

  But he still had to fill the empty ranks in Lincoln’s army. Meagher reached for his climax. “Come, my countrymen, fling yourselves with a generous passion into the armed lines . . . Come, my countrymen, one more effort, magnanimous and chivalrous, for a republic which to hundreds of thousands of you has been a shelter, a home . . . Come, my countrymen, follow me to the James River.”

  In the end, the orator’s words were not enough. By the close of Meagher’s leave, only 250 new men had signed on for duty. “Filling up the exhausted ranks of the Irish Brigade,” Meagher wrote in a blunt letter to President Lincoln on the last day of July, was, “to tell the truth, an uphill work.” To reconstitute itself, Meagher’s unit would need new soldiers from other parts of the North.

  August delivered a fresh blow: the death of Temple Emmet from typhoid fever. Meagher was beside himself at the loss of a young man who had shadowed his every move in the Peninsula, his aide-de-camp. Having lobbied General McClellan to bring Emmet home, having taken personal responsibility for the lad, he thought he had saved him from the plagues of war. “I am grieved to the heart to hear of this,” Meagher wrote a friend. “For I esteemed, trusted and loved him as a favorite brother.” He said nothing of the cause for which Emmet had given his life.

  In cornfields holding mid-September’s tawny light, in orchards that rolled up from the Shenandoah Valley, in stubble on either side of Antietam Creek, an American pastoral presented itself to the Irish Brigade camped near Sharpsburg, Maryland. At the center of this tableau was a plain white church of the Dunker sect, whose members did not believe in war or ostentation, and so their house of worship was without a steeple. How sweet it would be to drift into a nap on the warm grass, to revel in the sunshine of the last days of summer, to gaze over these rumpled hills and see no fear in the land. It had taken the brigade a full month to get from Harrison’s Landing outside Richmond to a farmland less than forty miles northwest of Washington. At the James River camp, the men had fattened up on fresh food and ample rations. Whiskey kegs were rolled out nightly, and cattle were slaughtered, the meat fast to the grill over Virginia hickory. They slept well, were given new uniforms and shoes. But then, when they shipped north and fell in line for a quickstep through Maryland, the food was swill, rest minimal, conditions harsh. For several days, breakfast and supper were the same fare—stale bread and a tin of sardines. They had walked in calcified clay, the horses kicking up dust so thick it obscured the sun. They bedded down on that same clay. Hair, beards, arms, legs, uniforms—everything was floured in reddish dust. Muskets had to be cleaned several times a day to keep them in firing order.

  The soldiers were moved like set pieces within a set piece, seldom told of the master war game. Generals drew up schemes on maps and sent divisions to certain death. Then they reassembled them a few miles away and did it again. As a grunt, you could drop weapons and flee, and many did, but if caught you’d be shot. A man could make $30 for every stray he rounded up for execution. You could feign malaria or typhoid, but it would take an actor of rare skill to pull it off. You could shoot yourself, with a wound of convenience that might be a ticket to a hospital bed. More likely, the self-inflicted tear would kill you, given the high mortality rate in the primitive medical trenches. The best thing to do was to curse and follow orders. The odds of getting out of this thing alive were still better in a soldier’s uniform than a deserter’s rags. As for motivation, whatever Meagher had said at Jones’s Woods or the 7th Regiment Armory was now vapor. Survival was the only reason to expose a face to a shower of musketry.

  Among the Irish, as with many Union soldiers, desperation became contagious. The war’s center had moved from the Southern capital to the Northern capital because Robert E. Lee had moved. The South had struck a large Union force in a second Battle of Bull Run and whipped them. That August, the South also advanced on Kentucky, a slave state with divided loyalties. Emboldened by the triumphs, Lee invaded the North for the first time, crossing the Potomac into Maryland on September 4, 1862. He would try to take ground under the American flag, then menace Washington, forcing Lincol
n to the bargaining table. The riots in Northern cities, the open ridicule of the president and his outmaneuvered generals, had convinced the Confederacy that the time was ripe for a settlement. They would keep their slaves, call it a draw and go home. First, though, the South had to crush McClellan at Antietam Creek.

  On September 13, 1862, Union soldiers discovered cigar leaves wrapped around the battle plan of the Confederacy—Lee’s orders, an accidental gift to the North. Now McClellan knew that his counterpart’s army was split, knew when and where they planned to strike, and knew that if he hit them quickly he could annihilate them. “Destroy the rebel army,” Lincoln told Young Napoleon. But once again McClellan did nothing. After a few days’ time, the advantage was lost. The Southerners had reassembled, with upwards of 40,000 fighters around Antietam, behind batteries on high ground and a rail fence protecting a long sunken road in the center. They were dug in and perched above their enemy—the ideal advantage for the kind of formation-leveling, industrial butchery that this continental clash of brothers had become. McClellan had about 65,000 men available; as usual, he saw only vulnerabilities and phantom divisions in gray. “If we should be so unfortunate as to meet with defeat,” he said, “our country is at their mercy.”

  Under drizzling skies on the night of September 16, Confederate guns pounded the Union periphery with canisters and lit-fuse explosives. By now, most of the Irish were veterans of the killing roulette; they had calculated the chance of a cannonball decapitating a horse, or being directly beneath a shell when it burst to a sunflower of hot fragments. Superstitions were trusted: if you wore your forage cap one way, or didn’t shave for three days, or directed your prayers to an obscure and underworked saint, you might be spared. But more than 120 of the men camped in the lilt of land where the rust-colored Antietam drained into the Potomac were new recruits to Meagher’s unit; they had no experience with savagery in the most lethal of American wars.

  These boys looked for reassurance in the rheumy eyes of General Meagher and the battle-worn face of Captain John Kavanagh. The recruits had been little children in a famine-flattened country when their superiors took on the British Empire. If luck was the element that allowed the leaders of Young Ireland’s stunted rebellion to live to early middle age, the new soldiers could only hope that some of it would rub off on them tomorrow.

  At dawn the following day, the grand designs of both sides had come down to this: Lee’s army on one side of the creek, McClellan’s on the other—the Dunker church, a cornfield and a sunken wagon road between them. Whoever had the strongest stomach for catastrophic loss would prevail. In first light, the Irish ate a hot breakfast a mile from the creek, the mist slow to give up its cling to dewy fields, an opaque morning. They chewed bacon and drained tin coffee cups to the sounds of a battle already under way. Meagher had slept on the ground, and his face looked puffy. The Union sent Fighting Joe Hooker, the general most tolerant of heavy casualties, forward to the cornfield, there to meet Stonewall Jackson among others in clay-dusted gray. Hooker’s men had a reputation for recklessness and heavy drinking equal to the Irish. As the fog thinned, the church of the pacifists glowed bone white in peekaboo sun. Callused from a summer of combat, the rebels raised the flag of the slaveholders’ republic and pushed the Northerners back over trampled corn to the edge of the woods. A second Union general, Joseph Mansfield, was summoned to join the fray. As he tried to lead a charge, his horse buckled under musket fire. Scurrying for cover, the general was shot in the gut, a mortal wound. By then, 3,000 Union men had been cut down. The day had just begun.

  At 9 a.m., Bull Sumner told the Irish it was their time to join the carnage. The old general removed his false teeth and called his men to battle. Some soldiers gulped mouthfuls of dried coffee and washed it down with water from the copper-colored creek—caffeine to supplement adrenaline. Before they could see the faces of the enemy, they felt the flesh-ripping power of bullets fired from long range. This was something new: minié balls from rifled muskets, named for the French captain who’d perfected the inch-long slug. A marksman could still fire only one shot at a time, but with a grooved barrel, the range and accuracy had increased fourfold. Snipers from a quarter mile out could pick off targets, particularly those on horseback, in officer’s braids or carrying a flag. The advantage further shifted to defenders, who had rebuffed nearly 90 percent of infantry assaults through the war.

  Meagher stuck with the elemental weapons that had served him well: close-range buck and ball, and razor-sharp bayonets. After fording the creek, holding their weapons and cartridge boxes aloft to make the crossing through waist-deep water, the Irish dropped to the ground and awaited orders. Over the next fifteen minutes, down near the cornfield, Sumner lost 2,000 men. Now a second Union general fell to gunfire: Joe Hooker was hit below the knees, his foot spraying blood like a loose hose. Meagher told his men to shed everything but their cartridge belts and rise for a charge. Ahead of them, 500 paces away on rolling ground, the rebels were entrenched behind a fence of rough-cut rails, safely bunkered in the Sunken Road. The graybacks could fire away with only their heads exposed.

  Meagher mounted his white horse, his mustache and sash covered in dust, and moved forward.

  “Raise the colors, boys!” he shouted, ordering his men to their feet. “Follow me!” The Notre Dame priest dashed in front of the brigade and shouted out a blanket absolution to an infantry on the run. At least these Irish Catholics would die with clean souls. To get to the rebel line, the soldiers first had to knock down the fence. Balls pinged off wood and splintered rails, tore away kneecaps and shattered skulls. A bullet in the head made a sound different from a bullet in a fence; it hit with a hard splat. At Bull Run, at Fair Oaks or Malvern Hill, men had fallen intermittently, a casualty for every half-dozen people in a row. Here they dropped as if in a shuffled deck, half the line cut down with every charge. Barely twenty minutes after Father Corby had conducted an act of group contrition, 500 of those men in the priest’s wake had been hit.

  The cost of war. Irish Brigade dead on the battlefield of Antietam, September 19, 1862, the bloodiest single day in American history. Lincoln was spurred to announce the Emancipation Proclamation after the battle. The brigade suffered horrific casualties at Antietam.

  COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-DIG-DS-05164

  With an opening in the fence, Meagher’s plan was to fire two volleys, then lead a sprint of Irishmen with the knife-pointed ends of their weapons into the pit of the Sunken Road.

  “Faugh-a-Ballagh” came the cry, echoing the poet’s admonition that had first stirred the boy orator to action in Dublin. Clear the way!

  But the way was not clear. The Irish gained only a few paces at a terrible cost. The bellowing, crying and whinnying of newly riderless horses drowned out feeble attempts at a Gaelic yell. One bearer of the emerald flag was shot down. Another picked up the banner and was also cut to the ground. The same happened to a third, a fourth, a fifth, until the flagpole itself was shattered. Men with brains spilling from their temples crumpled next to haystacks. During one volley, Captain Kavanagh took a blast of shell fragments in the face and fell dead just short of the Sunken Road. Meagher’s best friend in the Irish Brigade, a man who’d helped organize the unit, was thirty-five years old and a father to seven children, with a wife of nearly eighteen years. His run from risk, dating to the Tipperary cabbage patch in 1848, had come to an end.

  After three hours of fighting, Meagher’s men made it to within thirty yards of the rebels.

  “For Ireland!” they shouted.

  “For Saint Patrick!”

  Farther down the line of the road, other Union soldiers broke through and could now start pouring hot lead into the rebel trench. Graybacks who climbed over bodies and stumbled out met the fists and knives of Irish soldiers; the defenders were clubbed in the head, bayoneted in the back, strangled. Major General Israel Richardson, Mea- gher’s guest at the steeplechase in May, as impetuous as the Irish, was hit by a shell fragment,
a wound that would later kill him.

  Meagher tossed off his hat and tried to finish the battle. Just then, his horse took a blast in the head, reared up in panic, a blood pattern sprayed on its white mane. Meagher was thrown to the ground—the fourth Union general to go down. Concussed by his fall, he couldn’t tell up from down, light from dark. Two soldiers dragged him back among other wounded in the haystacks. The forage was not much of a refuge: soon the stacks caught fire in the rain of explosives, burning men alive.

  The final clash at Antietam started in the early afternoon. The Union had lost more than 7,000 men by the time General Ambrose Burnside led fresh combatants across a stone bridge over the creek.

  “Whose troops are those?” asked Lee, peering into the smoke with his field glass.

  “They are flying the United States flag” came the answer.