The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  The last of the set pieces played out as the numbers would dictate: a superior Union force driving an outnumbered Confederate Army backward, toward the town of Sharpsburg. Lee stiffened outside his entrenchments, saved by reinforcements from the west. The firing dropped off. By nightfall, both sides had seen enough. The lanterns of medics flickered over plowed fields covered with the dead and those who wished they were dead. Some bodies formed a gory frieze: Yank and rebel, each with a bayonet in the other’s gut, united in death. Antietam Creek carried corpses of bloodied men who had snaked along the grass to get a drink of water, only to fall in and drown. Horses with just a pair of working legs dragged themselves forward, their rear limbs shattered. A merciful man shot them.

  When darkness came at last, “the earth was absolutely hidden under acres of slain and dying,” Meagher wrote his brother-in-law Sam Barlow.

  If McClellan had steeled himself, he could have driven Lee into the Potomac, and perhaps won the war. But he feared that the general who’d mastered him at every turn had something hidden—more of those phantom reserves. Lee had no such thing, and soon, no hold on Union soil; the rebels retreated the following day back into Virginia. After more than twelve hours of fighting, only a few hundred yards had exchanged hands—here in a cornfield, there near the Sunken Road, known forever after as the Bloody Lane. The Dunker church stood, though perforated by grapeshot and musket balls. The bloodiest single day in American history had taken down 22,717 men, about 5,000 of them dead, the rest with smashed limbs, open wounds or burned flesh, others lost in fields that would grow corn and hay again, but whose main crop for generations would be despair.

  Come, my countrymen, he’d pleaded in the armory two months earlier. And of those who responded, more than half the new recruits were gone. Kavanagh was dead. Lieutenant James Mackey, named by Meagher to replace Temple Emmet as his aide-de-camp, dead. Lieutenant Colonel James Kelly, shot in the face, dead. Same with Captain Felix Duffy, mowed down in front of his men. Captain Patrick Clooney, a fellow Waterford native, crippled by a bullet that shattered his knee, then shot in the heart and brain, dead. Several of the drummer boys—not even teenagers—killed by shell fragments. One lad died with shattered pieces of his instrument embedded inside him. All told, the Irish Brigade was sliced in half—540 casualties in a single day. In a letter to Libby, Meagher was blunt. “It was an awful battle,” he told her. “The poor little Brigade was woefully cut up.”

  Come, my countrymen, to liberate Ireland at some future date, but not now, not with what was left after this slaughter. Come, my countrymen, a call of duty, honor and the like, words that could not seem more empty to families of those who’d answered the summons. They had come, all 540 of the dead, lost or dying, because Meagher’s words could move men to sacrifice. But to what end? What was the point of claiming a victory when one side had lost 12,000 men and the other 11,000?

  At the White House, Abraham Lincoln had no trouble finding meaning in the graveyard of Antietam. On September 22, five days after the battle, he assembled his cabinet and let them in on a secret. He told them he’d made a promise when the Southerners entered Northern territory: if Lee could be driven back across the Potomac, the president would make good on the idea he’d first floated to these advisers in July. “I said nothing to anyone. But I made the promise to myself . . . to my Maker. The rebel army is driven out now, and I am going to fulfill that promise.” He then read them the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In a little over three months, at the first tick of the new year of 1863, “all persons held as slaves” within any state in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforth, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to suppress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they make for their actual freedom.”

  The next day, Lincoln released this proclamation to the press. Democrats were outraged. McClellan was stunned. Leading Catholic clerics, Archbishop John Hughes among them, fumed. Jefferson Davis said Lincoln had broken his inaugural promise; the criticism, as Northerners noted, didn’t mean much coming from a traitor. The clamor, often taking a violent form, would continue for decades. Still, from September 22 onward, there would be no doubt about why so many Americans had been killed at Antietam, no doubt about why men from either side of the Liffey River had answered Meagher’s call to Come, my countrymen. It was not for Ireland, or for Saint Patrick, or even to Faugh-a-Ballagh, as many had shouted, their last words at the edge of the Sunken Road. The living could invoke those cries, and they would for the rest of their lives. They could cite the cause of holding together a nation that had sheltered them after a genocidal famine, and they would. But there was no getting around history’s anchor: the men of the Irish Brigade had died to free the black slaves of America.

  17

  * * *

  The Green and the Blues

  Late November, snow already starting to swirl around the bare Virginia hardwoods. More than two months after Antietam, Meagher’s men let their beards grow long and gnarly. They grubbed for turnips in cold fields and traded blankets for liquor. They dipped tin cups in vats of wretched coffee slicked from pork bits, and licked their blackened fingers for the grease. Meagher leaned on his tent pole one frigid night, his body wrapped in the flyleaf, staring into an immense bonfire a few feet downhill from his shelter. He was wobbly, strangely quiet. A soldier with the lowest rank in the army, William McCarter of the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, tried to get his attention. Over the past two weeks the private and the general had developed a friendship fused by love of the written word. McCarter could barely speak; he had a debilitating stammer. But he could write—verse, prose, and he had the most extraordinary penmanship.

  “Gen-Gen-General Muh, Muh, Muh Meagher?”

  “Whaaaaa?”

  The sound that emerged from the orator was guttural, almost incomprehensible. McCarter, as he confided to his diary, worshiped the Irishman who could speak at least five languages, recite an epic poem without missing a line, make roll call seem like an ode. “He had a voice that sounded like a lion,” he wrote in one of his perfectly penned sentences, as if the words were standing at inspection. But now: who was this stumbling soul leaning against his tent pole? For a second time, the clerk called out to him. Meagher grunted, slurred something that sounded like nothing. The general reeked of whiskey, which he called “a smile,” as in “Let’s have a smile before dinner.” Soldiers used a dozen other terms for the infantry’s only real diversion—busthead, knock-’em-stiff, dead shot among them. In the worst year for the Army of the Potomac, liquor was medicinal and ubiquitous, for officers and infantrymen, Irish and native-born. The best general of the North, Ulysses S. Grant, was widely viewed as a drunk. He’d been forced to resign in 1854, his reputation in ruins. He got his second chance after volunteering in 1861, though his reliance on heavy drink had not diminished. “I can’t spare him,” Lincoln said. “He fights.” And hearing yet again that Grant was overly fond of whiskey, the president asked what brand, and wondered if he should send a keg to each of his other commanders.

  But even with all the high-octane spirits flowing through the depressed ranks of the Union Army, no one in the brigade had seen Thomas Francis Meagher like this—a standing man, blank-faced; the great conversationalist, mute; the wit of Bull Sumner’s corps, staggered. “He was very drunk,” McCarter wrote on November 13, 1862, “and looked strangely wild.”

  The private and the general had met after Antietam, as the war slowed, the skies darkened early and everyone smelled of smoke. The rebels had burned and shelled to a splinter pile much of the town of Harpers Ferry, on the Potomac, before hightailing it south. The Union Army moved in, a chipped centipede of cannons and canvas, horses and cattle, setting up camp on a rise just above the ruins. Would they spend the winter there? Or pursue the rebels? Who knew? Who cared? Nobody wanted to fight i
n the cold months.

  For a few days in October, the high command allowed officers to bring their wives into their quarters at night. Some did not come; it was undignified to be so close to men at war. But Libby didn’t hesitate. She rushed down from New York, nursed a boil on her husband’s banged-up knee and tried to revive a flattened man. She made an impression on those who saw them together. The mud, the chill, the cluster of befouled and bloodied soldiers did not deter her. If anything, she wanted to see as much of the war as her husband had seen, if only to be closer to him. The chaplain, Corby, noticed that General Meagher had more cheer, was more graceful and solicitous, when around Libby. The Meaghers welcomed infantrymen into their tent for drinks and hot meals, card-playing and poetry. She got to know many of them well enough to grieve, later, when she read names on a casualty list. One bit of news cheered the couple: their friend Michael Corcoran had been released by the rebels in a prisoner exchange. He left the Confederate dungeon looking like a skeleton. Still, he was ready to go back at the South, and wasted no time organizing an Irish legion—Fenians, openly nationalistic. The God that had saved Michael Corcoran was the one that Meagher prayed to now.

  A week, ten days of Indian summer passed, and Libby was forced to fly away, leaving the conjugal cot and buffalo robe cold inside the tent. Departure was hard, knowing how likely it was that they might never see each other again. Meagher went through his military motions, the days unmemorable, fog holding on to the lowlands a bit longer with every page turned in October. The routine broke when the Pennsylvania unit arrived, a fresh regiment for the devastated Irish Brigade. The soldiers of the 116th were city boys, mostly Irish but a number of Germans as well. Some of them were Protestants, not unlike Private McCarter. He was born in Derry, as the Irish still called their city in the north, had emigrated just after the famine. Belittled for his stammer, McCarter worked on his calligraphy every waking hour. His handwriting was a thing to behold; the letters looked as if stamped from a machine, but with enough of a bend or curve to humanize them. The soldiers of the 116th were not long out of their training by the time McCarter was a man in demand. A note home, crafted by the private with the magical pen, was a gift that would become an heirloom.

  One of those handwritten masterpieces, a poem, had been passed along from a dying soldier to a living one, from an officer to Meagher. After poring over it, the general turned to a subordinate: Find me the man who wrote this note. A few weeks later, at the bivouac above Har-pers Ferry, a slight, soft-shouldered young soldier with a weak chin was brought to Meagher’s tent. He struggled to get his words out.

  “Yuh, yuh . . . Y-y-you wahhhhted to, to see-see-see—”

  “Be seated, Private.” Meagher pointed to a stool inside his tent. Books, maps and a field glass covered a small table. McCarter was impressed by Meagher’s bearing: mustache finely trimmed, buttons on the general’s uniform polished. “He was a gentleman of no ordinary ability,” he wrote in his diary. And when Meagher spoke, McCarter was transfixed. He heard Greek, Latin, French and Gaelic over the course of an hour, “the latter sounding like a mixture of all the others jumbled up together.” Meagher sized up the kid from Pennsylvania, where the Know-Nothings had driven the Irish into hiding. He held a smile for a half minute without speaking, pulled up a stool close to him, fixed his eyes on the private.

  “Well, you are from the Old Sod?”

  “Yuh-yuh, yuh—yes! Yes, sir.”

  Meagher stood, walked to a table and riffled through some papers. He came back with a poem, “The Land of My Birth.”

  “Is that your handwriting?”

  McCarter informed him that the poem indeed was his creation. A colonel who’d accompanied the private to Meagher’s tent interrupted. He said his unit needed the boy for picket duty, and could they please be dismissed.

  “Well, really, Colonel, that is all very good,” said Meagher. “But he writes so well.” Meagher could use him. He faced the private.

  “Now, Mac,” he said, all charm and informality. “You can go to your quarters and the colonel will instruct you this afternoon what to do.”

  At the same time, Lincoln and McClellan held a summit in a field tent. They despised each other and no longer tried to hide it. Why hadn’t the commander chased Lee out of Maryland and into the river? What would it take for the general to finish something? He led the largest army in the world in 1862. What more did he want? Did McClellan expect victory to be wrapped in a ribbon? He bristled at the Emancipation Proclamation, a real surprise, sir. He may not have shared the anger of Jefferson Davis—“the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man,” the Confederate president said—but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the timing. Didn’t hold back from saying he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the sudden shift from waging war to keep the Union whole, to waging war to rid the country of slavery. He told his wife he “could not make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection.” But it didn’t matter what McClellan thought: hereafter, the Army of the Potomac would be a force for liberation.

  Lincoln’s gamble with England had worked out brilliantly. The proclamation put the Empire on the defensive. Crowds gathered in the streets of London to cheer for the American president. As he’d hoped, the British could not recognize the Confederate States of America, because the C.S.A. stood for what the enlightened world now recognized as a relic of barbarism. “The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory of the powers of evil,” said John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher. A year earlier, Russia had freed its serfs. Support for the American South meant support for slavery, nothing more. The peripheral reasons for breaking up the Union—states’ rights and defending a way of life—looked like a cloak for something civilized people would no longer tolerate. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed,” Lincoln said; “without slavery it could not continue.”

  But the proclamation cost him political support at home. The Republicans were hit hard in the November midterm elections of 1862. Not only was the legality of the executive order questioned, but so was the mixed message it sent: slaves were free only in the rebel states, per Lincoln’s interpretation of his wartime power. Still, with a clarity of mind and purpose that he’d lacked for two years, the president now tried to bring the country around. A month before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, he delivered a short message to Congress. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” he said. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”

  For Meagher, England’s neutrality after the proclamation undercut one of his best arguments to the immigrant soldiers. They could no longer hold to the illusion that they were fighting two enemies—one in the New World, the other a tormentor through the centuries in the Old World. Some of the Fenians in the army still envisioned a future when hardened veterans of the Civil War would cross the Atlantic to liberate Ireland. Dreams born on weaker foundations had kept previous patriots going while they rotted in the Empire’s prisons. But Meagher, if honest with himself, knew hatred of England could no longer be used to carry a tattered, bullet-riddled green flag up a hostile hill. He couldn’t lie.

  In the first week of November, Lincoln dismissed McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Now Meagher feared an uprising. His men loved fighting for Mac; with all his faults, he gave the Irish their due. After Antietam, in his official report McClellan wrote: “The Irish Brigade sustained their well-earned reputation, suffering terribly in officers and men, and strewing the ground with their enemies.” When General McClellan’s farewell address was read to the brigade, it was followed by much grumbling and open protest. They would go with him anywhere, the men said. Name the fight. Saying goodbye, the Irish lined up on either side of a road outside their camp, stiffened their posture, cannons in position. As the little general passed by to salutes, the big guns roared M
cClellan a sendoff—on his way to Washington, then to his home in New York, and eventually a challenge to Lincoln in the next presidential election. The soldiers, taking their cue from Meagher, felt empty and perplexed. Many of the immigrants cursed Lincoln openly, and turned to each other with a question: “What next?”

  For some it was desertion—make a run before being ordered into another death sentence in tight formation. A few got away, hiding in the daytime, stumbling through the cold Confederate countryside at night. Most were caught just a few miles behind their lines. The Irish Brigade had to treat their own by army protocol: the sentence for those who tried to flee was execution. Father Corby witnessed one dispatching of a deserter. A dozen men lined up to face a blindfolded victim, standing above a pine coffin. A few soldiers were given guns with live ammunition, others were handed ones with blanks, so that no man would know who did the killing of an Irish brother. One volley was supposed to do the job, but sometimes a commander had to finish it. “Scenes like this jarred my nerves more than a battle,” the priest wrote.

  In mid-November, the Union soldiers broke camp. They marched with faces to the ground, stalled often in knee-deep mud, slowly south toward Richmond, about seventy miles away. Misery larded onto Meagher like layers of winter fat. When food rations ran short, he gave his men some of his own. When a bedroll was too wet for sleep, he brought soldiers into his general’s tent, there to join others who had faced death by hypothermia. With each day’s siphoning of the season’s daylight, his drinking started earlier.

  So now, on a late autumnal night, Meagher stared at the big bonfire, a glassy-eyed general supported by a tent pole. Private McCarter was petrified. He watched as his worst fear unfolded—a tumble forward. Meagher slipped from the tent and rolled down toward the big blaze. McCarter sprang to his rescue, using his weapon to stop the general just before he could fall into the flames.