by Timothy Egan
“My God!” the private shouted. “He would have been roasted alive.” McCarter dropped his musket and dragged the unconscious Meagher back to the tent. The stock of McCarter’s weapon caught fire, and it went off, bringing a crowd of soldiers with guns at the ready. After a few hours on his back, Meagher came to—groggy and red-eyed, his lips dry with a powdery crust.
“You owe this man your life,” a fellow officer said, pointing to the private with the stammer. The next morning, Meagher presented McCarter with a new musket. He said nothing of what had transpired the night before. “I never saw General Meagher intoxicated again,” McCarter noted.
In the last days of November, the brigade finished its slog to the river and built a camp just upstream from Fredericksburg, Virginia. They were midway between Washington and Richmond, a geographic limbo to match the direction of the war. General Lee’s army of 75,000 men was massed on the south side of the big, rat-colored Rappahannock—dug in for winter. The rebels were on high ground, as usual, and remarkably well fortified on a ridge behind a thick stone wall. Across the deep waters of the river, the new Federal base was close enough to the enemy that soldiers could watch the Southerners building their breastworks and putting heavy artillery in place all along the line of Marye’s Heights. Clearly, any attack from below would be doomed.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Father Corby assured a soldier passing on a rumor that the Irish Brigade would be thrown at the heights. “Your generals know better than that.”
Perhaps some of them did. The new Union commander, General Ambrose Burnside, presented himself as a mass of fussed-over facial hair running down the sides of his cheeks and curling up into his nostrils, bald on top. (“Sideburns” would be his legacy to the English language.) As Lincoln’s new man, Burnside felt he had something to prove, and would not wait until the spring to do it. With an army of 110,000 men, he drew up plans to take Fredericksburg, then charge up the gentle slope to confront Lee behind that imposing rock wall. On his map, it drew out as a perfect success, set pieces again. First, though, pontoons had to be built and put in place for the Federals to cross the river.
Private McCarter was put on picket duty, which meant serving as kill-bait for rebels firing from the outskirts of Fredericksburg. For two weeks, as the Northerners waited for the pontoon pieces to arrive, the Southerners shot at them. The Irish, unable to keep quiet, started to barter with their enemies across the Rappahannock.
“Hey, Johnny.”
“Yeah, Yank.”
“Any coffee today, Johnny?”
“Plenty. And tobacco too.”
On November 28, Meagher summoned McCarter. The general explained to the private and an accompanying officer that the grunt now serving as target practice for rebel gunmen was the best penman in the Union Army. He’d never forgotten the poem.
“Here,” said Meagher, opening a file to show off the attractive verse. “Here is some of his writing. Just look at it and see if you can beat it.” The officer looked perplexed.
“Have some food,” said Meagher, motioning to salted salmon, potatoes steaming in their skins, fresh biscuits and gravy, and a pitcher of cold water. “Help yourself.” After some negotiation over the meal, Meagher finally got command of the calligrapher. McCarter became the general’s secretary and ghostwriter, the man who finished his sentences in print.
“Now, Mac,” he said a few days later, “I have a private matter of my own which I would like you to attend to at your convenience.” For a brief moment, Meagher looked as if he were going to cry. McCarter never saw him more vulnerable—a man of war trying to hold back his innate sentimentality. The general opened a small tin box and produced several pages of his spiky handwriting and a blank book bound in leather.
“It is a poem of thirty-seven or thirty-eight verses, of my own composition . . . I wish it written in this book.”
Meagher’s plan was to give away his bound poem as a gift to a friend in Ireland, he explained. McCarter could not contain himself. “I was so completely overcome at this that I burst into tears,” he recorded. A few days later, Meagher did something that nearly made the private weep again. He handed him what looked like a $5 bill.
“Now, Mac, here’s a slight acknowledgment for your beautiful work.” He urged the soldier to use the money to purchase goods sold by the black marketeers who swarmed over the Union Army, flies to the still-warm corpse. McCarter needed socks, suspenders, a handkerchief and a scarf. When he handed the currency to a field merchant, the man complained that he couldn’t make change. Only then did McCarter realize Meagher had given him $50—a huge sum. The private rushed back to the general, insisting he’d made a mistake.
“I cuh, cuh, ca . . . can’t keep it.”
“To be in the army is to obey your superiors, Mac.” Meagher arranged to have the money sent to McCarter’s wife by special courier.
“Happy thought, my boy.” He then gave McCarter $10 and told him to buy the clothes he needed. “Not another word, Mac.”
Orders came on Wednesday, December 10, 1862, to prepare for the first big clash of armies in the east since Antietam. The Irish were told to pack three days of food rations and eighty rounds of ammunition—portending a drawn-out battle to the end. The camp was cacophonous with collapse and the quick slaughter of cattle for the soldiers’ fuel. Private McCarter worked his pen at a feverish pace, writing official correspondence and doing favors for friends who begged him for last letters to loved ones. When he finished, about 9 p.m., Meagher offered him a glass of brandy and a cigar. The private walked outside, joining a cluster of soldiers around a fire on a brisk, cloudless night. Around midnight, he returned to the general’s tent. Meagher was packing his books of poetry, history and philosophy, and his personal writings, into metal lockers. His limp was noticeable. A surgeon’s attempt to lance the boil on his damaged knee had only made it worse. The private asked if he could help, but Meagher dismissed him. At 1 a.m., Meagher called him back inside. Now all of the general’s possessions were in a neat stack in the corner. It struck McCarter that Meagher was preparing to die.
“Now, Mac, everything here is packed and ready to be put on board one of those wagons in the morning . . . I want you to remain in the rear, near my personal property, and on no account to go into action or to the front. Here is a duplicate key of my tin case. Keep it safe for me until the fight is over. If my fate is to fall, hand it over to General Hancock.”
Meagher hobbled outside, mounted his white horse and rode off into the night. Within half an hour of his departure, Union guns started pounding the area around Fredericksburg. More than 8,000 projectiles rained down.
On Thursday, in the half-light of a metallic dawn, as Federal engineers tried to put pontoons in place for crossing the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg, they were being picked off by sharpshooters firing from the smoking hulk of the town. Once a thriving merchant and rail center of 5,000 people, nearly 25 percent of them slaves, Fredericksburg was empty now except for Southern snipers and a hapless refugee or two. Burnside sent squads across the river to hunt down the gunmen. After hours of house-to-house fighting, the nests were destroyed.
Meagher’s men crossed on Friday with other Union brigades and went in search of protection. Now that their gunmen were gone, the Confederates started to bombard Fredericksburg from the ridge. Ceaseless shot and shell hissed at the thousands of Union men scrambling to find shelter in a house or building. One of those soldiers looking for cover was Private McCarter. He had disobeyed Meagher’s orders; staying behind did not feel right. Before he left, he gave the general’s key to another infantryman. A few residents—the old, the sick, some feeble slaves—had been unable to get out during the evacuation. McCarter saw an elderly black woman, shoeless, with three crying children clinging to her tattered dress. She stood at an intersection in the town, dazed and in shock. A minute later, she was hit by a Confederate shell and cut in two. The fragments killed the children as well.
General Burnside had insisted there
be no fires at night, to conceal the troops. This was treated as a joke; surely the rebels knew that the town was now crawling with bluecoats. Snow fell in the evening, wet and heavy. The ground was saturated. As the Irishmen shivered, unable to get any rest in the dark hole of Fredericksburg, Meagher became livid. He waived the no-fire edict. His men dragged furniture from empty houses and built a few blazes on the cobblestone streets. It must have been a fine town in its day. Soldiers found barrels of flour in the rubble of an old mill. They mixed it with water and made gooey bread over the embers of charred table legs. Some of the flour was stuffed in small bags under blue uniforms, as insulation and protection. Meagher could not sleep.
On Saturday morning, December 13, under a haze of mist and artillery smoke, the general told his men to fall into place along a side street in Fredericksburg. Sprigs of green boxwood were distributed to each of the 1,200 members of the Irish Brigade, infantrymen and officers alike. Meagher ordered the soldiers to place the evergreen clips under their caps, and to make sure they were visible. He demonstrated with his own hatband. The general wanted the enemy to know whom they were fighting. They would not fall as nobodies in bloody heaps. They would die as Irishmen.
Walking down the line, he addressed each of the five regiments of the brigade. When he came to the New York unit that his wife had doted on, sending them sweets and new socks, he choked on his words. “Officers and soldiers of the Eighty-eighth Regiment: In a few moments you will engage the enemy in a most terrible battle, which will probably decide the fate of this glorious, great and good country—the home of your adoption.” No mention of liberating Ireland. The fight was about this land, these people. He paused there, tears filling his eyes, stammering like Private McCarter, before he regained his composure. “This is my wife’s own regiment, her own dear Eighty-eighth, she calls it. I know, I have confidence that with that dear woman’s smile upon you . . . this day you will strike a deadly blow to those wicked traitors who are now but a few hundred yards from you.” Some of the soldiers started to cry.
“This . . . this may be my last speech to you, but I will be with you when the battle is fiercest. And if I fall, I can say that I did my duty, and fell fighting in the most glorious of causes.”
Next to the river, along the empty edge of Fredericksburg, they walked to certain death, away from town and up the rise to the rebel fortifications. They went past Caroline and Princess Anne Streets, then a left turn on George. Fitting—all these names from the English Crown. They crossed on planks over a small canal, the houses now at their backs. Ahead was an empty field, sloping upward, 400 yards or so. There was no protection, no place to hide or take cover, save a small home off to one side. At the top, along Marye’s Heights, the stone wall ran along the length of the ridge. The graybacks stood four deep, and had 150 cannons in place to hurl lead balls, grapeshot and canister shot down on Union soldiers. One of the men behind the wall was a son of the Young Ireland revolutionary John Mitchel. Looking down at the field, James Mitchel was close enough to see the man who had been his father’s blood brother in the uprising of 1848, an officer now barely able to walk.
The killing came too easily. For every one rebel who was hit behind the wall, almost three Union soldiers fell. The blues charged in waves, each more suicidal than the other. As deep as the Confederates were, they could spit nonstop fire down the hill. No pause for reloading; after one line exhaled a volley, another took its place. At this short range, canister shot was particularly lethal, spraying shards of metal from cannons that served as big shotguns. Unable to keep up with his line, Meagher fell back in search of a horse to mount. Captain Cavanagh took his place. Within minutes, a ball took his leg out. Private McCarter was hit in the calf with a shell fragment but kept moving upward, tripping over bodies. An order came to fix bayonets. The high end of the advance was about fifty paces from the wall—close enough for men to look into the mouths of smoking artillery guns. It was a marvel to the Confederates that the Irish kept coming and coming. “Your soldier’s heart almost stood still as you watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their deaths,” said a rebel spectator, General George Pickett. McCarter raised his arms to fire one more time before the planned assault. He was hit square in the shoulder, a ball shattering parts of his arm and his collarbone. Blood trickled down his chest, into his pants, down his legs, a warm stream, into his shoes. Dizzy, the private fell to the ground. A friend dropped directly in front of him, dead when he hit the ground. McCarter closed his eyes and prayed. “Into thy hands, oh my God, I commit my soul and body.”
Near town, Meagher found his horse and returned to the battlefield. As he galloped up the hill, he was passed by rollers of human carnage—his Irishmen, cut to pieces, among the thousands of other flesh-torn young men. Father Corby saw one soldier who’d been shot in the neck try to take a drink from his canteen; water poured out of the bullet hole. “The place into which Meagher’s brigade was sent was simply a slaughter pen,” the priest wrote in his diary. In two hours’ time, after fourteen attempts to break through Marye’s Heights, 3,000 Union troops had been mowed down. Soldiers begged Meagher to stay put—the butchery on that hill was murder, not warfare. Every officer in the 69th was hit. “We might as well have tried to take Hell,” one captain said. Up beyond the wall of Marye’s Heights, General Lee watched Stonewall Jackson and other commanders treat the Army of the Potomac like blades of grass before a scythe. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee famously remarked to an aide. “Otherwise, we should grow too fond of it.”
On the Union side, officers tried to dissuade Burnside from continuing with the attack. “It’s a useless waste of life,” said General Hooker, no faint heart to a fight. Burnside would not budge. The battle continued till the sun dropped below the fields in late afternoon, now with 8,000 casualties on the heights, and then sputtered into the dark, the rebels taking potshots at soldiers who tried to retrieve their wounded. Meagher knew before he had an official account, knew by the dead men he recognized on the ground, their blood-smudged sprigs of boxwood muddled onto their skulls: the Irish Brigade was shattered. He had lost half his men.
Meagher wept profusely, even as other officers tried to console him. He could not stop. A broken man, his tears fell in the mud.
No one associated with Marye’s Heights tried to put a gloss of glory on it. “Oh! It was a terrible day,” Captain William Nagle wrote his father. “Irish blood and bones cover that field today.” An Irish Brigade historian, Henry Clay Heisler, summarized it this way: “It was not a battle—it was wholesale slaughter of human beings.” The Union suffered nearly 13,000 dead and wounded, to a loss of about 5,000 for the Confederacy. Walt Whitman, doing newspaper duty in Fredericksburg, recorded a grim scene in his journal: “A heap of feet, legs, arms and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening.”
On Sunday, a cold rain fell. Humiliated in his one chance to shine, General Burnside gave the order to retreat. He would soon lose command of the Army of the Potomac. Meagher was told a bit of incongruent news: the new green flags for the Irish Brigade had arrived from New York. Well, then, he said, we must commemorate the occasion. He rounded up food and whiskey, and invited officers to a little theater in Fredericksburg, its roof still intact, for a makeshift dinner. He called it a “Death Feast,” an Irish wake in the midst of war. To those who didn’t understand, Meagher explained: it was the Celtic way to honor the dead with some lightness of heart. The banquet got under way on Monday night. Toasts commenced as Confederate guns started in again on Fredericksburg, some of the heavy balls landing just outside the theater. The new colors were presented. Songs were sung. Two tables in the center of the room were weighed down with food bought from black market merchants on the other side of the river. Meagher rose, grim-faced, eyes reddened and swollen.
“Generals, brother officers, and comrades of the Army of the Potomac: fill your glasses to the brim.” He then toasted a man sitting next to him, General Alfred Sully, “who is not one
of your ‘political generals,’ but a brave and accomplished soldier.” The theater went still, an awkward silence broken only by artillery fire outside the door. Meagher was honoring a friend, but he was also talking about himself. A political general was the insulting term for those high-ranking officers who never had any formal military training, never went to West Point or fought in the Mexican War. General Burnside, the career military man responsible for the most incompetent, wasteful battle of the war, was considered a real general. And Meagher’s appointment, it was said by many, was Lincoln’s sop to the Irish—the most glaring example of a political general. But after he’d held the line of a panicky retreat by other regiments at Bull Run, after he’d saved a division outside Richmond, after he took the Sunken Road at Antietam and now had seen his most hardened men cut to flesh bits on the cold ground below Marye’s Heights, after he’d been twice thrown from his horse in this war—the political general was due some respect.
One soldier put his hands together and clapped. Then another. And another, until the little theater was full of applause. During dinner, Meagher carried on, “in tones of almost unearthly eloquence,” one witness noted, honoring the dead. It was a long list, and took up much of the remaining time of the banquet. Many of the fallen were still unburied, he said, their bloated bodies outside these doors on the slope.
In closing, Meagher drew attention to a dessert tray presented by a soldier waiter on a center table. A few minutes earlier, the man had been sent on a mission. Now the lid of the serving tray was lifted, revealing a cannonball that had bounced down a street outside the theater—dessert. Great gasps of horror filled the crowd. With that, Meagher left the room, ending a Death Feast for the bloodiest single day of the Irish Brigade.