The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  18

  * * *

  A Brigade No More

  Before returning to Falmouth, just across the Rappahannock, Meagher and some of his soldiers went back to the killing fields. A temporary truce was arranged to allow the Union forces to retrieve corpses that had been left behind. Up Marye’s Heights they walked again, the fields littered with severed limbs and unfinished letters to loved ones, clothing, cold muskets and cannonballs. Meagher was slow and gimpy-legged, helped by his men. They turned over face-mashed bodies, looking for a green boxwood sprig under the cap. They found their lifeless flag-bearer, a sergeant, leaning against a tree, the brigade banner wrapped around him and riddled with bullets. Near the stone wall, they discovered what was left of Major William Horgan of the New York 88th—Mrs. Meagher’s Own. Horgan was thirty years old, an original member of the Irish Brigade. He’d been in every battle with Meagher since the start. The major had been cut down just twenty-five paces short of the wall. No Union officer made it closer. The body was carried through the blood-smeared field, through Fredericksburg, across the river and then to winter camp. Meagher made sure Bill Horgan was embalmed for transport. He had plans.

  A new year, bringing with it the liberation of the Confederacy’s slaves, could not shove aside quickly enough the worst year for American forces. Lincoln was distraught. He’d been pressed by Democrats to delay the Emancipation Proclamation; the country was not ready to break the chains of four million blacks—it was a desperate move by a desperate president, they claimed. Look at the recent midterm elections: opponents of abolition had routed Republicans. On military matters, the president was in another kind of ditch. After the disaster of Fredericksburg, the most lopsided battle of the war, he was besieged by officers urging him to sack Ambrose Burnside. The hirsute-faced general was incompetent, his subordinates said, or worse—a mass murderer, sending wave after wave up Marye’s Heights.

  The White House, its drapes closed and Mary Todd Lincoln in mourner’s black, had been like the waiting room of a funeral parlor for almost a year. The first family had lost a son, eleven-year-old Willie, to typhoid fever, most likely from contaminated water coming into the Executive Mansion from a nearby canal. “The poor boy,” Lincoln said. “He is too good for this earth.” The commander in chief tried to keep up his routine, but many days he would closet himself in his office and weep at the loss of his child. Mary fell into an even deeper depression, had visions at night of the dead boy, her favorite child, and cried in hysterics, months after he was gone. At one point Lincoln took her to a window and pointed to an insane asylum across the way. She needed to be strong, he said, or she might have to change residences. “If there is a place worse than Hell,” Lincoln told a friend, “I am in it.”

  There was such a place: the Union camp at Falmouth, Virginia. Desertion was never higher: 1,800 soldiers went missing after Fredericksburg, many of them using the chaos of battle to slip away, one in four soldiers now AWOL. Meagher could barely walk, but his agony was a minor annoyance in an army of pain. “I am quite safe with the exception of a bruised knee,” he telegraphed Libby, anxious to counter stories in the papers that he’d been killed. “I am remaining for the present with what is left of my noble brigade. But should I get the necessary permission, I will return to you as soon as my wounded are cared for.”

  What was left of that noble brigade was in no condition to fight. They were shattered, had not been paid for months, were sick with dysentery, colds and fevers. Meagher counted barely 500 men to call his own. And now a wet winter, rain turning to snow and vice versa. “Such a sight as the Army now presents never was seen before,” wrote Captain Elliot Pierce to a friend. “We are stuck in Mud. Bivouacked in Mud. Sleep in Mud. Eat in Mud. Drink in Mud. If we do move we shall move in Mud. I am sitting in Mud as I write.” The food was maggot-infested, the uniforms tattered and damp. Anything that could burn had been stripped and chopped and put to flame. Every fog-ensnarled tent had an empty cot or two—holes where there had been life a few days before. “All of us were sad,” Father Corby wrote, “very sad.”

  Meagher’s books and writings had not been touched. Since the battle, Private McCarter had been missing. The general sent out queries looking for the boy with the master penmanship, keeper of his written thoughts. The brigade surgeon, Dr. Laurence Reynolds, took a look at Meagher’s leg and ordered him to a field hospital or home. The knee oozed pus; infection, in this war, could be more lethal than loaded shell. “He is suffering from a furunculous abscess of the left knee, which quite disables him,” the doctor wrote. “It is further my opinion that an absence of 20 days is absolutely necessary to prevent loss of life or permanent disability.” Granted a medical leave, Meagher set off for New York, traveling with the embalmed body of Major Horgan.

  On Christmas Eve, 1862, at the Broadway headquarters of the Irish Brigade, Meagher stayed up late writing letters to families of the deceased. Libby urged him to come home, to be festive for a few hours. For too long, sorrow had shadowed their marriage. Horgan lay in a casket next to Meagher’s desk, his body full of lead balls, his facial features improved by a mortician’s magic. For three nights and two days, the officer’s corpse was on display. It was, to say the least, not an inducement to further recruitment. But Meagher didn’t need the shaking heads, the hushed signs of the cross, the mutterings of “shame, shame,” to understand how things had changed among his people. The Irish had turned against the Union cause. From the press and the pulpits, from the laborer in the Tammany hiring hall to the widow in church, he heard a dirge. “The Irish spirit for the war is dead!” cried the Boston Pilot, voice of the Bay State’s Celts. “Absolutely dead.”

  New Year’s Eve arrived with some suspense regarding Lincoln’s intentions. Awaiting word, blacks in New York City staged a jubilee to count down the final hours of Confederate slavery. A crowd that was one third white filled Shiloh Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Prince and Marion, to capacity. At 10 p.m., a preacher asked the congregants to imagine what would have happened if slaves had been freed immediately after Fort Sumter was fired on. The war would now be over, he said, to a clap of amens. No one was more loyal to the United States, he said, than the descendants of those brought to these shores in chains. Another speaker attacked clerics who had used their religion to defend slavery. An ex-slave spoke of growing up in North Carolina—“a most excellent place to get out of,” he said, to laughter. A few minutes after midnight, a dispatch was read from Washington: the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued. It was “the greatest event in our nation’s history,” said Frederick Douglass. Thunderous cheers for Abraham Lincoln erupted in the Shiloh pews, tears and some fainting and breathless asides, then more huzzahs for the Union Army, in which blacks would now be able to serve, and then a hymn from the choir, beginning, “Blow ye trumpets, blow, the year of jubilee has come.”

  In another church, two weeks later, the Irish held a Grand Requiem Mass for the fallen of Fredericksburg. St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street was draped in black and packed with widows, many refusing to meet the gaze of Thomas Meagher, who sat in the front row with Libby. In the center aisle was a single coffin, representing those buried in hastily dug graves along the Rappahannock. The choir sang Mozart’s Requiem, the music rising to the top of the eighty-five-foot-high vault, morning light streaming through stained glass that the Know-Nothings had once tried to smash. Baskets were passed for families without fathers, and Dagger John Hughes sent the souls off to an eternal Irish repose. Afterward, officers of the Irish Brigade retired to Delmonico’s for lunch. Meagher gave a few short remarks, but there was no spark in him; he was visibly aged and made sluggish by war’s physical toll. “We have but two wants today—one for the dead, the other for the living,” he said. He was supposed to be recruiting, but on this day could not bring himself to corral another man with his words, only a cryptic thought: “War for me has no attraction, beyond those developments it gives for hearts and minds.”

  After weeks of re
st, he returned to the front. But first a detour to Washington, for a meeting with the president on Lincoln’s fifty-fourth birthday, February 12, 1863. Lincoln looked gaunt, sunken-cheeked, his clothes loose and oversized. He moved about in a strangely soundless manner, as if he were there in spirit and not in corporal form. Meagher had gone to Washington to beg for the Irish Brigade’s life. The unit needed time to recover and rebound, and only then could he hope to fill its ranks with new soldiers. The general’s reputation had preceded him: his bravery in battle, first to the front, last to retreat, certainly—but also the drinking. As well, the odd tale of the Death Feast, with the cannonball at dessert, had circulated among the high command. Meagher did not try to explain the inexplicable life of an Irishman at war. He spoke only of trying to save his creation. Lincoln listened without word. Meagher made a pitch for promotions of his officers: good men, Colonels Robert Nugent and Patrick Kelly, had been passed over despite stellar performances in combat, while men who’d done less fighting in other brigades had been elevated. Lincoln unfolded the large, sticks-in-winter fingers of his, walked across the room and shook Meagher’s hand. No sooner had the general left than the president wrote a letter to the War Department: “General Meagher, now with me, says the Irish Brigade has had no promotions,” and that “they had fairly earned them.”

  Not far from the White House, Private McCarter had taken a turn for the worse in a crowded ward for the wounded at Eckington Hospital. After he had committed his soul to the afterlife at Marye’s Heights, the boy remained conscious, bleeding on the ground, consumed by thirst. “I would have given $1,000 for a cup of cold water,” he wrote. In the evening, under cover of darkness, McCarter was dragged down the hill by his comrades and helped across the river. At Falmouth, the medical corps set up forty tents to hack away at the wounded—a “village of butcher shops,” McCarter called it, with pyramids of severed limbs outside every tent. When McCarter was brought in for his turn at medical attention, a doctor told him, “You must have that arm taken off.”

  “Nix,” said McCarter, without a hint of his stammer.

  From Fredericksburg, the wounded were taken by rail to a river port, and then by steamer to Alexandria, and off to the hospital outside Washington. Through January, McCarter’s upper arm festered, turning the color of rotten fruit. By February, it did not even resemble a human appendage: the flesh and some muscle had fallen away, and what was left ballooned out of proportion—“two times its natural size, assuming a most sickening and revolting appearance.” Crammed into a large room with fifty other wounded men, McCarter was on track to an early grave. The ward surgeon, Dr. Edling, arrived with a sheaf of papers. He was unusually solicitous this morning, McCarter noticed, taking personal interest in his condition. After the doctor left, an extravagant meal arrived: roast beef, potatoes, bread, mince pie and a glass of bitter ale. They were fattening him up for the kill, the private thought. The next day, a nurse brought him a fresh gown and told him he was wanted in the office of the head surgeon. Three doctors greeted McCarter warmly. The wound, a mush of broken bone fragments and a bullet, was unveiled and studied. McCarter asked if they were now going to saw his arm off.

  “Oh, no, I hope that won’t be necessary,” said Dr. Edling. “We have brought you up here to place you in more comfortable and quiet quarters. You shall receive our best attention.”

  Taken aback, McCarter wondered what had happened to change his fortune. The doctor produced a lengthy handwritten note in a spiky penmanship that was vaguely familiar to the private. “A letter . . . from a friend of yours, who wants you to be well cared for. He is a friend of my own, too.” The doctor showed McCarter the note, but covered the signature at the end. The wounded young man now recognized Thomas Meagher’s scrawl, the letters unable to keep up with the mind that committed them to paper.

  “How . . . how di-di—did he nuh, nuh, know I wah—was here?”

  The doctor kept his secret, pressed his fingers to his lips, smiled. Private McCarter never found out how General Meagher got wind of his whereabouts. And he never heard from him again. In March, McCarter was released to a hospital in his home state of Pennsylvania, his right arm still attached at the shoulder, though largely useless except when he formed his fingers around a pen to cautiously craft the most exquisite calligraphy a certain lover of longhand had ever seen.

  Ambrose Burnside was out, Fighting Joe Hooker was in. The mood lifted considerably at Falmouth when another major general took over command of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker outfitted his men in new uniforms and brought in wagonloads of fresh food from a supply line that seemed to stretch the length of the Rappahannock. Clean latrines were dug, cabins and tents sanitized. Brick ovens produced hot bread every other day. Robert E. Lee was still across the river, about three miles downstream, camped beyond Marye’s Heights. Hooker was eager to take a whack at the rebels, but he couldn’t go anywhere until the ground firmed up in early spring.

  When Meagher returned to camp after nearly a two-month absence, his men were so happy to see him they serenaded him. He spent his first weeks writing copious correspondence to the War Department, occasionally dropping Abe Lincoln’s name, trying to get a leave for the original three regiments he’d recruited from New York. “The Brigade has ceased to be a brigade,” he wrote Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war. Days went by without a reply. Worse than a rejection, the high command ignored him—punishment, perhaps, for the Death Feast.

  Those close to him saw that Meagher was at sea in his life. He had rallied his fellow exiles to this fight, and so carried the weight of his words. But he did not move men to die just because it was his great gift. He believed that hope for the Irish in America would never be realized if the nation remained torn in two. And he understood that his brigade, in this new year, was a force for ensuring that humans would never again be owned by other humans in the United States. As for freeing Ireland, well . . . someday, lads, someday. These convictions, hardened by the losses of Horgan and Haggerty, of Kavanagh and Clooney and dozens of others whose young faces came to him at night when he tried to sleep with a gut full of whiskey, had cost him standing within the fractious diaspora of Irish America. No longer was the press friendly. “We did not cause this war,” wrote the Boston Pilot. “But vast numbers of our people have perished in it.” The commentary ranged from cynical to hostile—as if it were up to Meagher to lead the Irish out of a war as he had led them into it.

  He never lost the talent, or the nerve, to take the ordinary and try to make it memorable. Stuck in winter mud, stuck without a way forward, stuck by the shunning silence from the War Department, Meagher concocted a St. Patrick’s Day festival that the Army of the Potomac would never forget. For the second time in this war, he put his men to work laying out a track for a steeplechase. He bargained for champagne and whiskey with the sutlers who trailed the Union supply line. A chapel of boughs and pine posts was assembled, and there on the morning of March 17, Father Corby commenced the saint’s holiday with Mass, cannons firing in place of church bells ringing. For a day and a night, the forlorn Falmouth camp was thick with brogue, blarney and bluster, and everybody wanted a part of it. Mostly it was a festival of sports: horse and mule racing, and foot racing by the swiftest of soldiers, contests to chase down a greased pig, contests of strength, all with cash prizes. More than 10,000 showed up, including the highest-ranking generals of the army—Joe Hooker, prominently. Meagher, the master of ceremonies, dressed in a white beaver-skin hat, green scarf and blue swallowtails, launched the races with a warning.

  “Stand from under,” he said. “If that stage gives way, you will be crushed by four tons of major generals.” This got him a big laugh, even from the four tons. Long wooden tables groaned with thirty-five hams, a side of roasted ox, fire-baked pigs stuffed with turkeys. And for the officers: ten gallons of rum, eight cases of champagne and punch spiked with twenty-two gallons of whiskey. Meagher’s face had gotten fleshy and worn in this winter of dread. But just as he had made merr
y music with his clarinet at Stonyhurst while under suspension, as he had grinned his way through readings of verse while awaiting execution at his cell in Clonmel, as he had “laughed till the woods rang around” in a shepherd’s hut reunion in Tasmania, Meagher always found a way to find scraps of joy in a cellar of despair. He needed those moments, needed to mark them in memory in order to call on them later in melancholy, to keep himself from giving up.

  His last battle with the brigade got under way in late April 1863. It was Joe Hooker’s turn to move the set pieces, and he designed a flanking move on General Lee’s left. The diminished Irish unit crossed the Rappahannock on April 30 and camped at the hamlet of Chancellorsville. Hooker had nearly twice the number of men as Lee’s Confederates, but only half the nerve. He struck first, and withered quickly as the rebels did not fold and the Union men got bogged down in a tangle of brush called the Wilderness. Lee sent Stonewall Jackson around back, to encircle the attackers from their rear. He cut the Army of the Potomac to pieces. When the Irish were sent to the front, they ran into fleeing Federals. Their orders were changed from charging to holding the line of retreating soldiers at bayonet point. The losses were horrific. Captain John Lynch exploded in front of his men when he was hit by an artillery shell. Directing troop traffic, Meagher took a few steps one way. A minute later, the ground where he had stood was cratered by another shell.

  After three days of battle, Hooker straggled back across the river. He had lost about 18,000 men—dead, wounded, captured or missing—to 13,000 for the South. Among the casualties was the best general of the Civil War. As Jackson was galloping out of the brush, a Confederate commander mistook his troops for Federals. “Pour it into them, boys!” shouted Major John Barry. Jackson had always believed that a righteous God had directed the general in battles on behalf of the slaveholders. If so, the providential design at the end was a cruel twist: shot by his own men, Stonewall Jackson died eight days later.