This bright, evocative Sunday helped fix in place the idea that Irish and Union interests were identical. The offer to raise an Irish brigade had, according to the Daily Tribune, been accepted with great satisfaction by President Lincoln. The civilian committee of the brigade, of which Daly and James Topham Brady were effective members, financed a recruiting station located in a vacant store at 596 Broadway near the Metropolitan Hotel, and Irishmen from all over the city enrolled in such numbers as allowed Nugent and Michael Cavanagh to select only the better specimens. Of all foreign-born New Yorkers in 1861, 87 per cent were Irish, and a range of recent immigrants as well as New Yorkers of Irish origin presented themselves. Most were labourers, navvies, railroad-track-layers, hod-carriers, cabmen, streetcar-drivers, waiters from Delmonico’s, barkeepers. There were some enlistees from the New York Bar—indeed the energetic Judge Daly had a Bar committee to provide equipment and comforts to lawyers now going to war. Schoolteachers, academics and journalists such as Cavanagh also enlisted. A company of 150 trained militia from the 23rd Illinois, came to New York by rail and enrolled en masse. All the brigade surgeons were Irish-born. Chaplains came from Jesuit Fordham and from Notre Dame in Indiana.
One of the new arrivals in America was Lieutenant John Gosson, a gentleman horse lover from Swords in County Dublin. He was a characteristic Wild Goose: had served in the Austrian army, campaigned in Syria and most recently held a commission in the 7th Hungarian Hussars. Captain William H. Hogan of the brigade artillery was a New York newspaperman who had started the war as captain of a coastguard gunboat. Hogan took command of the already formed Napper Tandy Light Artillery of Brooklyn. There were also veterans from the British army who had served in India and the Crimea. Others had campaigned with Meagher’s younger brother Harry in the Papal Irish Brigade, some as recently as at Spoleto and Ancona, the two papal cities that had been lost to Italian forces the summer before.
During September’s mid-recruiting, MacManus’s body arrived in New York in its lead-lined coffin and under the care of two San Francisco Fenians. An obsequies committee was put in place to organise the body’s New York stay, and the three members were John O’Mahony, Colonel Meagher and Colonel of Militia Michael Doheny, himself a devout Fenian but in less than good health. On the committee’s behalf, Meagher was pleased to go up Madison Avenue to Archbishop Hughes’s residence to suggest that the remains of his friend be admitted to St Patrick’s Cathedral for a Requiem Mass. After all, Meagher pointed out, Hughes came from the same town as MacManus, Temo in County Fermanagh. The body would lie at first in a militia armoury and then, Meagher suggested, be taken to St Patrick’s in solemn procession. Hughes agreed, even though he was wary of Fenianism. MacManus was a Young Ireland hero, and Young Irelanders—Meagher, O’Gorman, Doheny—were powerful figures in the archbishop’s flock. The Mass was celebrated in St Patrick’s on 18 September, and the archbishop acknowledged the holiness of MacManus’s sacrifice, ‘upholding the right of an oppressed people to struggle for their liberation.’ Libby Meagher, if she wondered at the company the accidents of marriage had brought her into, was still fascinated both by the Irish question and by the solemnities of Catholicism.
After the Mass, thousands accompanied MacManus’s coffin downtown to the steamer Glasgow. The Catholic hierarchy of Ireland were for the most part determined not to admit to their churches the body that a secret, oath-bound society was using for its own purpose. In Cork, Meagher read, MacManus lay in state at a chapel under the jurisdiction of the Carmelite Order. In late October, it was accompanied by a crowd, estimated by some at 300,000, through the streets of Cork to the railway station. The American delegation had been enlarged by Doheny, Meagher’s friend and fellow recruit Michael Cavanagh, and John O’Mahony. On its way to Dublin, wherever the train paused, solemn crowds, rosary beads in hand, stood hatless to pay their respects.
Since Archbishop Cullen had flatly refused to admit the body to the procathedral of Dublin, it lay until 10 November in the Lecture Hall of the Mechanics’ Institute. As thousands visited it, the question revived as to who owned poor MacManus’s bones. At the Shelbourne Hotel, Terence’s sister met the American delegation in a reception room, but some of the non-Fenian men of ’48, James Cantwell, Father Kenyon, and John Martin who had shared the same exile as MacManus, were there too. They wanted to argue Miss MacManus out of letting the Fenians manage the remains.
The veterans of Young Ireland were considered to have been unduly chastened by their ’48 adventures and were looked upon by Fenians as laggards now. Miss MacManus told them that the men who had disinterred her brother in San Francisco and brought the remains ‘such a great distance with much labor and expense, were the only ones entitled.’ At a meeting of the Irish obsequies committee, Kenyon and Martin made another failed attempt to retrieve MacManus, and Smith O’Brien might have involved himself if he had not been on his bereavement travels in Europe. The young Fenian medical student John O’Leary remarked that his brethren were not always kind to the living Young Irelanders. They were all welcomed, however, in view of their past sufferings and friendship with MacManus, as honoured guests to the funeral.
On the day of the interment, the Metropolitan Police ‘abdicated their functions,’ said O’Leary, and left the control of the crowd entirely to the Fenian organisation. The coffin was carried atop an enormous funeral car, with the American delegation behind. The celebrant, who had recited the De Profundis as the coffin left the Mechanics Institute, was the Fenian priest Patrick Lavelle. Waiting to greet and join the procession, crowds had begun to assemble in Abbey Street as early as nine o’clock in the morning, in cheerless weather of ‘true November character.’ They fell in and followed the bier, behind the two bands playing the Dead March, the ceremonial harper on his own spectacular carriage, the Dublin committee and the pall bearers. The funeral cortège crossed to the south side of the Liffey at the Essex Bridge to enable sites sacred to the national cause to be visited. ‘At the Bank of Ireland and along the College railings,’ the Freeman’s Journal reported, ‘large crowds were assembled, who fell in and swelled the procession as it proceeded through Sackville Street.’ A further multitude were in place at Glasnevin in North Dublin when the bier arrived at 6.00 p.m. In a brief, impromptu funeral oration, Father Lavelle told the crowd, ‘The demonstration this day in the streets of Dublin will not be lost on the oppressor.’ He was ‘here to pronounce that in Terence Bellew MacManus there died one of the bravest and best of Ireland’s sons.’ In guttering torchlight, an oration crafted by James Stephens was delivered by Captain Smith, the San Francisco Fenian. ‘We have raised him from the grave, and with feelings that no King has ever won—could ever command—have borne him over a continent and two seas—the greatest space over which the dust of man has ever been carried by the faith, love and power of his kind.’
Next day, the establishment Irish Times piously regretted the event, not least since a cutting wind and sleet ‘must have tried the frame of the humble artisan.’ What was significant, however, was the power of the event on Fenian recruitment. The ornate monument erected above MacManus’s tomb implies to this day a line of succession between him and the Fenian leadership. And one outfall of the Fenian funeral was that relatively few Irishmen would cross the Atlantic specifically to join the Union army. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, in other words Fenianism, provided them with sufficient militancy and hope right at home.
Meagher had by the time of MacManus’s burial been to Boston, to address a public meeting at the Boston Music-Hall at which Governor John Andrew occupied the chair. Meagher referred to a period of Know-Nothing frenzy when Irish militia regiments had been disbanded by the Massachusetts authorities. ‘Every Irishman this side of Mason and Dixon’s line is with me. If there is one who is not, let him take the next Galway steamer and go home.’ He was credited with raising two regiments in Massachusetts, the Irish 28th and Yankee 29th Massachusetts.
In Philadelphia, Meagher sought to enlist a regiment of infantry
and one of dragoons! As he spoke, a Southern sympathiser rose in the audience to derail him with a question about his treatment of ‘the Irish girl who aided him in making his escape from Australia.’ Meagher hated to be dragged from fresh and glorious fervour back to melancholy Van Diemen’s Land and its moral squalor. In fact he would succeed in raising the Irish (and, in part, German) 116th Pennsylvania. But though it was dangerous for local officials dependent upon the support of the Irish community to oppose him too actively, neither Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania nor Governor Andrew of Massachusetts wanted their citizen volunteers subsumed in a brigade headquartered in New York. Each state had its quotas to fill, and Philadelphia had already lost a lot of the Irish Americans to the California Brigade.
Next, recruiting in New York! ‘Dined with Meaghers,’ wrote Mrs Daly for 6 October, ‘and went then to hear his recruiting oration. The oration was full of point, full of sarcasm and of wholesome truths … I like people who commit themselves.’ Her alienation set in again though, when Meagher criticised those old members of the 69th Militia who did not re-enlist. Had Corcoran still commanded, she argued, the 69th would have re-enlisted as a group: ‘but in Meagher they do not place such reliance. A countryman said of him a few days ago that God Almighty had just made him to step off a scaffold with a big speech in his mouth.’
But it was with the support of all other brigade officers that Colonel Meagher was confirmed as acting brigade commander on 21 October. The assigned camp of the Irish regiments of infantry and artillery was at Fort Schuyler, a fortress on the end of a peninsula in the Bronx. On 4 November the Dalys drove with Libby to visit, and were greeted on arrival by bands playing Irish airs. The men had decorated their blue caps with green cockades and the officers wore green plumes on their hats.
The Meaghers and the Dalys dined with the officers that day, and Meagher was frank about his ambitions. Mrs Daly wrote, ‘He is tempted to try for Brigadiership, and his wife will urge him on. She seems to be very fond of a soldier’s life and told me that she might join the brigade when it is ordered off.’ A week later, in Shields’s continuing failure to appear, there was a large meeting of the Irish leadership at the Dalys’ house in Clinton Street on the question of what should happen to the command of the brigade. The Meaghers went out with the Dalys afterwards. ‘In the carriage,’ wrote Mrs Daly of Tom Meagher, ‘I saw him exchange a very equivocal glance with his wife when the dear, innocent, frank judge told him his mind on the subject.’ Meagher told Libby he would not accept field command of the brigade. ‘ “No, Lizzie,” said he, “no, I certainly will not. You may look as cross as you please.” ’
Captain Lyons, who had as a boy visited Meagher in his cell at Clonmel, was an officer at Fort Schuyler, and saw the brigade’s officers put great pressure on Meagher to accept the command. Washington was about to allot an American-born officer, but a delegation from the brigade went to Washington by train to petition the Secretary of War and the President to appoint Meagher.
By mid-November, the troops were having such a good time at Fort Schuyler with visits and picnic days that Meagher wrote to the Secretary of War suggesting the brigade be transferred away from New York. The Department of War telegraphed back to Meagher: ‘Get your command ready for marching orders. We shall have quarters for you at Harrisburg in a few days.’ On 18 November 1861, the entire brigade travelled into Manhattan by ferry to see the 69th New York, commanded by Robert Nugent, leave for Washington. Outside Archbishop Hughes’s residence in Madison Avenue (the archbishop himself was in Ireland, encouraging Irish youth to enlist in the Union army), the regiments were presented with their battle flags. Smiling and dimpled Elizabeth Meagher had the honour of presenting to the premier regiment of the brigade, the 69th, the flag she herself had embroidered. On the green base were harps and sunbursts, and the motto No Retreat. The regiments soon to follow—the 63rd New York, the 88th New York, the 2nd Battalion, New York Volunteer Artillery—were also presented with flags by members of the Women’s Committee. It was in the ranks of the 88th that the survivors of Meagher’s Zouave Company were found, so the regiment had chosen to call itself ‘Mrs Meagher’s Own.’
By mid-December the assembled brigade found themselves not in Harrisburg but near Washington, in ground familiar to Meagher, as part of General Sumner’s division at Camp California, a muddy fortified position about 2 miles from Alexandria. General Edwin Vose Sumner, sixty-five years old, nicknamed ‘Bull’ and a veteran of the Mexican war and of the 1st Dragoons’ Indian engagements, was admired by ordinary soldiers, even if General McClellan, the darling of the Union army, thought that ‘nature had limited his capacity to a very narrow extent.’ That hopeful early winter, the Irish Brigade revelled in the possibility of war breaking out between the United States and Great Britain. A US ship had stopped a Royal Mail steamer, the Trent, in the Atlantic and taken from it the Confederate Commissioners to England and France, Mason and Slidell. There were protests from Whitehall, but the Union did not budge, considering Britain to favour the Rebels. Meagher told his men that if war did break out, ‘We’ll let the Yankees and the Germans handle the Confederates, and we’ll take care of the English.’ Lincoln authorised the return of the imprisoned commissioners, however, and the crisis passed.
On Christmas Eve 1861, in the constant downpour of northern Virginia, the Irish built a canopy of brush over a huge fire beside which men could recline and listen to musicians such as Johnny Flaherty, Bostonian fiddler of only fourteen years of age. His father accompanied him on the pipes. The brigade’s coloured servants slapped their hands on their knees and went ‘capering and whirling around.’ Songs that were sung that night included ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ‘Fontenoy,’ ‘The Green Above the Red.’ The Fordham Jesuit Father Ouillet and Father Dillon of Notre Dame celebrated Midnight Mass.
By now General Shields, arrived in New York, had at last been offered the command of a division in the army of Nathaniel P. Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. (He would soon enough be outmanoeuvred by a young Rebel general named Stonewall Jackson.) But before departing New York, he had told a number of influential people that Meagher was the right person to lead the Irish Brigade. To Mrs Daly’s chagrin, some New York Democrats had been urging Lincoln to grant Meagher a brigadier-general’s commission. The Senate was due to confirm a number of men to the rank of general in early February, and amongst the nominees were George Meade, Lew Wallace (author-to-be of Ben Hur), Winfield Scott Hancock, all of whom were or had been professional soldiers, and Meagher, whose training consisted of inspecting Irish militia regiments in the 1850s, and the chaotic experience of Bull Run. On 3 February 1862, the Senate ratified Meagher’s general’s star. He rode up from the lines at Camp California, across the river to Washington to celebrate at Willard’s Hotel with some of his officers, and ultimately accepted his glittering rank by military telegram. ‘I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of my commission of Brigadier General of Volunteers, and hereby signify my acceptance of the same. My age is thirty seven years, was born in Ireland and residence when appointed was the City of New York.’
Only three days later, Colonel Michael Corcoran was exchanged for Confederate prisoners and returned to New York to drink whiskey punch with the Dalys. But Meagher was serenely and confidently in place at the head of the brigade, and as spring approached, on 3 March, Elizabeth Meagher joyously visited his camp and sent her mother, Mrs Peter Townsend, 129 Fifth Avenue, New York, a simple message: ‘Safe here—all right.’
In keeping with Little Mac, their flamboyant commander General McClellan, thirty-five years old and showing a Napoleonic flair in camp, the Irish Brigade and their general developed a reputation for high colour. As Meagher got his headquarters properly organised, he slept in a tent with a boarded floor, his bed covered with a buffalo robe. Visiting generals could drink whiskey from the famed escapee’s portable kegs, and admire the skin of a Central American tiger shot in Costa Rica. Captain David Conyngham would describe the slightly portly general at his baize
-covered table in fairly florid terms: ‘There is a grandeur and stateliness and a sense of intellect and power about him, that makes you almost think you are looking upon one of the old Irish princes of medieval times.’ Father Corby, the 88th’s chaplain from Notre Dame, would also write that the general possessed a superior intellect, had had a liberal education, was a fine classical writer and a born orator. He was brave as a lion, but not above ‘going to confession from time to time, especially before battles.’
Under steely skies, the brigade, with the rest of Sumner’s division, were ordered out of Camp California to advance into Virginia. Meagher, muffled in a blue cloak, found the Virginian countryside, parched last July, was now a freezing morass. The brigade camped near Warneton Junction in a comfortless wood of dark, bare pines. Meagher reported making his way at night amongst poor fellows who had eaten their standard meal of compacted twists of vegetables, soluble in hot water, and now lay with their toes to the sky and knapsacks and coffee kettles under their heads. ‘They might as well have drowned us at once!’ he heard one soldier say. His brigade headquarters consisted of a few dozen stakes planted in the bog to form a circle, the spaces in between interlaced with branches and twigs, and the whole surmounted by his tent. ‘A basket of noble dimension,’ he called it.
That March of 1862 there existed a naive anxiety in the ranks of the three regiments—the artillery had been hived off—that the war would end before their timbre could be proven. Grant had captured Fort Donelson on the Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida had fallen. Union armies had landed along the coasts of the Carolinas. In the cockpit of Virginia, the Confederates pulled back towards the Rappahannock, halfway to Richmond. The Irish Brigade’s advance, watched by sullen Southerners, had involved a brief exchange of fire along the road to Warrenton, and an interesting find. On 31 March 1862, the War Department sent to Senator Ben Wade, chairman of the Joint Committee for Conduct of the War, ‘A certain carpet bag of papers, said to have been found at Manassas by General Meagher.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 49