The image of Meagher at Gaines’s Mill proffered by some historians is not entirely flattering: one modern historian claims that General Meagher ‘led his Irish brigade with the courage found in a bottle, galloped about drunkenly, trying to rally everyone he saw.’ One of French’s men, James Miller, wrote that he saw Meagher ride into a group of walking wounded and single one man out: ‘He struck him over the head with his sword, knocking him down, then galloped on.’ Rumours of Meagher’s tipsiness—tinged with anti-Irish bias or not, and coloured by the rigorous temperance of some soldiers and officers—would pursue him throughout the war. But random reports should in justice be put against the fact that none of Meagher’s Irish Brigade ever offered such an unflattering picture of Meagher. Father Corby the chaplain admitted in his memoirs that, ‘especially when no fighting was going on,’ Meagher’s ‘convivial spirit would lead him too far.’ But Corby insisted that he was never drunk in battle, that love of sport and joviality caused him to drink, and his bouts were ‘few and far between.’ Would it be possible, in any case, for an habitually and dangerously drunken general to retain his junior and senior officers’ regard? No one else reported less than glowingly that evening of his brigade’s performance. Colonel Estevan of the Confederate cavalry said, ‘A Federal Brigade commanded by Meagher, consisting chiefly of Irishmen, offered the most heroic resistance. After a severe struggle, our men gave way (beyond Gaines’s Mill), and retired in great disorder.’
Meagher and his staff sheltered under trees as rain began, and watched the Union army troop past them all night. In the final hours of dark, Meagher’s men and French’s were the last to cross from the north of the Chickahominy and climb up the river bank on to a low plateau where the exhausted Union army was collapsing behind roughly thrown-up fortifications. Captain Conyngham observed that the two mighty armies slept within a mile of each other.
Next morning, after a few hours’ fitful sleep, Meagher was told to guard the Union rear as the army withdrew. This order reflected Sumner’s trust in Meagher and his men. In air full of explosions, Meagher drew up the 88th New York, Mrs Meagher’s Own, behind fences by the road which led south to White Oak Swamp and Malvern Hill, with the Union army behind him slipping south to their base on the James. As he rode along the lines of his men on Dolly, a number of officers, including Captain Hogan of that regiment, asked him to dismount, since his uniform and his grey horse made him a target. ‘If I’m killed,’ he said, ‘I would rather be killed riding this horse than lying down.’ Father Corby admitted in his memoirs, however, that on the Peninsula the more flamboyant officers of the brigade did make brilliant targets. They possessed ‘great Austrian knots of gold on their shoulders, besides numerous other ornamentations in gold, which glistened in the Virginia sun enough to dazzle one.’ In future campaigns, they learned to dress more plainly.
When ordered themselves to retreat, the brigade now had to pass through their old Fair Oaks camp which the engineers were putting to the torch. Father Corby, the chaplain, saw the chapel tent go up and thought it more replaceable than his books and manuscripts inside.
On Sunday morning, 29 June, they encamped in fields and the edges of woods just a little south of that same Richmond & York River railroad where they had fought at the start of the month, and close to the small rail village of Savage’s Station. It was not till 4.00 p.m. that the Rebel artillery started pounding at Sumner’s men in their clearings in front of the village. Mysteriously, Meagher was not in official command that day; he had been placed under 24-hour open arrest on the retreat through Fair Oaks the evening before. There is no record of the arrest in Meagher’s War Department file and no charges resulted. Meagher, at Nugent’s side, took up official control after twenty-four hours and wrote the brigade dispatch. ‘It gives me the heartiest satisfaction to bear witness to the able and intrepid manner with which Colonel Nugent fulfilled the duties which devolved upon him during my arrest.’
At Savage’s Station, when General Sumner himself commanded the brigade forward, Captain Conyngham recorded, ‘About four thousand went off at once with a roar which might have drowned the musketry.’ Sumner and the arrested Meagher, side by side and friendly, were delighted to see Mrs Meagher’s Own, the 88th New York, drive off the men of a Virginia battery and their supporting infantry, haul two guns away, spike them with broken-off lengths of bayonet, and chop the carriages to pieces with engineers’ axes. As Dr Ellis wrote: ‘night came on and put an end to the carnage.’ The two armies stood basically where they had that morning. Meagher’s brigade, wavering with fatigue, held their section of line as the bulk of the army was again withdrawing south, along the roads through White Oak Swamp. Surgeon Ellis had to do what he could for the wounded and say goodbye to them. Father Ouillet and a new chaplain named Scully volunteered to stay with them. It was midnight before the Irish themselves were ordered to fall back urgently. Many had left their rations behind when they charged, and could not now retrieve them. The enemy was continually around their flanks, firing at them from the woods, racing them towards the higher ground just beyond the swamp.
In daylight, the Irish Brigade were halted around a farm belonging to a Mr Nelson. They knew they would fight another battle that humid afternoon. Yet Meagher, like many of the others, seemed suited by temperament to the light-headed, febrile utterness of the moment. As Cuchulainn, the Irish warrior-hero of the Ulster cycle, was transformed by process of battle, undergoing a so-called battle-rage which turned him into another and more terrible being, so Meagher—whatever Mrs Daly thought—seemed to let battle transform him, and reward him somehow with its frenzy.
Thus, when General Lee pursued that very afternoon a strategy to destroy McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Stonewall Jackson attacking from the north while Lee attacked along the roads from the west, a lack of Rebel orchestration permitted Meagher’s Irish, with the apparent enthusiasm of their general, first to be used against Jackson to the north, and then later in the evening to be marched down the Long Bridge Road towards the village of Glendale to take on a Confederate brigade of A. P. Hill.
Lieutenant Turner remembered that after stemming the initial assault by Jackson, the Irish Brigade were ordered to line up to protect Hazzard’s battery. Meagher ordered the men to lie down on their arms. Turner wrote:
A round shot ricochets, strikes with a dull, heavy sound the body of a fine brave fellow in the front rank, and bounds over him. He is stone dead; the two men on each side of him, touching him as they lay, rise up, lift the stiff corpse, lay it under a tree in the rear, cover his face with his blanket, come back to the old place, lie down on the same old fatal spot … A hundred thousand of these Celts would—but no matter: What is speculation here?
When Jackson’s corps were ‘pressing us badly’ at five in the afternoon that day, the US gunboats Galena, Aroostook and Jacob Bell opened up from Turkey Bend on the James River to the south with shot and shell from their immense rifled guns. After eight o’clock in the evening, the Irish, having stood up and fought off an assault by Jackson’s men on Hazzard’s guns, were ordered to march in quick time 2 miles west towards the Glendale crossroads and Lee. General Sumner observed them clatter up the road and roared at them, ‘Boys, you’re going to save another day!’ They were lined up along the north-south-running Quaker Road to resist the charge of A P. Hill’s last reserves, the brigade of Confederate General Anderson. Here there was a sharp short contest. One Union officer wrote, ‘The enemy ceased firing. We give tremendous cheers. They send us a terrible volley which we return. Both parties give three cheers and the day’s work is done.’
And so another dazed night retreat began. Bull Sumner, riding along the line of withdrawal, told Meagher he believed the Second Corps had won the battle for McClellan, and should have been allowed to remain in place. But withdrawal from a held battlefield seemed to be standard with the Army of the Potomac.
Inland from the safety of Harrison’s Landing, an open, farmed slope named Malvern Hill rose uninterrupted b
etween two creeks. The Rebels would need to use the road which ran up Malvern Hill if they wanted a last chance to race to the James River and cut the Union army off. During the night, Meagher’s men stumbled up and over Malvern Hill and fell into position beside Meagher’s friend Sickles and his brigade. Meagher was able to eat beef and drink coffee with Generals Richardson and Sumner, older men who nonetheless matched him for strange wakefulness. Other men fell profoundly asleep on that last hill before the James River.
At six o’clock in the morning of 1 July, the last of the seven days of that intense campaign, Meagher and his men, if not already awake, were roused and put into position amongst cannon on the south side of the hill. Meagher, wild with sudden rage, rode across the lines of his advancing men to upbraid the colonel of the 63rd New York, Colonel Phelan, the saloon owner from downtown Manhattan in whose premises Meagher had first been elected a captain, for dilatoriness in going forward to protect one of the artillery batteries. ‘Give me your sword, sir! You are a disgrace to the Irish Brigade. I place you under arrest, sir.’ But Meagher and Phelan, fatigued and half-crazed, quickly seemed to forget the confrontation.
After the action began, at three o’clock in the afternoon in this case, the Irish Brigade were able to rest on that blind side of the hill. Indifferent to what could not be seen, though it could certainly be heard, some of the Irish had found and slaughtered sheep. They were cooking the meat and were just about to eat when, over the crest, Fitz John Porter’s desperately pressed brigade saw fresh Rebels massing to their front. Meagher was at the time seated chatting at the headquarters of General Sumner, when Sumner got a message and ordered him to take his four regiments forward. Sickles’s brigade was similarly ordered up.
Cresting the hill a little after six, Meagher and his men met the remnants of the 9th Massachusetts carrying their dying colonel, Cass, to the rear. A staff captain witnessed this encounter. ‘As they recognized a fellow countryman,’ Captain Auchmuty wrote, ‘they gave a yell that drowned the noise of the guns.’ Further along, Meagher encountered McClellan and his staff. Little Mac had spent a large part of the day on the Galena in the river, a fact which would be used against him in a later presidential campaign, but he had landed at 3.30, and was now in place. Hats were doffed. Meagher and his men did not glimpse the terror behind McClellan’s neat features and judicious frown. Brigadier-General Butterfield, a member of Little Mac’s highly Democrat staff, grabbed the distinctive green flag of the leading regiment of the brigade. He ‘exhibited the ardour of a general who was personally interested in its honour, and thereby renewed and re-excited the spirit of the advance.’
Over the top of the hill, the brigade, the 69th leading, was then sent forward against a wood on the left where the Rebels were concealed. Surgeon Thomas Ellis was impressed that Meagher was riding at the head of his troops and ordering them to fling everything off, including their jackets, and go into battle in shirt sleeves. A rifle ball grazed Meagher’s hand. ‘Coming in contact with the enemy,’ Meagher wrote in his battle report, ‘the Sixty-ninth poured in an oblique fire upon them with a rapid precision and an incessant vigor.’ They repeated the process of advancing and firing, again and again. Their smoothbore muskets had become hot and powder-clogged when the 88th took the front line, and the 69th ‘cooly and steadily’ moved out by the flank. Then the 69th moved up again when the 88th exhausted its ammunition. Meagher declared in his report that it was ‘simple justice’ to praise their composure and steadiness ‘under an unremitting fire of some hours.’
Sergeant Haggarty, brother of Lieutenant-Colonel Haggarty killed at Bull Run, was amongst the brigade’s dead that evening. Captain O’Donoghoe of Bantry, County Cork, twenty-two years old, took his death wound in these exchanges at Malvern. Lieutenant Temple Emmet, grand-nephew of the martyr Emmet, was wounded. In a last attempt to break the Union position, Irishmen of General Semmes’s 10th Louisiana struggled hand to hand with Irishmen of the 69th New York. Near a Union battery far up the Quaker Road, the farm road which ran through the battlefield, a very tall Louisiana Irishman fell in cross-fire and marked the furthest advance for the Confederacy that day. His motivation—to chastise Lincoln and then to liberate Ireland—had got him to the top of that incline above the James before dispatching him into the void.
The losses of Lee at Malvern Hill were so severe that many Union generals, including one-armed Irish-American General Phil Kearny, wanted McClellan to counter-attack. Kearny said of the plan for withdrawal to Harrison’s landing; ‘Such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.’ But McClellan was committed. After two hours’ rest amongst the dying on Malvern Hill, the Irish Brigade marched numbly through the dark hours.
It rained ferociously, units lost each other, officers lost their men. But the Confederates, who had sacrificed 5,600 men the evening before, were incapable of taking advantage. In early morning, Meagher watched his men collapse inside the half-built ramparts of the new federal base at Harrison’s Landing on the James. They had no tents, few clothes, little equipment, but the river below was full of supply boats. Their morale was high, said Conyngham. ‘The retreat, for retreat it was, was ably conducted in the face of vastly superior numbers of men, brave and desperate as ourselves.’ The ‘vastly superior numbers’ of the other army was one of the false articles of faith for McClellan supporters.
That morning the brigade was paid, and money travelled to New York and Ireland.
In new underwear and clothing, eating fresh beef and bread, most of the Irish Brigade looked refreshed. But General Bull Sumner seemed aged and exhausted. Meagher showed Sumner the battle flag of the 69th riddled by Confederate rifle shots. ‘That is a holy flag, general,’ said Meagher, but Sumner—in less than martial mood—did not respond. It was not yet Meagher’s turn to think of futility. The Union deaths were to him still more sacred than obscene. The 69th New York had certainly made its contributions to the holy dead and noble maimed. It had been reduced from 750 men at Fair Oaks to 295 at the end of Malvern Hill. The 88th and the 63rd had lost more than 500 men between them. Meagher now made an ambitious but also tribal proposal to the Adjutant-General to put all the Irish regiments in the Union army under his command. No doubt his request was praised in the brigade officers’ mess tents, but it served only to annoy the War Department: the organisation of troops on ethnic lines was now considered ‘unwise and inexpedient.’
… I’m finally cheated by the Irishman,’ Mitchel, beginning to suspect that his association with the South made him unfashionab le, had complained in a letter from Paris that year to his sister Matilda. Along with occasional Union blockade-delayed payment from the Charleston Mercury office had been news of his son James having a hard time but surviving Bull Run and other engagements. But after visiting newspapers in Paris, particularly the Constitutionel and its remarkable woman editor Marie Martin, Mitchel brought back a new sense that the Union would not easily yield. Now in Choisy-le-Roi in the summer of 1862, he and Jenny waited fretfully for reports from the Peninsula, and began to consider that at least one of them should be in the Confederacy, with the boys. The best way home, said Southerners he spoke to in Paris, was to evade the Union blockade by going to the North and then passing through the lines. If he chose to penetrate the South, Jenny and Isabelle should go with Father Kenyon to Ireland, and the two other daughters—Henrietta and Minnie—would stay in Paris at Sacré Coeur.
As mentioned previously, Henrietta had in early 1861 converted to Catholicism, as her sister Isabelle would at a later date. The scrupulous Mother Superior showed Mitchel the archbishop’s directive that the nuns must avoid ‘conversion by surprise,’ but I instantly wrote the required consent. For this acquiescence I was most earnestly blamed by some of my connections.’ The nuns of Sacré Coeur were now Henty’s real home, and Minnie was also attracted by the Order’s mystique. Whereas Willy wanted to be with James in the 1st Virginia.
‘So there is another break-up of our household,’ said Mitchel, blaming circumstance.
‘… Two trembling and saying their prayers in Ireland; two passing anxious hours in the Paris convent; two in camp and garrison beyond the Atlantic; and two making ready to penetrate the Yankee blockade in disguise, and by way of New York.’
21
WOEFULLY CUT UP
If Irishmen had not long ago established for themselves a reputation for fighting, with a consummate address and a superlative ability; if it had not long ago been accepted, as a gospel truth, that Galway beats Bannagher, Bannagher beats the devil; and if the boys of the Irish Brigade had not, with an untoward innocence, shown themselves, the first chance they had, as trustworthy as their blessed old sires … the Irish Brigade would not have had any more fighting to do than anyone else.
General Thomas Francis Meagher,
New York, 1862
In July 1862, Meagher got permission to return with wounded, pale Lieutenant Temple Emmet to New York to recruit. General Dan Sickles travelled with Meagher for the same purpose—recruiting for his Excelsior Brigade. They were shocked to find that after their friend McClellan had performed that great manoeuvre of shifting his base, the New York Times implied McClellan and other Democrats in the army might be fighting the war with less than a full heart. Though it probably made no dent on the joy of reunion with Libby, the Republican press was labelling as Copperheads, from the venomous snake of that name, those who feared the emancipation of slaves would flood the labour market. That is, it was insulting the Irish proletariat from which Meagher now sought to recruit. On top of that, the huge casualty lists from the Peninsula were themselves a drag on enlistments.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 51