About the same time as Meagher’s fall, General Richardson was preparing for a general advance along the line, when a Rebel case-shot exploded nearby and felled him. It was a fatal wound, and he was carried off the field. Sumner called for the young former regular soldier Brigadier General Hancock, to take over Richardson’s division. Hancock galloped along the lines held by the Second Corps to report for duty. Arriving behind the Irish, he told them to hold. Until he gave this sensible order, they had crazily thought they would be attacking the road again.
The casualties from Meagher’s four regiments were 540 men. Of the 120 newcomers who had refused safe provost duty, 75 were either killed or wounded. It was one o’clock. Meagher had by now been carried to the rear concussed, and the brigade withdrawal which General McClellan would praise in his report was conducted by Colonel Bourke of the 63rd New York. General McClellan’s report read:
The Irish Brigade sustained its well-earned reputation. After suffering terribly in officers and men, and strewing the ground with their enemies as they drove them back, their ammunition nearly expended, and their commander, General Meagher, disabled by a fall from his horse, shot under him, this Brigade was ordered to give place to General Caldwell’s brigade, which advanced to a short distance in its rear. The lines were passed by the Irish Brigade breaking by company to the rear, and General Caldwell’s by company to the front, as steady as on drill.
Bull Sumner would mention Meagher in dispatches as one of those general officers he thanked for ‘their zeal and devotion.’ Some time later, visiting wounded Colonel Barlow in New York, Mrs Daly declared, ‘Barlow gave a fine description of the fighting of the Irish Brigade and said that Meagher rode before his troops during fire.’
During the afternoon, hundreds of wounded of the brigade had to be carried to a large straw stack on the Roulette farm which answered for a hospital. Union troops at the Burnside Bridge, a mile and a half south of the place where the Irish Brigade had suffered their losses, began an assault late in the day which took them into the streets of Sharpsburg. A Confederate counter-attack drove them back to the outskirts at dusk. But the battle was certainly, and in spite of the carnage, a Union victory.
That night the brigade rested amongst the maimed in the fields, half a mile behind General Hancock’s front line at the Sunken Road. In darkness pricked by the lanterns of surgeons and chaplains lay the day’s 25,000 casualties. By next morning Meagher was recovered and was back with his troops, who retrieved their knapsacks and breakfast amongst shattered trees. An order to renew the attack was expected. But McClellan did not try to exploit the good ground he held, to bring into play his 34,000 fresh troops, and drive Lee into the Potomac. For failing to act, Washington would judge him harshly.
Meagher was called on by General Hancock to speak with Confederate General Roger Pryor, a Virginian about his own age, former Congressman and newspaper editor, who appeared from the direction of Sharpsburg in front of the Sunken Road under a flag of truce. Hancock may have thought that to deal with the political Pryor, the political Meagher would serve best. Pryor suggested a pause in hostilities to allow the burial of the Rebel dead who lay with Hancock’s dead around the bend in the lane. Though considerations of decomposition and respect were urgent—Hancock had himself needed to chase away Union plunderers from the Sunken Road dead—the dealings were tragically abortive. Like McClellan, Hancock was edgy, concerned about the possible renewal of the mayhem. He ordered Meagher to seek proof from Pryor that the truce was sanctioned by Lee. Pryor admitted he had no such authority; the idea had arisen out of discussions between pickets of the opposing forces. The day went by without either commander, McClellan or Lee, seeking an official truce.
All night the Union troops heard the groan and rumble of wagons, and next morning the Rebels were gone. The brigade advanced to occupy the lines vacated the night before by the enemy, and the burial of dead men and horses began. Many Irishmen now expressed the strain of the recent battle by bursting into tears when untangling the corpses of Rebels of sixteen years from those of grandfathers. Meagher found his partial release in letter-writing, and his letter to Libby was that of a man undaunted:
It was an awful battle. Fancy a deafening storm of artillery and musketry raging along a line of over two miles in length, and when at last it subsided, the glorious Stars and Stripes flying triumphantly three miles beyond where the Rebel colors had been planted in defence. The poor little Brigade was woefully cut up—I have not more than 750 in Camp today—the best of my officers too, killed.
If there was a muted sense of triumph in the fields around Sharpsburg, in Washington there was a jubilation the battle-shocked troops could hardly have imagined. Captain Gosson was in Washington a week after Antietam, in a capital frenetically celebrating the Union victory. While in a theatre box listening to the songstress Mrs Wood singing the ‘Bold Soldier Boys,’ he saw an elderly gentleman in the box below with a bouquet of flowers in his hands. He drew his sword, dragged the flowers out of the man’s hands and delivered them by swordpoint at Mrs Wood’s feet. As far as Washington was concerned, grace had re-entered the war.
As arranged, Jenny and Isabelle Mitchel were by late summer, 1862, back in Ireland, with Father Kenyon in Tipperary’s soothing hill country, and planning a visit to Newry to see Mitchel’s sister Matilda. For Jenny it was her first time home since she joined John in Van Diemen’s Land, but she missed Willy, who had won his argument about participating in the war. Confederate prospects seemed good: Lee’s army having rebuffed McClellan’s mighty host on the Peninsula, one Confederate outflanking of Washington would bring a settlement. Would Willy have even finished his training before that happened?
Mitchel learned that the Hamburg Line of steamers took French passengers in a small steamer to England from Le Havre, and put them directly on board the line’s flagship Belorussia at Southampton without their having to land. However, when the little French steamer arrived with Mitchel and Willy aboard in Southampton Water, the Belorussia had not yet arrived. Mitchel found himself illegally ashore in England. ‘Walking through Southampton we saw a newspaper placard announcing the second battle of Manassas (Second Bull Run), and the supposed defeat of the Rebels. This was of course a Northern dispatch, and the English we spoke to said Northern dispatches were to be treated with a grain of salt.’ At last the Belorussia left port, and by 23 September docked in New York.
John Mitchel and his Rebel son booked into a Broadway hotel: ‘Many absurd-looking officers, with plumes in their hats, were stamping round in the reading room and office, expounding to civilians on some startling newspaper army reports.’ These reports concerned a battle in western Maryland at a place named Antietam, where, though his father did not know it, James Mitchel and the 1st Virginia had had a harsh time. This would turn out to be a crucial Union victory, but amidst Northern propaganda, Mitchel had no means of knowing that either. He and Willy reached Washington by way of Baltimore. Here he ran the risk of identification, and so put up at an obscure hotel and sent a message to a young pro-Confederate lawyer of his acquaintance. The lawyer turned up in a funk. ‘Why are you here? … This place is peopled with spies.’
Mitchel eventually made his arrangements through Southern contacts. John and Willy were to cross the Potomac well to the south of Washington, beyond Camp Springs, where the river broadened, turned south-east, and was not guarded by pickets nor by as many gunboats. Travelling out of Washington, they met up with two Confederate officers who had been to Maryland on some secret mission, and ultimately the four of them approached the farmhouse of an old man who had got others into the South. The Mitchels were to undertake their adventure in a party of eleven, including the Confederate officers. Amongst those waiting in the farmhouse were two Hassidic Jews, with bales of goods they hoped to sell in Virginia, and a man dressed in blue Yankee cloth, supplier to Confederate sutlers, who had an Irish accent and seemed to recognise Mitchel. The mixed but colourful party left the farm after midnight, but the vessel the
old man had sent them to was in awful repair and not large enough for everyone and their goods.
All the next day they waited at and around the house as Union gunboats inspected the shore through binoculars. After dusk, the farmer brought out a second boat from its hiding place and it was hauled down on to the beach. Now, between both boats, there was room for all. Mitchel and his son felt unsafe crossing in the dark, and indeed the other boat with the traders and their goods aboard was almost immediately intercepted by Union sailors. ‘Two men jumped on board the little boat, drove it ashore, rolled out the Israelites’ goods, stove the boat with an axe.’ In Mitchel’s boat the Confederate officers decided that the patrols were too thick. They rowed back to the Northern shore, hid the skiff and lost themselves in the woods until the next night. The Irishman in the blue shirt and pants had been intercepted in the first boat, and by the time Mitchel, Willy and the Confederate officers secretly landed, he had turned informer, leading a party of twenty Union soldiers and sailors up to the farmhouse. The soldiers broke in, smashed trunks and cupboards, and demanded information on all who had been sheltering there.
It rained all night in the woods, and the Mitchels and their two Confederate officers could not light a fire. The next day, the Confederates bought a better skiff from a fisherman. It was still small for the party, but the night was calm and the river perfectly smooth. Though lights of gunboats could be seen out in the river, the crossing was almost routine. On the far side, still in Union-held territory, they travelled uneventfully in a spring wagon well to the south-east of the main bodies of troops. They did not encounter Union troops at all, and arrived by afternoon at the little depot at Milford on the Richmond & Fredericksburg line. There they simply waited for a train to the Confederate capital.
So Mitchel and Willy came to wartime Richmond, a self-possessed, proudly surviving city set on escarpments above the James. It was frenetic, full of brave, determined women, and pale-faced soldiers with injuries from which there would be no recovery. The Mitchels stayed first at the home of an old Washington friend, Mr John Dooley, a journalist. Dooley, a former major in the 1st Virginia, had been invalided out, but still had two sons in that regiment in which James Mitchel was also serving, by now as a captain.
Willy Mitchel enlisted immediately and desired to be posted to the same renowned regiment. Mitchel himself seemed calm about the choice. Perhaps he did not yet understand how suddenly regiments could be consumed. His host’s son Private John Dooley certainly knew: he and James Mitchel had stood on Cemetery Hill outside Sharpsburg at 4.00 p.m. on the afternoon of the battle and seen their companies torn apart by Union guns from beyond the Antietam. The advancing Union infantry poured in such fire that day that of some 450 Virginians, barely half remained to retreat through the streets of Sharpsburg. Not that individual gallantry had been borne away. ‘I was afraid of being struck in the back,’ John Dooley wrote, ‘and I frequently turned half around in running, so as to avoid if possible so disgraceful a wound.’ A long-legged captain, possibly James, ran backwards for the same purpose, and Dooley kept pace with him.
Mitchel called on President Jefferson Davis at the neo-classical Confederate White House. Though he found he was not considered fit for service in the field—indeed, there was room to wonder what manner of soldier he would make—there was an instant offer of employment for him. He took over editorship of one of Richmond’s two most important dailies, the proadministration Richmond Daily Enquirer. The Enquirer was a broad-sheet, published by Tyler, Wise and Allegre from a Greek revival building in Richmond. Despite the withdrawal of Lee’s army from the North after Antietam in September, the paper was still in fine editorial fettle by early October, when Mitchel took over the editorship. Amongst its functions was to provide communication across the lines of war: ‘Wiesbaden—I am indeed sorry to learn you have been so ill but glad that you are quite recovered … Answer through New York Daily News.’ But the chief vocation of the Enquirer, apart from support of Jeff Davis, was wrath against the invasive North, an emotion into which Mitchel entered readily. ‘The North is like a desperado who throws himself into an abyss in order to draw his adversary down … it has lost its liberty—we will preserve ours. Its peoples are subjects—ours shall continue citizens and freemen.’ He wrote off Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation after Antietam as the ploy of a US President desirous of ultimate re-election. Mitchel must nonetheless have flinched at the casualty lists from battlefields, and from Chimborazo Hospital south of 31st Street.
After Lee’s army departed western Maryland, what was left of the Irish Brigade and of Hancock’s division marched over the Potomac to Harper’s Ferry, and to wooded Bolivar Heights, above the steep-streeted, burned-out little town where the Shenandoah met the Potomac. Here on 1 October they were visited by President Lincoln, accompanied on horseback by McClellan. The President was grateful to an army which had enabled him to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, but some of the working-class Irish in the ranks were probably dubious about it.
Libby Meagher came down from New York to visit her husband in a very sociable camp, marked by dinners under canvas, and horse-races. She admired the mountainous scenery and on Sunday was proud to ride to Mass with him down into the narrow-valleyed town at the head of the regiment. Father Corby described her as ‘a woman of marked character and possessing more than an ordinary degree of refinement and excellent virtues. She was a devout convert to the Catholic Church.’ Her husband’s survival merely amplified her faith in prayer’s power. But she must now perhaps have seen with concern some signs of fatigue and shock in him, and heard him cry out in his sleep for loss and terror.
A new regiment, the 116th Pennsylvania under Colonel Dennis Heenan, was assigned to the Irish organisation. They raised the numbers back up to 1,700. Private William McCarter, Irish-born, a tanner by trade, a stammerer by his own confession, was a member of the regiment and brought a fresh eye to the war and to General Meagher, describing him as younger than he actually was—about thirty-five years old, said McCarter, 5 feet 8 or 10 inches, ‘stout build, and had a clear high-colored complexion.’ He noticed that these days Meagher, although uniformed in camp in the full dress of his rank, dressed as a private soldier in battle. ‘In thorough military skill and in courage and bravery on the battlefield, he was second to none in the army of the Potomac,’ McCarter wrote later. McCarter also later claimed that ‘In kindness and thoughtfulness for his men he was the shining light and bright star of the whole Union Army.’ McCarter had seen Meagher take sick or wounded soldiers into his tent in cold weather.
Summoned to Meagher’s tent now because the general wanted to use him to copy orders, the highly literate McCarter found the general in fatigue dress, stretched out on a wooden bench covered with brown army blankets. His feet were propped up against an empty cracker box.
On a small, plain wooden table there were a few books, maps and a field glass. In another part of his tent stood a large empty box covered with an India-rubber blanket and holding three canteens. Nearby was a bright tin bucket full of clear spring water with a tin cup attached by a string. Along one of the sides of the tent were placed three or four camp stools and a writing desk … These articles constituted the entire furniture of General Meagher’s tent on Bolivar Heights, Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
McCarter recounted in the most intense detail, since it was his first experience of war, a small battle to which other officers of Meagher’s—Cavanagh, Conyngham, Turner, Lyons—devoted barely any attention. On 16 October, almost a month after Antietam, Meagher was ordered to march his brigade next morning to Charlestown, 6 or 7 miles south-west, to drive off a force of Confederates, said to number 3,000, sitting on the Union army’s flank. Departing through Harper’s Ferry, the troops sang ‘John Brown’s Body,’ for this was the town where Brown had made his final abolitionist gesture, and Charlestown was the site of his execution. The singing of an abolitionist song by largely Irish soldiers indicated that emancipation had achieved validity in th
e brigade. McCarter thought the Irish still an impressive body of men, with the 69th New York leading, then the brigade band, the 4th New York Artillery of six guns, the Pennsylvanians, then the 29th Massachusetts, the 63rd, the 88th and finally the ambulances.
Near a ridge about three quarters of a mile from Charlestown, Meagher’s veteran skirmishers, approaching the town, were met by massed fire from Rebels occupying upper rooms and roofs, and so halted. McCarter saw Meagher consulting with his staff. All regiments except for the 116th Pennsylvania, which was left to protect the artillery, were to charge the town. The brigade’s guns, 50 yards ahead of McCarter, were firing spherical case-shot into the streets ahead.
McCarter admired Meagher’s management of the scene. A signalman with a flag was positioned in a limb of a high tree commanding a view of Charlestown: ‘he kept General Meagher, who was constantly patrolling the ground on horseback between the signal station and his troops, fully informed of the movements of the rebel force within the town and on its outskirts.’ At last on Meagher’s command ‘Attention, forward, double quick, march,’ the 116th descended the hill. McCarter saw the long line of grey coats emerging from the edge of the town break without a shot being fired, and withdraw through the streets to vanish into fields and hills beyond. Amid ‘the deafening yells and cheers of the remaining portion of the brigade,’ General Meagher rode into town at the head of the 69th New York.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 53