He shook hands with the entire remaining brigade, and then turned what was left of the brigade over to Colonel Patrick Kelly. The officers presented him with a combined farewell address. ‘We regard you, General, as the originator of the Irish Brigade in the service of the United States … In resigning the command of the remnant of the Brigade, and going back to private life in obedience to the truest dictates of honour and conscience, rest assured, General, that you take with you the confidence and affection of every man in our regiments.’
When Meagher returned to New York, the mayor, Republican George Opdyke, called to offer him the hospitality of the city. In a formal address, the mayor declared that Meagher had given the nation ‘three of the most potent instruments—the eloquence of your voice, the force of your pen, and the power of your sword.’ Meagher was reassured enough to think he would not long be idle.
As early as 18 May 1863, Mitchel reported in the Enquirer that Meagher had resigned his commission because ‘he cannot recruit his brigade … This fact … proves to us what we have believed before, that the Irish of the Federal States are entirely sick of the war.’ There was some truth to that, but some wishful thinking too, as there was when the Enquirer held out hope to its increasingly distressed readership that the 3-year-service men of Lincoln’s army, 300,000 strong, would be free to go home the next month, and ‘the war must collapse and die out.’
Sometime in May, Mitchel discovered that during the renewed struggle for Marye’s Heights, his second son James had been seriously wounded. James was to be sent to Richmond for recuperation. But a further grief descended almost at once. A Confederate officer of Irish origins entered the Enquirer newsroom one day with a copy of the Dublin Freeman’s Journal. It carried a paragraph announcing that Henrietta Mitchel—adored Henty—had died at her convent school in Paris. She had perished—Mitchel consoled himself—without violence, and amongst the nuns she loved. Her burial in the Montparnesse cemetery was attended by her young sister Minnie, also a student at the Sacré Coeur convent. Jenny and Isabelle Mitchel’s grief can be imagined, but Mitchel in Richmond was oddly comforted by the presence of other Southern parents who had endured the same acute losses.
During Lee’s midsummer advance into the North, Mitchel spent time training with the Ambulance Committee on the banks of the Chickahominy, to which Lee would be able to ship his wounded from a conquered Philadelphia. Editorially, Mitchel had urged the advancing Confederates not to be fussy about property. ‘Would it not do a man’s heart good to get one glimpse of the fat burghers, and highly bedizened ladies of Philadelphia at the moment when the first brigade of Mississippians marched down South Street!’ He was pleased just the same to have one son, John, safe behind redoubts in Charleston, a captain of artillery. John had found garrison duty tedious, however, and had earlier in the year led a company of snipers in capturing the Isaac P. Smith, a Union gunboat. Mitchel reported to John that ‘Everybody speaks highly of James, and, like you, he gets every luck except promotion.’ James, mended, had rejoined General Gordon’s brigade for the invasion of the North, and with the rest of the Confederate forces he would descend on the massing Union army at the Pennsylvania town named Gettysburg. Willy’s 1st Virginia of Pickett’s division was on its way there as well.
Later Mitchel would write with pride to John at Fort Sumter that Willy had been ill in Staunton, Virginia, and had needed to catch up with his regiment, and his friend Captain John Dooley, whom he loved like an older brother, at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a few days before the battle. To do so, he walked 130 miles in six days. Captain James Mitchel would come safely through the three days of Gettysburg. But on the third day a desperate Lee chose to throw in General Pickett’s Virginians on a long, crazed attack across open ground towards the Union forces on Cemetery Ridge. The Confederate line lay on Seminary Ridge, about a mile to the west, and young Willy Mitchel was amongst Pickett’s men who formed up in the woods below and then came yelling forth. According to John Dooley, Willy died 200 yards from the stone fence behind which the Union army was lined out, which meant that he got further than most but not as far as a few demented souls. Mitchel wrote, ‘Those who were in that advance lay where they fell; his remains were never identified.’ The minuscule Irish Brigade was at Gettysburg, and left behind a quartermaster, Captain Haverty, to look for Willy’s body. There was a report that it had been buried with a note attached: ‘Private Mitchel, son of Irish patriot.’
The hope that Willy would simply turn up, staggering back into the South, or writing from a prisoner-of-war pen, lingered on until confirmation of Willy’s death came from an eye-witness. ‘So poor Will finished his first and last campaign,’ wrote Mitchel to John. The family would treasure a little knapsack of entomological memoranda and drawings which had been left in the woods near Seminary Ridge and was now returned to them.
The South set about protecting themselves from awareness of the full import of the fact that Lee had withdrawn from Gettysburg, and as part of this process, Mitchel promoted in his editorials the idea that if shirkers in the Confederacy had been at Gettysburg, the Union line might have broken. And: ‘If any short-sighted Confederates, of weak knees and pallid livers, have been deluding themselves with the idea that in case of subjugation by our enemy, the worst that could happen to us would be merely to go back into the Union as it was with the Constitution as it is etc, it is time for them to awake from that dream.’
On 31 August, more than seven weeks after the battle, he was still publishing Gettysburg casualty lists.
Early in that same summer, Meagher had relaxed with Libby at the Long Island house of Mr Dan Devlin, Donegal immigrant and pioneer of ready-to-wear men’s clothing. But nearly eighteen months of frustration awaited him. In June, the month of Lee’s new advance in the north, Meagher wrote to President Lincoln a futile letter offering to raise 3,000 Irish troops. His political supporters helped his military legitimacy by presenting him with the first Kearny Cross, named for Phil Kearny, killed at Chantilly the previous autumn. Mayor Opdyke, in a letter to Mr Lincoln on 8 July 1863, reminded the President that Meagher was popular with the Irish ‘not only in the field but in the forum.’
At Gettysburg, Meagher knew, his friend and former client Sickles had commanded a corps, albeit leading out of alignment with the rest of the Union army on Cemetery Ridge, creating a dangerous salient through whose gaps the Confederate forces rushed and came close to destroying the Union army. Still waiting, Meagher went to Washington and wrote from Willard’s Hotel on 13 July to Secretary of War Stanton. ‘I have now to request permission to withdraw my letter of resignation and beg to renew the offer of my services to the Government.’ But by evil chance, the New York draft riots, blamed on the Irish, began the same day, and spoiled any attractiveness Meagher might have held for the Department of War.
Conscription of men for the army was brought to New York through a military draft which had begun at the Ninth District draft office, Third Avenue and 47th Street, on Saturday 11 July. Under the supervision of the Acting Provost Marshal, a numbered wheel was turned and names corresponding to the numbers were thereby conscripted. The Provost Marshal on the premises was Meagher’s close friend, Colonel Robert Nugent of the Brigade, convalescing from a Fredericksburg wound.
On Sunday the draft office was closed, but on the Monday a workers’ protest meeting was held in Central Park. Brief as it was, there was much talk about the recent use of black labour to break waterfront strikes. The Black Joke Engine Company Number 33 marched from the meeting to Nugent’s draft office, invaded it and smashed the wheel. Someone set fire to the building. Neighbouring houses began to burn. Factories closed and workers and artisans flooded into the streets, where railtracks were pulled up and telegraph poles felled. Some notable Peace Democrats, nicknamed Copperheads, emerged from their homes and offices to address the crowds, assuring them of their right to resist the draft. One party of rioters made a friendly visit to General McClellan’s house in East 33rd Street, as if for his b
lessing. Others moved downtown to burn Robert Nugent’s house to the ground. A week after the riots, Nugent’s broken sword of honour would be found in the hands of an Irish child on the upper East Side.
At the Coloured Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, there were cries of ‘Burn the niggers’ nest.’ Firemen trying to put out the blaze had their hoses axed. Orphans were rescued and taken to refuge in the firehouse of the Twentieth Precinct, and fed and protected by local priests for the duration of the riot. As similar attacks on brothels showed, race was not the only matter at hand. Over a number of days the rioters attacked the houses of known Republicans and unjust employers—the same thing in the minds of New York’s poorly paid. Grain elevators, which had replaced many grain-handling jobs, were also set alight.
The same Monday, Irish Colonel Henry O’Brien of the 11th New York used a howitzer to clear a crowd in Second Avenue. A woman and her child were killed. That night his house was burned. When he visited the ashes of his residence, he was beaten to death by a mob, and his naked and savaged body dragged through the streets. Many owners of plundered houses blamed these attacks on the inflammatory speeches of anti-war Copperheads, Governor Seymour, Fernando Wood, former mayor, and Clement Vallandigham. Editors of the Daily News declared that they had warned America of the consequences of the draft: black people were reaping the results of abolitionist excess. When mobs passed the News office they cheered it. In Varick Street a black man was hanged, on Fifth Avenue three blacks were hanged. Brooks Brothers was looted, and Lord & Taylor employees were armed to defend their store at the corner of Grand and Chrystie Streets.
Governor Seymour issued a proclamation declaring the city and county in a state of insurrection. Secretary of War Stanton was able to send Mayor Opdyke five regiments. On Wednesday morning, too, the Herald carried a letter from Archbishop Hughes pleading for peace, and calling a public meeting outside his residence on Friday. Just when Meagher returned to New York that week is uncertain, but he knew that some of the rioters had advanced against armed military formations and attacked the US flag, while others had offered three cheers for Confederate President Jeff Davis! From these his own people, how could he now raise a warrior legion?
The riot ended savagely. As a house-to-house, tenement-to-tenement battle began between 22nd and 31st Streets, where a large number of the 6,000 Federal troops were concentrated, Irish women exhorted their husbands to ‘die at home.’ A number of people jumped to their deaths from roofs. With a death toll hard to establish, the riots withered. Solid citizens complained that the rioters had not been punished because the courts ‘are all in the hands of the Irish.’
Justly or otherwise, the Irish took the blame for what was a proletarian riot. The draft would be a failure, producing only 50,000 conscripts instead of the 250,000 hoped for. Back in New York, Meagher complained of the Copperhead behaviour of Vallandigham, who ‘after aiding in the equipment of volunteers, and fanning the martial fire twirled or sneaked about to the rear.’ But many resented this attack on a Democrat darling. The Irish American began to depict Meagher as in his heart a Lincoln man—in their view, the worst you could say of a person. Not least because the riots were seen as specifically Irish, Meagher had to tolerate further months of inaction. He wrote to his friend Major O’Beirne, ‘The fact is, I hate being out of the field. Military life is my true life. It is, perhaps, the only honest, generous, noble life we can lead.’
John Mitchel set out that fall to seek family comfort by riding north-west towards the Rappahannock to visit James at General Gordon’s headquarters. As he sat down to converse around the campfire with James and General Gordon, an assault by General Meade ‘ruined the occasion.’ Two Confederate brigades to the west were overpowered, but the line was for the moment shortened and held.
As a result of his discussions, Mitchel wrote to his daughter Minnie on 22 October 1863 that James was willing to try for a furlough so that he could go fetch his mother and sisters. But it was obviously the women’s idea, and he tried to dissuade them. ‘You would have to come by way of Wilmington, in a blockade-running steamer, which is dreadfully expensive … This is by no means a comfortable or desirable place for a family.’ James failed to get the furlough anyhow, which, Mitchel hoped, put an end to the matter. For in the last months of 1863, he was losing faith; he was moving away from support of President Davis through the Enquirer towards the more critical mode of the Richmond Examiner, which condemned Davis for his support of Generals Bragg, Pemberton and Hood, whom Mitchel considered to be in the process of losing the war in the western arena. He also believed Davis too soft in retaliating for Federal outrages against Southern homes.
The owner of the Richmond Examiner, a dandified fire-eater named John M. Daniel, had satirised Jeff Davis’s polite instructions in this matter by reporting that during Lee’s campaign in the North in 1863, while Virginia howled with devastation, three railroad ties had been pulled loose on the line between Washington and Baltimore. Mitchel now found he had a lot in common with small, viperous Daniel.
O’Mahony had, only a few days before the riots, inducted Meagher into the Fenian Brotherhood at its offices in Ann Street. ‘I, Thomas Francis Meagher, solemnly pledge my sacred word of honor as a truthful and honest man that I will labor with earnest zeal for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of England and for the establishment of a free and independent government on Irish soil.’ Two factors would deliver him from obeying the letter of the pledge. One was the increasing disfavour of the Fenians with the Catholic Church. The other was the ultimate factional split of the Fenians in America. For the moment, however, General Meagher was a plum catch, whom O’Mahony asked to represent New York at the Fenian convention in Chicago in the coming November.
To evade attending the convention, Meagher wired O’Mahony that he was ‘on call’ to the War Department. In fact, he had been invited to visit the Army of the Potomac, and particularly Brigadier General Michael Corcoran. Before departing for Virginia, Meagher wrote a defence of the Union for the Dublin newspaper the Irishman. It was in a way a response to O’Brien, who, in a public lecture, asked, ‘If Poland or Hungary could declare their independence, why shouldn’t the South?’ He pointed even to the Irishmen that Meagher had led up the hill at Fredericksburg: ‘the manpower which would be needed for the liberation of Ireland?’ As reward, he said, the Union had treated Meagher shabbily. ‘Earnestly do I warn all those who are about to emigrate from Ireland against taking any part in the disastrous contention.’
Corcoran’s Irish Legion would never be as hard-used as Meagher’s men. They were encamped that December at Fairfax Court House, and Meagher spent a number of days there, attending concerts, and being honoured by serenaders and bands. On 22 December, he had to return to Washington and then entrain to New York for Christmas with Libby. Corcoran insisted on riding the 17 or so miles to Washington with him. On the way back, riding one horse, leading another, he fell from his mount on to the icy road and suffered a head injury. When found by his staff, he was dying. There was rumour about his sobriety at the time of his accident, but his death certificate said he had died of a stroke. Meagher, still in Washington, received the news of the death and sent an eloquent telegram to Daly on 23 December. ‘By this you have learned our gentle, gallant, noble friend—Colonel of the old 69th—General of the Irish Legion—is dead … It is a black Christmas with us.’
The same day he was told that the War Department had at last cancelled his resignation. But although he was again an active member of the Union Army, no command came. It was unlikely that Meagher, the reluctant Fenian, would become commander of the thoroughly Fenian Corcoran’s Legion. The Irish American took exception to what they saw as pro-Lincoln bias in his funeral oration for Corcoran at the Cooper Institute in New York. General Hancock himself would have been more than happy to have Meagher in his corps. But he told James Topham Brady, Meagher’s friend, Charles Daly’s brother-in-law, ‘The War Department seems to regard the Irish
general as a communicable disease …’
During the opening campaign of 1864, Mitchel worked for the Ambulance Corps at Guiney’s Station, but kept up correspondence with his two remaining sons. Major John Mitchel was a popular and respected figure in Charleston, commuting between the lively city and the harbour forts where he served with the 1st South Carolina Artillery. In the summer of Willy’s death he had narrowly escaped death or capture himself when Fort Morris was overrun, and Fort Sumter, where he now served, was subject to constant Union bombardment. In Charleston he had made important friends, especially the Rhett family, whose patriarch, former Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett, had been a Southern champion in Washington. Senator Rhett’s son Robert Rhett junior, editor of the Charleston Mercury, had employed John Mitchel the elder. But Claudine Rhett, 17-year-old daughter of the former Senator, was in 1863 Major Mitchel’s closest attachment.
The preoccupied Mitchel men did not know that Jenny and her two remaining daughters had chosen to join Mitchel and the boys, and live or die together. Father Kenyon and Martin advised Jenny, now in her early forties, against undertaking the perilous journey, but perhaps she wanted to be reassured by John Mitchel’s towering certitude should news of other deaths reach her. Advised by Confederate contacts, Jenny and her two daughters went to Falmouth in Cornwall, where the blockade-running steamer Vesta was moored. As Vesta loaded a cargo of boots, hams, tea and coffee, the Mitchel women took cabins aboard.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 56