by Niall O'Dowd
A large number of the medals were earned by Irish troops from Meagher’s Irish Brigade, which fought and took heavy losses at Fredericksburg and Antietam.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
General Shields, Former Dueling Partner, Declares for Lincoln
There was another Irishman who might have been a candidate for the Medal of Honor. After surviving his near duel with Abraham Lincoln, Tyrone native James Shields went on to a remarkable legal, military, and political career—and an intriguing spy scandal. In 1843, he moved up from auditor general and became a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court.
Subsequently, Shields served for two years as a judge and then for a year as commissioner of the US General Land Office. On July 1, 1846, he was commissioned by President Polk as a brigadier general of volunteers to fight in the Mexican-American War, which began after Texas was annexed by the US from Mexico.
He served under future American president Zachary Taylor. Among those who fought with Shields in subsequent engagements in the war were a cadre of young officers such as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee (who was directly under Shields’s command), Stonewall Jackson, and George Pickett.
At the battle of Cerro Gordo, Shields received what many believed was a mortal wound, when a shot from a cannon felled him. He was assumed dead. After being struck, Shields was carried back to the medical tent by several soldiers, who thought they were bearing a corpse.
According to Richard Oglesby, an officer in one of the Illinois regiments, Shields regained consciousness and told him, “I am no further use to my country. You lay me down and let me die, for God’s sake, lay me down and go to your duty.” However, an Irish surgeon named McMillan, who ironically had been captured as he was fighting for the Mexicans, saved his life.
Shields came home a conquering hero and was given an appointment as governor of Oregon, a new territory. However, before he could take up the position, he ran for the Senate in Illinois and won. Though a Democrat, Shields opposed the extension of slavery, in a speech on the admission of California to the Union. He called slavery “a violation of natural law that can only be enforced by positive enhancement.” He warned the South secession would fail because of it. “The South might as well attempt to shut out the pressure of the atmosphere as to shut out the whole pressure of the civilized world.”
His term ended in 1855, and he ran again against Lyman Trumbull but was defeated. While in the Senate, he spoke passionately on Ireland and the fight against the British.
He resettled in Minnesota, where he had been awarded a large tract of land for his services. He had a dream that the wide-open state would be peopled by Irish exiles, and he ventured to New York but ran afoul of Archbishop Hughes, who wanted to keep his flock close. Nonetheless, Shields did persuade many Irish to come back to Minnesota with him. The town of Shieldsville, Minnesota, bears his name and was settled by Irish immigrants.
Shields soon involved himself in politics in Minnesota and amazingly, won a Senate seat in 1858 but only served one year.
He was still a major figure in Democratic Party politics and, but for being Irish-born, would surely have been a presidential contender.
He predicted correctly that the Buchanan presidency would be a disaster. While in Washington as best man for Stephen Douglas’s wedding (his second), Shields stated of Buchanan, “The South elected him and will make him a Southern president. If he yields to this, he is lost.”
Out of politics, the restless Shields set his sights for business reasons on booming California. In San Francisco in 1861, he married an Irish woman, Mary Carr, from County Armagh. The Shields and Carr families were close friends in Ireland.
When the Civil War broke out, Shields wrote to his old adversary and volunteered. Lincoln immediately made him a brigadier general. He was sent to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, the center of the fight for the Union.
The command of the Irish Brigade was originally intended for and offered to General J. Shields. Shields declined the offer, saying that “no one was so well entitled to the command as Colonel Meagher himself, who had raised the brigade, and shared the honors and perils of the first battle of the war with the gallant Sixty-Ninth.”
Shields was soon to have his own appointment with destiny, facing the legendary Stonewall Jackson across a battlefield in Virginia in a famous encounter. In addition, a scandal involving him and a female Confederate spy was simmering.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Taking on Stonewall Jackson, the Rebel Avenger
Stonewall Jackson was the Rebel avenger of the Civil War, a man who became so legendary that even Union prisoners rushed to hail him and cheer when he passed through the camp where they were being held.
Stonewall Jackson was descended from Robert Jackson, a farmer from Cumbria on the Scottish border with England. Jackson came to Ireland in 1609 as part of the Ulster plantation, replacing the rebellious Irish whose leaders had fled, taking their best land.
Unlike most of his cohorts who were Presbyterian, Robert was Anglican, a distinction that helped him advance enormously as it was the royal religion. He settled in Ballynarry, County Armagh, and fought several campaigns against the Irish who tried vainly to regain their lands.
Robert Jackson had two sons, John and Thomas. It was John who, in 1690, deflected the bullet which struck his gun and ricocheted off, hitting William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. Fighting on the other side were members of the Shields family.
John Jackson’s son, also John, described as “a respectable and prosperous tradesman,” and Stonewall’s great-grandfather, emigrated to West Virginia in 1715, where he married an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Cummins. Stonewall Jackson’s father Jonathan, a lawyer, died young, as did his mother Julia. He was raised by relatives as a result.
There was a military tradition going back generations—his grandfather and great-grandfather had fought in the War of Independence.
Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, born in January 1824, went to West Point, graduating nineteenth out of a class of fifty-nine. After the Mexican War, he became an instructor of artillery at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). In December 1859, he and a contingent of VMI soldiers stood guard at the execution of John Brown, the abolitionist who helped spark the Civil War.
When war broke out, Jackson joined the Rebels, breaking with his beloved sister Laura, who took the Union side. They never spoke again.
Jackson earned his nickname from the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, when Brigadier General Barnard Bee, who was trying to rally his men, pointed to Jackson “standing like a stone wall.”
Up to that point, Jackson had hardly made an impression. He was considered among the worst lecturers and odd to boot, often seen conversing with himself.
On the battlefield, however, he was transformed. There are those who believe that if Stonewall had survived his wounds at Fredericksburg, Lee would have won Gettysburg with Jackson at his side.
Jackson was a deeply devout soul. He was convinced that God was on his side against the rampaging Northern invaders. He believed in the message of Psalm 118: “The Lord is on my side, I will not fear.” “Give them the bayonet” was his admonition to his men, as the enemy closed in on them.
In the campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, Jackson took on three separate federal forces and defeated them all. Forced marches, surprise maneuvers, brilliant reconnoitering, and best use of the topography saw Jackson became a legend. He drove his men hard, marching fifty miles in two days on one remarkable occasion. But he drove himself even harder.
Only once did he make a mistake—at the first battle of Kernstown, when his opponent was none other than James Shields. The two men, whose distant ancestors had faced each other at the Boyne, where Jackson’s side had won a famous victory, would now fight again but with a different result.
Shields had orders from General Nathaniel Banks to pursue Jackson, who had retreated to the town of Strasburg. By the time Shields reached the town, Jackson was gone. A series o
f events followed as Shields, believing Jackson had fled, marched his Union army back east. On Jackson’s side, false information given by his cavalry outriders made him underestimate severely how many soldiers Shields had in the field.
Jackson’s cavalry now launched a surprise attack on Shields’s forces, but the Irish veteran leading from the front fought him off at the cost of a broken arm for Shields, which took him off the battlefield.
Shields, now realizing Jackson was considering another attack, sent part of his force marching north, as if away from the battle. However, they were poised to return if Jackson attacked. It was a risky bluff.
The following day, Jackson advanced smack into the trap laid by Shields, believing from his cavalry intelligence that most of Shields’s army had retreated. Jackson thought they would face a force of about three thousand instead of Shields’s army, which numbered over ten thousand.
Jackson believed Shields and his replacement field commander, Nathan Kimball, were vulnerable on their right flank. Actually, the Union army had massive reinforcements ready to attack. When Jackson saw the actual size of the army, he told a subordinate “We are in for it,” and so it proved at the Battle of Kernstown. It was a small battle and not decisively won, but because it was Jackson, it carried great weight.
Until the end of his life, Shields gloried in the fact that he was the only Union general to defeat Jackson in an open battle. There was even talk of Shields taking overall command of the army, or so Shields’s supporters said. What happened, however, was quite the opposite. Weakened by his wounds, Shields was incapable of continuing to fight and resigned from the army, much to the chagrin of the Irish soldiers.
There is one mysterious coda to the life of James Shields. Karen Abbott, a New York Times best-selling author, wrote a book about real female spies in the Civil War entitled Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy.
In it, she claims Jackson’s command of the Shenandoah Valley in one key battle was not entirely due to his military prowess.
She introduces us to Belle Boyd, an eighteen-year-old spy for the Confederacy who at one time, Boyd says, used her charms with the well-known ladies’ man, General James Shields.
Shields stayed in the Fishback Hotel in Front Royal, where he had his headquarters during his Shenandoah campaign.
Belle, whose aunt owned the hotel, stayed in a cottage on the ground. She left her calling card and the fifty-one-year-old Shield “came running,” to use Abbott’s term. Belle told friends she found him charming: “He was an Irishman and endowed with all the graces of manner for which the better class of his countrymen are justly famous for.”
During their frequent meetings, Belle pumped Shields for information. A visiting New York Times reporter stated that Belle “stayed four hours closeted with him” during his visit. She also had eyes for his aide-de-camp Captain Daniel Kelly. She apparently elicited from him the time and location of a gathering of Union generals at a council of war at the hotel.
On the appointed night, she managed to secure the room directly overhead where the meeting was being held and listened through a small hole in the floor. After the meeting, she dressed as a boy, mounted her horse, and rode past the Union pickets to Jackson’s camp. Armed with the information, Jackson won an easy victory over federal forces the next day.
Some time later, a note arrived from Jackson himself. It read, “Miss Belle Boyd, I thank you for myself and for the army for the immense service that you have rendered your country today.”
Did Shields spill any secrets, or was it Kelly, his aide de camp? Was Jackson greatly aided by the information? We will never know.
Amazingly, Shields had one more act—settling in Missouri where, yet again, he became a US Senator, the third different state and an unmatched achievement. As for Jackson, his war was soon over after Fredericksburg, where his own men shot him as he was returning to his lines, thinking him an enemy force. General Lee’s army would never be the same. With Jackson by his side Gettysburg might well have turned out differently.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Gettysburg, the Gap of Danger
There is a phrase in the Irish National Anthem, which is usually sung in Irish, that reads “Bearna Baol.” The closest translation of “Bearna Baol” would be the “Gap of Danger,” or the most dangerous part of the battlefield.
In Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, of all the one hundred seventy-five thousand or so men who had fought in the battle, it was the Pennsylvania Irish 69th who would face the fire of Pickett’s Charge at its height.
Elsewhere in that battle, the climactic clash occurred as Pickett’s Charge met the Union Blue front lines right in the center of the Union defensive line. There stood the men of the 69th Pennsylvania Brigade, immovable as other regiments ran.
They had no warning when they woke up that day of what would be their fate. The first two bloody days had been inconclusive, and both sides knew, given the massive loss of life and injuries suffered (around fifty thousand casualties between dead, wounded, and missing) that both armies were close to exhaustion.
On Wednesday, July 1, with the temperature a mild seventy-six degrees, the Rebels had the Union boys on the run even as both armies were still arriving. But the Union staved off disaster by retreating as far as the high ground on Cemetery Hill, a gently sloping ridge that gave the Union army the precious ability to look down on their opponents.
On July 2, with the temperature at eighty-one degrees, Lee flung his army at both flanks, but the Union held despite massive casualties. Now it was July 3 and a sweltering eighty-seven degrees. The soldiers in their heavy cotton military uniforms were close to heat exhaustion by midday.
It came down to this final test of strength. It is not fantasizing to say the fate of the Republic and what we now know as modern democracy, as well as the future of slavery, was at stake.
Lincoln stated it bluntly in his Gettysburg Address. The battle was critical in dictating whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
With a Confederate victory, the election of 1860 that put Lincoln in office would have meant nothing. Challenged by armed might, the United States would have split in twain with likely a military dictatorship in one or both jurisdictions. The popular vote would be overturned and useless.
The French had invaded Mexico and removed an elected leader, putting Emperor Maximilian in his place. The tide of anti-democracy was surging. The French were secretly helping the Confederates, sending thousands of weapons across the border.
If Lee had won at Gettysburg, a country founded on the back of slavery would have been created. The likelihood of British and French recognition of the new state would have almost definitely forced negotiation and peace on Confederate terms. Slavery as an institution would have been allowed to grow and expand.
Lincoln himself knew the stakes were at their highest. He told General Dan Sickles, who was injured badly and was a deeply controversial figure, that he knew Gettysburg was the turning point. The following quote is from Rufus Rockwell Wilson’s book Intimate Memories of Lincoln:
“When Lee crossed the Potomac and entered Pennsylvania, followed by our army, I felt that the great crisis had come. I knew that defeat in a great battle on Northern soil involved the loss of Washington, to be followed perhaps by the intervention of England and France in favor of the Confederacy. I went to my room and got down on my knees in prayer.”
If the Union lost, what did that mean for millions of black slaves? The massacre of black soldiers slashed and stabbed to death after they had surrendered to Confederate leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men at Fort Pillow in April 1864 showed what was in store for the black man in a Confederate state if Civil War generals ruled. “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered,” Forrest, who was one of the founders of the KKK, boasted.
Future events, such as the vital American intervention in two world wars, might likely have never happened if America had split in two. Europe might co
nceivably be under a Nazi dictatorship.
At Gettysburg, the Rebels reached the furthest point of their journey to force the North to offer terms and form their own country. Pickett’s Charge was their last desperate lunge. It would be the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
An astute observer would certainly have bet on Lee, the magician who conjured victories against far greater numbers out of thin air and defeated the leaden-footed Union army again and again. However, he had lost his right-hand man Stonewall Jackson to friendly fire at Fredericksburg.
On the other side was an Irish American general who was commanding a major army for the first time. He had been notified only three days earlier that he was commanding general of the army of the Potomac, as Lincoln cast desperately around for a fighting general. How could such an inexperienced leader take on the tactical genius who led the Confederates?
General George Meade was suddenly center stage in the most important battle of the Civil War. His great-grandfather Robert Meade changed the family name from O’Meagh when he arrived from Ireland and settled in Philadelphia, where he became a strong supporter of the church and helped build St. Joseph’s church there. His daughter, Catherine, married an Irishman, Thomas Fitzsimons, who was one of two Catholic delegates who helped to frame the American constitution. Two of General George Meade’s relatives were among the founders of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Philadelphia.
General Meade, the unlikely hero of Gettysburg, was born in Cadiz, Spain on December 31, 1815, and baptized in the parish of Nuestra Señora del Rosario. The family eventually moved back to the United States and Meade graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War, became an army surveyor, and eventually took a commission of brigadier general when the Civil War blew up. His bold actions at Antietam and Chancellorsville marked him as a general who could fight even where the overall battle was lost. While others dithered, Lincoln rolled the dice with him.
