by Niall O'Dowd
So, on June 28, 1863, just days before the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), after the forced resignation of ever-cautious General Joe Hooker, Meade was put in charge, much to his surprise. Meade said he didn’t know whether the messenger from Washington had come to arrest him or promote him, so treacherous were Union army politics at the top.
It was an extraordinary rise, given his Irish Catholic background and the deep animosity radical Republicans and Know-Nothings held towards him. One of those radicals, Thaddeus Stevens, suspected Meade held Copperhead views, a faction of Democrats who wanted to sue for peace with the South on any terms.
His enemies, led by former army officer Dan Sickles who fled from Gettysburg, tried to prove Meade had mishandled the battle, a strange accusation given his side won. They even held joint committee hearings on Meade’s handling of the war.
On day three, Lee made up his mind where his army would attack. Right at the center of the Union line was a copse of trees. That, Lee told his officers, was the target. In front of the copse was the 69th Pennsylvania Brigade, Irish to a man.
Amazingly, General Meade had outthought Lee on the vital matter of where he would strike. At eight that morning, he had sent a dispatch, saying it seemed to be the enemy’s intention, “to make the attempt to pierce our center.”
Journalist Whitelaw Reid described Meade as “calm” and “… lit up with the glow of the occasion.”
The battle started with a massive cannonade from the Rebels. According to a veteran of the Philadephia 69th, “The air [was] filling with the whirring, shrieking, hissing sounds of the solid shot and the bursting shell. [The men threw] themselves flat on the ground behind the low stone wall.” The firing from so many cannons sounded like a continuous roar, deafening and terrifying. The soldier recalled that artillery shot and shell “flew through the air high above us or [struck] the ground in front, ricocheting over us … [or smashed into] the wall, scattering the stones around.”
The gunners were aiming much of their fire too high, however, and most of the balls passed over the Union line heads. The Union army artillery experts had prepared well. They had forty-one pieces of artillery, hidden by a small rise in the ground, which would prove vital.
Then came Pickett’s march—thirteen thousand soldiers in serried file, marching their way across the open field to the Union lines about three-quarters of a mile away. They were cut down and enfiladed in massive numbers by the Union cannons and soldiers, but still marched straight towards the center of the Union line. It would take them fifteen to twenty minutes to cross the field. They were in plain sight as the cannon smoke disappeared.
The grim Union gunners eyed them well. There were shouts of “Fredericksburg” from the Union side, revenge for the death charge there in which the Irish Brigade, among thousands of others, had been cut to ribbons. Now, victory at Gettysburg would be their response.
Why did Lee order it? The most obvious answer is overconfidence after so many victories over superior numbers on the Union side. He believed his men were invincible. He learned the truth in a town eighty-five miles from Washington, a battle fought partly on the land of a freed slave.
Pickett’s Charge was soon in sight of the Union defensive wall. They wheeled east and marched towards the copse of woods and the nearby gap that would forever be known as “The Angle.”
Suddenly, a huge hole appeared in the Union line. The 59th New York had turned and bolted at the sight of thousands of Confederates bearing down. The Rebels pressed on. Next, the 71st Pennsylvania did the same. Remaining in the gap of danger were the Pennsylvania Irish 69th.
In the 69th, Colonel Dennis O’Kane called his men together and put steel in their soul. He warned his men not to fire until they “could distinguish the whites of their eyes,” and above all he reminded them that they stood defending the very state they loved so much and a Union that had given a million Irish a new chance at life.
O’Kane told them that if any man should flinch in his duties, “he asked that the man nearest him would kill him on the spot.” O’Kane, born in Derry, married and had two kids there before setting out for America, but he bled Union blue.
“These addresses were not necessary,” wrote Private Anthony McDermott, “as I do not believe that there was a soldier in the Regt. that did not feet that he had more courage to meet the enemy at Gettysburg, than upon any field of battle in which we had as yet been engaged, stimulus being, the fact that we were upon the soil of our own State.”
The 69th was the only regiment not to withdraw from defending the stone wall in front of the copse of trees during Pickett’s Charge. Over the two days they fought at Gettysburg, they lost 143 men out of 258 who marched on to the battlefield on the second day.
O’Kane kept his men down behind the wall, controlling their instinct to fire at long range at their enemies. When the thousands of Confederates reached the Angle, they were convinced they could breach the Union defense and split the Union army in two. When they were only a few dozen yards from the wall, O’Kane ordered his men to jump up and open fire. Pickett’s men were “staggered” and thrown into “disorder.”
The Irish had armed themselves well, taking the rifles of dead soldiers and continuously firing as a result, not needing to reload.
The Confederates finally breached the wall led by one of their heroes, General Lewis Armistead. Now it was firing at point-blank range, ferocious fighting over control of the cannons, and finally, desperate hand-to-hand fighting and using their weapons as clubs. The Irish gave as good as they got. The heroic O’Kane was wounded and died later, but his men fought on until, at last, help arrived.
Two other Pennsylvania regiments now rushed to the defense of the Irish and one of their members shot Armistead dead as he tried to rally his men. Without their famed leader, the Rebels were whipped and disorganized. The Union center would not be breached.
Armistead, who had been present at the Hancock house in Los Angeles when “Kathleen Mavourneen” was sung as a tragic farewell, died only a short distance away from where his oldest friend Winfield Scott Hancock was playing a hero’s role in leading the resistance against the Confederate onslaught.
Doctor Earl Hess, a leading historian of Pickett’s Charge, writes that a turning point in the battle was the repulsion of Armistead and his thousands because “the 69th refused to give way… . This regiment put up a magnificent fight that saved the Angle and killed any chance that Pickett’s division might push the Federals off Cemetery Ridge.”
General Meade savored the victory as well he should have and wrote to his wife: “It was a grand battle and is in my judgment a most decided victory.”
However, the strain might almost have been too much for him. He also mentioned that their son, also George, an aide to him, was fine but as for himself, “I feared I should be laid up with mental excitement.”
For Robert E. Lee, it was a crushing defeat. It hardly helped that his principal subordinate General James Longstreet had warned him the morning of July 3 that “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and he pointed to Cemetery Hill.
As for President Lincoln, he had double reason to celebrate after news that General Grant had taken Vicksburg, which gave the Union control of the vital Mississippi river.
Shortly after, Lincoln attended a prayer ceremony in Washington where a local Methodist bishop, who had been imprisoned in the notorious Libby prison in Richmond, told him that when news of Meade’s victory had reached them, the whole prison erupted in wild celebration. Then, every prisoner sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in unison.
A choir at the prayer event then broke into the song, and Lincoln, deeply affected, asked them to sing it again. The Republic had been saved from dissolution at Gettysburg, led by an Irish American general and featuring extraordinary courage by Irish immigrants.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Father Corby Summons God—The Draft Riots Cometh
The
Irish heroics at Gettysburg were not confined to the Pennsylvania 69th. Colonel Paddy O’Rourke of the 140th New York, an Irish immigrant, had led his men on a breakneck charge to secure Little Round Top. The Maine 20th, under Joshua Chamberlain, had won back the fiercely disputed hill, which was a key element of the battlefield topography. If the Confederates could grab it, they would be able to overlook the Union position.
Chamberlain’s men were in dire straits when O’Rourke and his men arrived and commenced their charge. The Texas and Alabama troops they faced thought they had won the day until the 140th counterattack began.
O’Rourke fell early in the battle when a Southern shooter brought him down with a bullet in the neck. However, his men arrived in time to help save Little Round Top for the Union, one of the key battles at Gettysburg.
Finally the Irish Brigade and their pastor, Father William Corby, wrote themselves into history. His passionate defense of the Irish Catholic soldiers he rode beside, prayed beside, slept beside, watching as they fought and died, is worth repeating. Nothing irked him as much as the anti-Catholicism he so often experienced.
He knew that despite the supreme sacrifice by so many Irish, they were still mocked and humiliated in the Eastern establishment and Know-Nothing world.
He wrote in his diary:
Well nigh on every page of the history of the United States you find recorded the brave deeds of Irish Catholics, and Catholic of all nations, including American Catholics, who labored zealously in the cause of American liberty; and still we have the mortification of hearing, through the press, from the pulpit, and even in legislative halls, the hue and cry: ‘Catholics will destroy our free institutions!’
Did not Catholics furnish the material to make them? Shame on bigots for their ingratitude… . Shame on bigots for vomiting out spleen on the very men who … won for them, on bloody battlefields, the liberty they now enjoy. Hold! Enough!
On the second day at Gettysburg, Corby became famous far and wide for his deed. He was with his men when they were called into action in the area known as the Wheatfield, where a Union division was in difficulty. As the 600-member Irish Brigade and thousands of others filed down a narrow path to enter the battlefield, Father Corby jumped on a nearby rock and pronounced a general absolution on those who were heading for what might well be their last moments on earth.
Corby’s stentorian tones competed with the sound of battle, but thousands fell to their knees and prayed with him.
“For Catholics at least, no event during the Civil War bound together Catholic and Protestants fully or united Catholics more with the nation then the moment when soldiers of all faiths knelt before Father Corby on the dawn of the second day of Gettysburg,” posited Randall L. Miller, co-editor of Religion and the American Civil War, who has written very impressively on the issue of how the Irish contribution to Lincoln winning the Civil War has been overlooked.
A witness to Corby’s remarkable speech wrote, “The scene was more than impressive, it was awe inspiring. Nearby stood a brilliant throng of officers, and there was profound silence in the ranks of the Second Corps. I do not think there was a man in the brigade who did not offer up heartfelt prayer… . Some knelt there in their grave clothes… . Father Corby pronounced the words of the general absolution.”
The moment has passed into history, and Corby’s statue stands proudly in Gettysburg and in Notre Dame where he had joined the Union army from and later served two terms as president. With that statue, Catholics entered American sacred space and memory.
Gettysburg in many ways was the demise of the old Irish Brigade. The Wheatfield battle went well for the Irish at first, but they were later driven back by sheer weight of numbers and suffered terrible casualties. Within a year, the original Irish Brigade was merged with other regiments.
After massive Union losses at Gettysburg, the draft proved an explosive issue. Most Irish were incensed at the belief they were being targeted as cannon fodder. However, with the enactment of the draft in 1863, Hughes preached a sermon urging that “volunteering continue and the draft be made; if three hundred thousand be not enough this week, next week make a draft of three hundred thousand more. The people should insist on being drafted, and so bring this unnatural strife to a close.”
Hughes, however, had misjudged the anger over the draft issue badly, an uncharacteristic mistake by him.
Perhaps he was worn out by war and just wanted it over. He was also ill and close to death. The draft riots, the most shameful episode in Irish American history, came at the very end of Hughes’s life. Irish Americans were enraged by the fact that the rich could buy their way out of conscription with three hundred dollars, an impossible sum that represented about a half year’s salary for most working Irish.
The first names of those to be drafted were released on July 12, appearing in the New York Herald newspaper and breaking a promise by Governor Horatio Seymour, who had stated he would fill the New York quota with volunteers and failing that, go to court to stop conscription.
The draft numbers from New York would be significant. By the end of 1862, it was reported that New York State was short 28,517 in volunteers, of which 18,523 were to be recruited in New York City.
It was the last straw for many. The horrendous casualties at Gettysburg left many an Irish family in New York bereft of their breadwinner, and the war had become increasingly unpopular. Now, thousands more of their menfolk were to be drafted, and many to die, in order to end Negro slavery.
Ironically, the draft notifications came on the July 12 weekend, when Orangemen celebrated and tensions were already high.
On Monday morning, the die was cast. The mob burned draft offices, destroyed telegraph wires, and assaulted police officers. It only went downhill from there.
As the riots went on, they took most of their venom out on the unfortunate blacks they encountered. Over 120 were killed, and the Colored Orphanage Asylum was destroyed in an act of pure savagery. Eleven black men were lynched. The great work of Meagher, the Irish Brigade, Michael Corcoran, and Hughes in bringing the Irish into the mainstream and making them no longer targets of hate was seriously undermined.
Hughes was deeply impacted but moved slowly—far too slowly. After the fury of the riots had somewhat alleviated, a gravely-ill Archbishop Hughes, dying from Bright’s disease at age sixty-six, addressed his people, desperately trying to stop the carnage:
Men! I am not able, owing to the rheumatism in my limbs to visit you, but that is not a reason why you should not pay me a visit in your whole strength. Come, then, tomorrow, Friday at 2 o’clock to my residence, northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street. There is abundant space for the meeting, around my house. I can address you from the corner balcony. If I should not be able to stand during its delivery, you will permit me to address you sitting; my voice is much stronger than my limbs.
I take upon myself the responsibility of assuring you, that in paying me this visit or in retiring from it, you shall not be disturbed by any exhibition of municipal or military presence. You who are Catholics, or as many of you as are, having a right to visit your bishop without molestation.
Five thousand showed up the next day to hear a weak but strong-willed Hughes demand an immediate end:
Men of New York. They call you riotous but I cannot see a riotous face among you … . I have been hurt by the reports that you are rioters. You cannot imagine that I could hear these things without being pained grievously. Is there not some way by which you can stop these proceedings, and support the laws, of which none have been enacted against you as Irishmen and Catholics? … Would it not be better for you to retire quietly?
Hughes’s words calmed the situation and played a major role in ending the riots. But it is a mystery why he did not move sooner.
“As for the draft riots,” says Strausbaugh, “[Hughes] was treading a fine line. Other New Yorkers were blaming the Irish for the riots. He didn’t want to play into that, but at the same time he wanted t
o discourage his flock from participating. It left him in rather a quandary, simultaneously denying the Irish had participated and asking them to stop.”
Lincoln had earlier in the war wanted to parlay Hughes’s massive influence abroad.
The archbishop’s pro-Union stance meant he suffered much criticism, especially from Southern Catholic clergy and bishops. Lincoln saw an opportunity to defend Hughes and bulwark his support. He wrote to the Vatican about Hughes saying he “would feel particular gratification in any honor which the Pope might have it in his power to confer upon him.” Was Lincoln suggesting that Hughes should be made a cardinal? His intent remains unclear.
They certainly had become close. Hughes was called to the White House and asked by Lincoln to act as an ambassador abroad, especially to the Vatican and Europe, where most of the monarchies expressed support for the Confederacy.
Hughes agreed to go on condition that Thurlow Weed, a close friend and a Republican who was a newspaper publisher, go with him.
Before Hughes embarked, Lincoln called him to Washington again. White House staff who saw the archbishop enter Lincoln’s office speculated on what the conference was about. The prelate came out, entrusted with a secret mission. He knew that he was going to Europe—France, Spain, Italy—the Catholic countries. “Neither the North nor the South knew my mission,” Hughes wrote a friend. “I alone knew it.” Hughes did a sterling job and was received warmly at the Vatican. He persuaded several royal houses to remain neutral and established himself as a very high-profile Lincoln supporter.
Lincoln knew the situation on the international scene was perilous, which is why he needed Hughes, the uncrowned leader of the Catholic Church in America, to especially visit the Catholic leaders.
European leaders preferred a weak and divided nation on the American continent. In September 1861, England’s former colonial secretary Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton stated that a permanent division of the United States would benefit the “safety of Europe.” A truly united United States “hung over Europe like a gathering and destructive thundercloud … [but] as America shall become subdivided into separate states … her ambition would be less formidable for the rest of the world.”
