The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  The trooper had brought Captain Meagher to the Washington side of the run and revived him. Bugles were blowing retreat, and a horseless Meagher joined in what began as an orderly withdrawal in a group of Fire Zouaves (raised from New York fire companies), walking at first, then hitching a ride on the 69th’s artillery wagon, which jolted him along to Cub Run. The retreating army were ambushed by Confederate Black Horse Cavalry, who in a flurry of fire killed one of the horses, the wagon itself capsizing in the water. Until this point, said Meagher, fragments of regiments had been coolly and steadily retreating, ‘when all of a sudden down came commissariat wagons, ambulances, hospital couch, artillery forges and every description of vehicle, dashing and smashing each other, and with one fearful wreck blocking up the river.’ Ayer’s Union battery rode up and went into action quickly, throwing canister into the Confederate cavalry. Otherwise, said Meagher, there would have been an utter slaughter.

  On foot near Centreville later that evening, Meagher met up with Dr Smith, a regimental surgeon, and found an organised fragment of the 69th, but at Sherman’s order they kept marching too, since rumour said the Centreville position was already outflanked anyhow. At three o’clock on the morning of 22 July, they dragged themselves back into Fort Corcoran, part of the Washington defences. Although exhaustion and unease of soul marked their arrival, Meagher, in emphatic mood, told the men they had done so well that he intended to write an account of their actions, so that the 69th should be exempted from the opprobrium that would certainly attach to other units.

  An early rumour to reach New York, that Meagher was a casualty, was soon corrected. Acerbic Maria Lydig Daly had doubted the news anyhow: ‘I think he will be heard from,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘He is a mixture of apparent bravado and much prudence, if his face does not belie him.’ The next day the Daily Tribune carried a story about Captain Meagher, copied from the Times of London’s journalist, William Howard Russell, Crimean War correspondent. As quoted in the Tribune, Russell had Meagher proclaiming loudly that the Confederacy ‘ought to be recognised tomorrow; they have beaten us handsomely, and are entitled to it.’ Fortunately, the idea that Meagher, suffering concussion, a measure of sunstroke and battle fatigue, was still running and shouting over his shoulder at Centreville defied not only Meagher’s honour but also all physical credibility. Meagher’s fellow officers of the 69th wrote angrily to the Tribune and The Times, attesting Meagher’s valour in three charges against the Confederate position. The Tribune of 25 July denied the Russell report of its own volition and wrote that later testimony showed that Meagher ‘bore himself with distinguished gallantry.’ Russell’s later pro-Southern memoirs mentioned the outraged officers’ letter, which, he said, claimed Meagher went into action ‘mounted on a magnificent charger and waving a green silk flag embroidered with a golden harp in the face of the enemy.’ Such a description, said Russell, should cause Meagher more embarrassment than anything he, Russell, had written.

  O’Brien was watching these developments in America with a passionate concern. He had ‘never heard any satisfactory answer … to the question—” Would you wish to be a slave yourself?” ’ But he also discouraged the involvement of the Irish young in the American war and in Fenianism at home. By the time Tom Meagher found himself in a brutal conflict on the hill above Bull Run, O’Brien had assumed even more markedly the role of Ireland’s ambulatory conscience, its wandering secular pontiff. He stayed aloof from Parliament, but had proposed an unofficial Irish council, meeting in Dublin, to place moral pressure for reform on the British government. This plan was considered unworldly by politicians and contemptible by James Stephens and his Fenians.

  As for life at home, the broad O’Brien family was not a happy one any more. O’Brien’s formidable mother had died in 1856. His brother, Sir Lucius, about to acquire the title Lord Inchiquin through the death of a childless uncle, had lost his wife and married a turbulent second one, Louisa, a widow twenty years younger than he. On 13 June 1861, William Smith O’Brien’s wife Lucy, who balanced the relationship between Sir Lucius and William, and between William and his reserved, distantly affectionate son Edward, died in her mid-fifties after a brief illness. She was taken to her grave by a weeping husband and mourning children with the massive caoine—keening—appropriate to a chieftain’s wife. In John Martin’s perception, O’Brien was never the same afterwards: ‘his spirits had become bad and his fine person spoiled by fatness—a pale unwholesome fatness.’ O’Brien began travelling even more energetically because he was ‘depressed by the sorrows of a domestic calamity—the greatest that I could sustain—and at the same time I have been so harassed by anxiety connected with my property.’ He left Cahirmoyle, and made his Irish home in a house near the sea in Killiney near Dublin, where his loyal and politically engaged daughters Lucy and Charlotte stayed with him. He attempted to retrieve ‘my property’ from the family trust, but Sir Lucius refused to arrange the transfer. O’Brien wrote of Lucius’s conduct that ‘After the death of my dear wife’ he ‘having been both treacherous and unfeeling I have resolved never to speak to him again.’ But in the end Smith O’Brien was able to achieve a settlement through the Court of Chancery by which his son Edward acquired the entire property and paid his father an annual £2,000.

  The Mitchels in Paris had also been watching America. In May 1861, a month after the war between the North and South began, they left the semi-squalor of rue de l’Est to go and live in Choisy-le-Roi, a leafier western suburb of Paris. Mitchel had heard that his two elder sons were now ‘soldiering in one form or another.’ James, Jenny’s mainstay in Tuckaleechee, was serving in the Montgomery Guard, a fine company of the 1st Virginia Volunteers, and for the moment, following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, John was training with heavy artillery in Richmond.

  Mitchel’s income these days derived from his writings for the Irish-American of New York, the Charleston Mercury and the Dublin Irishman. ‘I wonder,’ he reflected in the Irishman, ‘whether the working people of New York are beginning to think it would have been better to go on as they began with that abolition treason—namely, by hurling it down, mobbing it, pelting it with cabbage stalks to the devil.’ In Choisy though, Mitchel found it hard to gauge the intensity with which people like Meagher were reacting to Fort Sumter. It had been a dazzling and sedating spring, and fifteen minutes from Paris on the Orleans line the Mitchels had the house to themselves. Willy, a born naturalist, collected beetles along the shores of the Seine but had also attended some classes at the Sorbonne. And then in July 1861, before the first great battle of Bull Run demonstrated the potential scope of the war, the family had the excitement of a visit from bereaved Smith O’Brien. He came to them on his way to inspect one of the splendid French army camps. Drinking tea in Mitchel’s garden, O’Brien argued with his friend over the abiding Irish expectation that if England and France entered the American War, Ireland had anything to gain from the France of Louis Napoleon.

  When it was time for Mitchel to see O’Brien off on his further intended travels to Italy, Austria and Hungary, he and his son Willy went with their friends to the railway station and the last words of O’Brien were: ‘As for your southern Confederacy, you will hear of the collapse of that in a few days.’ Mitchel took O’Brien’s reflection in good humour. ‘Farewell, then, royal heart!—The best and noblest Irishman of our generation, and for this reason alone, sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered!’

  The Mitchels’ increased concern for their sons emerged in a letter John wrote to his sister, Matilda. ‘At present we are anxiously looking out for some intelligence of James. He is on more dangerous ground than John for the present … and the first serious fighting will be on the Potomac.’

  Back in Fort Corcoran after the demoralising experience at Bull Run, the 3-months volunteers clamoured to leave the army. Sherman mustered his pre-war regulars to guard the camp and to fire on anyone who tried to decamp or to attack government equipment. Even so, he had reported to the War Department t
hat of his three regiments, ‘I have the Irish Sixty-Ninth New York, which will fight.’ The opinion was shared by others. The Tribune of 2 August quoted a Southern correspondent as saying that though the 69th might be made up of ‘sprawling drunken vagabonds’ from the low groggeries of New York, ‘They fought like tigers.’

  Three days after the battle, Sherman’s brigade and the 69th were visited by Abe Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward. ‘We’d heard you’d got over the big scare,’ Lincoln told Sherman, ‘and we thought we’d come over and see the boys.’ Abe himself spoke to the 69th and praised its devotion. Democrats to a man, they were charmed. ‘He said that Bull Run had been a misfortune but not a disgrace, and brighter days were sure to come.’ When the men raised an Irish howl of approval, Abe said, ‘I confess I rather like it myself, but Colonel Sherman here says it’s not military, and I guess we had better defer to his opinion.’

  It became apparent that the Confederates were too depleted to make an attack on the capital. The 69th was therefore boarded on trains with other 90-day men and travelled in picnic mood to Baltimore to take ship home. The final New York parade of the 69th, up Broadway from the Battery, drew what the newspapers called the biggest crowd ever seen in New York. The 7th New York provided an escort of honour, and Irish societies lined the pavement all the way along Broadway. The men looked like veterans—their flagpole now a trimmed branch cut in Virginia; many of them lacked coats. Drawn up at their armoury on Essex Street, they were dismissed with instructions to return on Monday and be mustered out of the militia.

  The New York Daily Tribune pushed the candidacy of Meagher for the colonelcy of any new regiment which might be based on the disbanded militia corps, and it was apparent to Libby that her husband had found a new vocation. As Meagher would later say, life was simpler in the field. And Libby was now as enthusiastic as she had been about the Costa Rica adventure. Over dinners at Maison D’Oree in Union Square, which Meagher said ‘beats Delmonico’s to Ancient Nick,’ the officers of the disbanded 69th wanted to induce the men to sign up for a longer term of service. A circular headed Erin Go Bragh urged the Irish of New York to avenge Lieutenant-Colonel Haggarty, and ‘to rescue Corcoran if living, or avenge him if dead.’

  The charming but exacting Maria Daly was happy to report the glowing accounts of Meagher’s valour she received from a chaplain, Father O’Rourke. ‘Meagher behaved very gallantly when the ensign who bore the green flag was killed. He seized it, and calling to his men, “Remember Fontenoy,” charged and carried the battery, not seeing that his horse was shot until he fell from him.’ Mrs Daly would find it easier to believe such gallantry of Meagher while he still held the modest rank of captain. She was a Yankee competing with another Yankee, Mrs Meagher, for madonna-ship of an Irish regiment. Her sense of proprietary right over the 69th was clear. ‘My flag, which I gave to the 69th, was lost, the ensign dropped it in his retreat, and as he escaped unhurt has not dared to show his face.’

  Although Mrs Daly would accuse him of it, in the months after Bull Run Meagher did not seem quite as frantic as many other public figures for high rank. Some of the 69th’s officers joined other regiments, getting up a step or two as veterans of the big battle. Yet Meagher refused the colonelcy of an Irish-American regiment from Rhode Island, as well as of New York’s 3rd Regiment of Irish Volunteers. ‘I have no ambition to increase the catalog of blunderers and impostors.’ General Fremont in Missouri, soon to be engaged in bloody combat there, had telegraphed through an offer to him to serve as aide-de-camp with colonel’s rank. He declined this too. The uncharitable view was that Meagher saw the value of remaining in an all-Irish group in New York where his influence was strongest. But he could have as easily used that influence in the 3rd New York Regiment, soon to be the 63rd, or from a vantage point in glamorous Fremont’s staff.

  19

  FAUGH-A-BALLAGH

  Raise that green flag proudly, let it wave on high,

  ‘Liberty and Union’ be your battle cry;

  ‘Faugh-A-Ballagh’ shout from your centre to your flanks,

  And carry death and terror wild into the foeman’s ranks.

  Song composed ‘by an Irishman’

  69th New York fund-raiser, New York, 1861

  In the late summer of 1861, Meagher was engaged with the concept of raising an entire Irish brigade from New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The very name, ‘Irish Brigade,’ resonated. After the lost battles of the Boyne in 1690 and Aughrim, East Galway, in 1691, and the disastrous Treaty of Limerick, also in 1691, brigades of Irish exiles and their descendants, nicknamed ‘the Wild Geese,’ served in the French army. The motto of the Irish Brigade of the French army was Faugh-a-Ballagh, Irish for ‘clear the way,’ and the brigade had most famously fought against the British army in 1745, at the battle of Fontenoy, a Belgium hamlet where the Duke of Cumberland’s forces were decimated. Of all expatriate victories, Fontenoy in particular had entered a mythology hard-pressed for Irish victories. And now Meagher, his Fenian friend Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Nugent of the 69th, Judge Daly, Michael Cavanagh and others were developing the idea of a new Irish brigade for defence of this most worthy system, this imperilled republic.

  Judge Daly and Meagher had been writing to General James Shields, a remarkable Tyrone man Meagher had first met at the time of Franklin Pierce’s inauguration. Shields had achieved American repute as a brigade commander in the Mexican War, but his experience then gave him reason to be wary now of the idea of an Irish brigade. During the conflict in Mexico, Irish Catholic troops in the army had been so brutalised by Know-Nothing officers, and had so disbelieved in their cause, that they defected to the Mexicans, forming a San Patricio Brigade of the Mexican army. Shields knew better than most how fragile was the standing of the Irish soldier with the officer corps who would run this new war. His passion lately had been for attracting Irish immigrants westwards, to save them from the stews of the eastern cities. He led Irish city-dwellers to Minnesota, where such hamlets as Shieldsville, Erin, Montgomery and Kilkenny would represent his efforts. These days he had business in California, owned a ranch in Durango province in Mexico, and wished to attract Irish immigration both to Durango and Mazatlan. In San Francisco, he felt ‘at such a distance from the seat and centre of the excitement.’

  Quite apart from his political and military lustre, Shields knew the President well. He had once challenged Lincoln to a duel in Springfield, Illinois, over an article which had satirised Shields as a questionable state auditor. The article had been written by Mary Todd, later to become Lincoln’s wife. When asked by Shields’s seconds to choose weapons, Lincoln had whimsically nominated broadswords at 7 feet. Rancour broke down in laughter, and Shields and Lincoln had remained friendly thereafter, which, Judge Daly believed, would be a great help to any Irish brigade.

  For the New York Irish leadership, it was a matter of waiting for Shields to come east and receive his envisaged command. Richard O’Gorman and Daly had already written to Washington urging that he be confirmed a brigadier-general, and Tom Meagher seemed as concerned to produce this result as anyone. From his law offices at 41 Ann Street he wrote to Judge Daly on 23 August, ‘Run in, my good fellow, for an hour, I want to see you in relation to General Shields. Some enemies of his are at work to get a revocation of his appointment as Brigadier-General.’ The problem was a small group of New York Republicans. Shields was confirmed a brigadier-general on 31 August. Meanwhile, Meagher’s repute, bright with the public and with the officers of the proposed brigade, was helped by the fact that the Meagher Guards of Charleston had changed their name to the Emerald Light Guards, and the same city’s Hibernian Benevolent Society had expelled him.

  Shields was in fact waiting for a more spacious military offer directly from the federal government. He was chagrined that aged General Winfield Scott at the Department of War seemed to have so forgotten his Mexican exploits. While everyone waited, Judge Daly believed that Tom Meagher should go forth to the recruiting platforms with the rank
of colonel. Daly seemed to envisage Meagher as an elevated recruiting sergeant holding ornamental rank. After some urging, even—it seems—from Robert Nugent, who was a veteran officer of the 69th Militia, Meagher accepted the acting colonelcy of the reorganising 69th New York State Volunteers, in place of Corcoran who was a prisoner in Libby Prison in Richmond. Meagher’s agreement to this glittering rank was a reversal of his earlier stance on the 63rd, and though Libby was delighted, Mrs Daly would snipe at him for it.

  The recruiting process for an Irish brigade began in earnest at the end of August, in a pleasure ground named Jones’s Wood on the Upper East Side. The newly envisaged 69th held a picnic to raise money for the benefit of the widows and orphans of men killed at Bull Run. The press reported, reliably or not, that an extraordinary crowd of 100,000 people paid 25 cents each to attend. Meagher and Libby were handsomely present and at the end of the day Meagher rose to the platform. His audience were either ambiguous about Lincoln or hostile to him. But Meagher told them that the question of what party the President belonged to had become an irrelevance: ‘The moment he took the oath from Chief Justice Taney to support the Constitution of the United States, that moment the platform disappeared from view, and we beheld nothing but the Constitution.’ Defeat of the Union would encourage the evil designs of European royalty and knaves, ‘to whom this great commonwealth … has been, until within the past few weeks, a source of envy, vexation, alarm and discomfiture.’ Meagher was still a staunch Democrat; but the national interest overrode the interest of Democrat factions and machines—Tammany Wig Wam, Mozart Hall, or the Pewter Mug.