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

by Thomas Keneally

  When Meagher addressed a great rally at the 7th Regiment Armory over Tompkins Market in Lower Manhattan, 5,000 people crowded into the drill hall to hear him, but not all of them were admirers. A Celtic voice in the audience shouted, ‘Why don’t the Black Republicans fight?’ There was for the first time a certain tone of war-weariness in Meagher’s speech too. ‘We don’t need any more officers. We have enough of them in the Army of the Potomac, and more than enough, if we are to judge the shoals in which they are coming down the James River.’ He was challenged by a question about whether he sought personal glory by overworking the Irish Brigade? The brigade, he said, had done no more marching than French’s brigade, and no more picket-and-trench duty than the brigades of Caldwell and Sickles, ‘nor was it more exposed to the unhealthiness of the climate—to the dampness, to the miasma, to the drenching rain, or the deadening sun of the foul lowlands in front of Richmond—than any other brigade along the line.’ Even in answering his critics Meagher was forced into a far from flattering picture of the environment awaiting recruits, and was left to argue that it was the Celtic spirit itself which was the cause of so many Irish casualties. ‘Heroic old Sumner,’ Meagher argued, ‘would otherwise not have asked so often, “Are the green flags ready?” ’

  Over the next two months there were only 250 new recruits for the brigade. The prisoner-exchanged Corcoran, more clearly a Fenian than Meagher, was able to enlist five regiments of nearly 1,000 men each, largely of Fenians, in the Corcoran Legion, while the lustrous battle record of the Irish Brigade was good enough to draw a mere company.

  A favorite of Meagher’s, Lieutenant Temple Emmet died at the age of twenty-six years at his father’s house in Astoria, Long Island, joining his forebear Robert Emmet in the heroic shades. According to Conyngham, it was typhoid remittent fever, ‘the relapsing fever,’ a killer during the Famine, which finally took the young man’s weakened life. Lieutenant Emmet’s New York funeral raised the question of whether America was more fatal than Dublin Castle for the descendants of Irish heroes.

  By midsummer, a disappointed Lincoln had already decided that McClellan’s army was to be pulled out of the James and returned north. For now that Lee had penned up the army in Harrison’s Landing, Jackson was again sweeping north up the Shenandoah. A Union cavalry general named Pope, despised by McClellan men, was to have overall command when the army was concentrated again in northern Virginia. McClellan would be subordinate to him, and this was seen as another ‘Black Republican’ plot.

  Meagher returned from New York to the James by navy steamer to supervise the evacuation. As the brigade withdrew, moving down the Peninsula past the Yorktown defences, the Irish found the ground they traversed now in ruins. Shells of ruined houses and burned villages filled them with melancholy. Some felt as if they had somehow been trapped into reproducing the same evicting effects as the British army in Ireland. Conyngham was appalled to find emaciated child corpses waiting by the road in cots for passing soldiers to bury, the parents being too famished to do that work themselves. ‘It reminded me of the famine years in Ireland.’

  While much of McClellan’s withdrawn army was still on steamers, Lee and Jackson struck at Pope at Bull Run and Manassas Junction and humiliated him. The Irish Brigade arrived in Washington and had fires going in their old bivouac at Fort Corcoran when they were ordered out to the old 69th’s haunts at Centreville to cover Pope’s withdrawal. They found his retreating men so debased by their thrashing that the Peninsula veterans taunted them as they passed. Meagher heard with delight that McClellan was back in command. Little Mac ordered Meagher to stay fairly close to Washington. ‘If he moves,’ McClellan told the War Department, ‘… it leaves us without any reliable groups in or near Washington.’

  Again the Confederate threat to the capital failed to present itself, and so the Irish Brigade effortlessly advanced as they had before through desolated northern Virginia towards Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. An officer wrote home, ‘The Confederates occupy the same lines they did last winter.’ But did they? Though Rebel pickets were active along the river, Lee had now sidestepped from Fredericksburg and the approaches to Washington. Meagher woke one morning in his tent by the river to find that Lee’s men had gone from the defences ahead. They had joined with Stonewall’s army and were making a vast flanking movement into western Maryland: an invasion of the North. Urgent if not panic-stricken orders came to Sumner, Richardson and Meagher: to stay where they were would be useless; they were to move across country from northern Virginia towards South Mountain in Maryland, where General Hooker was trying to come to terms with the advancing Rebel flank.

  The Irish Brigade crossed the Potomac to Georgetown, and marched by pleasant stages through Seneca Mills and Hyatt’s Town. By nightfall on 13 September, they had covered 50 miles in easy marches, those who had grown up in rural Ireland enjoying the sights of soil-rich Maryland with its friendly people and plush farms. In a field full of haystacks near the orderly town of Frederick, they were bivouacked comfortably. In a similar field nearby, under a tree, two soldiers from Indiana would find an authentic copy of Lee’s orders wrapped around two cigars, and McClellan received thereby all the information he needed to destroy Lee. But he feared the document had been planted to mislead him.

  Sumner’s men were held in reserve on the long ascent up South Mountain. Then they were moved up through Hooker’s exhausted men and sent in pursuit of the Rebels. Richardson’s division became the lead division of Sumner’s corps on the roads of western Maryland, and Meagher’s the lead brigade, marching in good weather through broad Turner’s Gap and then turning south-east down red dust lanes into western Maryland’s well-ordered countryside, the landscape of the Jeffersonian dream.

  The troops now heard with some anger that Union Colonel Miles had disgracefully surrendered Harper’s Ferry to Jackson. This meant that Jackson would be moving in to join Lee somewhere ahead, amongst these lovely orchards and fields of grain. Meagher’s report declared with a little awe that on the afternoon of 15 September, as the brigade neared the western limits of Maryland formed by the bend of the Potomac, and stood on slightly high ground north-east of the village of Sharpsburg, ‘the enemy was discovered in full force, drawn up in a line of battle on the heights near Sharpsburg.’

  All that stood between Meagher and the Confederates was the creek named Antietam. By its banks, the brigade made camp that afternoon. One look at the map showed how penned in Lee was, with the Potomac behind and Antietam Creek to his front. Meagher sat chatting before his tent with acting Colonel Patrick Kelly of the 88th, Jack Gosson, Captain McGee (D’Arcy McGee’s brother), Colonel Robert Nugent of the 69th, the surgeons Ellis and Reynolds, and the nationalist poet and newly promoted Captain James Turner, aide-de-camp to Meagher and a chronicler of the brigade. A few miles to the south-west of where now Meagher sat expatiating, stood the occupied town of Sharpsburg with its one modest church spire. He probably did not guess that John Mitchel’s son James was there, with the 1st Virginia. Dimly discerned perhaps on the Hagerstown pike north of town stood the plain chapel of a pacifist sect, the Dunkards or Dunkers, who eschewed all decoration, including steeples. The rest of Sumner’s corps arrived during that afternoon, to be joined to the north during the evening and night by Hooker’s and Mansfield’s corps.

  The next day, 16 September, was restful in the camp by the creek, no one aware that they were on the eve of the greatest American slaughter. Many officers sniffed the chance that if a Confederate rout occurred in the farmlands in front of town, Lee’s army could be destroyed trying to cross the Potomac back to Virginia. At four in the afternoon, Hooker’s men were ordered to cross Antietam Creek at the upper ford, above the site where Richardson and the Irish Brigade were camped, and attack the Rebel left in some woods. The Irish casually listened to the exchange of fire over there. Of the Irish New Yorkers who had just caught up from Washington, 150 young recruits had been told they would be employed on provost duty the next day. They sent a dele
gation to General Meagher and insisted on participating in the battle. Meanwhile, over the creek, Hooker had caused the Confederates to retreat a little southwards towards Sharpsburg, over fields owned by the pacifist Dunkards. The Union bridgehead made by Hooker on the Rebel side of the creek allowed another Union corps, Mansfield’s, to cross that night too and camp in a screen of woods. Sumner, Richardson and Meagher remained where they were, in rustic composure.

  Waterford-born surgeon Lawrence Reynolds of the 63rd New York was poet laureate to the Irish Brigade. He was also ‘Center’ of the Potomac Fenian circle, the secretary being Captain John Rorty from the regular artillery. In the field, pending the end of the war, Fenian meetings were largely social. Dr Reynolds would make a boilerful of a punch of condensed milk, hot water, nutmeg and whiskey. He had composed a history of the Irish Brigade in rhymed verse, and he would read that; or else there would be singing of ballads. It seemed that nearly all the officers of Meagher’s ‘original and famous Irish Brigade’ were Fenians by late 1862. John H. Gleeson, for example, a Tipperary man and former member of the Papal Foreign Legion, who would ultimately become colonel of the 63rd New York, was a particularly ardent member. Many of the leaders of the American Fenians were serving in the army, including John O’Mahony, who had raised the O’Mahony Guards, the 1st Regiment of the Phoenix Brigade. He and his Fenians had been marched off to guard Confederate prisoners at Elmira, New York. The esteemed Michael Doheny, Young Irelander and Fenian, recently returned from the MacManus funeral, had died in New York in April 1862, but there were many to replace him. Members were not restricted to the units from Irish New York, such as the Corcoran Legion. In Milford, Massachusetts, out of a ‘circle’ of 115 members, 80 would enlist in the Union army under their Center, Major Peard. Two thirds of the 9th Massachusetts Infantry were active Fenians. There were Fenians of varying degrees of conviction in the Confederate armies, and especially in their seven distinct companies of Irish, which included Company E of the 2nd Tennessee, a company in the 6th Alabama, and another one recruited at Augusta, Georgia.

  American Fenianism was directed for the moment towards the War between the States. The flow of donations from America to Stephens of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland was poor. ‘It would pain you to hear all that is said about the American branch,’ the Irish Fenian leader Stephens wrote to O’Mahony. ‘It would also pain you to see how my friends here received the announcement of a money order of £10.’ Stephens’s focus reduced the events that Fenian soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies were now enduring to an intermediate stage in the preparation for an Irish republic. For Irishmen fighting battles in Virginia and Maryland, however, the American quarrel was becoming the issue in itself.

  At length Stephens sent his lieutenant, a 40-year-old former Young Irelander, the quiet Thomas Clarke Luby, to look into American Fenian affairs and to replace O’Mahony if necessary. With O’Mahony as guide, Luby made a visit to Corcoran’s Legion in the field at Suffolk, Virginia, where the Union army had established a bridgehead. When operations began there, wrote Luby, ‘Corcoran was most anxious to get John O’Mahony out of harm’s way … It speaks highly of Corcoran’s patriotism that at such a time he managed to get the officers together for our purposes.’ But again Luby defined ‘Corcoran’s patriotism’ entirely in Irish terms.

  The tragedy was of course that in the legion alone, twenty-four Fenian officers would be killed or wounded, mainly in the bloody campaigns of 1864. The Douglas Brigade of Illinois suffered broad losses of its Fenian officers and men, and hundreds perished in Meagher’s brigade.

  In a thinning fog the next dawn, the Irish were eating their breakfasts of bacon when across the creek the rage of firing began. Hooker’s men were advancing down the Hagerstown pike towards Sharpsburg, attacking the North Woods. By 7.30 in the morning, they were supported by Mansfield’s corps. The Irish were experienced enough to drink their coffee and wait their turn. Bull Sumner sent one of his divisions, Sedgwick’s, splashing over the creek to add weight. The Confederates seemed for a while to be giving way, and abandoned the Hagerstown pike into town, but only to come back ravening and resupplied to form up again around a spinney called the East Woods. They caught Sedgwick in open fields, and by hectic fire deprived him of 2,300 of his men in fifteen minutes. Bull Sumner sent McClellan a message: ‘Things look blue … Our troops are giving way.’

  At nine o’clock Richardson’s division, including the Irish Brigade, its three New York regiments and the 29th Massachusetts, were told it was their turn to cross the Antietam. Meagher rode, but the cool water reached to the hips of the men crossing on foot. When they got to the other side, they sheltered under an escarpment, and like picnickers emptied their shoes and wrung out their socks. Then they checked their rifles. They came up over the high bank into the well-farmed fields of the Dunkards, people named Poffenberger, Piper, Mumma and, perhaps sinisterly, Roulette. Many of the fields had recently been ploughed, though there were pastures, crops of trampled corn, and a scattering of orchards. Meagher dismounted and walked amongst his men telling them to strip to their cartridge belts and shirt sleeves.

  The colonels and Meagher remounted their horses, as did Father Corby, who gave the men a general absolution of their sins. At first the brigade was protected from the awful artillery fire by shallow dips in the terrain. But they were quickly subject to musket fire coming from Confederates behind one of Mr Roulette’s snake fences on a ridge. Meagher’s orders were that he should take his men 150 yards beyond that ridge and capture a bend in an east-west sunken road ahead. He told a hasty gathering of his officers that the men were first to rush the snake fence and tear it down. The Irish, he would proudly relate, did this in the face of ‘a galling fire.’ The brigade now straightened its lines again. Corby dismounted to attend to the already fallen. All this calm behaviour was characteristic of the futile splendor and awfulness of the day. Meagher rode along the ranks of his men, yelling, ‘Boys, raise the colours and follow me!’ He was leading his men against the same soldiers the Irish Brigade had fought at dusk one evening near the Charles City crossroads on the Peninsula—General Anderson’s North Carolinians. They lay in the sunken road, or as it would hereafter be known, the Sunken Road, which shielded the approaches to Sharpsburg. Meagher’s friend General French’s division, already on the edge of these farmlands and under heavy fire, cheered the Irish as they marched up to the left and filled a dangerous vacancy in the line, only 50 yards from the Confederates.

  As they had moved down to occupy this gap, a thunderclap of gunfire greeted them, ‘in volume the greatest yet delivered from the Sunken Road,’ said one of the brigade’s officers. Meagher’s men crowded in with French’s and poured an awful fire against the bend. Meagher would report, ‘I permitted them to deliver their fire for six volleys, and then personally ordered them to charge upon the Rebel columns.’

  In these first few minutes of combat, pouring in fire from the ridge and then charging the lane with bayonets, the 63rd and 69th New York may have lost as many as 60 per cent of their number. The Irish colour-bearers fell so often in the attacks on the Sunken Road that McClellan, watching through a telescope, presumed that the Irish were either being cut to pieces or running. ‘The day is lost, general,’ an aide cried out to McClellan. ‘The Irish fly!’ When Captain McGee bent to pick up the colours from the ground, the staff was instantaneously cut in two by a bullet. For three hours the Irish Brigade was the centre of five frontal attacks on the Sunken Road, some Irish reaching the road and wrestling with Rebels on a shifting floor of dead and wounded. And then there was bitter defence against Rebel attempts to rise up out of the lane and sever the Army of the Potomac in two in Roulette’s fields. Like French’s men, Meagher could do very little in the end but withdraw to their low ridge, hug the ground and try to return fire. Officers gathered cartridges from the boxes of the dead and wounded, filling their pockets and hats with them, and bringing them to the infantrymen.

  Amongst the dead lef
t lying as the brigade ultimately withdrew this short distance was Captain John Kavanagh, of the 63rd New York, who had been shot dead at the head of his company near the Sunken Road. A piece of shell had smashed the drum of one of the boys of the band and then fatally entered his body. The 19-year-old Tom Connors of County Down died leaving no family in America to mourn him, so that his officer, Bernard O’Neill, had the awful task of interpreting these events to Connors’s parents in Ireland. Colonel Patrick Kelly, shot through the jaw, was still in place with his 88th New York.

  At some stage in these operations—no one is specific in timing the incident—Meagher’s horse was shot from under him. Meagher fell to the ground concussed, and was carried off the battlefield. The New York Tribune claimed that Meagher had been ‘struck in the breast by a shell,’ but that he had recovered consciousness. In a few papers he was reported as having been killed. A more malign rumour was harder to defuse. Colonel Strother of McClellan’s headquarters staff wrote, ‘Meagher was not killed as reported, but drunk, and fell from his horse.’ The men who were near Meagher—rather than on the safe side of Antietam a mile and a half off, like Strother—were many of them temperance Irishmen and took his fall and concussion seriously. Corby, Lyons and Conyngham, all present, reported that his horse was simply killed beneath him. Lieutenant Mackie of Meagher’s staff was killed by the same shell that unhorsed Meagher. Nor is there any reference to drunkenness in the reports of any general officers who witnessed his behaviour that day. The annotation which, some years later, Union Brigadier-General Jacob Cox made in the margin of his personal copy of McClellan’s Own Story, reads: ‘Commonly reported drunk.’ But General Cox was in no better position to comment reliably on Meagher’s behaviour than Strother, since he was waiting some miles away above what is now called the Burnside Bridge leading to Sharpsburg.