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

by Thomas Keneally

  McCarter was horrified, however, to find in one of the houses a young woman whose only child had been killed, while looking from an upstairs window, by a Union shell. Soldiers stood guiltily around a melodeon on top of which lay ‘a sweet little girl, some seven or eight years old, cold and stiff and dead.’ Her face was intact, but blood soaked the white quilt which covered her. ‘A young colored woman was cutting the long brown curls from the child’s head and perfectly saturating them with her tears.’

  The rest of Hancock’s division now followed the brigade as they marched south down the valley, where they stayed on the alert for two weeks against an attack by Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. In camp, ‘we were entertained by General Meagher. He gave a short speech, politely informing us that we were now the advance of our entire division.’ But on 2 November, having assessed Hancock’s strength, the enemy was gone. So the brigade marched back to camp on Bolivar Heights where the 28th Massachusetts, a very Irish regiment, was added into the brigade. Thus Meagher briefly commanded six regiments. These events should have reinforced faith, but now Meagher was beginning to experience a crisis of belief.

  Sent back into Virginia, the Irish found it sometimes amusing yet fundamentally dispiriting to be seen as occupying forces, rather than liberators. In Warrenton, Virginia, as the Irish Brigade marched through, McCarter experienced the blazing resentment of Rebel women—‘a shower of missiles, including stones, brick bats, chunks of firewood, bottles, shoemaker hammers, and pieces of coal. They were all thrown at us by the hands of these fair Virginia damsels, aimed from windows.’

  The gradual movements of McClellan’s army as a whole gave the Confederates plenty of time to re-position themselves in front of Richmond. On 7 November, a Washington general, riding through a snowstorm, told McClellan that Lincoln had ordered his removal from command. An order of 9 November called on troops to assemble at 6.00 a.m. the next day to greet and farewell General McClellan, and in passing it on to his officers Meagher declared that no other brigade in the entire army would feel the general’s departure more intensely. To Barlow he wrote:

  The sentiment of an army of 100,000 men is that a gross injustice has been done McClellan … Were it not for the Brigade I wouldn’t serve a moment longer in the army. As I brought them out, I feel bound in heart to bring them back … Ah, if the gentlemen of the White House could have seen what I saw this morning—could they have heard the cheers of those 100,000 Soldiers which rent the air and deadened the artillery itself.

  McClellan’s dismissal generated far more heat among the Irish officers than the Emancipation Proclamation. Emancipation had not moved them to offer their resignations, as they now did in numbers to Meagher over McClellan’s dismissal. Meagher and the rest of them talked each other around, however, and awaited events. With any luck, the year’s campaigning was coming to a close. The day after McClellan left, in the brigade camp at Stafford Hills behind Falmouth, snow began to fall.

  Ambrose Burnside, a man who had been hours late committing the Union left wing at Antietam, now commanded the Army of the Potomac. For the moment, he took the Yankee 29th Massachusetts away from the Irish, reducing Meagher’s brigade to five regiments, which was still more than normal. At eight o’clock in the evening of 11 November, according to McCarter, Burnside met with other general officers in Meagher’s tent, and Private McCarter became a copier with a vengeance—forty-two plain copies of General Burnside’s immediate orders were to be produced. When half of the orders were done, the rest of the copying was postponed until morning, since an officers’ party was to be held. McCarter was put on sentry duty outside the tent, where after some hours he saw the results of Meagher’s going on a binge. The young Pennsylvanian sentry’s post was close to one of the huge bonfires which dotted the camp. Late at night, he saw the general open his tent flap and perceived that if Meagher let go of the pole, he would be pitched into the huge fire. Other officers still inside did not seem to be aware of Meagher’s danger. And now he released his hold. ‘He ran or rather plunged forward towards the fire.’ McCarter used the side of his bayonet to stop Meagher’s body pitching into the flames. The musket itself then fell into the fire and accidentally discharged. A senior general, now running with other officers from the tent, helped pick up Meagher and told him, ‘General, you owe your life to that man.’ The next morning, when he went to Meagher’s tent to copy further orders, he found ‘a beautiful new musket with bayonet was there.’ McCarter said Meagher seemed to feel deeply mortified by the incident. ‘To his honor and credit, I never saw General Meagher intoxicated again.’

  Sumner had been put in overall command of what was called the Right Grand Division, and his Second Corps, of which the Irish Brigade was part, was put under the command of General Darius Couch. Hancock remained at division and Meagher at brigade, sharing reminiscences of many mutual Democrat friends as autumn advanced. From their position on Stafford Hills the brigade could look across the Rappahannock to the well-made town of Fredericksburg. Sumner sent an officer across on 17 November to demand its surrender. The Rebels refused, and on the escarpment called Marye’s Heights behind the town, began digging redoubts. Ambrose Burnside took no action. Sumner argued with Burnside to let him cross the river, occupy the entire town and try for the heights while they were still lightly defended. He had in fact sent Meagher’s Irish across already, but Burnside countermanded that order. McCarter later wrote, ‘I am of the opinion and I am not alone in it that General Burnside, not withstanding his alleged unprepared condition … committed the saddest blunder of his whole military career.’ This decision led everyone to presume that Burnside would do nothing until the spring. A blizzard came and the men were happy to begin building log huts, roofing them with canvas, covering their walls with pictures from the illustrated papers.

  Since the season now seemed lulled, Meagher sent the brigade colours north, in the care of Captain James McGee, for presentation to the civilian committee in New York. A banquet was in fact held to receive these tokens of Celtic valour, and a number of officers home on sick leave attended. Heavily bandaged Colonel Patrick Kelly was asked to speak, but McGee had to explain that the colonel’s jaw had been smashed.

  The committee meant to bring down to the winter camp new battle flags. Meagher, ever an enthusiastic arranger of banquets, was actively preparing to receive them. The men of the brigade began refurbishing a theatre in the Union-held outskirts of the town, reachable by boat across the Rappahannock. Turning it into a banquet hall, they decorated it with boughs for a feast to be held on 13 December. In the meantime, Meagher showed Surgeon Ellis a full-blown ulcer which had developed near one of his knee-joints. As for the men, said Private McCarter, they ‘anticipated spending what many of them termed “a gay and happy winter in Dixie’s little land” but alas, poor fellows, hundreds never left the place.’ For on 9 December, orders were sent, which Meagher’s renowned copyist McCarter had to write out, and it became apparent to him that an attack on the Rebel lines above Fredericksburg was in fact planned. On 10 December, each man was furnished with three days’ cooked rations and eighty rounds, and that night Union engineers, on Burnside’s belated orders, began pushing pontoon-bridge segments out across the Rappahannock towards the town of Fredericksburg. Watching these preparations, a young Irish soldier of the 88th New York turned to his chaplain, Father William Corby, and said, ‘Father, are they going to lead us over in front of those guns which we have seen them placing unhindered for the past three weeks?’ Corby said, ‘Don’t trouble yourselves; your Generals know better than that.’

  At Hancock’s urging, Meagher sent a telegraph to the Irish Brigade Recruiting Office, 596 Broadway. ‘Every officer in this brigade in or about New York will instantly rejoin his command.’ For as Father Corby confessed, ‘To our great surprise, the poor soldier was right. On December 12, we were ordered to move.’ Before leaving his tent, Meagher locked up his possessions in a chest and gave the key to McCarter. ‘If my fate is to fall, hand it over to Gener
al Hancock.’ McCarter was discontented at being left and was later able to talk his way into crossing the river and catching up with the brigade.

  Helped by a morning mist, the Irish Brigade crossed the pontoons to Fredericksburg. The Confederates gradually withdrew from the centre of the town, leaving a city in which the remaining civilians stayed in their cellars. Meagher broadly forbade looting, but it was nonetheless widespread. Men dressed up in plundered clothing and were grateful to find a supply of whiskey. There were also warehouses full of tobacco and barges laden with it. McCarter found a small bakery and some barrels of flour in its cellar. Everyone had resigned himself to dying the next day, on the defences above the town, and during the afternoon officers had to drive away undertakers’ clerks who approached men and guaranteed shipment of bodies back to the North on good terms. Now some drank, some went to confession, many did both. They studiously wrote their names on slips of paper for pinning to the backs of their jackets.

  Meagher, sleep interrupted by his leg ulcer, was never to record what he thought during this bitter night. The whimsical pen which had described the nuances of transportation and Costa Rican travel was defeated. He talked with Hancock, who like other generals had tried to dissuade Burnside. A philosophic lassitude combined with flaring hope tempered his blood. In the morning, summoned by bugles and pipers, the brigade emerged from houses, took up parade rest formation in the riverfront section of town, and at 9.30, in residual mist, moved up to a street that ran east-west in the centre of the city; here they formed in line of battle. Meagher, on horseback for now to relieve his ulcerated leg, gave a brief speech to each regiment. Sergeant William McClelland published an account in the Irish American of what General Meagher said to the 88th New York. The general’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Soldiers—This is my wife’s own regiment, “her own dear 88th,” she calls it, and I know, and have confidence, that with that dear woman’s smile upon you … this day you will strike a deadly blow to those wicked traitors who are now but a few hundred yards from you …’ But just in case they might be confused with some other, less distinguished brigade, Meagher ‘sent to our officers the bunches of boxwood requesting them to present in his name a green sprig to each man in the ranks.’ To an extent this was another gesture, but also a means of marking those who were killed as Irish.

  A few days before, Mitchel and his journalist friend John Dooley started from Richmond to visit the camps outside the town of Fredericksburg and see their sons. Arriving at the railhead near Guiney’s Station south of the town, Mitchel and Dooley walked to Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg and found their boys sitting at a campfire with comrades, and on the morning of 13 December Mitchel and Willy ate a breakfast of corn and hardtack with the Richmond Howitzers, who were commanded by an Irishman, Ned McCarthy.

  From where he chatted with Willy that morning, Mitchel, the journalist Dooley and Dooley’s son, indeed the entire Confederate Army on Marye’s Heights, could see ‘the gathering hosts of the Yankees filling up the plain,’ and he admired ‘their order and celerity.’ He found that the location where he was sitting, close to Confederate artillery, began to attract Federal fire. Mitchel was now no more than a mile and a half from his Vandemonian colleague Meagher. Yet everybody agreed that Burnside would not fight that day. So Mitchel bade both Willy and his officer brother James goodbye, and he and Mr Dooley left the camp. As they neared the railhead they heard the huge and sudden rage of the battle.

  In Fredericksburg, on the side of the street the 116th Pennsylvania faced, a cotton factory was on fire. McCarter feared that it might fall on him. ‘Here and there Negro women were seen rushing out of half demolished houses, frequently with young children in their arms or crying and clinging to their skirts, perfectly frantic with fright.’ A parson and his wife emerged, demanding that Colonel Heenan, in view of the fact that the North had destroyed their living, should allow them safe passage across the river to seek compensation.

  As the brigade went into motion, they had to enter streets running north-south and subject to terrible fire. Up ahead, McCarter saw Meagher at the head of the column, waving his glittering sword. A shell wounded Colonel Heenan in the hand and entered the calf of McCarter’s left leg. Artillery smoke added to the mist as they crossed the small millstream between the town and the heights. The planks of the wooden bridge were gone, and only the stringers were intact. Beyond was a slight indentation in the terrain where the Irish dumped their haversacks and blankets. Meagher told them, on General Hancock’s instruction, to fix bayonets. A prisoner of war had told Hancock that the Irish bayonet charges at the Sunken Road at Antietam had been decisive. A Pennsylvanian at McCarter’s side, who would be killed within seconds, remarked, ‘That’s the thing to fetch the sons of bitches.’

  The slope of Marye’s Heights was 150 yards off. When French’s men went off uphill in broad day, the Irish were able to watch them swept away and obliterated by musketry and canister and grape. Regiments with whom the Irish had socialised in Camp California were reduced by half in seconds, then bravely moved in to fill the gaps, were halved again, and finally fell to the ground to take any cover they could. Meagher now received Hancock’s expected order to take the brigade forward. With his severe but secret leg ulcer—according to Surgeon Reynolds, Meagher had concealed his ulcer from General Hancock—Meagher had dismounted, for it was not the terrain for equine gallantry. As ever, the Irish went forward at their de rigueur rush, trying to prove their worth to nativist America. They crossed a ruined cornfield to the first fence, rushed to the second and were now struggling past French’s maimed, 50 yards below the stone wall and the Rebels. This was as far as any human on the Union side got. Thomas F. Galwey, a scholarly young Irish veteran of Antietam and an officer of an Ohio regiment in French’s division, hugging the ground with the remnants of his company, wrote:

  The Irish Brigade … comes out from the city in glorious file, their green sunbursts waving … every man has a sprig of green in his cap, and a half-laughing, half-murderous look in their eyes. They passed just to our left, poor fellows, poor, glorious fellows, shaking goodbye to us with their hats! They reach a point within a stone’s throw of the stone wall. No farther. They try to go beyond, but are slaughtered.

  He saw them lying in line by ‘that terrible stone wall.’

  Lee would have reason to be more than pleased. The Union lost 13,000 men, the same as at Antietam, but Lee only 4,000. Pickett’s Virginian division had repulsed the Irish Brigade, and Pickett, under whom James and Willy Mitchel served, wrote to his wife, ‘Your soldier’s heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin … My darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up all along our lines.’ The mild Captain Conyngham of the Irish Brigade had a harsher verdict: ‘It was not a battle—it was a wholesale slaughter of human beings—sacrificed to the blind ambition and incapacity of some parties.’ As for the brigade, another of its officers called down God’s blessing on ‘the widows and orphans of nearly all those belonging to it. It will be a sad, sad Christmas by many an Irish hearthstone in New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.’

  After the first, fatal and only attack failed, Meagher sent an orderly to get his horse, and limped down the hill a little way to meet it coming back. General Hancock rode up and ordered him to withdraw the remains of the brigade back into Fredericksburg. Survivors huddled in the streets as the dressing-stations filled up. Meagher gathered what was left of his staff. Fortunately the night was mild for the season and Private McCarter, wounded in hand and leg, tried to walk down the hill into town. He collapsed with loss of blood and a raging fever, but was found by a sergeant of his regiment.

  Now not even Meagher could convince himself that today a terrible beauty had been born. But he maintained a good front. In Fredericksburg, in the theatre the brigade had decorated, the banquet for the presentation of the new colours went ahead. The sutlers’ wagons came up over the pontoon bridge with whiskey and champagne, table
s and banners. Many officers were not present, they were out in the dark, trying to retrieve wounded. The guests from New York attended, and the corps commander Darius Couch. Meagher told the civilian visitors of the committee that he wanted them to take the flags back to New York and save them until the brigade could be rebuilt. An orderly amused the company by bearing in a salver covered with a napkin. Removing the napkin he displayed a cannon ball. General Hancock, unaccustomed to wakes, secretly wondered how the Irish could follow such a slaughter with a feast. But what Meagher took to the banquet was less a gaiety and more a manic heart. He had begun darkly to consider that the Irish Brigade had to this point been expressing a debt to the Union. Now—in his mind—the debt column was overtopped and the Union needed to express its debt to the Irish Brigade. ‘Of the 2,200 men I led into action the day before,’ he would write the next morning, ‘218 now appeared on that ground that morning.’ Hancock saw three Irishmen standing alone. ‘Close up with your company,’ he ordered them. ‘General, we are our company,’ one of them replied.

  Sundered by loss and divided by oceans of gore, the Irish of the divided states were still poignantly united in hope for Ireland. Dennis J. Downing, a Cork-born Union captain, schoolfriend of the most famous Cork Fenian, O’Donovan Rossa, claimed that on the night after the battle of Fredericksburg, socialising at a camp fire, he began singing the ballad ‘Ireland Boys Hurrah.’ It was a marching song of O’Donovan Rossa’s radical Phoenix national and literary clubs in Cork, paramilitary groups of young men who had been heavily pursued by the police and were now merged with James Stephens’s Irish Republican Brotherhood. The chorus spread from Irish voice to Irish voice 6 miles along the river, and then was echoed by Irishmen in the Confederate lines on the further bank.