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

by Thomas Keneally

  It was a pleasant trip as far as Bermuda. But nearing the coast of North Carolina they were chased and fired upon by a flotilla which Jenny claimed was made up of some eight or ten Federal ships of war. Over several hours, as the Mitchel women waited below in the main cabin, the chase continued, and Vesta finally skittered around Cape Fear and into the Cape Fear River. Legs of bacon destined for the Confederate commissary were used to fuel the boilers. No sooner was Vesta bottled up in the Cape Fear River channel than the captain decided to run her aground, landed the passengers in coastal scrub with their small luggage and set fire to the vessel.

  The women spent the night on the beach, but at last a wagon was found, and Mrs Mitchel and the two girls were carried ‘half dead’ into the town of Smith. After resting in that unadorned place, they caught a steamer to Wilmington, North Carolina, where Jenny Mitchel at last telegraphed her husband. She had proved again her remarkable mettle. Jenny and her daughters were able to catch a direct train by way of Goldsboro to Richmond, a tedious journey of over 200 miles. Mitchel wrote: ‘No more destitute refugees ever came to Richmond, even in those days of refugeeing, than my wife and two little girls.’

  Jenny found that by now Mitchel had adjusted his employment to his politics and had moved to the Richmond Examiner, whose editor was his friend, short, dapper, tubercular John Daniel. In quicksilver temperament, impulsiveness and lack of tact, Daniel, former US representative in Sardinia, was a soul-mate of Mitchel’s. As a rabid Southern nationalist, early in the war he had sought ‘an honourable scar,’ and had achieved one in the right arm at Mechanicsville. Now he expressed his preference by favouring Walker’s dictionary over the Yankee Webster’s, and maintained in the Examiner spellings such as ‘musick,’ ‘dyspeptick,’ ‘politick.’ But by the summer of 1864, he had lost faith in the government’s will to pursue the war, lost faith in the generals, and was advocating a negotiated peace.

  Mitchel had abandoned his support of Davis in June, and came to the Examiner as Daniel’s editor. ‘I am quite sensible that there is one vice in this Confederacy,’ Mitchel wrote for his new paper:

  one weak spot in its harness; one taint in its heart—namely, that the poorer people—the mean whites—have not the same interest in the contest which wealthy planters have. They cannot, indeed, bear the thought of being, what they call, whipped; and have fought well these three years, still hoping that the Northerns will tire of their many defeats and humiliations … Now they begin to see that the North is growing stronger every day, while they are growing weaker.

  Mitchel had moved his family into a house on Fifth Street, Richmond, at the corner of Cary Street. Despite the critical demeanour of the Examiner, Jefferson Davis still considered him a friend and welcomed the newcomers, Jenny Mitchel and her daughters, into the Confederate White House. Gentlewomen trying to break into Richmond at such a questionable time were a novelty and an omen of hope.

  Throughout most of the stalemated summer of 1864, as the war in Virginia returned to the country it had been fought over two years earlier, the opposing armies occupied trenches in front of Petersburg. John Mitchel was on duty around Richmond with the Ambulance Committee. The city that summer was continually distracted by the Dead March being played as an officer was borne to the cemetery through the ‘bowery streets.’ For part of the time, James Mitchel was serving with Gordon in dangerous lines in the vicinity of Petersburg where his father could visit him. That struggle had developed into a pounding attrition, whose brand of trench warfare would be seen again half a century later, in the First World War. But then James was moved up into the Shenandoah Valley with the rest of Early’s division to fight Hunter, and afterwards Sheridan, in a more conventional war of movement.

  In June, to Mitchel’s great pride, Major John Mitchel junior was put in command of Fort Sumter. On 20 July 1864, while Daniel and Mitchel were working in the Examiner office, a telegram arrived from Major-General Sam Jones, commander of the Department of South Carolina. ‘Your gallant and accomplished son fell mortally wounded by the fragment of a shell about 1pm today, whilst in the faithful performance of his duty as commanding officer of Fort Sumter.’ Mitchel took his hat, excused himself, and walked for 2 miles before being able to enter his house and face his wife and two daughters.

  In the eleventh month of a bombardment during which the Union lobbed 43,000 shells into Sumter, Major Mitchel had mounted a parapet to persuade a sentry to do a better job of reporting the fall of Sumter’s shells on Union positions at Morris Island. A mortar exploded in the air above him, lodging a fatal metal fragment in his chest and killing him almost at once. He was given a splendid military burial at the beautiful Magnolia cemetery, Charleston, with the cadets of the Citadel providing the honour guard. Claudine Rhett would keep Major Mitchel’s memory green, publishing articles on him and visiting his grave every anniversary. Ultimately a committee would erect a monument, with surrounds which were a stone model of Fort Sumter.

  If Mrs Jenny Mitchel ever threw up her hands in inexpressible pain at the life Mitchel had led herself and her children, we have no record of it. Mitchel himself had reached the conclusion that Jenny and the girls and he had suffered enough. He harried officials in the administration, presenting himself to Clement C. Clay, a confidant of Davis’s, a former US Senator for Alabama and Confederate negotiator with the British and Canadians, and to others. He was thus able to arrange that his remaining son James Mitchel be now removed from the front to the staff of General Kemper, garrison commander of Richmond. Mitchel himself set out from Richmond on the Shenandoah Railroad to deliver the redeeming order to his son.

  The Examiner meantime remained the leading critic of the manner in which the Atlanta campaign had gone. ‘Those fights lost us Atlanta, and the smallness of our loss in killed and wounded proves that, by generalship alone, the enemy got possession of the city … The fact is, while Hood thought the bulk of the Yankee army was in his front at Atlanta, it was twenty miles in his rear, on the Macon Road. We hope he will be on the lookout for a repetition of the movement.’ The situation in Georgia gave Mitchel and Daniel some small, delusional comfort. ‘Our army, from all we can hear, is safe and in good condition. Sherman’s army is not safe.’

  Mitchel’s former fellow prisoner O’Brien was remote from the decline of the Confederacy. Still Ireland’s Visitor-in-Chief, he had been in Hungary again and taken up the cause of the imprisoned Hungarian nationalist Count Teleki. In Warsaw he visited a notable Wild Goose cousin, a reactionary commander of the Tsar’s troops in Poland, used to exiling and imprisoning Polish activists. These excursions profoundly tired him, but were necessary to a man for whom the concept of ‘home’ had grown ambiguous. His last general comment on the Irish situation, written, as were earlier such commentaries, in the form of a long letter, was thus marked by wistfulness. He grieved that the liberal Protestantism for which he stood before 1848 no longer had a presence in a highly sectarian Ireland.

  He was visiting Wales when he became very sick. In an earlier letter to his daughter Charlotte, he had complained that he was in low spirits and suffering from ‘a terrible oppression of an asthmatic kind.’ After refusing to call a doctor, on 18 June 1864 he died in the Penrhyn Arms Hotel at Bangor of what may have been a pneumonic heart attack, combined with complications of the liver. The Freeman’s Journal of 20 June said that his liver disease had caused loss of appetite, depression and ‘general break up of a frame naturally robust.’ He was sixty-one.

  The family would have preferred that the return of the body to Dublin be a private affair, and not a pretext for a national demonstration. But before dawn on the fifth day after his death, crowds greeted the ship, as did the Lord Mayor of Dublin and John Martin and Pat Smyth, now returned to Ireland. The Times is believed to have under-estimated the crowd, putting it at 2,000, ‘among whom there could not have been more than a dozen persons of respectable exterior.’ The Nation put the assembly at 20,000 and said that as the procession passed the place where Robert Emmet was
executed, men removed their hats and the pace slackened. At 6.00 a.m. the coffin was placed on the train west to Limerick. The burial at Rathronan churchyard near Cahirmoyle was more sedate, presided over by two of Lucy’s clergymen brothers. The Times of 21 June signed off on O’Brien for the moment: ‘He was certainly one of the weakest, as we would fain hope he was the last, of agitators, but he was also one of the most humane and honest.’ John Martin mourned him most sincerely at a meeting of the Irish National League. ‘I confess that when I heard that Smith O’Brien was no more, I looked around the land, asking myself almost in despair whence and from what quarter was there likely to rise another O’Brien.’

  O’Brien’s friend Meagher was at the time of the great man’s burial pleading with the War Department for the usual allowances made to army officers. He could not have been helped by the fact that a presidential contest was in progress, that McClellan was standing for the Democrats against Lincoln, that Samuel Barlow was Little Mac’s campaign director, and that he himself acted as occasional window-dressing on McClellan’s platforms. In September, at last, orders came for him to travel to Nashville, Tennessee, taking rail to Pittsburgh, and then travelling by steamers on the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers. He was to report from Nashville by telegram to Major-General William T. Sherman, who would give him an assignment.

  Upon Meagher’s arrival that autumn in Nashville, a city on the south bank of the Cumberland River which had been captured by the Union more than two years before, he was asked by the installed Union governor to speak in the House of Representatives. Though he praised the Democrat parliamentary candidate, his friend and former commander George B. McClellan, for the sake of the coming victory over rebellion he was obviously in favour of Lincoln’s re-election.

  Sherman, away to the south-east on his march to the sea, now delayed issuing Meagher orders. He derided Meagher as ‘Mozart Hall,’ a nickname derived from a faction of the New York Democrat party—ironically, one associated with a desire for a peace settlement. At last General James B. Steedman in Nashville got a signal from General George Thomas in Chattanooga—‘assign him to the command of the convalescents of Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps.’ The convalescents were fellows who had seen too much to take the army with gravity. But ordered south to Chattanooga, Meagher and his command did well at the job of guarding 70 miles of track of the Chattanooga & Knoxville Railroad to the north-east, as well as the Chattanooga & Atlanta as far south as the Union army’s control extended. Meagher moved his brigades by rail and deployed them in depots along both lines with what General Steedman considered great efficiency.

  Having done this guard duty for a little more than a month, Meagher was then put in command of the military district of Etowah in Tennessee, temporarily replacing Major-General Steedman himself as an acting major-general. His headquarters were at Chattanooga, and his command area ran north-east again, parallel with the mountains of eastern Tennessee—country well known to John Mitchel. Meagher had a force of 12,000 infantry, 200 guns and three regiments of cavalry. To his west, Confederate General Hood was pushing up towards Nashville with plans to go on into Kentucky, a last attempt to draw Sherman off from his rampage towards the sea. Meagher and his men were in considerable peril of being cut off from Nashville. As well, as Meagher’s former officer from the Irish Brigade, Lyons, would record, Etowah was overrun with guerrillas ‘with whom he sometimes dealt with the full severity of martial law’; the War Department records no communications on the matter from Meagher, so we are left to wonder what Lyons means by this.

  But on Christmas Eve 1864, General Thomas at Nashville drove off Hood’s Confederate army. The victory was greatly celebrated by the troops in Chattanooga. An officer wrote: ‘We had numerous reunions amongst the officers and wound up with another great dinner party at General Meagher’s at which he shone brilliantly with his Irish wit and humour.’

  Steedman returned to Chattanooga in the new year, and Meagher was told that a great part of his convalescent Provisional Division of the Army of Tennessee would soon be travelling to Savannah to link with Sherman’s forces. Before Meagher departed, Steedman wrote enthusiastically to him. ‘I beg leave to express to you my profound regret that the fortunes of war call you from this Department.’ He praised him for ‘your splendid success in protecting the railroad and telegraph to Knoxville and Dalton, the steamboat transportation on the Tennessee River, the public property exposed to capture by the enemy’s cavalry, and the harmony and good order maintained by you throughout the district.’ Meagher was to take his troops to Nashville and embark them on the steamboats which would ship them up the Cumberland, and then eastwards along the Ohio, all the way to Pittsburgh. After some days on the river boats, Meagher reached Pittsburgh, but in the meantime General Grant had expressed concern about the arrangement. ‘If Meagher’s command stops in New York it is feared many will desert.’ Halleck ordered Meagher to bring his command to Washington instead of New York. Meagher’s telegraph in reply explained that his division of 6,000 or 7,000 men were still scattered along the river, delayed on their way by ice on the Ohio. The War Department was alarmed to read the opinion of the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial that the troops were ill-treated and badly managed, ‘shamefully deserted by drunken officers, etc. etc.’ Secretary of War Stanton telegraphed Meagher for names of recalcitrant officers. But Meagher answered, enclosing letters from his Assistant Quartermaster, his Provost Marshal, and Colonel Roughton, one of his brigade commanders. Vehemently denying the accusations, all mentioned the frozen Ohio and scarcity of rail transportation.

  Halleck, in Washington and in no position to know what was happening on the Ohio, signalled Grant concerning Meagher’s men: ‘They are in utter confusion, and he seems to be ignorant of what troops he has and where they are.’ When the division had at last all arrived in Washington, the men were entrained for Annapolis, where they joined their transports. Meagher took over one of the waiting steamers in Chesapeake Bay. A transport officer, Major Scott, had an argument with him over the fact that, as Scott complained, ‘he has selected a steamer for his headquarters, and directed her to be kept empty until certain troops arrive.’ Halleck supported Scott: the ship should be loaded and dispatched as fast as troops arrived. On the evening of 5 February Scott delivered orders to General Meagher on board the Ariel, to the effect that Meagher was to deliver his command to General Palmer at New Bern, North Carolina. Scott signed off the papers: ‘Copy furnished to Capt Flagg A Q M 8.30 pm his commander (Genl Meagher) being too drunk to understand anything.’ While it is credible that General Meagher may have been too drunk to understand, we have the word of only one transport officer who needed an excuse to explain transport delays.

  By 13 February nearly all Meagher’s men had arrived at Beaufort, North Carolina, and an as yet unreplaced Meagher reported with his command to General Palmer at New Bern, the large Federal garrison on the estuary of the Neuse River, amidst coastal lowlands and turpentine forests. Palmer, yet another of the West Pointers who had little time for the Irishman, described Meagher’s command as ‘but a mob of men in uniform.’ If so, Meagher bore the blame. Had Meagher lost control, said Grant, ‘it will afford a favourable pretext for doing what the service would have lost nothing by having done long ago—dismissing him.’

  Six days passed before Grant signalled Halleck, ‘Has General Meagher been dismissed?’ The response came the same day: ‘The President has not acted on Meagher. The Secretary of War thinks you had better order General Schofield to relieve and send him home.’ And Schofield did it, apparently very tactfully. For steaming home from New Bern, Meagher was under the impression that he had performed the movement of his troops competently, and he clearly did not feel in any sense culpable. But he was once again faced with all the problems of 1860–1: What to do? How to make a mark? As the war wound down, he toyed with the idea of writing a biography of General Bull Sumner. In April, as he still cast about him, the war ended and then, on 14 April, Lincoln was assassinated. Meagher t
ravelled to Washington in mid-April to take part in the Honour Guard of general officers for the lying-instate, under the Capitol dome, of a President he had served, whatever General Halleck thought, very thoroughly.

  The Richmond Examiner was nearing the close of its war too. Everyone in Richmond seemed thin, and like most citizens, Jenny and John could afford only the plainest and sparsest of meals. Little Daniel, proprietor of the Examiner, was sinking under poor diet and over-exertion, but Mitchel was still vigorous. Mrs Mary Pegrim Anderson, wife of a Confederate general, wrote: ‘When his own heart was almost broken by the deaths in battle of his two sons … he never stopped to bewail his afflictions, but with the Ambulance Corps in the field, or in the hospitals at home, did all he could to soothe and relieve the suffering.’

  On 27 February, the Examiner dissented from the President’s speech in the Confederate Congress, which had contained the sentiment: ‘If the campaign against Richmond had resulted in success instead of failure; if we had been compelled to evacuate Richmond as well as Atlanta, the Confederacy would have remained as erect and defiant as ever.’ The Examiner accurately attacked ‘this fatal error … The evacuation of Richmond would be to the loss of all respect and authority towards the Confederate Government, the disintegration of the army, and the abandonment of the scheme of an independent Southern Confederation.’ Fatal errors abounded. General Lee was urging that the slaves be conscripted to Southern military service, and Mitchel went so far as to raise the blasphemous doubt as to whether Lee was ‘a “good Southerner”; that is, whether he is thoroughly satisfied of the justice and beneficence of negro slavery.’