The Immortal Irishman

  In midafternoon, lying on grass slick with warm blood, an Irishman lost his ear. Through the smoke, men of the 69th had to dart one way or the other to dodge the bounce of heavy cannonballs. But the plum-sized iron balls that rained from overhead, after a lit-fuse shell exploded, were something else—a random shower. The soldier had looked uphill, into the whir of musket fire, when his ear was clipped clean by a shell fragment. He put his hand to the bloody opening in his head and screamed as he felt the loss.

  The Union generals sent several waves up Henry’s Hill, and each time they were repelled. Now it was the immigrants’ turn. As the temperature climbed, the Irishmen stripped off their shirts and prepared to charge. Bare-chested, they formed a line behind their emerald flag, and with a loud cry ran toward the battery of Southerners. Tightly bunched, the men of the 69th dropped quickly. Legs were knocked out. Faces were torn open by fragments from canisters. Heads split. Every few minutes, a cannonball made a direct hit, decapitating a volunteer or cutting him clean in half. To shoot a man on the run is not an easy thing, not with a heavy musket that fired a single shot at a time. Teeth moved faster than trigger fingers, tearing open cartridges, the powder blackening lips. Compounding the problem was identification: some of the enemy buzzing around the house wore blue, some wore gray, some wore the clothes of a field hand. The Irish led one charge, with Meagher on a white horse, and were cut down. They tried a second time, even as other Union soldiers started to melt away in the wrong direction. This too was repelled. A third assault followed, and again was rolled back at high cost in blood.

  Meagher tried to continue the fight, to push through to the house and break Confederate will. His men briefly crested the hill. “We felt quite elated,” a soldier of the 69th told the New York Times. Then, out of the fields to the side, out of nowhere, a rush of fresh Southern soldiers charged forth. These reinforcements, thousands of them, had come from the Shenandoah Valley, where they were supposed to have been kept in place by another Union force. As tired, dehydrated and dispirited as the American soldiers were, the rebels new to battle were fully charged, letting loose a bloodcurdling yell. At the same time, showers of iron and grapeshot from cannons increased. Not a space between Union soldiers was free of lethal projectiles. Bodies covered the grass of the hill, the blood turning brown under the sun. “We beat their men,” Meagher said. “Their batteries beat us. That is the story of the day.”

  Loss begot chaos. General McDowell’s Union soldiers headed for safety, back across Bull Run—quick-stepping and then sprinting, a dash of fear. Already weakened by hunger and heat, many threw down their weapons and ran. Meagher was stunned at the sight of an army fleeing from a fight. To go to war requires the suspension of survival instincts. If the illusion cannot be sustained, base human fear takes over. Swept up in the stampede of retreat, the Irish stumbled back down toward the stream with the main army, protecting the rear. Their lips were cracked and parched, their legs heavy. Some were barefoot. Corcoran ordered his men to form into a square that could slow the enemy advance, and maybe start a counterattack. But his group was soon separated in the haze and surrounded by secessionists. Where was Corcoran? Meagher cried out for his friend from 1848. Word came that he was killed. No, wounded. Or captured. Command now fell to Meagher, whose cap had come off. He mounted his horse and waved the unfurled green banner of the 69th. “Look at that flag,” he yelled. “Think of Ireland!” Would the harp, outlaw instrument in the days of the British Penal Laws, still have power in a New World clash?

  Poised to spill Southern blood, the Irish captain tried to hold the line. Meagher was knocked from his mount and smashed into the ground. His horse had been pummeled, torn open by cannon shot, tossing him into a heap. His vision blurred, his hearing went to a white-noise monotone and then—nothing. He lay face-down, spread-eagled in reddish Virginia dust, unconscious, his body splattered in horse blood and scraps of the animal’s flesh and hide. As waves of Federals fled, rebels chased them in high-spirited pursuit. Meagher would have been captured, or had a bayonet run through his rib cage, had not a lone soldier gone back to rescue him. Private Joseph P. McCoy, a student from a Jesuit college, grabbed Meagher and horse-collared him back toward the fleeing Union soldiers. The captain was placed in a wagon, which bounced along the uneven field. Minutes later, the horse pulling the carriage took a load of shot in its flank and reared up in agony. The animal fell, the wagon capsized, and Meagher was pitched into the stream. The splash shook him fully back to consciousness, but the sight all around him was a heave of loss and abandon. “Here it was that the panic took place,” he recalled. “Up to this point, there was no fright, no alarm, no confusion.” Caught in the break for safety was a New York congressman, Albert Ely, who had ventured down from the picnic grounds for a closer look at combat. A rebel soldier wanted to kill him. “You infernal son of a bitch! You came to see the fun, did you? God damn your dirty soul!”

  Nearby, on the rise that the Union had failed to take, Jefferson Davis rode up to view the battlefield. He had come from Richmond on the train, traveling over the rail line that was supposed to be turned into a Union one-way to the Confederate White House. The fussy Davis arrived in time to hear Stonewall Jackson’s boast on behalf of the slaveholding nation. “We have them whipped—they ran like dogs,” Jackson told him. “Give me ten thousand men like them and I shall take Washington City tomorrow.”

  Lincoln’s soldiers limped back to Camp Corcoran, collapsing into their tents at 3 a.m. The Union reported these casualties: 625 men killed, 950 wounded, 1,200 captured. Confederate losses were 400 killed, about 1,600 wounded. Thirty-eight Irishmen from the 69th died at Bull Run, another 59 were seriously hurt, and nearly 200 were missing. Corcoran was presumed dead or captured. And Meagher, some New York papers reported, had been killed. The Union had been humiliated. That was true, to a point. The Irish had performed admirably, as even Sherman noted afterward in his official report. The “sewage from the city” won praise from both sides. The immigrants charged when others would not. They held firm and fired back when others threw down their weapons. They were among the last of the Union soldiers to retreat. Still, a British correspondent from the Times of London ridiculed Meagher, saying the fall from his horse was due to drunkenness, a story reprinted in the American press. There may have been a larger motive behind the misinformation: if Meagher was serious about raising an army to eventually liberate Ireland, better that he be stopped now. By contrast, the New York Times quoted an eyewitness who said, “Meagher was remarkable in his bare head, urging his men forward.” A few days later, 29 officers in Meagher’s unit wrote a letter to the New York papers praising Meagher’s performance—“on the march, no one was more eager in battle; none more reckless of his life.”

  At camp, the deflated band made plans to return home. War was horrible and, it was now clear, would not be short. The day after the battle, Lincoln signed a bill authorizing the enlistment of 500,000 men for three years of duty—a professional army for the long haul. A second bill called for an additional half million men. Meagher was ready to follow Lincoln, but how? A citizen soldier for now, his tour of duty was up. He packed to go home to Elizabeth and an uncertain future. But William Tecumseh Sherman would have none of it. Eyes narrowed, hair unkempt, the colonel growled at Meagher.

  “How can you go to New York?” he asked him, in the company of the unpaid men of the 69th. “I do not remember to have signed a leave for you.”

  Meagher said his ninety days had expired. He was a free man, not a professional officer in the regular army. So were the others.

  “You are a soldier and must submit to orders until you are properly discharged.” To make his point, Sherman moved closer, and spoke loud enough for every one of the soldiers to hear, no cloaking his West Point training with a veneer of civilian manners. “If you attempt to leave without orders, it will be mutiny, and I will shoot you like a dog.” Meagher retreated to his tent. Sherman had shamed him before his friends; worse, he made it clear he had no
respect for these men.

  In the afternoon a gangly, black-suited visitor with a pallor of gloom came to visit the New York Irish—President Lincoln. “We thought we would come over and see the boys,” he said. The unusual timbre of his voice, a bit high, caught the men by surprise. On Sunday, the blue-sky day of battle, Lincoln had gone for a ride in the country outside the capital, reasonably confident of victory. That evening, he read a telegram of startling news from his War Department: “The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.” Monday it rained, weather to match the mood of broken men in bandages and tattered clothes staggering through the streets.

  “They come along in disorderly mobs,” Whitman wrote, “queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d in the feet . . . Where are your banners and your bands of music?” Some supporters urged the president to give up the fight. “If it best for the country and mankind that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their terms, do not shrink even from that,” Horace Greeley wrote Lincoln. But the Confederates, despite Stonewall Jackson’s boast, were in no shape after Bull Run to storm the White House. A much bigger Union Army stood guard on the banks of the Potomac. Lincoln’s task was to gird a confused nation for a long war. In the days following the defeat, he wanted to see soldiers who would not run from battle. Sherman, despite his low regard for the Irish, knew what they were worth to him. “I have the Irish Sixty-Ninth New York, which will fight,” he wrote the War Department.

  Lincoln shook hands with the bedraggled Irishmen, offering encouragement. Bull Run was just one battle, not the war. Next time would be better, and there was certainly a place in the vast new American force for the immigrants. More than a nod to ethnic tolerance, Lincoln needed the nearly two million Irish in the country to fight for a splintered nation. Northern factory owners, businessmen and Main Street merchants weren’t about to give up their livelihoods to risk death in the South. The farmers, from whose ranks the American revolutionists had drawn some of their best marksmen, were seasonal soldiers—available mainly in the winter, when fields were dormant but fighting was a logistical nightmare. The urban poor, the immigrants without trades, might have to form the backbone of the new Union Army. Whether they would die for this country was still an open question. To Lincoln’s kind words, the Irish 69th gave a president they would never vote for a Gaelic cheer. He was moved, a crooked smile breaking the undertaker’s face—“I confess I rather like it.” Was there anything he could do for them? Be honest, he told the men. Meagher stepped forward. Since being thrown from his horse, and losing friends to combat, the shine of the orator was gone. He looked haggard, with lips tight, eyes clouded, a full half foot shorter than Lincoln.

  “Mr. President, I have a cause of grievance.”

  “Yes.”

  “This morning I went to Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me.”

  Lincoln tipped his head, puzzled. Unwilling to get in the middle of a spat between officers, he threw off a joke, with some truth to it. “If I were you,” he said, “and he threatened to shoot, I would trust him.” For one of the few times in his life, Meagher was speechless. Still, the 69th was mustered out of duty a few days later, free to return home, as the Irish captain had requested. Lincoln would remember Thomas Francis Meagher.

  14

  * * *

  The Call, the Fall

  He could not forget Haggerty, his chest blown open, and Corcoran, gone to the fog of war, friends who’d followed him from Waterford to life’s end in a Virginia field. War was not fit for poetry. Back in New York, he told Libby what he’d seen and what he’d heard: a horse shredded, a boy suddenly blind and crying for his mother, prayers and curses, one and the same. It was not glorious at all—“men I knew and loved, and they lie there in the rich sunshine discolored and cold in death.” The rumors about Corcoran gave way to a letter in his hand from a cell in Richmond. He was held by the rebels, caught when he tried to defend the rear of the Union Army. After losing sight of his main unit, he and a dozen or so soldiers had holed up in a cabin, where the Confederates found them. More than a prisoner of a four-month-old war, Corcoran was a prize for the South: they offered to release him if he would publicly vow not to fight—a powerful disincentive to other Irish. He refused, and was eventually transferred to a damp, lightless cell in Charleston and put in solitary confinement. Should the North execute a single prisoner, it was announced, Michael Corcoran would be hanged.

  Someone had to fill the void, to lead the Irish. No sooner had Meagher returned to New York than requests poured in for him to take up where Corcoran had left off. Orator, barrister, scholar, journalist, revolutionary, adventurer and part-time soldier he was, but a commanding military officer? His little Zouave unit of volunteers had put up a fight at Bull Run, yes, but they’d been routed along with the other New Yorkers. Still, there would be no sitting out this war for Meagher. After a few days at home, he went back to Washington to look after the wounded from the 69th.

  Young men who had run through an Irish vale as children, or played full-throated hurling matches with other lads, now lay on cots, their gangrenous limbs awaiting the surgeon’s handsaw. It was stomach-turning, these boys with their disfigured bodies, but it spurred Meagher to give meaning to the loss. The War Department proposed to make him a captain in the regular army. Good pay, good post, perhaps mostly ceremonial, an Irish American on uniformed display. A better offer came from John C. Frémont—the Pathfinder!—onetime presidential candidate, now a major general in St. Louis, commander of the Department of the West. Meagher could be his aide-de-camp, as a colo- nel. Meagher turned down both requests. His fate was with the New York Irish. “I cannot find it in my heart to part from my tried and honored comrades,” he wrote. He would “prefer the humblest position in their ranks to the highest I could hold with newer friends.”

  An idea was taking hold: why not outfit an all-Irish brigade? The 69th was Hibernian to the core, but not formally established as such. This new creation would be a distinct ethnic unit of at least four regiments, with its own flag, its own pipe and drum corps, its own priests and surgeons, its own poet laureate. The notion was floated in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, home to the largest concentrations of Irish laborers ripe for recruitment. The plan played to Meagher’s heart, stirred by his reading of countrymen who had formed Gaelic units for the French and the Spanish in the past, the vaunted Wild Geese. It played also to his Irish insecurity, the chip holding down his shoulder. He would show William T. Sherman what it meant to lead men into battle, and yet bark out his orders with a brogue. But what would happen if the brigade was a bust? If the immigrants failed to fight, fell apart, deserted, turned on Meagher? If they only confirmed the low opinion held of them by the Know-Nothings? What if the Union lost? For what purpose, then, would Meagher have recruited people to risk death in a new country? To Meagher, the perils were outweighed by the draw: being part of something greater than any one Irishman or any one American.

  For a man who fed off crowds, the gathering on August 29, 1861, at Jones’s Wood in New York, was a feast. The patch of farmland overlooking the East River, 132 acres in what would be subdivided as 66th to 75th Streets, was a pleasure ground for New Yorkers fleeing their tenement traps. It had beer gardens, games of chance and strength, amusements and oddities, picnic tables. On this Sunday, it was transformed into the largest rally of Irish yet on the continent. The festival was ostensibly a benefit to help the widows and families of those killed at Bull Run—admission, 25 cents a person. But it became a recruitment drive for an Irish brigade that would be formed out of the New York 69th, with units from other parts of the Northeast. Meagher on Slievenamon Mountain in 1848 was a boy revolutionary under a summer sun, trying to raise soldiers from the starving. Now, at Jones’s Wood, he once again put his voice to work for a fledgling army. The turnout was estimated at 60,000 by the New York Times. No gathering of that size and character “has ever occurred in this city,” the paper reported. Meagher mounted a large
stage at the front of grounds festooned with the flags of the harp, of the United States, of Ireland. The chatter stilled, the music and dancing stopped. It was the perfect match of man and masses, the Times noted. “Captain Thomas Francis Meagher understands the character of his countrymen better, perhaps, than any other man in this country. To great affluence of language he combines a quickness of imagery which, even to a duller race than the Irish, is delightful.”

  Life is but a shadow that passes over the earth, swiftly gone, Meagher began, not unlike those who fell in Virginia. Think of the men “sealing their oath of American citizenship with their blood—whose doorways are now hung with blackest mourning, and whose tables miss the industrious hands that once furnished them with bread.” They perished for a nation that offered them refuge, “immigrants driven by devastating laws and practices from their native soil.” This Civil War was a test for a people who’d been offered a second chance in a new land.

  “What of the cause in which our countrymen fell that day? Was it urgent? Was it just? Was it sacred?” He let the words linger, the pause for effect, the long silence. Then he answered his own question. “Never was there a cause more urgent, more just, more sacred!” Through the big field came a ripple of applause and cheers. But also some jeers, some drunken catcalls, some cants of discontent. Who wanted to die for Abraham Lincoln? Or worse—slaves? Meagher powered forth, pressing the issue.

  “Will the Irishmen of New York stand by this cause—resolutely, heartily, with inexorable fidelity, despite all the sacrifices it may cost, despite all the dangers into which it may compel them, despite the bereavements and abiding gloom it may bring?”