The Immortal Irishman

  “There, in that very room which I had occupied for several days as his guest . . . he lay cold and white in death, with the hands which were once so warm in their grasp, and so lavish in their gifts crossed upon his breast,” Meagher wrote. The body was sent to New York, arriving on Christmas Day. He lay in state in the Governor’s Room at City Hall, flags flown at half-mast throughout the city.

  The last Civil War orders of General Meagher arrived in September of 1864. He was sent west to Tennessee, to help guard the tail end of a very long and oft-severed Union supply line stretching from Nashville to Atlanta. Rebel fighters, hungry and hiding, no longer marching in crisp formation to brigade-leveling deaths, were trying to bleed the artery that pumped food and fresh men into a Union assault to end the war. At the front of that line, making plans to march to the sea and choke the South, was Major General William Tecumseh Sherman. He shelled Atlanta, killing civilians who had stayed behind, tearing up railroad tracks, raiding farms for field provisions. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman wrote to Atlanta’s mayor. He hit the slaveholders everywhere—in their homes, their plantations, their public buildings. The Union now had a million men in uniform, and more on the way. The South was out of money, out of food, out of troops to counter the steamroller making its way toward Richmond. The leaders of the Confederacy considered a last-ditch plan to force thousands of slaves into fighting on behalf of their masters—prompting a dissonance that political minds shaped by white supremacy could not countenance. “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution,” said Howell Cobb, a Georgia politician and former speaker of the House of Representatives and a rebel general. “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” For the North, they made excellent soldiers: 180,000 blacks served in the Union Army.

  Surrender terms were offered to the breakaway nation, not yet four years old. Jefferson Davis, his billy goat tuft of chin hair flapping in rage, rejected calls for peace. He was as haughty and uncompromising as ever. His army executed black soldiers they’d captured, troops that were now fighting some of the very men who had enslaved them. “You may ‘emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free,” the Confederate president declared, even “if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.” The flames came soon enough. Pounded by Sherman, the rebels abandoned Atlanta on September 1, burning everything of military use.

  Meagher had never forgiven Sherman for how he treated the Irish at Bull Run. And Sherman could not let go of Meagher’s description of him, which had found its way into print—the “envenomed martinet.” In the three years since the first big battle of the war, Meagher had lost his brigade. But Sherman had lost his mind. The cinnamon-haired officer fell into an unshakable depression in the fall of 1861. Unable to see beyond a fog of despondency, he was temporarily relieved of his command. Newspaper headlines proclaimed what Sherman himself had feared: the general was “insane.” He talked to the floor, mouth motoring, sputtering gibberish. He repeated certain refrains—of woe, of doubt, of anger—over and over and over. His fingers tapped ceaselessly on desktops, his eyes darted back and forth, and his bewhiskered chin was in a constant twitch. He couldn’t sleep, and ate very little. “I am up all night,” he wrote his wife. “I find myself riding a whirlwind unable to guide a storm.” During a convalescence at home in St. Louis, he took to books and long walks, his mind uncoupled from war. At the start of a new year, 1862, the darkness passed. He revived his career under General Grant.

  “He stood by me when I was crazy,” Sherman said of Grant. “And I stood by him when he was drunk.”

  Meagher kept his distance from his old nemesis. While Sherman marched toward Savannah in the fall of 1864, torching fields and farmhouses along the way, Meagher took to the stage in Nashville, orating for the president’s reelection, speaking to the state legislature. The army let him campaign for the commander in chief and take other speaking engagements when he wasn’t in the field. In public he was still the man who made music with his spoken words. In private he was lonely, vulnerable, and had premonitions of death. “Do come,” he wrote Captain W. F. Lyons, a longtime acquaintance, “and bring any true friend (or two) of mine along with you you can find. It may be the last time (God only knows) that you shall see me.” Another blow was the loss of William Smith O’Brien, the gentleman of Young Ireland. He’d been traveling in Wales when he collapsed, dead at the age of sixty. His coffin was mobbed on the streets of Dublin, en route to the family home near Limerick. Three of the seven rebels shipped to Tasmania—the merchant Terence MacManus, the law clerk Patrick O’Donoghue and the member of Parliament William Smith O’Brien—had now died.

  Both Meagher and Sherman, in their own ways, helped Lincoln become the first president to win a second term in more than thirty years. The Democrats had nominated McClellan, Lincoln’s former military right arm. The Little Napoleon’s party ran on a peace platform: the Union should call a truce and negotiate terms to end the war. But Sherman’s autumn triumphs in Georgia made that platform look like a retreat, just as the tide was finally turning for the North. McClellan’s backers also played to race fears. A covert campaign spread word that Lincoln wanted blacks and Irish to breed and blend, creating a degraded race at the bottom. “Miscegenation”—a fright line boldfaced in thousands of pamphlets circulated in Hibernian havens—was his secret plan.

  Meagher would not abandon the president who had never abandoned him. He liked McClellan personally, but he told the Irish who would still listen to him, the Irish who filled the ranks of nearly every Union infantry division, that it was in their best interest to stick with Abraham Lincoln. In November, McClellan was crushed, losing every state but three. More than 75 percent of Union soldiers voted for Lincoln. But the president lost New York City, getting just 33 percent of the vote.

  In the war’s final six months, Meagher was sustained by poetry and drink. Verse he could still use to draw a crowd and a cheer. One of his fans, the Reverend George W. Pepper, had last heard Meagher speak at his sentencing to death in Clonmel in 1848. At the time, the English press said Meagher’s words—“the history of Ireland explains this crime, and justifies it”—would last no longer than his life, then scheduled to end at the age of twenty-five. “Fools!” wrote Pepper. “They might as well attempt to crush the Andes or the Rocky Mountains.” A Protestant from the north of Ireland, the chaplain idolized Meagher for the gift of his speech. Men like him came along but once every other generation, he believed. On stage, facing a roomful of strangers, “Meagher was an athlete.” When he heard of Meagher’s plan to devote an evening to poetry, the chaplain went to General Sherman to ask for a short leave. Sherman muttered a caustic aside, lumping Meagher in with the New York Irish who had rioted and shown sympathy for the South.

  Not true. After ex-slaves—paid less than other Northern soldiers, mistreated, fighting for a nation that would not let most of them vote or hold office—had fought and died for the Union, Meagher came out publicly for full rights to “our black comrades on the battlefield.” He defended them as he had defended starving Irish peasants grabbing pitchforks to stare down British artillery. “By their desperate fidelity to the fortunes of the nation, in many a fierce tempest of the war . . . they repaid in torrents of generous blood the proscription and wicked bondage in which, under the Stars and Stripes, they have been for generations held,” Meagher said. “The black heroes of the Union Army have not only entitled themselves to liberty, but to citizenship.” In that sentiment, he was well ahead of much of the country.

  He was starting to build a case, born in his lowest moments after Fredericksburg, that the Irish had sacrificed their lives for the cause of a nation that must live up to the egalitarian promise of its founding. Meagher saw it now with the clarity in which he had seen the need for Irish rule at the height of the Great Hunger. He was out on a far limb, a minority voice among the exiles in America. Freeing the slave
s was one thing. But full citizens? Fellow Democrats wondered what had gotten into Meagher—feuding with the Irish, and now killing any chances of political opportunity within his party. He was dismissed as a lost soul.

  On a cold Tennessee night, Meagher packed a hall with people wary of war and the language of violence. They came to Nashville to hear him talk about Chaucer and Shakespeare, Lord Byron and an old favorite of his from Dublin, someone only a few people in the audience would recognize—Speranza, the mother of ten-year-old Oscar Wilde. War was temporary, he reminded them, the worst thing that humans can do to each other. But the images constructed by the poets were immortal, our “better angels,” as another man of words, Lincoln, had said. The audience swooned. Women waved handkerchiefs and men stood and shouted “Bravo!” Pepper returned to his post in Georgia with the loft of Meagher’s love of poetry in his head.

  The drink increased with his final duty. Meagher had command of a passel of men who’d been wounded, misplaced or disciplined—the soldiers who didn’t fit. They called themselves the convalescents, their lives dimmed and damaged in battle. As one of them, Meagher was a perfect man to lead. But though they were bandaged and battered, they were expected to fight. An army of convalescents didn’t sound like anything that would strike fear in the heart of Johnny Reb. So they were renamed the Provisional Army of Tennessee, more than 10,000 strong—the military equivalent of a mutt. No one expected Meagher’s wounded warriors to do anything more than put up a show of limping bluecoats to keep a desperate cadre of graybacks from attacking the railroad between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The South was down to a few last hopes; one was to bleed Sherman’s rear.

  As Meagher had molded immigrants from Five Points into some of the best fighters in the Union Army, he made this provisional army into a formidable force. Strategizing and skirmishing by day, and drinking heavily by night, Meagher surprised the generals who’d written him off. Over three months, Meagher’s convalescents did what was asked of them: the rebels were rebuffed, allowing the Northerners to march freely to the sea. On December 22, Sherman telegraphed Lincoln: “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.”

  For his role, Meagher won high praise from his commanding officer. “Your splendid success . . . and the harmony and good order maintained by your men throughout the district have given me much satisfaction,” wrote General James B. Steedman. “The officers of the entire command” were proud of him. Well, not the entire command. Sherman withheld any praise for the Irish general. He ordered Meagher to pack up the best of his convalescents and travel by river to Pittsburgh, then overland to meet the bulk of the Union force as it advanced north through the Carolinas.

  Out of harm’s way, with idle days on the railroad, the provisional army lived up to the earlier low expectations. They partied, they drank, they disobeyed orders, they left without leave, they slept late, they harassed locals at train stops. Meagher, never much of a disciplinarian, was blamed. By the time they arrived in Pittsburgh, in January of 1865, the 6,500 remaining convalescents were more trouble than help. Conflicting orders dispersed them to different places. Many deserted. Meagher went ahead to a hotel in Baltimore and a likely liaison with Libby. “The whole command is but a mob of men in uniform,” one general complained to Sherman. That was it. The Union brass had seen enough of the Irish general. Meagher was mustered out of the army in March.

  He returned to New York in time for St. Patrick’s Day. No doubt he would appeal again to Lincoln, and expect a fair hearing. While in Tennessee, he’d been thinking about a new life—starting from scratch in the far West. He’d always liked California. And what he’d seen in between was an alluring swath of open country. Lincoln should be favorably inclined to offer the general an appointment in one of the territories, as a reward for all he’d lost in political capital among the Irish by campaigning for a Republican. But it would never be.

  Sherman ripped a path through South Carolina, no apologies for pyres and plunder in the Palmetto State. Many in Sherman’s army wanted revenge. South Carolinians were traitors—the silky-voiced politicians, the crisp-collared officers manning big guns, the wives who egged their men on, and the slave masters in whose cause all the killing had been done. Sherman’s men showed little restraint.

  Richmond was abandoned on April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis and his war cabinet fleeing town on one of the last operating rail lines. In retreat, his soldiers burned bridges and factories, fires spreading to a larger conflagration that left the city in ruins. Mobs ran through Richmond, elegant no more, setting flame to Confederate currency, axing open barrels of liquor from the cellars of Virginia aristocrats. By dawn, the capital of the Confederacy looked like a garbage dump, smoke curling from piles of rubble. Lincoln went to Richmond with his twelve-year-old son, Tad, sat in the very seat of the rebel president, the American flag overhead. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” he said. In the streets of the conquered city, he was mobbed by blacks savoring their first days out of bondage. “You are free—free as air,” said Lincoln. “You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it.”

  The military had now completed its part, after Lincoln had mastered the political realm. In January, the president had cajoled reluctant Democrats to join Republicans in Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery in every part of the United States. At war’s end, he was fifty-six years old, but it was striking how much the great conflict had broken him physically. Scuffed by time, he was both wizened and made wise by the Civil War. “I sometimes think I am the tiredest man on earth,” he said. Lincoln lived just a few more days. On April 14—Good Friday—the president was shot by an actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, who had seethed about “nigger citizenship” while hatching a plot to kill the Great Emancipator. With a bullet in his bleeding skull, Lincoln died on the morning of April 15. Whitman grieved in verse:

  O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

  The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won . . .

  My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

  My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will.

  Meagher assembled some of his ex-officers at the Astor House in New York to mourn the commander in chief who’d once kissed the flag of the Irish Brigade. He drew up plans to travel to Washington to be part of the honor guard as Lincoln’s body lay in state. And he made sure that the emerald flag that had been knocked down at the Sunken Road and wrapped around the body of the last color-bearer in the slaughter at Marye’s Heights would be displayed under the Capitol dome, near the dead president. The orator offered a few words about what Lincoln meant to him and to the Irish—“eloquent” remarks, as the New York Times reported, without further elaboration.

  Robert E. Lee, his Army of Northern Virginia shredded, surrendered to General Grant on April 9, at Appomattox Court House, to generous terms. Rebel officers were allowed to keep their sidearms, and soldiers to walk away with their horses, mules and muskets. Several members of the Irish Brigade stood by, just outside the room where Lee put an end to the short, violent life of the Confederate States of America.

  Not far away, John Mitchel scrambled through the ruins of Richmond in search of safe haven, having given up two of his sons to what many in the South would later call the Lost Cause. One of the Mitchel boys died at Gettysburg, another at Fort Sumter. A third was wounded at Marye’s Heights, behind the rock wall. Mitchel was arrested and sent to Fort Monroe, on the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula. During the war the moated compound had been a refuge for runaway slaves—Freedom’s Fortress, it was called. Now it was a warehouse for traitors, Jefferson Davis and John Mitchel its two best-known occupants.

  All of the awful tallies were not yet in, but scholars would eventually determine that more than 700,000 people died in the war. When the wounded, the sick, the lost, the captured, the missing and never found were added to the toll, the human cost of the fight over America’s origina
l sin was at least 1.5 million people. Nearly 140,000 men of Irish birth fought for the Union, a third of them from New York City. Only two other units suffered greater battlefield losses than the Irish Brigade—a casualty rate of more than 50 percent.

  Early summer 1865. New York was clogged with Irishmen newly out of uniform, officers devoid of command, free blacks trying to find a place in a nation where the broken pieces were not easy to fit together. The brigade was long disbanded. Some of the soldiers had joined the Fenians, who were plotting to strike across the border at British North America. Father Corby was back at Notre Dame, soon to be named president of the school in South Bend. Meagher’s friend Captain Lyons found him at the place he now called home in Manhattan, his brother-in-law’s brownstone on East 23rd Street. The house was bursting with riches and books, said to be the largest private library in America. Meagher leaned against a fireplace mantel, a letter and small photograph in one hand. Lyons couldn’t tell if he’d been crying when he came upon him; his eyes were clouded. That would not surprise him. He knew that the toll of the past two years—losing the brigade, losing Corcoran, Kavanagh, Emmet and countless others, losing his name among influential Irish Americans, losing Lincoln—had taken much of the life out a man who had seemed irrepressible.