More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I am a Democrat.” To this, the biggest cheers yet. “For my part, I ask no Irishman to do that which I myself am not prepared to do. My heart, my arm, my life is pledged to the national cause. I care not to what party the Chief Magistrate of the Republic has belonged. I care not upon what plank or platform he may have been elected—” “Hear, hear!” “The platform disappears before the Constitution, under the oath he took on the steps of the Capitol, the day of his inauguration—” “Hear, hear!” “The party disappears in the presence of the nation . . .” And then, a jab at the enemy of more than 500
...more
His strongest argument for the Irish was linking the Confederacy to the hated oppressor England, as he had done in New York.
His case linking the English Crown and the American South was only part hyperbole. Great Britain had outlawed slavery more than a generation earlier. But few nations benefited more from slave labor than England, with its looms, mills and clothing factories running full bore to outfit and enrich the aristocracy that Meagher had chastised at Jones’s Wood. The textile industry was the dynamo of England’s Industrial Revolution—one in five Britons was connected to the trade—and almost 80 percent of the cotton for that industry came from the slaveholding South.
“It is a fact that after all her denunciations and horror of slavery, England is for the South, where slavery is in full blast, and against the North, where it has long been extinct,” he thundered in Boston’s Music Hall one night in September 1861. “In spite of Shakespeare and Bacon, England is no sentimentalist, no poet, and no philosopher,” he said. It is a nation where “cotton is more precious than political principle.”
The nativists’ day was done, he said; the immigrants’ time was at hand. “Here at this hour I proclaim in the center of that city where this insult was offered to the Irish soldier, Know-Nothingism is dead!”
His Philadelphia pitch was so effective it alarmed Confederate spies in the city’s midst.
During the short days of December 1861, the Irish practiced at being soldiers just outside Arlington, Virginia, at Camp California. They wore Union blue now, a jacket falling just below the waist, pants held up by suspenders and a big cape of heavy wool that served as overcoat and blanket.
The fate of the Union had been placed in the hands of a little man with a big opinion of himself, General George B. McClellan. Well credentialed, from a wealthy family, McClellan had graduated near the top of his class at West Point, proved himself a brilliant logistician in the Mexican War and run a railroad in the private sector—all before his fortieth birthday. But he never mastered the military discipline of keeping his nonmilitary thoughts to himself. He despised abolitionists. “Help me dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him,” he wrote one high-ranking political friend. “I am
...more
McClellan did not think much of his commander in chief. Lincoln, he said, was “a well-meaning baboon,” his inferior in class, breeding and intellect.
Lincoln knew Meagher was a Democrat and had not voted for him—all the better for unity’s sake. In some cases, Meagher stated the cause for the North better than Lincoln had yet done.
Lincoln would need every man he could get. “Let Thomas Francis Meagher be appointed a brigadier general,” he told his War Department secretary. Still, there were concerns. Meagher was a fugitive, an outlaw, a man whose best weapons were words.
Meagher’s appointment came through in February 1862.
ground. It was no small thing to have the patriot and revolutionary, a man still wanted by the British Empire for treason—one of us!—elevated to the highest ranks of the American military. In Meagher’s time, the Irish had been starved, bundled off to the penal colony and forced to flee to dank tenements in strange cities. But here, less than a decade after the end of the Great Hunger, a few years after the Know-Nothings had tried to deprive them of standing in their new nation, the Irish were ascendant in a conflict to save a halved democracy.
He was very witty.” And when the brigade got instructions to move—responding to Lincoln’s General War Order No. 1, to throw the huge expanse of men against the Confederate capital—the cleric saw another side of Meagher. It was while waiting to shed blood, certain that he would lose friends on his orders, that Meagher began to drink heavily again. As a brigadier general, he carried the hopes of the Irish in America on his gold-braided shoulders; the burden of grief was his as well.
So there it was from on high, without filter or equivocation: the Irish would not fight to liberate enslaved blacks. God himself may well have spoken. Line drawn. In his defiance, the archbishop had the support of the Irish American press. What Meagher did not know as he bounded to the stage on the night of July 25, what nobody in the armory could know, was that three days earlier Lincoln had drafted a proclamation that would eventually free four million people from their chains—at least on paper.
Lincoln had returned those two Confederate diplomats seized from a British ship. “One war at a time,” he said. But Britain appeared closer to recognizing the South than ever before. If Lincoln broke the manacles that held millions to their masters in the American South, the war would be—explicitly—about a great moral cause. This would force the issue. Would England recognize the largest, perhaps the last, of the Western nations to defend slavery?
The story produced a hearty rumble of claps. The Irish loved being told they were fearless bastards, crazy and unpredictable. And Meagher loved being called reckless, half mad, a life of improbable invulnerability riding along on a white horse—let ’em talk down south.
Among the Irish, as with many Union soldiers, desperation became contagious. The war’s center had moved from the Southern capital to the Northern capital because Robert E. Lee had moved. The South had struck a large Union force in a second Battle of Bull Run and whipped them. That August, the South also advanced on Kentucky, a slave state with divided loyalties. Emboldened by the triumphs, Lee invaded the North for the first time, crossing the Potomac into Maryland on September 4, 1862. He would try to take ground under the American flag, then menace Washington, forcing Lincoln to the
...more
They would keep their slaves, call it a draw and go home. First, though, the South had to crush McClellan at Antietam Creek.
On September 13, 1862, Union soldiers discovered cigar leaves wrapped around the battle plan of the Confederacy—Lee’s orders, an accidental gift to the North. Now McClellan knew that his counterpart’s army was split, knew when and where they planned to strike, and knew that if he hit them quickly he could annihilate them.
McClellan had about 65,000 men available; as usual, he saw only vulnerabilities and phantom divisions in gray. “If we should be so unfortunate as to meet with defeat,” he said, “our country is at their mercy.”
The advantage further shifted to defenders, who had rebuffed nearly 90 percent of infantry assaults through the war.
But the way was not clear. The Irish gained only a few paces at a terrible cost. The bellowing, crying and whinnying of newly riderless horses drowned out feeble attempts at a Gaelic yell. One bearer of the emerald flag was shot down. Another picked up the banner and was also cut to the ground. The same happened to a third, a fourth, a fifth, until the flagpole itself was shattered. Men with brains spilling from their temples crumpled next to haystacks.
When darkness came at last, “the earth was absolutely hidden under acres of slain and dying,” Meagher wrote his brother-in-law Sam Barlow. If McClellan had steeled himself, he could have driven Lee into the Potomac, and perhaps won the war. But he feared that the general who’d mastered him at every turn had something hidden—more of those phantom reserves. Lee had no such thing, and soon, no hold on Union soil; the rebels retreated the following day back into Virginia. After more than twelve hours of fighting, only a few hundred yards had exchanged hands—here in a cornfield, there near the
...more
The bloodiest single day in American history had taken down 22,717 men, about 5,000 of them dead, the rest with smashed limbs, open wounds or burned flesh, others lost in fields that would grow corn and hay again, but whose main crop for generations would be despair.
Come, my countrymen, he’d pleaded in the armory two months earlier. And of those who responded, more than half the new recruits were gone. Kavanagh was dead. Lieutenant James Mackey, named by Meagher to replace Temple Emmet as his aide-de-camp, dead. Lieutenant Colonel James Kelly, shot in the face, dead. Same with Captain Felix Duffy, mowed down in front of his men. Captain Patrick Clooney, a fellow Waterford native, crippled by a bullet that shattered his knee, then shot in the heart and brain, dead. Several of the drummer boys—not even teenagers—killed by shell fragments. On...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Come, my countrymen, to liberate Ireland at some future date, but not now, not with what was left after this slaughter. Come, my countrymen, a call of duty, honor and the like, words that could not seem more empty to families of those who’d answered the summons. They had come, all 540 of the dead, lost or dying, because Meagher’s words could move men to sacrifice. But to what end? What was the point of claiming a victory when one side had lost 12,000 men and the other 11,000?
The next day, Lincoln released this proclamation to the press. Democrats were outraged. McClellan was stunned. Leading Catholic clerics, Archbishop John Hughes among them, fumed. Jefferson Davis said Lincoln had broken his inaugural promise; the criticism, as Northerners noted, didn’t mean much coming from a traitor.
and they would for the rest of their lives. They could cite the cause of holding together a nation that had sheltered them after a genocidal famine, and they would. But there was no getting around history’s anchor: the men of the Irish Brigade had died to free the black slaves of America. 17 The
But by mid-1863, it was hard to see how an army of Irish veterans in America could defeat the British Empire. He could stew and drink and find like-minded lost Irish souls to commiserate with. Or he could revive the fight in his heart. So, at the very time the Irish American and other papers were attacking Meagher, he was negotiating to become a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish nationalist group whose members were well represented among the ranks of police officers and military members throughout North America.
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.
“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.
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.
More than 75 percent of Union soldiers voted for Lincoln. But the president lost New York City, getting just 33 percent of the vote.
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 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 slaves 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
...more
Speranza, the mother of ten-year-old Oscar Wilde.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
