No one associated with Marye’s Heights tried to put a gloss of glory on it. “Oh! It was a terrible day,” Captain William Nagle wrote his father. “Irish blood and bones cover that field today.” An Irish Brigade historian, Henry Clay Heisler, summarized it this way: “It was not a battle—it was wholesale slaughter of human beings.” The Union suffered nearly 13,000 dead and wounded, to a loss of about 5,000 for the Confederacy.
