Failing to grab Meagher, the mob marched on the house of his top lieutenant in the Irish Brigade, Colonel Robert Nugent, wounded at Fredericksburg by a bullet to the stomach. They sacked his house, cursing him as a “nigger-lover,” and raised cheers for Jefferson Davis. In the colonel’s den, enraged men slashed a portrait of Meagher. The face of the general, the man who had been hailed a decade earlier as the Irish American savior—“a chief to unite and guide them”—was cut and trampled and burned in the bonfire of hatred in Nugent’s home.
