Without having had to fight a battle yet, Bull Sumner was elevated by Mr Stanton, the new Secretary of War, to command of the Second Corps. The Irish Brigade found themselves part of this under their new divisional commander, Israel ‘Dick’ Richardson, who had led the Union attack at the Bull Run. An easy-going fellow of sixty, he was as anxious to campaign as any 19-year-old. Though he was a West Pointer, his raffish style was admired by the Irish. Under him Meagher’s brigade advanced, by the easy stages McClellan preferred, to the north bank of the Rappahannock River, well beyond fated Bull Run. Its drummers and pipers, some of them children, played them into camp with ‘Patrick’s Day,’ and Richmond and the end of the war were not much more than 60 miles off. For the moment Meagher enjoyed the martial immanence of his new life. ‘We are under orders to hold ourselves in readiness to march at an hour’s notice,’ he proudly told Barlow, ‘and consequently, we are all in a hurry and flurry and tempers getting into trim to be off. You can easily picture the predicament I am in—orderlies from Divisional Headquarters riding up every ten minutes with circulars, special orders, and every sort of urgent epistolary missive—and the Brigadier sending them back with satisfactory acknowledgments.’
20
THE CHICKAHOMINY STEEPLECHASE
But the dawn revealed it all. Here was a Georgian—a tall, stout-limbed, broad-shouldered fellow, lying on his face; his head half buried in the mud … nearer to us, close to a burned stump, lay one of our own artillerymen; his bold handsome face streaked with sweat and the smoke of battle; his right leg torn off by a shell above the knee.
Captain Lyons, the Irish Brigade,
Fair Oaks, Virginia
The only problem with the advance of McClellan’s army towards Richmond was that it got further and further from Washington. This made the capital nervous about the activities of Stonewall Jackson on the far side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan, who always desired to occupy ground other than that which he presently held, was able now to get approval to engage his Army of the Potomac in a massive flanking movement. It would involve transporting it by steamer down the Virginia coast to the Peninsula, a spit of broad land between the York and James Rivers. On it the east-west roads led to Richmond. If the Union army turned up there, Stonewall would have to desist from threatening Washington.
Meagher’s Irish Brigade marched back to Alexandria to embark on transports for the Peninsula. Meagher found it a rough voyage down Chesapeake Bay, and the transports lay pitching for five days off Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the Peninsula, waiting for the landing order. Wading ashore in icy water, the men found themselves ordered into camp on the low, wooded shore beside Oliver Howard’s brigade of Richardson’s division, and General Howard ordered his men to share their already constructed huts, their firesides and rations.
When Meagher’s brigade marched up from the beach towards the old British defences of Yorktown, it broke up along boggy country roads. Only 200 men arrived with Meagher in their allotted camp in front of the entrenched Confederates of Yorktown, where he set up his headquarters in an abandoned shanty. He certainly thought of Ireland now, walking up and down in some anxiety. ‘Great God, the Irish Brigade will be brought into action at daybreak, and the work of a Brigade will be expected from them, while I have scarcely two hundred men. Are these the men I expected in some future time to free Ireland with?’
But since McClellan remained cautious, there was time for the rest of the men to arrive. Amongst the turpentine trees and dwarf cedars of the low, scrubby, malarial Peninsula, the Irish were put to accustomed work, digging roads, mortar emplacements and redoubts. Meagher quite liked his surroundings: ‘we are in camp in the middle of the tall Virginia woods, in the midst of peach and apple blossoms, and under a gentle sky, waiting for our turn to walk in.’ The support committee of the 63rd New York had by now sent a circus tent, which was erected in camp to serve as the brigade chapel. On May Day it was decked with flowers, as up the corduroy roads from the transports, McClellan manoeuvred such a quantity of guns that Confederate General Magruder would abandon the Yorktown lines on 3 May. The Irish rested amid a turpentine forest in pup tents, a new War Department item of equipment, as a battle was fought for Williamsburg.
Boarded now on transports on the York River, they steamed along the swampy northern shores of the Peninsula, along the broad reaches of the York and then into the serpentine Pamunkey River north of Richmond. They were unloaded at a pier named Cumberland Landing. From their new, painlessly achieved camp, Richmond lay only 20 miles to the south-west, and was inevitably theirs. One problem of terrain, however, was that inland from them, down uncertain and boggy roads, the swampy main artery of the Chickahominy River cut the Peninsula in two, and with its profuse networks of tributaries separated them from the Rebel capital.
In their new depot, a Chickahominy steeplechase was organised by Meagher and his fellow officers for 31 May. There would be a Gaelic football game early in the day, followed by a series of horse races, then amateur theatricals. A racetrack had been prepared, hurdles had been erected and water jumps energetically dug. Entries, purses and prizes were decided on by the officers. General Meagher put up as a prize the skin of a tiger he had shot in Costa Rica. Captain Jack Gosson, a brigade favourite for his spacious gestures, had run up a jockey’s suit for himself out of flame-red curtain material, a general’s jacket turned inside-out, and a smoking cap ‘bedizened with beads and gold fringes.’
The race meeting began with Generals French and Richardson in the judges’ stand. Amongst the entries were Lieutenant-Colonel Kelly’s bay gelding Faugh-A-Ballagh, with Katie Darling, Mourne Boy, Molly, Tipperary Joe, Rasper, Little George and others supplying the field. By mid-afternoon the Chickahominy Steeplechase had been run and won, and a mule race to be ridden by the brigade drummer boys was being marshalled. Just then the entire crowd, from generals to neophyte privates, heard a huge firing of artillery from the far side of the Chickahominy and looked simultaneously south. What they were hearing was the beginning of a battle at Fair Oaks, a Confederate attempt to break McClellan’s army in two. The struggle which was beginning now would within a month consume a great part of this audience.
Orders from McClellan by way of Bull Sumner arrived almost at once, and Richardson and French descended from their judges’ stand and mounted their horses. Sumner’s corps had been asked to perform an enormous manoeuvre. From their place at the right or northern end of the Union army, they were to move south-east down the confusing system of country lanes, where any movement was masked by monotonous forests, cross the Chickahominy River and end up on the left flank of the Union army, where they could conveniently and unexpectedly be thrown into the battle. Meagher accepted this, as did his officers and men, as a reasonable demand. He was utterly undaunted by the dreary march, which went on for the rest of that day and almost all night. In the small hours, wearing their pup tent halves, the brigade crossed the Chickahominy in darkness and downpour by the Grapevine Bridge. The water of the river washed over this rickety apparatus, and Meagher walked his horse Dolly across amongst men wading wet to the knees. Before dawn they arrived at the lethal zone. A broad field where the Union General Sedgwick’s division had stopped the Confederates the previous dusk, it was littered with broken caissons, disembowelled horses, corpses and howling wounded, and the yellow lanterns of surgeons searching for the latter pricked the blackness. ‘The weary men of the Brigade lay down to rest,’ Captain Lyons would always remember, ‘upon the drenched and torn ground, in the midst of the havoc of the day, hardly conscious of the ghastly companions who slept amongst them.’
As dawn broke, a tree stump marked the headquarters of the Irish Brigade. A stirring Meagher started a conversation at five in the morning with a wounded young Irishman, a Confederate from South Carolina, ‘whom I found propped up against a mouldy, old tree, disabled by a musket shot in the side, and manfully suppressing the expression of his pain.’ In mid-discussion, a massive volley cam
e from the direction of the Richmond & York River railroad, which ran all the way to Richmond, 500 paces away, on the edge of deep woods. The little depot named Fair Oaks Station, from which the battle would take its name (it was also called Seven Pines), lay a short way along the railroad to Meagher’s right. Beyond the rails stood ‘a vicious swamp,’ which offered both cover and means of retreat to the Rebels. The Rebels had surprised General Casey the day before on the far side of the railroad, and destroyed the hopeful young men of his division. Generals Sedgwick and Kearny had stopped the Rebel advance in the very field of trampled-down corn where the 69th and 88th New York now stood. ‘Richmond was at most four miles distance from the colours of the Sixty-Ninth New York Volunteers, the right of the Brigade,’ wrote Lyons, and one of the older soldiers had climbed a pine tree close to the rail and seen the dome of the Confederate Capitol flashing through the smoke. In front of the railway, according to General Richardson’s orders, the Irish Brigade hastily formed two lines in a wide cornfield which ‘had been thoroughly trampled out of sight.’ Musket fire continued to pour upon them out of tall woods beyond the rail track, and Meagher marvelled at the composure they showed. Meagher had the 69th and 88th New York drawn up facing the enemy, and kept back the 63rd with the assigned artillery.
A few minutes after the volley interrupted Meagher’s conversation with the wounded young Confederate, Richardson sent Howard’s brigade across the railroad, on into the woods and swamp against a brigade of Georgians. ‘French’s Brigade followed. Our turn came next.’ As the Confederates, having mangled Oliver Howard’s brigade and shattered Howard’s arm as well with a musket round, formed up in the woods and charged French’s men, forcing a retreat, an externally calm, internally frantic General Sumner rode along the Irish line. ‘Boys, I am your General. I know the Irish Brigade will not retreat. I stake my position on you.’
Easily said. The Rebels were coming on raging over the line. Copious war had come to Meagher and the Irish Brigade, and they all behaved with exemplary solidity—crucially so for the hopes of the Union. If they had been crumpled by the assault, one flank of Sumner’s corps could have been turned, and a confused retreat across the Chickahominy swamps would have been the result, with the Union Army split in two. Meagher enjoyed this extreme moment and rode up and down the line resonantly encouraging his men. His groom, who loved Meagher’s horse Dolly, kept near him, and as firing began was shot through the legs.
The Irish volleys broke up the Rebel assault. In pursuit, the 69th rushed the railroad and reaching it, deployed into line of battle on the track. The 88th New York now went forward beyond the rails and centred itself around a log-built cottage and various outbuildings—‘Property of a lethargic German with pink eyes and yellow hair,’ said Meagher, ever the littérateur. Meagher told the 69th and 88th to reform, and then at his word the brigade advanced again, yelling in Irish. A battered little barn near the railway became the regimental hospital. Father Corby moved amongst the dying laid out on damp straw.
The Irish Brigade’s charge into the woods and the swamp caused in that stretch of line a flight by the Rebels on an important scale, and the Irish losses for the day were only thirty-nine men. One of the privates who died at Fair Oaks, however, stood for all the shifts and passions of the world’s Irish soldiery—Michael Herbert, the first man killed in the brigade. He had served in the British army in India during the Sepoy Mutiny, in which Indian soldiers rose against their British officers (a concept which was about to be tried by Irish Fenians). In 1860, like Meagher’s brother, Herbert served in Italy with the Papal Brigade. He had not been long in New York when he enlisted in the 69th New York. Rural poverty, Catholic zeal and national fervour had determined his soldiering career, which now ended in steamy Virginia.
Fair Oaks was a disaster for the Rebels. They lost 8,000 men and failed to split McClellan’s line. Later, a South Carolinian who was in Richmond that day would tell Meagher that the fragments of Joe Johnston’s Confederate army had run in panic through the streets of the capital. Meanwhile, savouring Sumner’s applause and the trust and enthusiasm of his brigade, General Meagher made camp beyond the railroad on the ground gained that day. As the dead were buried, he exuberantly named the place Camp Victory.
A Spanish general named Prim came with US General Heintzelman that week to Camp Victory to review Meagher’s men. Little Mac also rode up, sat with Meagher before his tent and gave a message to be relayed to the men. ‘Officers and men of the Brigade! It is my pleasing duty to announce to you that General McClellan has desired me to express to you the gratification he feels at your steady valour and conduct at the battle of Fair Oaks, June 1st.’ For Irish surgeon Thomas Ellis, the reality was not as splendid. He would soon be back at White House on the Pamunkey, cutting blood-stiffened uniforms from the wounded. ‘In many instances maggots were creeping out of their festering wounds.’
Meagher and other members of the Union army had suffered obliquely an imponderable loss: the Confederate general Joe Johnston, watching the action at Fair Oaks from a position near the railway line, had been wounded in the shoulder and chest. He might have lost Richmond had he gone on commanding, but the command was now passed to Robert E. Lee, who had the capacity to save the capital, lengthen the war and interminably delay action on Ireland.
After exaltation, static tedium. The Irish spent three weeks at Camp Victory, behind zigzag breastworks of huge logs, and heard reveille and retreat sounded in the Rebel lines as ‘loudly and as spiritedly’ as in the Irish Brigade’s. At mid-June, they were relieved and ordered back to rest near Fair Oaks station. Their supplies came up, a speakeasy appeared, and the chapel tent. Meagher’s Irish Brigade was reinforced by the 29th Massachusetts, commanded by Colonel Ebenezer Pierce, a man of old Yankee stock. The taciturn New Englanders of Pierce’s regiment got even for Meagher’s parade orations by plundering a Meagher whiskey cellarette aboard one of the wagons. Meagher could claim here, however, that his use of whiskey was medicinal: the surgeons were issuing it to the men as a remedy against malaria. But under the influence of a chaplain, Father Dillon, many of the men in the 69th and the 88th had taken the temperance oath, which some of them, to challenge the caricature of the Irish dipsomaniac, adhered to despite any health risk. Father Corby said that the Adeste Fideles was frequently heard as the brigade musicians accompanied an abstaining malaria victim along the camp’s gritty white roads to his grave amongst turpentine trees.
Stonewall Jackson was now on his way from the Shenandoah to reinforce Richmond. Meagher did not blame his friend and fellow Democrat McClellan for allowing time for Stonewall to move. Instead, he chose to be angry, in front of his fellow officers and in letters to his brother-in-law, at the ‘grand policy.’ Republican Washington, Meagher complained, detained a splendid army—McDowell’s—along the Potomac and in the Shenandoah, ‘which would have been of great service in the Peninsula.’ Stonewall’s approach activated McClellan to make another defensive decision: despite the risks and complications, he believed he must move his base from White House on the Pamunkey River all the way south across the Peninsula and down to the James River, a distance of more than 30 miles. He would bring his entire army south of the Chickahominy. This massive movement across the Peninsula now began. The thousands of wagons and troops vacating the north side of the Chickahominy were screened by the troops of Generals Porter and McCall. On 25 June, the Irish Brigade, a little south of the river near Fair Oaks, had been in reserve and heard a renewal of fighting to the west, on their side of the river. And the next day, as they watched the masses of relocating Union men and wagons pass them, they heard the Confederates attacking the screening forces of Fitz John Porter, up on the river’s north side, near Mechanicsville. This assault converted what was to have been a manoeuvre into a frantic retreat, and made inevitable a frenzied week—a string of brutal encounters known for ever after as the Seven Days—during which both armies fought by daylight, and then marched and took up new positions by night. For Lee the objec
tive was the destruction of McClellan’s army and a peace settlement. For McClellan, and thus for Meagher’s Irish, it was survival.
Porter’s forces on the north side gave way and retreated overnight east, beyond a village named Gaines’s Mill. Sumner now was asked to send two of his brigades across to the north side to support Porter. French’s and Meagher’s were ordered out. They crossed the Chickahominy in melancholy late afternoon light, amongst scrubby forests which limited what Meagher could see of the battle going on to the north-east.
It was a little after 7.00 p.m., and Lee had ordered the entire Confederate line forward against Porter’s men. Meagher’s eloquent report gave something of the flavour of his own brigade’s advance into the chaos beyond the Chickahominy. ‘The head of the [Irish] column had just appeared on the opposite side when an immense cloud of dust through which teams and horsemen hastily broke indicated something more than a repulse to our arms. These teams were followed by crowds of fugitive stragglers on foot whose cry was that “they had been cut to pieces.” ’ The Confederates were near, Meagher was told by Bull Sumner, and he and General French were ordered to line their men up, French to the left, the Irish on the right, along a road covering the two most crucial bridges, Alexander’s and the Grapevine. French’s lines of men had to their left the Chickahominy. Meagher’s had to their right a morass named Elder’s Swamp. There was potential for a great tragedy in the triangle of earth they occupied. Bull Sumner ordered Meagher forward up a gently sloping cleared hill ahead, where the brigade was to wheel to the right and reinforce the regular army brigade of General George Sykes on whom the storm was breaking. In his official dispatch, Meagher proudly recorded this movement. His men advanced through the ‘broken masses of the Union forces that had been engaged all day’ and across a clearing which housed the main hospital of the Union army, crowded with retreating Union forces. ‘My brigade reached the summit of this hill in two lines of battle … and having reached it, despite of the cavalry, and artillery, and infantry that were breaking through them, preserved an unwavering and undaunted front.’ General Fitz John Porter, riding up, greeted Meagher and told him to hold. So the Irish lines stood close-packed, and returned an awful fire. Captain Conyngham wrote that had the Rebels ‘succeeded in breaking through our lines … McClellan could not have saved his army.’