Clash of the Irish Brigades
The Union Army’s Irish Brigade was decimated during the assaults on Marye’s Heights during the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. About 45% of its members were killed, wounded or went missing. The casualty rate of the Light Brigade in its storied charge during the Crimean War was 40%. But nobody wrote a poem about the Charge of the Irish Brigade. Their sacrifice is forgotten.
The men of the Irish Brigade watched as Confederate sharpshooters picked off the combat engineers trying to lay the pontoon bridges. Dead engineers floating off down the river finally halted construction. Only after several boatloads of Union infantry crossed the river and routed the snipers from their bunkers did work on the bridge resume.
The Battle of Fredericksburg was off to an inauspicious start under the leadership of the hapless Major General Ambrose Burnside. He had planned to outfox Robert E. Lee. Rather than marching directly on Richmond from his current position near Warrenton, he would make a quick sidle east to Fredericksburg, jump across the Rappahannock River on pontoon bridges and race to Richmond from an unexpected direction. But he moved too slowly, and someone forgot to order the bridges. By the time the bridges arrived, the Rebels were there and dug in.
Brigadier General Thomas Meagher, commander of the Irish Brigade, rode his line before the assault, asking his men to put green sprigs in their hats. They found it hard, being December, to scrounge much greenery, but they tried. Then they marched, greenery affixed and carrying their battle flags—emerald green embroidered in gold with a shamrock, a sunburst and an Irish harp. They joined over 100,000 other Federals attacking the Rebel position, but the Irish Brigade may have been in a unique position. While the Civil War pitted American against American, at Fredericksburg it may have also pitted Irishman against Irishman.
Meagher received orders to form a brigade in February 1862. The first units recruited were the all-Irish 63rd, 69th and 88th New York Infantry Regiments. Later, the all-Irish 28th Massachusetts and the mostly Irish 116th Pennsylvania joined the brigade. The unit served until June 1865.
The Irish Brigade became renowned for its battlefield heroics. At the Battle of Malvern Hill in July 1862, a Confederate general reportedly said, “Here comes that damned green flag again.” By the end of the war, the Irish Brigade had sustained the third highest number of battlefield casualties of any brigade in the Union Army. Eleven members received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Once across the river, the Federals were faced with the Confederate works, half a mile away across a mostly open field, gradually uphill, then a ridge, Marye’s Heights, about fifty feet high. Rebel artillery emplacements stretched along the crest of the heights. The Rebel artillery lay beyond the range of the Union artillery on the opposite side of the river. In the absence of counter-battery fire, the Confederate cannoneers had a free hand.
Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet allegedly asked his artillery chief about needing one more cannon in a particular spot and the man bragged a chicken couldn’t survive on that field when they opened on it. The contention proved close to correct.
A low stone wall stood at the base of Marye’s Heights. A road ran behind the wall. The Rebels had dug out the road and thrown the dirt over the wall. The dirt reinforced the wall and allowed the Rebs to stand along the road and fire from behind the wall.
Among the Confederate units firing from behind the wall was the 24th Georgia Infantry Regiment, the unit most often mentioned as a possible Confederate version of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade. The 24th Georgia was the infantry component of Cobb’s Brigade or Cobb’s Legion, a combined arms unit that consisted of infantry, cavalry and artillery, commanded by Brigadier General Thomas R. R. Cobb. Although far from home, Cobb’s Legion fought as part of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia for most of the war. Members of the unit were present at Appomattox.
After crossing the river, the Federal troops began marching toward the Rebel position. A deep ditch cut through the field part way across. Foot bridges crossed the ditch, but only three and the Rebels had removed all the planking. The Federals had to pick their way across single file stepping on the stringers. Sitting ducks.
As the bluecoats moved forward, Confederate artillery shells started to drop, filling the air with grape shot and cannister, each cannister containing several hundred musket balls. Like being caught in a rainstorm except with lead raindrops. Even the cannonballs that didn’t explode would bounce and careen through the ranks, killing and maiming men.
The Federals pressed forward, trying to dress their lines. With the Union infantry about 150 yards from the wall, the Rebels unleashed massed volleys of musket fire, cutting the bluecoats down like a scythe through a stand of wheat. The clatter of gunfire seemed never to stop, even for an instant. Bodies, arms and legs covered the field. Every conceivable manner of maiming. Men disemboweled. And accompanying the terrifying racket of the gunfire was the constant smack and crack of musket balls hitting flesh and bone. And the screams of those hit.
Orders kept coming to advance but after a while were mostly ignored, regarded as asinine. If anyone tried, others would reach out and pull them down. At one point, orders came to fix bayonets and charge the wall. Nobody moved. None would have gotten within fifty yards. It would have been insanity.
Chaplains moved among the wounded lying on the field that day. One was Father William Corby of the 88th New York. The chaplains were comforting the wounded, hearing confession, administering the sacraments, even giving last rites. Mortal men moving about as if their black uniforms protected them, like a kind of sacred armor. Never flinching. Corby later served as president of the University of Notre Dame. A statue of Corby stands on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Before the Union generals would accept defeat, they had sent men charging at those Confederate works five times. All failures. When they removed the dead afterwards, the corpses nearest the wall had green boxwood sprigs in their caps.
Authorities argue about whether an Irish Brigade existed in the Confederate Army and whether the Union’s Irish Brigade and the Confederacy’s Irish Brigade fought each other at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The alleged fight between the two Irish Brigades played prominently in the 2003 movie Gods and Generals. Ken Burns mentioned such a meeting in his 1990 PBS series on the Civil War. Gods and Generals refers to Cobb’s Brigade as “Brigadier General Thomas R. R. Cobb’s Irish Regiment, Georgia, C.S.A.”
John McNeer discusses the ostensible battle between the two brigades in An American Tragedy at Fredericksburg: Clash of the Irish Brigades.1 John Joe McGinley wrote a comparable article for irishcentral.com.2 There are other similar accounts.3
Conversely, in Civil War Myth Busting: The Fictional Confederate Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg, Ryan Quint contends no Confederate Irish Brigade ever existed and no clash of the Irish Brigades occurred at Fredericksburg.4 Quint points to the description of the Fredericksburg battle in the regimental history of the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, written by its commander, St. Clair A. Mulholland, as the origin of the myth.5
Quint writes:
“Lieutenant Colonel St. Clair Mulholland, commanding the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry at Fredericksburg, later wrote a regimental history. In his section on Fredericksburg, Mulholland wrote, ‘And now occurred a strange and pathetic incident. . . behind that rude stone breast-work were ‘bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh’—the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish like themselves.’
According to Mulholland, the Confederates recognized the Irish Brigade and let out, ‘Oh God, what a pity! Here comes Meagher’s fellows!’ That quote has been repeated ad nauseum in writings regarding Fredericksburg, but it’s important to remember it was Mulholland writing it, not a Confederate.”
But it was not Mulholland who wrote those lines. Mulholland authored The Story of the 116th Regiment: Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion in 1903.5 Mulholland begins his personal account of the battle on page 38 with “The long hours of the night had slipped away and the morning of December 13th broke chill and cold.” His personal account ends at the bottom of page 55.
Mulholland then mentions “A British line officer, writing on the campaign of Fredericksburg…” and goes on to say, “We quote his account of the attack of the Irish Brigade on December 13th, 1862.” Mulholland states the British officer’s account was published by “Keegan & Co., London” but there are no footnotes or endnotes to track it down further.
The next two and a half pages appear to be an account of this unnamed British officer, writing as though he is embedded with the Confederate forces. We cannot expect a book written over a century ago to obey our current conventions regarding quotation marks and paragraph breaks, which makes interpretation more difficult.
The narrative states that a Confederate commander, a Colonel Miller, “ordered his men to hold their fire for a space.” This is followed by the language about the strange and pathetic incident…bone of their bone…and “the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish...” and four lines later comes the language “What a pity! Here comes Meagher’s fellows! was the cry in the Confederate ranks.”
Language follows that strongly suggests the author, the British officer, is writing from a perspective behind the stone wall and not in front of it, as Mulholland would have been: “twelve hundred rifles, plied by cool and unshaken men, concentrated a murderous fire upon the advancing line” and “the Confederate veterans never quailed.”
Finally, near the end of this account, stands a line St. Clair Mulholland could never have written: “the Irish Brigade had ceased to exist.” For the Irish Brigade, though suffering Light Brigade level casualties, had hardly ceased to exist and Meagher remained its commander.
It appears most likely it was this British officer embedded with the Confederate forces and presumably well acquainted with the Cobb’s men who wrote, “bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh—the soldiers of Cobb’s Brigade were Irish like themselves.”
The British observer could not have been the celebrated Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards. Fremantle’s travels did not bring him to the Confederacy until four months after the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Immigration from Ireland to America occurred in two principal waves. The first, in the early 1700’s, occurred when the Scots who had settled the Northern Ireland region around Ulster to anchor the land for the English king, becoming the “Scots-Irish,” left because of deteriorating economic conditions and a souring of relations with the English. Individuals in this initial wave of the Irish diaspora settled in the major east-coast population centers but also along the frontier, filtering their way south through Appalachia as far as Georgia. They say you cannot swing a possum in the South without hitting someone of Scots-Irish descent. Many notable Americans are of Scots-Irish heritage, such as Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, George S. Patton and Neil Armstrong.
The second and much larger wave of the Irish diaspora occurred during the potato famine era, beginning in the mid-1840’s. These immigrants settled primarily in the major east-coast population centers, Pennsylvania and New England. Current maps show a much denser concentration of Irish descendants in the Northeast than in the Southeast. Georgia is one of the states of the old Confederacy with the lowest density of Irish. A map of the “Most Irish States in the US” ranks Pennsylvania #6, New York #19 and Georgia #43. (New Hampshire is #1). A 19th century map would likely show a similar distribution.
When Thomas Meagher recruited the regiments of his Irish Brigade, he drew from a region thick with Irish. Thomas Cobb, not so much.
The ten most common Irish surnames in the 19th century, excluding Smith since it is so prevalent, were Murphy, Kelly, O’Sullivan, Walsh, O’Brien, Byrne, Ryan, O’Connor, O’Neill and O’Reilly. Examining the rosters of two random representative companies for Irish surnames shows that Company B of the 69th New York Infantry, one of the core regiments of the Union’s Irish Brigade, had six of these common names of ninety-eight members, or 6.1%, plus many more readily recognizable Irish surnames.6 In contrast, Company B of the 24th Georgia Infantry had no members with these common surnames and only a few with possibly Irish surnames.7
Some sources mention the 24th Georgia having a green battle flag. Hugh W. Barrow wrote a detailed regimental history of the 24th Georgia.7 The flags shown in Barrow’s account are variations on the Confederate stars and bars and show no trace of green. The 24th Georgia battle flag widely peddled on the internet is apparently a Hollywood concoction.4 It resembles the first flag shown in Barrow’s regimental history but with an added gold Irish harp. There is no evidence this flag existed before Gods and Generals.
It is difficult to dismiss the account of the embedded British officer quoted by Mulholland. One cannot impugn Mulholland, who went on to win the Medal of Honor at Chancellorsville, reached the rank of Brevet Major General and had a distinguished postwar career. So, while there may have been “bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh” Irishmen in the 24th Georgia Infantry, it seems unlikely they made up enough of a proportion to call it an “Irish” unit in the same way the men in the regiments of the Union’s Irish Brigade did, where one truly could not have swung a skunk without hitting an Irishman.
Bibliography
1. McNeer J. An American Tragedy at Fredericksburg: Clash of the Irish Brigades. (http://historyarch.com/2017/12/12/an-american-tragedy-at-fredericksburg-clash-of-the-irish-brigades)
2. McGinley JJ. The clash of the Irish Brigades at the Battle of Fredericksburg. (https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/clash-irish-brigades-battle-of-fredericksburg)
3. Irish Rebels of the Georgia 24th Regiment https://ultimateflags.com/confederate/irish-rebels-georgia-24th-regiment)
4. Quint R. Civil War Myth Busting: The Fictional Confederate Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2021/01/07/civil-war-myth-busting-the-fictional-confederate-irish-brigade-at-fredericksburg/
5. Mulholland SA. The Story of the 116th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Fordham University Press, New York, 1996.
6. dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/MusterRolls/Infantry/69thInf_NYSV_MusterRoll.pdf
7. Barrow HW. Private James R. Barrow and Company B Cobb’s Legion Infantry. http://cobbslegioninfantry.com/
