Alcohol consumption and drunkenness was a chronic problem among all Civil War regiments. Although it might be dismissed as negative stereotyping, there is evidence to suggest that it plagued the Irish units more than most. Such behavior may have been an extension of the soldiers’ civilian experience, where the saloon was often the center of Irish social and political life, and carousing with fellow workers was socially acceptable. Father Corby, chaplain to the Irish Brigade, admitted that alcohol was the special curse of the Irish. In January 1863, Irish-born Colonel James McIvor, commander of the 170th New York in Corcoran’s Legion, publicly posted an official letter requesting that no whiskey be sold to the junior officers of the regiment without the approval of a field grade officer. ‘For if you do,’ McIvor explained, ‘I assure you that before four weeks expire there will not be a line officer for duty in the Regt.’

The ‘creature’ negatively affected the careers of some of the leading Irish commanders. The Irish Brigade’s first commander had been dubbed ‘Meagher of the Sword’ for his bellicose pronouncements in Ireland. His behavior in the Civil War soon demonstrated that Meagher’s belligerence was confined largely to his mouth, with an overfondness for the bottle contributing to his poor performance. The brigade won high praise and admiration for its conduct at Antietam, where its members charged the Sunken Road, and at Fredericksburg, where the unit hopelessly stormed the bullet-swept slopes of Marye’s Heights. But it became clear that the Irish Brigade’s performance was due to the bravery of the rank and file and the command skills of Meagher’s lieutenants.

As the struggle raged at Antietam, Meagher was carried from the field on a stretcher, leaving command to Colonel John Burke. Meagher claimed that some sort of injury caused him to leave the battle, but accounts spread that he was drunk and fell from his horse. He was also missing in action at Fredericksburg. When the Irish Brigade made its famous charge its commander was not on the field. Meagher claimed that after ordering the brigade forward he was forced to go to the rear to find a horse because an ulcer in his knee made it impossible for him to continue. Others present accused him of skulking, and few in the Irish community stepped forward to defend him. Reports of the battle in the New York Irish-American emphasized the leadership of Major William H. Hogan of the 88th New York, whose men advanced closest to the stone wall, the farthest point Union soldiers reached that day.

Meagher stayed with the Irish Brigade through Chancellorsville, although a dark cloud had settled permanently on his reputation. When his request to take his regiments back to New York for rest and recruitment was denied, he resigned. Citing the heavy losses suffered by his men, he wrote the War Department: ‘I beg most respectfully to tender you…my resignation as Brigadier General commanding what was once known as the Irish Brigade. That Brigade no longer exists.’ The Lincoln administration found a place for him in a convalescent unit, but he was soon removed for drunkenness. Meagher kept his career alive by being the only prominent Irish-American to support Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, but by then his credibility within the Irish community was much diminished. Two years after the war, while serving as acting territorial governor of Wyoming, he tumbled from a steamer into the Missouri River and drowned. He had been drinking at the time.

Despite the impediment of serving under an alcohol-fogged blowhard, the Irish Brigade won renown in the 1862-63 Virginia campaign. The Corcoran Legion, however, was shunted off to the relative backwater of Suffolk, Va., where in April 1863 it was engaged in minor fighting against Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who was seeking supplies in the area. On April 12, Corcoran shot and killed Lt. Col. Edgar Kimball in a dispute over a countersign. Instead of being court-martialed, Corcoran was given command of a division, including his brigade, in the Washington defensive perimeter. On December 22, 1862, after spending the day socializing with Meagher, who had come to visit him, Corcoran shrugged off warnings and headed out in the dark on a horse with a reputation for being difficult. The beast threw Corcoran in a ditch and then managed to fall on top of him. He died from his injuries the next day. When the Corcoran Legion finally saw heavy fighting during Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland campaign, it did so without the man who had given it its name.

Meagher’s assertion that the Irish Brigade had virtually ceased to exist was only slightly exaggerated. The brigade had been decimated at Antietam and Fredericksburg. The 63rd and 69th New York suffered 60 percent casualties in the first battle alone. Of the 1,300 Irish Brigade troops present when Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, 545 were listed as killed, wounded or missing after the battle. The brigade never fully recovered from the slaughter. Six hundred Irish troops stepped into the Peach Orchard and Wheatfield at Gettysburg — no more than an understrength regiment; 300 remained fit for duty when Robert E. Lee withdrew from Pennsylvania. The high toll in men exacted by the 1862-63 battles depressed recruiting in New York. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, followed by the formation of black regiments, dampened Irish enthusiasm for the war even further. The Boston Pilot, which alternated between denouncing nativists and encouraging a siege mentality among its readers, sneered that blacks ‘are as fit to be soldiers of this country, as their abettors are to be its statesmen.’

Within a week of the Irish Brigade’s struggle at Gettysburg, New York exploded into the Draft Riots, the greatest urban uprising in American history. The mobs were heavily Irish — as were the police who tried to subdue them — and were incensed by the implementation of conscription laws that allowed a man to escape military service by paying $300 for a substitute. Few Irishmen had that kind of money. In contrast, members of the city’s social and commercial elite, often abolitionists or their sympathizers, could buy their way out of the war. The tension in Irish working-class neighborhoods was worsened by the Emancipation Proclamation, which added the extinction of slavery to the preservation of the Union as the North’s war aims. The Irish fear that cheap black labor would undercut whatever they had gained in America seemed to have been realized after blacks were hired as scab labor during a shipyard workers’ strike the previous June.

The riots made the Irish anathema in the eyes of New York’s Republican-abolitionist elite, who bent their efforts to creating the state’s first black regiment, the 25th New York Infantry. When the heavily depleted Irish Brigade finally returned to the city for a combination rest and recruitment leave on January 16, 1864, few non-Irish turned out to greet them. Nevertheless, the brigade’s officers, joined by Meagher, organized a banquet for the furloughed veterans during which the officers saluted the enlisted men. Observers were struck by the large number of black-garbed widows in attendance.

The contrast between the thin ranks that returned home and the robust regiments that had left for the war in the summer of 1862 still did not sway the sympathies of most old-stock New Yorkers. Republicans wanted nothing to do with the Irish, pro-Union or not, and Democrats as well. For the remainder of the war members of New York’s elite deliberately slighted the service of the Irish Brigade, Corcoran Legion and other Irish regiments fighting for the Union — and emancipation. For their part, the New York Irish (and the situation was similar in the other large cities) had become bitterly divided by the war, which, along with the conflict’s increasingly bloody character, impeded enlistment. The Irish-American remained strongly pro-war, while the Metropolitan Record took a ‘peace at almost any price’ stance. In the presidential elections of November 1864, the New York Irish vote went heavily for George B. McClellan.

When Grant stepped off against Lee in May 1864, the Irish Brigade, somewhat rebuilt during its furlough, was attached to the 1st Division of the II Corps. The division’s commander was Brig. Gen. Francis Channing Barlow, who had tutored Colonel Shaw before the war and married one of his sisters in 1867. Barlow, a pugnacious fighter and strict disciplinarian, was not popular among the Irish, although such sentiments were not unique to them. Nevertheless, the Irish Brigade lived up to its reputation, winning special notice for its performance at the Wilderness. The Corcoran Legion was finally dispatched to Grant at Spotsylvania, where it became part of the 2nd Division, II Corps. Upon its arrival, the Army of the Potomac boasted two distinguished Irish brigades in its service, not to mention the thousands of individual Irish soldiers who fought in the more typical Union outfits.

Both the Irish Brigade and the Corcoran Legion were ground up in the fighting from May to August 1864. In fact, the numbers in the Irish Brigade fell so low that it was consolidated with the 1st Division’s 3rd Brigade at Petersburg. The strained relations between the brigade and Barlow erupted into charges and countercharges at Second Deep Bottom on August 13, 1864, when the Brahmin-reared ‘Boy General’ criticized them by name. In the 1867 History of the Irish Brigade William O’Meagher claimed that Barlow had a ‘running feud’ with the Irish Brigade. Although O’Meagher conceded Barlow was a fearless soldier, he claimed he was unpopular throughout the division and especially so with the Irish Brigade, ‘to which he rarely omitted an opportunity of showing his dislike by many petty acts of tyranny and persecution….’

Some of the specifics in O’Meagher’s account may not have been accurate, but as evidence of friction between the Irish and their Yankee commander it was likely on target. Barlow was, in Grant’s words, ‘an excellent officer,’ but coming from a Boston abolitionist background it is likely that he, like Shaw, harbored strong prejudices against the Irish. In any event, Barlow collapsed from exhaustion immediately after the battle, and the division was taken over by Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles, whose relations with the remnants of the Irish Brigade were much better.

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