The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Egan Timothy

Author:Egan, Timothy [Egan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, War
ISBN: 9780544272880
Amazon: 0544272889
Goodreads: 25897805
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2016-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

At camp, the deflated band made plans to return home. War was horrible and, it was now clear, would not be short. The day after the battle, Lincoln signed a bill authorizing the enlistment of 500,000 men for three years of duty—a professional army for the long haul. A second bill called for an additional half million men. Meagher was ready to follow Lincoln, but how? A citizen soldier for now, his tour of duty was up. He packed to go home to Elizabeth and an uncertain future. But William Tecumseh Sherman would have none of it. Eyes narrowed, hair unkempt, the colonel growled at Meagher.

“How can you go to New York?” he asked him, in the company of the unpaid men of the 69th. “I do not remember to have signed a leave for you.”

Meagher said his ninety days had expired. He was a free man, not a professional officer in the regular army. So were the others.

“You are a soldier and must submit to orders until you are properly discharged.” To make his point, Sherman moved closer, and spoke loud enough for every one of the soldiers to hear, no cloaking his West Point training with a veneer of civilian manners. “If you attempt to leave without orders, it will be mutiny, and I will shoot you like a dog.” Meagher retreated to his tent. Sherman had shamed him before his friends; worse, he made it clear he had no respect for these men.

In the afternoon a gangly, black-suited visitor with a pallor of gloom came to visit the New York Irish—President Lincoln. “We thought we would come over and see the boys,” he said. The unusual timbre of his voice, a bit high, caught the men by surprise. On Sunday, the blue-sky day of battle, Lincoln had gone for a ride in the country outside the capital, reasonably confident of victory. That evening, he read a telegram of startling news from his War Department: “The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.” Monday it rained, weather to match the mood of broken men in bandages and tattered clothes staggering through the streets.

“They come along in disorderly mobs,” Whitman wrote, “queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d in the feet . . . Where are your banners and your bands of music?” Some supporters urged the president to give up the fight. “If it best for the country and mankind that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their terms, do not shrink even from that,” Horace Greeley wrote Lincoln. But the Confederates, despite Stonewall Jackson’s boast, were in no shape after Bull Run to storm the White House. A much bigger Union Army stood guard on the banks of the Potomac. Lincoln’s task was to gird a confused nation for a long war. In the days following the defeat, he wanted to see soldiers who would not run from battle. Sherman, despite his low regard for the Irish, knew what they were worth to him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.