The Irish Brigade

From FB:

“For thousands of Irish-Americans who answered the call of their adopted country, service under the Stars and Stripes was viewed as a precursor to the war of independence they hoped one day would free the Emerald Isle from British rule. The fighting prowess and martial enthusiasm of the Army of the Potomac’s famed Irish Brigade was fired by this dual motivation.

On the chill, fog-shrouded morning of December 12, 1862, the Irish Brigade filed across a pontoon bridge spanning the Rappahannock River and stacked arms on a street in the war-ravaged town of Fredericksburg. The next day, Union General Ambrose Burnside commenced his ill-fated assault on Marye’s Heights. This commanding ridge bristled with Rebel artillery and infantry, many better deployed in a sunken road behind the cover of a thick stone wall. It was a desperate undertaking, and as Irish Brigade commander Thomas Francis Meagher inspired his overcoated troops in a fiery oration, the general’s staff officers handed out clumps of boxwood so that every man would go into action with a sprig of green tucked into his forage cap.

Perhaps because of their conspicuous green flag, Colonel Byrens’ Baystaters of the 28th Massachusetts were given the post of honor in the center of the brigade. Packs and blanket roles were unslung, and for ten anxious minutes the men awaited the inevitable. Finally General Meagher shouted, “Irish Brigade, advance! Forward, double-quick, guide center, march!” Muskets at a right shoulder shift, the brigade surged forward. Amidst the deafening cacophony of battle could be heard the old Irish cheer “Faugh-a-Ballagh!” – “Clear the Way!” – the motto of the 28th Massachusetts.

Over two fences they went, but the charge sputtered out before the stone wall in tangled heaps of dead and writhing wounded from blasts of Confederate artillery fire that mowed gaps through their formations. When Rebel infantry opened up, the carnage was even greater. One Union captain called it “a perfect slaughter-pen” in which “whole regiments melted away.”

Those who could made their way to the rear and rallied around their unit colors. Many others were caught on the slope through the freezing night.

The valorous charge had failed, at a cost of 545 of the 1,200 men in the Irish Brigade.

“Their devotion transcended anything I ever saw or even dreamed of,” one observer wrote. “Men walked right up to their deaths as though it were to a feast.”