Gettysburg's Unsung Irish Heroes

 "What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!" -- Joshua Chamberlain

"Well, if he's an angel, all right then... But he damn well must be a killer angel" -- Sargeant Buster Kilrain

If you've read Michael Schaara's Killer Angels or seen the movie version, you know that in 1863's Battle of Gettysburg, the most crucial of the war, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain aided by his trusty Irish sidekick,  Sergeant Buster Kilrain, saved the entire Union with their heroic charge.

Sergeant Buster Kilrain, didn't exist, at least not in Chamberlain's 20th Maine regiment at Gettysburg.  Chamberlain's orderly sergeant was Reuel Thomas.  The regiment's Sergeant-Major was Samuel Miller and the regiment's Color Sergeant was Andrew Tozier.

Chamberlain was a real person,  a professor at Maine's Bowdoin College before the Civil War where he heard Harriet Beecher Stowe read episodes from Uncle Tom's Cabin as she finished writing each chapter. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery at Gettysburg and was promoted to Brigadier General after being gravely wounded at Petersburg in 1864.  His famous charge at Gettysburg really happened,  but it wasn't decisive in the battle.  The charge that saved the hill occurred earlier in the battle and it wasn't led by Chamberlain.

Patrick Henry O'Rorke arrived in America from Ireland as a small child.   His father moved to Rochester, New York, to work in the Erie Canal economy after immigrating.  Young O'Rorke excelled in school and won a scholarship to the University Rochester.  His father died around that time and young O'Rorke went to work as a stone cutter to support his family instead.  Years later he won another scholarship.  This time to West Point, then the premier engineering school in the United States.  Not that there was much competition.  Most colleges then were little more than sectarian seminaries concentrating in Latin, Greek and theology.   Chamberlain taught rhetoric at Bowdoin.  Puritan children went to Princeton, Yale and Harvard.  Prosperous Catholics sent their children to convent schools,  Holy Cross College, Fordham, Notre Dame and Georgetown.  West Point was nominally Episcopalian, but in reality a secular temple of engineering and "the art of war."  Its de facto academic leader was the little Irish-American Dennis Hart Mahan, the most influential American who doesn't have a biography.   

O'Rorke excelled academically at West Point.  He had the distinction of graduating first in the class where George Armstrong Custer was last.  His graduation was accelerated and he went straight from West Point into the war.  He distinguished himself at the siege of Fort Pulaski before returning to Rochester to take command as colonel of the newly formed 140th New York infantry. It was a mixed American unit including many Irish and Germans:  Clanceys, Collinses, Murphys, Hoffmans,  Meyers, Shultz.  It was lightly engaged at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before Gettysburg.  

When the 140th arrived on the Gettysburg battlefield on July 2nd they were marching right into the fight.  On the way they ran into the general sent to inspect the left wing of the Union army's defenses.   The general knew O'Rorke and said "Paddy, you know me.  Forget your orders.  Get to that little hill over there.  We have to hold it."  The 140th reached the hill just as the center of the Chamberlain's brigade collapsed, its commander dead.   O'Rorke yell "charge!"  and the 140th counterattack drove off the Confederate.   Leading the charge O'Rorke was killed instantly by a sniper's bullet and didn't live to write a memoir about his heroics.

There were other unsung Irish heroes at Gettysburg even more significant than O'Rorke.   In Killer Angels the battle begins with General Bufford's cavalry division ambushing the Confederate army on the outskirts of Gettysburg.   Bufford's two brigade commanders were "Buford's Hard Hitter" Thomas Casimar Devin born to Irish parents in New York and William Gamble born in Lisnarrick, County Fermanagh, Ireland.   Their job in the early hours of the battle was to hold on until help arrived.

The help Bufford, Gamble and Devin were waiting for was Major General Fulton Reynolds, commander of the left wing of the Army of the Potomac and General George Gordon Meade's most trusted lieutenant.  Many called him the most respected soldier in Lincoln's army.  Some believe he was asked to lead the army, but declined because he wasn't offered enough autonomy.  It was Reynolds who made the decision to commit the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg.   During his march in with the army's left wing, he assessed the terrain and tactical situation and saw a great opportunity for a Corps d'Armee trap.  With the entire Army of the Potomac within one day's march,  at first the Confederates would seem to be winning, but as tens of thousands of Union reinforcements like O'Rorke and Chamberlain streamed onto the battle, the Confederates would, in fact, be losing.   Army of the Potomac commander Major General George Gordon Meade went along with the decision.  Reynolds was shot by a sniper's bullet while directing troops in the frontlines and did not survive the battle.

Reynolds and Meade were scions of Pennsylvania's old Irish families.   You could even say Meade's family saved the Union twice.

"Gen. MEADE, the new leader of the Army of the Potomac, is the grandson of GEORGE MEADE,  of Philadelphia, an eminent Irish-American merchant, whose firm (MEADE & FITZSIMMONS)  contributed in 1781 $10,000 to a fund for the relief of the famishing army of Gen. WASHINGTON."  

-- New York Times, July 2, 1863

On the second day of the battle two absolutions under fire would be given.  One by Father Josepeh O'Hagan of New York's Excelsior Brigade.  The more famous one by Father William Corby of the Irish Brigade.   Corby's is commemorated at Notre Dame by a painting that's part of the permanent collection and a statue that the students call "fair catch Corby."  

On the third day to the battle when Robert E Lee took his last gamble on victory,  the 69th Pennsylvania regiment held the center of the Union line.  In the Killer Angels scene where Confederate General Lewis Armistead leads his men into the Union lines, you can glimpse the 69th's green flag as its soldiers shoot down Armistead and his men.   The 69th was promptly reinforced by Colonel James Mallon's Tammany Hall Regiment, the 42nd New York.

Meade's victory at Gettysburg wasn't as conclusive as it could have been.   Lee escaped the trap.  He'd been as well versed in French tactics at West Point as Reynolds and Meade.  Lee used La Manoeure Sur Les Dierieres to invade the North three times.   The Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains could be used as a walled highway to flank the North's defenses, invade the North's heartland and threaten the capital at Washington.  It was also a secure escape hatch.   100 years later the North Vietnamese would use this strategy and the Ho Chi Minh trail to defeat the United States in Vietnam.

The game of military chess had been played many times in the classrooms and Napoleon Seminar at West Point.  Its architect was the little Irishman Dennis Hart Mahn,  Professor of Engineering and the Art of War.

Two Wounded Irishmen, One Medal of Honor and Very American Wives

“As I lay alone that night, near my guns, in expectation of renewal of the conflict in the early morning … I involuntarily exclaimed: “Great God of the universe, can not this causeless fratricidal strife be compromised?” In reply a tearful voice came out of the stillness … “Compromise what? Can right be compromised with wrong and justice remain among men? Can freedom be compromised with slavery and either master or slave be free?”

– Willliam Patrick Hogarty, Antietam.

When people think about the Irish at Antietam, New York’s Irish Brigade comes to mind. In the bloody fighting at the Antietam’s sunken road that broke the center of the Confederate army, the Irish Brigade suffered 500 casualties. However, most Irish Americans who served in the Civil war didn’t serve in ethnic regiments like the Irish Brigade. William Patrick Hogarty was one of them.

Hogarty enlisted in the 23rd New York volunteers from Corning, New York in 1861. The 23rd arrived just in time to take up a defensive position outside Washington, D.C. after the Union army was defeated at Bull Run. Subsequently, Hogarty volunteered to join Battery B, 4th, US artillery attached to the Iron Brigade, a western unit that earned its name for its famous stands at Antietam and Gettysburg.

At Antietam Battery B rushed into the front lines ahead of the Iron Brigade and immediately deployed for battle. First there was a crackle of musket fire from Union skirmishers then Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates in full strength came yelling and charging at Battery B.

“In battery!” An officer shouted.

The artillerymen and their horses raced their guns into position for a fight and swung their guns at the charging Confederates.

“With canister load!

Hogarty and the men loaded their six 12-pounder Napoleon cannons with triple-shotted canister, 50 iron balls to a canister, turning the Napoleon’s into giant shot guns.

Commence fire!”

The conical hail of canister fire shredded the Confederate lines, but the Confederates kept coming, leveling the Battery B cannoneers with fire from their rifled muskets, as the rest of the Iron Brigade raced into the fight. By the time the bloodbath of fire played itself out and the guns fell silent, 44 of the battery’s 60 soldiers and 33 of their horses were dead or wounded. The battle ended, the survivors tended to the wounded and began shooting the wounded horses, their gallant and beloved horses.

Three months later Hogarty’s war would end at Fredericksburg when a Confederate cannon ball blew his arm off. The Iron Brigade did not take part in the futile charges at the stonewall where the Irish Brigade was decimated. It was on the far left of the Union lines where 25,000 Union soldiers waited for an order to attack the vulnerable Confederate flank. For some inexplicable reason only a lone division of 4,500

men led by Irish-American George Gordon Meade was ordered to attack. Hogarty was among the wounded and his injury was so severe that his arm had to be amputated at the shoulder. He was discharged for disability.

For valor at Antietam and Fredericksburg, William Hogarty was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The commanding Union generals in charge the battles got sacked.

In the last year of the war, Hogarty re-enlisted, served in a reserve capacity and was promoted to captain for merit. When the war ended, he stayed in the army and helped run the Freedman’s Bureau in Tennessee and Kentucky along with operations to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. He was at Leavenworth, Kansas, running recruiting operations when he retired in 1870. He built a home and ran a fruit orchard outside Kansas City near the Freedman’s University at Quindaro. He and his wife are buried at the cemetery nearby.

Hogarty’s American story illustrates its hard life and the power of assimilation especially on the frontiers beyond the ethnic, sectarian and political strife of the big eastern cities.

Hogarty’s parents – Patrick Hogarty and Honora Barry -- were married in the Catholic parish at Monasterevin, County Kildare, in 1834. They left Ireland sometime in the late 1830s or early 1840s probably just before the worst of the Famine hit.

William was born in the US in 1840 and his older brother Michael was born in 1835 in Ireland. William’s records aren’t consistent with Micheal’s which indicate Michael immigrated to the US in 1844 or ’47. This ambiguity is something William shares with General Phil Sheridan and West Point “faculty dean” Dennis Hart Mahan. Perhaps it’s the Irish who first invented the “anchor baby” claim on American citizenship.

In 1849 Hogarty and his parents were living in central New York State when both parents died within days of each other, probably due to the cholera epidemic that swept New York that year. Patrick and Michael moved in with local families, earning their keep. At ten, Patrick worked and lived with Victor Warren owner of a hammer factory in New Lisbon, New York. Michael was a farm worker in the Thadeus Cattin household at Catherine, New York. By the late 1850s, both brothers were at Alfred University affiliated with the Seventh Day Baptists at Alfred, New York. Someone was watching over the orphaned Hogarty boys, perhaps Cattin or Warren.

Michael like his brother joined the Union army. Fighting with the 141st New York Infantry during Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, he was wounded and lost an eye at the battle near Resaca, Georgia. Like William, Michael was discharged for disability and re-enlisted again when he could.

Following the war Michael and his wife Sara took Horace Greeley’s advice “Go West, Young Man, Go West” and joined Greeley’s Union Temperance Colony at what became Greeley, Colorado. Their daughter married Colorado’s “Silver Fox”, Delph Carpenter, father of the Colorado River Water Compact which governed water sharing among the western states. Carpenter was a Mason and Methodist and like Ms. Hogarty, a child of the original settlers of the Union Temperance Colony.

The Hogarty women and The Daughters of the American Revolution are responsible for keeping the records that connect the two Irish orphans, William and Michael. The orphans married the Carr sisters of north central Pennsylvania who trace their family roots all the way back to Revolutionary war soldier Samuel Granger of Connecticut who in turn was a distant relative of the Adams family.

References:

The Cannoneer: Recollections of Service in the Army of the Potomac, Augustus Buell

Histoy of Kansas, “William P Hogarty”, William G. Cutler

War Talks in Kansas, “A Medal of Honor”, William P. Hogarty

Findagrave.com, cemetery records, biographical extracts, and DAR notes

Ancestery.com, census, marriage, military and passport records

Lineage Book, NSDAR, Volume 023: 1898, Daughters of the American Revolution

NY Times Covers Up When Army Shot NYC Civilians

Editor,  NY Times:

Yet again the Times abetted by Elizabeth Mitchell publishes a Nativist rendition of the New York City draft riots (NYT,  2.18/21).  This time citing Herbert Asbury's Nativist Gangs of New York, which some refer to as the Protocols of the Elders of Erin.   While there were indeed attacks on blacks during the riots,  by far most of the riot dead were white civilians, too many woman and children, gunned down by the army and militia.   Concurred with by Pulitzer-Prize historian James McPherson, Adrian Cook provided a detailed casualty list in his scholarly, Armies of the Streets.   In fact, the riots were not simply about a draft.  The riots were a protest against a draft that was class privileged -- for a price, the rich could buy their way out of the draft.  In addition, the protests were incited by rich businessman who wanted to preserve their commercial ties to the South.  The extent of the rioting was due to the Lincoln administration stubbornly deciding to hold the draft when the city militia, thousands strong, was still in Pennsylvania after supporting the Union army during the Confederate invasion of 1863.  By far most of New York City and its immigrants did not riot.  The city's police who battled the mobs and protected the city's black were the riots real heroes.   The Times and Ms. Mitchell need to apologize for their transgressions against immigrant New York whose 150,000 soldier and sailors won 200 Medal of Honor during the American Civil War,  and the scores of white civilians gunned down by the feckless native-born troops hiding out from the war in New York City's harbor forts.

***********

Times would not publish this complaint.

Complaint to New York Historical Society

 

President Louise Mirrer, New-York Historical Society

Subject: NYC Draft Riots and the Irish - all Columbia professors aren’t arsonists

President Mirrer:

Some months ago, I chanced upon a televised discussion between your Ms. Valerie Paley and Harold Holzer, who is very knowledgeable about Lincoln.  I tuned in just as they were discussing the Irish and the NYC draft riots.   Some seemingly innocent, but unfortunate comments were made.  Covid tragedy has delayed my response.

Blatant generalizations are likely to get most in trouble, including historians.   For example, Columbia chemistry professor Richard Sears McCulloch, a man with a famous American pedigree, disappeared during the NYC draft riots.   He reappeared in Virginia volunteering to make weapons of mass destruction for the Confederacy.   Arson might have been the reason for his fleeing New York.   If it was, it still would not be proof that all Columbia professors were arsonists who wanted to make weapons of mass destruction for the Confederacy.

Most troubling is that historians talk about the draft riots and it never occurs to them to question whether the government illegally used deadly force against civilians.  In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson comes the closest to admitting that happened in 1863 at New York City .

 “The Department of War rushed several regiments from Pennsylvania to New York, where on July 15 and 16 they poured volleys into the ranks of the rioters with the same deadly effect they had produced against the Rebels at Gettysburg two weeks earlier.”

In fact no army regiments were rushed to New York from Gettysburg.  The military doing the shooting were feckless troops from the harbor forts and militia that had never left the city.  Among New York’s dangerous “Rebel” dead?  Too many women and children, judging by Adrian Cook’s list in Armies of the Streets.

The enclosed should be required reading for any of your minions who plan on venturing into the minefield of immigrants and the NYC draft riots.

Slainte,

Gilligan

cc:        SVP Valerie Paley

https://hidden-civil-war.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-irish-and-draft-riots-real-story.html