Part 44

Once more, in 1864, Lee, hard pressed by the army under Grant, tried to create a diversion in favor of his army by sending General Jubal Early, the ablest of his cavalry generals, to surprise the national forces in camp at Cedar Creek, advance to the National Capital and thus compel the withdrawal of Grant’s army for the defense of Washington. With great quickness and secrecy he marched up the Shenandoah Valley, and on the morning of October 19th, under cover of a thick fog, which concealed his approach, he suddenly attacked the Union forces. Completely surprised, they hastily retreated and a great disaster threatened the army. The Eighth Corps was rolled up, the center gave way and soon the whole army was in rapid retreat. Sheridan had been in Washington, and was then in Winchester, twenty miles away, on his way to join his army, when he heard the firing. Rapidly riding toward the conflict, he found his army retreating in confusion. Raising his hat he shouted to his men, who were panic-stricken: “Face the other way, boys, face the other way; we are going back.” “Who is that?” a soldier asked of his comrade, for Sheridan is scarcely recognizable through the dust on his clothes and the foam on his black steed from hard riding. But there was no mistaking the manner of the man, and after closely scrutinizing the flying horseman, the comrade replies, “Little Phil, by G—!” and in his enthusiasm shouted, “Hurrah for Sheridan.” The enthusiasm spread, along the whole retreating line the shout went up, again and again repeated, and men who were flying in panic before the victorious army of Early, inspired with full confidence in that leader who had never lost a battle, reformed their lines and long before the close of that eventful day Sheridan was able to telegraph to Washington this characteristic despatch: “We have met the enemy under Early and have sent him whirling up the valley.”

Thus a second time was the National Capital saved by the genius and dash of the son of an Irishman.

Grant paid Sheridan the compliment of saying that he was the only man which the war developed capable of commanding a hundred thousand men under his own eye.

But it is not as soldiers alone that the Irish have won distinction; they have been conspicuous in every walk of life, in every department of human activity. They have filled with distinction the highest office in the gift of the American people, in giving to the Presidency such men as Andrew Jackson, who was the son of an Irish farmer; James Buchanan, the son of an Irish emigrant; James K. Polk, the grandson of Irish parents; Chester A. Arthur, the son of an Irish Episcopal clergyman; William McKinley, whose granduncle was executed by the British Government for

## participation in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Claims of Irish descent

have also been made for Taylor, Johnson and Cleveland (see “The Puritan in Holland, England and America,” Vol. 2, p. 493). In the long roll of distinguished names of the Senate and House of Representatives none stand higher for eloquence and statesmanship than those who trace their ancestry to Ireland.

In journalism men of Irish blood have been among the leaders of those who have moulded public opinion. Hugh Gaine, a native of Ireland, began the publication of the “Mercury” in 1752; Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, a native of Wicklow, started the “Farmers’ Library” and later the “Fairhaven Gazette.” He was known as a “peppery, red-headed Irishman.” He was indicted by the United States Court for an article reflecting on President John Adams, and was fined $1,000 and imprisoned for three months. One of the most interesting characters in the early history of journalism in this country was John Burk, a native of Ireland, who published “The Time Piece” in New York. John Dunlap, a native of Strabane, was the first Congressional printer. I can only give the names of a few of those who were prominent as publishers during colonial times and in the early days of the Republic. John Binn, William B. Kenny, proprietor of the “New Jersey State Gazette,” the first daily paper in that State; Henry O’Reilly, editor of the “Patriot” and later of the “Rochester Daily Advertiser,” the first daily paper between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean. We have Fitz James O’Brien, Col. James Mulligan, Thomas Francis Meagher, soldier, orator and writer; Robert S. McKenzie, Thomas Kinsella of the “Brooklyn Eagle.” James Gordon Bennett, Scotch by birth, was the son of an Irish mother. The roster of employees on the staff of the “Herald” during his life reads like the roll call of a Fenian regiment. Horace Greeley, one of the greatest of newspapermen, was the son of Irish parents. He made the “Tribune” the most influential paper in the United States during the war, and for ten years thereafter was a power in National politics. I cannot close this brief mention of Irishmen in journalism without naming one whose writings stirred not only America but all Europe, J. A. MacGahan. He was largely instrumental in bringing about the Bulgarian war of 1875, which changed the geography of Europe. John Boyle O’Reilly, of the “Boston Pilot,” exercised a wide influence by his writings, as did also his successor, James Jeffrey Roche. Patrick Forde, of the “Irish World,” has been a power in journalism for more than a quarter of a century.

It is unnecessary to call attention to the part which the Irish have played in the ecclesiastical history of this country. We need only look around us to see what they are doing today. From the Prince of the Church, Cardinal Gibbons, down through a long line of illustrious Archbishops and Bishops, to the latest arrival from Carlow or All Hallows, all zealous workers in the vineyard of the Lord. And what a harvest they have gleaned! And what the Irish are doing today they have been doing from the beginning—zealous, eloquent, self-sacrificing, untiring in the discharge of their duty, giving ungrudgingly to God’s service the best that is in them.

We have no reason to hang our heads at the part which our people have played in the history of the United States. No element that enters into the cosmopolitan population of this country has contributed more in every quality that goes to make a great people than the Irish. We have given eloquence to the bar, dignity to the bench, learning and virtue to the pulpit, wisdom to the Senate, and glory to the sword. We were present at the birth of the Nation and sustained its infantile arms during the years of its struggle for liberty, sharing in the hardships of Valley Forge and in the glory of Yorktown. We fought with Jackson at New Orleans and with Perry in Lake Erie; stormed Chapultepec with Shields, rode from Winchester down the valley of Shenandoah with Sheridan; stormed Marye’s Heights with Meagher and his brigade, and later climbed the heights of San Juan with Buckey O’Neill and “Rafferty of ‘F’.” On every field the Irish marched to the battle-front side by side with the Puritan from New England, the Knickerbocker from New York, and the liberty-loving dweller of the rolling prairies of Iowa and Illinois. In the same deep grave they sleep “the silent sleep that knows no waking.” The snows of winter, like a winding sheet, lie coldly above them, and as each returning spring awakens into life and beauty the sleeping forces of nature, the green grass grows and the wild flowers bloom above their common grave.

I will close by quoting the following tributes to the Irish by men who were not of our race: Col. John Parke Custis, the adopted son of Washington, says: “Then honored be the old and good services of the sons of Erin in the war of Independence. Let the shamrock be entwined with the laurels of the Revolution; and truth and justice, guiding the pen of history, inscribe on the tablets of American remembrance: ‘Eternal gratitude to Irishmen.’”

Similar sentiments were expressed by the late Senator Bayard, in the Senate of the United States. “If,” said he, “the names of the men of Irish birth and of Irish blood who have dignified and decorated the annals of American history were to be erased from the record, how much of the glory of our country would be subtracted? In the list of American statesmen and patriots, theologians and poets, soldiers and sailors, priests and orators, what names shine with purer lustre or are mentioned with more respect than those of the men, past and present, we owe to Ireland. On that imperishable roll of honor, the Declaration of Independence, we find their names, and in the prolonged struggle that followed there was no battlefield from the St. Lawrence to the Savannah but was enriched with Irish blood shed in the cause of civil and religious liberty.”

THE REMINISCENCES OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS, ONE OF THE FIRST MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY, EDITED BY HIS SON, HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS, AND PUBLISHED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.

My father began his reminiscences in the early spring of 1906, while recovering from a surgical operation in the Corey Hill Hospital of Brookline, Massachusetts. As he had spent a most active life, he chafed at that confinement until this scheme was devised to pass his hours; whereupon, to his great amusement, he dictated the first quarter of the work. Later, after his return to Windsor, when, to his bitter disappointment, he found that he could not for any length of time remain on his feet to model, he continued to write at odd moments up to the middle of the summer.

The contents of my father’s text itself I have left intact, save where exceptionally rough; but the order of thought and anecdote, which was badly tangled, owing to the lack of revision, I have shifted back and forth into a semblance of methodical progression.

My father begins:

“Reminiscences are more likely to be tiresome than otherwise to the readers of later generations; but among the consoling pleasures that appear over the horizon as years advance is that of rambling away about one’s past....

* * * * *

“I was born March 1, 1848, in Dublin, Ireland, near 37 Charlemount Street. If that is not the house, no doubt the record in the nearest Catholic church would give the number.”

My uncle, Mr. Louis Saint-Gaudens, who visited Dublin in the summer of 1890, found the building at number 35, near the head of Charlemount Street and not far from a bridge built over the canal which runs by the southeastern part of the city. There, under the trees that line the banks and in sight of the Wicklow Hills, my father as a baby must have been carried by my grandmother.

The reminiscences continue:

“My mother’s maiden name was Mary McGuiness. Of her ancestry I know nothing except that her mother was married twice, the second time to a veteran of the Napoleonic wars.”

My father’s maternal grandmother’s name was Daly. She married Arthur McGuiness, of whom it is only recalled that he worked in the Dublin plaster mills and that he was a Freemason. Neither of the couple lived to be old. Their daughter Mary McGuiness was born to them at Bally Mahon, County Longford.

To return to the autobiography:

“Of my mother’s family the only member of which I have had a glimpse was her brother George McGuiness, whom I saw in Forsyth Street. I have a daguerreotype of his delightfully kind and extremely homely face—a face like a benediction, as I have heard some one describe it. He, of all men, became the owner of two slaves in the South, and, judging from a daguerreotype, married an equally homely and kindly-looking woman. He was in some way connected with the navy yard at Pensacola. The war cut off all further communication with him.

“Of my father’s birth and ancestry I am as ignorant as of my mother’s, knowing only that his father was a soldier under Napoleon, who died comparatively young and suddenly after what I suspect was a gorgeous spree.”

My father’s paternal grandfather was called André Saint-Gaudens. His wife’s maiden name was Boy. Tradition has it that she sold butter and eggs in the market-place at Aspet, and that she became a miser, leaving under her bed upon her death the conventional box crammed with gold pieces.

The reminiscences continue:

“My father’s full name was Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens; Bernard Paul ‘Honeste,’ if you please, he called it later in life; it sounded nicer. He was born in the little village of Aspet, about fifty miles from Toulouse, at the foot of the Pyrenees, five miles south of the town of Saint-Gaudens, in the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, a most beautiful country, as the many searchers for health at the baths of Bagnères-de-Luchon know.”...

Three years my grandfather passed in London and, later, seven years in Dublin before he met his future wife in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. There, previous to my father’s birth, two sons, George and Louis, died, George at the age of six, and Louis in infancy. But when my father was six months old, “red-headed, whopper-jawed, and hopeful,” as he would repeat, the famine in Ireland compelled his parents to go with him to America, setting out from Liverpool, England, in the sailing-ship _Desdemona_.

The autobiography goes on:

“Father told me that an overcrowded passenger-list prevented his leaving Dublin with my mother, with me at her breast, in a ship named the _Star of the West_ that burned at sea during the trip. But because he told me this does not mean that it was so. His Gascon imagination could give character or make beauty wherever these qualities were necessary to add interest to what he was saying.

“They landed at Boston town probably in September, 1848, he a short, stocky, bullet-headed, enthusiastic young man of about thirty, with dark hair cf reddish tendencies and a light red mustache, she of his height, with the typical long, generous, loving Irish face, with wavy black hair, a few years his junior, and ‘the most beautiful girl in the world,’ as he used to say.

“Leaving mother in Boston,—where, by the way, I am beginning this account in the hospital fifty-six years afterward,—he started to find work in New York. In six weeks he sent for her. He said we first lived in Duane Street. Of this I knew nothing.

“From there we went to a house on the west side of Forsyth Street, probably near Houston Street, where now is the bronze foundry in which the statue of Peter Cooper which I modeled was cast forty-five years later. There my brother Andrew was born on Hallowe’en in 1850 or 1851, and there I made the beginning of my conscious life.

[Illustration:

FRANCIS I. McCANNA, ESQ.,

of Providence, R. I.

A Valued Member of the Society. ]

“The beginnings of my father’s business were peculiar, since what interested him infinitely more than his store were the two or three societies to which he belonged and of which he was generally the ‘Grand Panjandrum.’ There were constant meetings of committees and sub-committees when there were not general ones. The principal society was the ‘Union Fraternelle Française,’ a mutual-benefit affair of which he was one of the founders and for many years the leading figure.”

My grandfather enjoyed as well the making of speeches at Irish festivals, where he would round off his conclusions with spirited perorations in the Gaelic tongue. Also he became an abolitionist, a “Black Republican,” during the Civil War; while, to involve matters still further, he was a Freemason who insisted on associating with the Negro Freemasons, and presiding at their initiations. The white Freemasons thereupon blacklisted him.

The reminiscences say of him:

“In the daytime, notwithstanding mother’s gentle pleadings, instead of preparing work, he was constantly writing letters about these societies, all naturally to the serious detriment of his affairs.

“Nevertheless, for so small an establishment, father had an extraordinary clientèle, embracing the names of most of the principal families in New York—Governor Morgan, General Dix, some of the Astors, Belmonts and the wife of General Daniel E. Sickles.”

Horace Greeley also was a steady purchaser, for he delighted to wrangle with this argumentative shoemaker upon the philosophy of footwear.

The reminiscences continue:

“No doubt those who came were attracted by my father’s picturesque personality, as well as by the fact that at that time everything French was the fashion, and by the steadiness of his assurance as to the superiority and beauty of his productions. His sign, ‘French Ladies’ Boots and Shoes,’ must have been irresistible when taken together with the wonderfully complex mixture of his fierce French accent and Irish brogue. This bewildering language was just as bad at the end of fifty years as when he first landed. In the family he spoke English to mother and French to the three boys; we spoke English to mother and French to him; mother spoke English to all of us.”

Moreover, further to adorn his discourse, my grandfather constantly embroidered his remarks with fantastic proverbs of uncertain and international origin. “As much use as a mustard plaster on a wooden leg,” he would say; or, “Sorry as a dog at his father’s funeral”; or “As handy with his hands as a pig with his tail”; or “A cross before a dead man”; or (and this my father repeated after him through all his life) “What you are saying and nothing at all is the same thing.”

“In addition, close to that time my mother’s cousin, John Daly, a marine on one of the United States government ships, paid us a visit, when he read to us in papers brought from Honolulu and showed us great walrus teeth that had come from the Pacific. And finally I can see myself among the other children who attended the Sunday school of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Elizabeth Street.”

THE BATTLE OF COLLIERVILLE.

BY CAPT. P. J. CARMODY.

On a lovely October morning the battalion left Memphis by rail. It was the 11th day of the month,—Sunday—1863. The battalion consisted of the headquarter guard, with General Sherman and his staff, destined to reinforce Grant at Chattanooga. We got away from Memphis about ten o’clock, General Sherman, the staff and officers occupying the coaches. The rest of the battalion took places on top of the cars. Everything went smoothly enough until we got to Collierville, a small station about twenty-six or seven miles out of Memphis. I did not feel exactly right that morning; I had a premonition that something was going to happen, and, as first Sergeant of E Co., 13th U. S. Infantry, I was over-vigilant. I took particular pains to see that the men did not remove accoutrements.

Within something like a mile from Collierville, as the train panted along, I discovered three men riding hard towards the track. They were armed with crowbars instead of guns. One of our men let fly a shot at them, and the battalion was immediately in arms. The train stopped at the station. It was nearly mid-day, and no time was lost in action. The first work of General Sherman was to telegraph to Germantown, about twelve miles away, for hasty reinforcements, saying he had to cope with a division of Confederates numbering 3,100, with five pieces of artillery. It was the one opportunity of a generation for the Confederates to make a great capture; and the result would have been simple if those three men with crowbars and wire-cutting apparatus had got in their work in time. But it was not to be; fortune was on our side and the telegram for reinforcements reached its destination in time.

The battalion was detrained and ordered to form a line of battle. I will never forget that line. I looked to the right and to the left, scanning about two hundred and forty as good and brave officers and men as ever met an enemy. We marched in battle line two or three hundred yards from the train towards the enemy, and were ordered to lie down. We observed that communication was being made in the rebel lines with a flag of truce. This communication was received by Col. Irish, commander of the little dismantled fort, with 240 or 250 men stationed at that point. General Chalmers demanded the unconditional surrender of General Sherman, his troops and supplies. He added that refusal would mean a useless sacrifice of lives, because he had 3,100 cavalry, infantry and artillery in his command. What do you think your “Uncle Billy” said? “Give my compliments to General Chalmers,” said he, “and tell him that the government pays me to fight, not to surrender.”

As soon as the rebel aide rode back to his command, the ball opened with grape and cannister; but they overshot us and only a few were wounded. They threw four or five rounds into us, and the order was given to stand up and then to fall back on the fort and entrenchments. This was done in fairly good order, but let me tell you, comrades, we made awfully fast time in the three hundred yards to the fort. I cast the heel of my shoe—shot off.

The men were disposed of to the very best advantage. It was an easy matter to distribute the 240 of our battalion, and I suppose Col. Irish, with his six companies of the 66th Indiana, did not have much trouble in placing them where they would do most good. Well, here we were partially protected by rifle pits, a dismantled fort, and a train of cars—480 men against an army of 3,100. Comrades, think of it!

I had been paid at Memphis and I had two fifty dollar bills with me. I was so sure of being captured, I cut the sole of my shoe open and slipped the two fifties in there. I knew that if we were taken prisoners, they would shake us down; and made up my mind that the money would help my chances of escaping during the night if captured. It was hammer and tongs until about four o’clock in the afternoon.

This was the first time I had seen General Sherman under fire, and he was certainly worth watching. He was mad as a march hare at being trapped in such a manner; something was wrong in the line of communication—somebody had made a mistake. But he was Sherman all the time that afternoon. I could not help studying this remarkable man whenever I got the opportunity. Great as his anger was at the beginning, he became later on, calm and resolute. The interior of this earthwork contained about thirty or forty men and quite a number of cooks, waiters and followers of the headquarters’ guard. The general with his hat off in the broiling sun was a marvel to look at. When a man was shot he would get one of these headquarters’ employees and say to him: “Don’t you see that man is killed? Take his cartridge box and his gun and load it. Fight for your country, sir.”