From My Life in the Irish Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of Private William McCarter :
The charge was stalled by a wooden rail fence about 60 yards from the Southern line. The intense fire from Cobb’s Georgians splintered the fence, spattered mud in all directions, and decimated those men moving up behind it. But still, the Irish came on.
A strange and macabre sound was heard above the exploding artillery shells and pathetic screams of the wounded. The Confederates were cheering and applauding, overcome by the bravery of their Irish foe. Maj. Gen. George Pickett of Gettysburg fame wrote after the battle to his fiancée: “Your soldier’s heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their death. The brilliant assault on Marye’s Heights of their Irish Brigade was beyond description. Why, my darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines.”
Cathy and I are watching Ken Burn’s take on the Civil War. Usually, the romanticized view (if there is any such thing left) is cut from the heart of the events being described. Every so often, though, a nugget will slip through. There is something gratifying about the idea: an enemy, doomed by fate, inferior economic capacity, and moral incorrectness, losing control of themselves and being moved against their will to cheer the bravery and noble self-sacrifice of the “good guys.” Alas, it is all tosh. All you have to do is go back a few paragraphs in the narrative (currently published in fragments here) to find out that a large part of Confederate general Cobb’s 28th Massachusetts were, like their foes, recently immigrated Irish. And at this point in the war — a cold, late December in 1862 — any romantic notions about the war had long since been expelled. For the most part, these were countrymen on unfamiliar territory, fighting for different sides of a fractured dream of opportunity, held in position by the likelihood of being shot if they dared desert.
The simplified version is much more satisfying.
As a lengthy aside, I must say that the confederates offered much more compelling heroes. There was, of course, Lee, the genteel and conflicted genius of 1860s warfare; Albert Sidney Johnston, who died with his boot full of blood because he had sent his personal physician to take care of some captured Union soldiers; Stonewall Jackson, of course, the originally and absolutely coldblooded Saint of Killers; and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who could have been an inspiration for Neo fighting against a crowd of Federalist Agent Smiths and, after serving as the KKK’s first grand wizard, urged the dissolution of the Klan before the institution had become the monstrous legend we know and despite today. All I’m saying here is that, if I were playing a video game version of the Civil War, I would generally favor the confederacy. It was morally insupportable, of course (like Lincoln, who embraced emancipation mostly because of its political expediency!), but much more satisfying on a purely emotional level. McClellan was a putz, and Sherman lacked Stonewall’s cool factor; I’d prefer not to get a musket to the face serving either of them.
I wrote most of this thinking of the veterans of our recent wars in Iraq (both of them) and Afghanistan (only one, but reaaaaaally stretched out) and thinking about the confusion around how these wars, and their human cost, are painted in modern media. In years to come, it is possible that the hazy lens of retrospection will cast an aura of subdued heroism over these conflicts. The sharp edges of meaning and experience decay so quickly in human time; by the time I am on my deathbed, perhaps the world will largely regard these events as inevitable, perhaps even accidentally useful: the aging and decrepit West strikes out in untargeted frustration, and the East awakens from its Feudal Sleep and assumes its proper place in the world… More likely, some of us will look back and say, whatever happened to such selfless heroism as that? And the rest of us — whoever we are at that time — will say, what the hell are you talking about? Those young people died for something that no one, least of all the politicians of the time, understood properly.
Such is history. Which is why I don’t study it anymore, except accidentally =)
