The Irish Brigade Loses Approximately Half Its Strength But Keeps Its Flag at the Battle of Antietam

“God bless the Irish flag.”

—President Abraham Lincoln in 1862

 

The Irish Brigade’s Selfless Courage and Sacrifice at Antietam

The Irish Brigade—fighting under its emerald flag with a golden harp emblazoned on the banner’s center—made itself an indispensable part of the Union Army of the Potomac on many bloody Civil War battlefields. However, it was at the Battle of Antietam that this Federal unit transformed itself from a highly respected fighting force to a downright legendary contingent of staggeringly brave and selfless warriors whose sacrifice on September 17, 1862, in southwestern Maryland left no doubt that they, while still proud of their Irish descent, were Americans in the truest sense of the word. 

[Photo: The Irish Brigade at Attacks the Sunken Road at Antietam… ChatGPT generated this image.]

As one of three brigades in Israel Richardson’s division of Edwin “Bull” Sumner’s II Corps in George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, at the Battle of Antietam, the Irish Brigade made three lasting contributions not only to their nation but also to the scores of Irish in Northern cities whose loyalty to the United States had been unjustly questioned by Northerners of other ethnic heritages for far too long. These contributions consisted of the Irish Brigade:

• Taking the lead in Richardson’s bold attempt to cleave the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s battle line in two and coming the closest of any Federal unit at Antietam to precipitating the destruction of the most effective and famous Southern army of the Civil War.

The Battle of Antietam witnessed several moments during which Union forces seemed poised to obliterate Robert E. Lee’s undermanned Confederate army’s defensive position and massacre or capture most or all of the Southerners who had so defiantly dared to stand in their way. However, it was Richardson’s attack—led by the Irish Brigade—which came the closest of all the Federal assaults that day to sounding the death knell for Lee’s vaunted army and, with it, the probable death knell for the entire Confederacy. While the Union high command squandered the tremendous potential for total victory generated by the Irish Brigade’s attack, this tragic failure to capitalize on the North’s most golden opportunity of the day was no fault of the Irish Brigade.

• Taking on the lion’s share of Confederate musket balls and artillery shells spewed at Union forces from the center of Lee’s defensive position known then as the Sunken Road—and now as the “Bloody Lane”—as well as a casualty rate of around 50%, all while continuing to boldly fly their hallmark flag despite having eight color bearers shot down. This harrowing feat enabled Richardson’s other brigades to seize what had, just minutes before, seemed like an impenetrable makeshift trench.

Sumner initially conceived of what became the massive Union assault on the Confederates in the Sunken Road as an attempt to divert Confederates headed to reinforce Lee’s left, or northern, flank away from that crucial and horrendously bloody section of the battlefield. But in less than an hour, the pluck and self-sacrificial determination of the Irish Brigade ensured that this “diversionary” Federal attack soon transformed into the best chance McClellan would ever have at permanently splitting the Confederate army and destroying it in detail.

In hindsight, the maelstrom for control of the Bloody Lane largely foreshadowed the horrific, attritional, and tragically vain course warfare was beginning to take as the technologically cutting-edge weapons employed by both armies outpaced the commanders’ tactics. Yet the success of Richardson’s assault—spearheaded by the Irish Brigade—proves that, at least at this point in the Civil War, not every offensive against a fortified defensive position was a suicidal venture doomed to failure before it began. 

[Photo: Confederate Dead Fill the Bloody Lane after Its Capture by Union Forces … Public Domain]

• Convincing countless Northerners of non-Irish descent that Irish-Americans were as fiercely loyal to their new nation and willing to die in its defense as anyone else fighting for the Union in the Civil War.
  
  

The degree of unfounded suspicion with which most Northerners of non-Irish descent viewed Irish-Americans in the Civil War era is difficult to fully convey. But from a combination of simple ethnic prejudice, a widespread conviction that Irish immigrants were taking too many jobs from Northerners of other ethnic heritages, and a heavy bias against Catholicism—the Christian denomination of which the vast majority of Irish-Americans were a part—Northern anti-Irish sentiment was disturbingly palpable.

Yet the fact that approximately half of the members of the Irish Brigade were shot at Antietam in defense of the nation made it impossible for a great many Northerners to continue to imagine that Irish-Americans were more loyal to those people who shared their ethnic heritage than they were to their adopted nation. While the Irish Brigade’s sacrifice at Antietam did not eliminate anti-Irish bigotry in the North, it did, at least to a great degree, temper it.

Ultimately, the charge of the Irish Brigade against the Sunken Road, its shootout with the Confederates taking shelter there, and the determination of its members to retain their precious emerald flag at all costs have become legendary facets in any proper narrative of the Civil War’s bloodiest day. 

[Photo: A Zoomed In Shot of the Antietam Monument to the Irish Brigade… Credit to NPS]

 

The Creation of the Irish Brigade and the Design of Its Hallmark Flag

The iron will and ambition of Thomas Meagher (pronounced “Mahr”)—an Irish attorney, an orator, and a revolutionary who had immigrated to the United States in 1852, four years after the British had exiled him from Ireland—were the driving forces behind the formation of the Irish Brigade. Meagher presciently realized that the Civil War provided Northern men of Irish descent with an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the Union and thus help erode non-Irish Northerners’ immense prejudice toward these men and their families.

Meagher also undoubtedly found profound motivation to form the Irish Brigade from the unit’s potential to positively impact his own future and help him realize his ultimate dream: Irish independence achieved under his own personal leadership. By raising a brigade composed of men of Irish descent and leading it in battle, Meagher envisioned himself gaining experience as a military organizer and commander which would prove invaluable upon his return to Ireland at the head of a revolutionary army after the conclusion of the Civil War. The goodwill from the U.S. government toward his revolutionary cause he hoped to engender through his brigade’s contribution to a Union victory in the Civil War also seemed poised to be a priceless asset. 

[Photo: Union General Thomas Meagher…]

Upon receiving official approval from Washington, D.C., in February 1862, Meagher formed the Irish Brigade from three New York City regiments composed exclusively of men of Irish descent. To bolster the brigade’s numbers before the Battle of Antietam, the War Department gave Meagher one Massachusetts regiment. While the members of this Massachusetts regiment were not of Irish descent and were transferred out of the brigade soon after the titanic Maryland clash, during their time as members of the Irish Brigade, they served as invaluable elements of Meagher’s crack unit and even fought proudly under the emerald, Ireland-honoring flag of their comrades.

Along with its knack for proving a relentless and bloody thorn in the side of Confederates, the most distinguishing aspect of the Irish Brigade was the emerald flag with a golden harp in its middle, golden three-leaf clovers to the right and left of the harp, and the Sun breaking through clouds just above the harp displayed at the brigade’s head at Antietam. The words “Erin Go Bragh”—Irish for “Ireland Forever”—were inscribed just below the harp.

Inscribed on top of a red ribbon near the bottom of the flag was the Irish motto “Riamh N’ar Dhruid Spairn Iann.” This longest of the two Irish phrases to decorate the Irish battle flag translates to “They Who Never Retreated from the Clash of Spears.” A Catholic Archbishop presented one of these flags to each of the brigade’s regiments before the troops composing them departed from New York City. Very soon, these colors would become almost sacred to the men who fought under them.

[Photo: The Flag of the Irish Brigade Flown at Antietam…Public Domain… I would remove the white edge on the left.]

 

Even well before the Battle of Antietam, the Irish Brigade made itself indispensable to figures of the highest authority in both the Army of the Potomac and the federal government. During critical junctures of battles in the summer of 1862, Union II Corps commander Sumner would routinely ask his aides, “Where are my green flags?”. Similarly, an officer of the Irish Brigade recalled seeing President Abraham Lincoln, during one of his visits to prod McClellan into assuming the offensive, kiss the corner of the Irish regimental banner and say, “God bless the Irish flag.”

 

The Perplexed Sumner’s Comedy-of-Errors Sparks the Melee for the Sunken Road

In a recent article, we traced Confederate General John Bell Hood’s wildly destructive yet painfully costly counterattack against the bloodied and disorganized Union I Corps commanded by Joseph Hooker, who was shot in the right foot and carried from the field.   When he departed the battle for medical attention, Hooker would later remember, he believed “we had everything in front of us.” Practically, this meant that Hooker believed Lee’s northern flank was destroyed and his entire line was ready to be rolled up from north to south. But what Hooker failed to realize was that the qualified success of the massive Union assault on Lee’s northern flank was largely due to his own inspiring presence and cool-headed ability to regroup and get the most out of bloodied and disorganized Federal units.

With Hooker sidelined, the responsibility for continuing the Union thrust against Stonewall Jackson now fell to XII Corps commander Joseph Mansfield and II Corps commander Edwin “Bull” Sumner, both of whom were approaching the horrific landscape of Miller’s Cornfield and the woods surrounding it with their entire, fresh corps. At 59 and 65 years old, respectively, Mansfield and Sumner were two of the oldest battlefield commanders leading men for the North or South. But while both were career soldiers, Mansfield had never led troops in a battle, and Sumner was nearly as hapless as McClellan believed him to be.

[Photo: Union General Edwin “Bull” Sumner… Public Domain]

 

But far more damaging to the two aging corps commanders’ prospects for success at Antietam than their dearth of battlefield achievements to that point was the senseless and frankly shameful way in which McClellan left them in the dark as to the roles their corps were to play in capitalizing on Hooker’s progress. Yes, Mansfield and Sumner knew that their general purpose was to defeat any Confederates in the area, but they had no conception of the troop alignments of either side participating in the fracas on Lee’s northern flank, much less how to deploy their own soldiers to finish off Jackson. Mansfield was mortally wounded by a Confederate musket ball fired by one of Hood’s soldiers from a place to which the commander of the Union XII Corps believed it impossible for the Confederates to have advanced.

Like Mansfield himself, Sumner’s II Corps also largely came to grief, albeit in a more extended fashion. Sumner raced his lead division under John Sedgwick westward across the northern end of the battlefield to turn what he was sure would be the Confederate left flank facing east. However, to Sumner’s astonishment, it was Sedgwick’s own flanks which were in danger of being turned. Stumbling into one of Stonewall Jackson’s patented, improvised counterattacks, in just twenty minutes, Sedgwick’s division lost 2,200 men—or close to 40% of its original number—to Southern artillery shells and musket balls.

To extend what was already a pathetically extensive comedy-of-errors and the destruction it was wreaking on Federals on the northern end of the battlefield, as he led his troops into the jaws of defeat, Sumner abandoned his second and third divisions, under William French and Israel Richardson. Lacking not just orders but also any sense of the best direction in which to march their divisions to best serve the Union cause in the ongoing fight, French and Richardson wandered off with their soldiers toward the south. It was largely by chance, then, that they stumbled onto the Confederate position in the Sunken Road—the scene of one of the Civil War’s fiercest and most desperate struggles. 

[Photo: Map of the Antietam Battlefield as French’s and Richardson’s Divisions Approached the Sunken Road… Credit to NPS]

 

Actually, the Sunken Road was so deep and narrow that referring to it as a “road” is somewhat misleading. Instead, it was a wagon path which protruded east from the Hagerstown Pike, down which Hooker’s I Corps had advanced that morning, at an almost 90° angle for approximately a fifth of a mile. At that point, the Sunken Road veered slightly south while continuing east for approximately another quarter of a mile.

Utilized by farmers cultivating and harvesting in the countryside west of Antietam Creek for many years, the Sunken Road had gradually become more and more depressed due to heavy agricultural traffic. Now, to Confederate General D.H Hill and his superior James Longstreet, whose southern half of Lee’s line reached its northernmost point at this fateful wagon path, the Sunken Road seemed the ideal makeshift trench. Not only did it and the wooden rail fence in front of it promise protection to the men who took refuge in it; the road also blocked, at least for a little more than half a mile, any Union troops attempting to move from north to south on the battlefield. 

[Photo: The Sunken Road at Antietam Today…Credit to NPS]

At around 9:30 AM, one of Sumner’s aides found French, informed him of the disaster which had befallen Sedgwick, and relayed Sumner’s command that French attack any Confederates he could find to relieve pressure on the II Corps’ now badly cut up lead division. Sadly for French’s troops, their division’s bold frontal assaults, made by one brigade after the brigade before it had been decimated, were cut to pieces by the musketry unleashed by the Confederates in their front. In perhaps thirty minutes, more than 1,700 of French’s approximately 5,200 soldiers were shot down by Hill’s total of perhaps 3,500 veterans, and the Federal division’s survivors hugged the ground to minimize their exposure to the relentless flurry of Southern missiles.

Nevertheless, the arrival of Israel Richardson’s division on French’s left flank meant that the Confederate position in the Sunken Road—even though it had just been reinforced and extended by Richard Anderson’s 3,500-man division—was by no means out of danger. An aggressive leader well aware of the value of being respected down the ranks, Richardson cleverly turned his division’s first mini-crisis of the day—accusations from common soldiers in his second brigade that their brigade commander had elected to skip the coming confrontation in favor of hiding drunk behind a haystack—to his and his troops’ advantage. 

In reply to his soldiers’ angry protests about the delinquent general, Richardson thundered, “God damn the field officers!”—even though he was a field officer himself. Such a willingness to not only self-deprecate but also empathize with those of lesser rank was largely responsible for the steely-eyed determination and selflessness his soldiers would soon demonstrate. 

[Photo: Union General Israel Richardson… Public Domain]

 

 

The Irish Brigade Makes Its Grand Push, Transforms the Sunken Road into the Bloody Lane, and Preserves Its Emerald Banner

As Richardson and Meagher, whose Irish Brigade was first in line in the division to go forward, surveyed the fenced-in Sunken Road, the musket-wielding Confederates at the road’s northern edge, and the some 500 yards which separated the two enemy battle lines, they could not help but be impressed by just how strong Hill’s and Anderson’s position seemed. Indeed, one of the few ways for Richardson’ troops to have any chance of taking the Southern position was by penetrating to the crown of the crest just in front of the Confederates’ defenses. From this spot, the blue-clad assault force could shoot down on the Southerners as they moved back from the wooden fence for what very well might seem to them like the relative safety of the worn-down wagon path.

The responsibility for providing any members of Richardson’s division with the opportunity to fire down on the Confederates now fell squarely on the shoulders of the Irish Brigade. If Meagher’s Irish-Americans could somehow absorb and return the fire which would inevitably come from a direct attack all the way to the edge of the makeshift Confederate trench, they would provide Richardson’s two other brigades with a foothold from which to pour enfilade fire on the defending Southerners. Presciently, Richardson and Meagher realized that if any significant bodies of even only somewhat organized Union troops reached the northern edge of Hill’s and Anderson’s line, the Sunken Road could very well transition from a strong defensive position to a death trap for the Southerners aligned in it.

[Photo: Richard Anderson’s Confederates Stand in Force in the Sunken Road… ChatGPT generated this image.]

 

At 11:15 AM, Meagher ordered the Irish Brigade, whose troops elected to fly only one of their emerald flags at the head of the unit’s flawlessly-arrayed battle lines to emphasize their unity, to advance. As the fields which his brigade had to cross to reach the Sunken Road sloped back and forth in an undulating fashion, Meagher’s first objective was a crest about 300 yards in front of the Southern position. From this spot, the Irish revolutionary turned American general believed, his troops could fire several volleys to inflict severe damage on the Confederate defenders.

With cries of “Faugh a Ballagh!”—Irish for “Clear the Way!”— the members of the Irish Brigade emerged into the open farmland north of the Sunken Road. From a distance, the brigade’s initial advance seemed formal and somewhat grave. The soldiers’ march was so orderly and its flag appeared so pristine that observers on both sides compared the forward movement to a military parade. More ominously, one of the brigade’s chaplains, Father William Corby, moved up and down the ranks offering absolution to those soldiers about to die. Within the ranks, however, an attitude of levity amongst Meagher’s battle-tested veterans prevailed, with soldiers making light of the coming trial by joking, laughing, and even singing to lift their spirits.

[Photo: Monument to Father William Corby… Public Domain]

The resolute Irishmen surged to the top of the crest identified by Meagher in just a handful of minutes. Once there, they fired a tremendous volley that felled dozens of Anderson’s Confederates behind the wooden fence in front of the Sunken Road. Within seconds, however, the Southerners unleashed a crashing volley of their own which wreaked bloody havoc on the exposed Irish. Nevertheless, Meagher’s resilient warriors closed ranks and fired a second devastating volley at their gray-clad enemies.

Back and forth the two sides went, exchanging brigade-wide, brilliant sheets of flame that felled scores of men at once. In the Irish Brigade, these scores of felled men included the color bearer, who collapsed after being struck by a Minie ball and dropped the revered emerald flag which Meagher’s troops had chosen to represent the entire brigade. Though wounded by the same Southern volley which maimed the original soldier entrusted to carry the Irish banner, upon seeing the flag hit the ground, Captain Patrick Clooney seized the fallen flagstaff and raised it back skyward.

[Photo: Captain Patrick Clooney Holds the Irish Brigade’s Flag Upright… ChatGPT generated this image.]

The moment he did this, however, the next Confederate volley struck the Irish Brigade, with several of its bullets striking and killing Clooney. According to witnesses, the musket balls which riddled Clooney contorted his body to such an extent that the flag wrapped like a shroud around his broken, lifeless form. Here the flag lay briefly, a silent but overwhelmingly moving testament to Clooney’s and his comrades’ willingness to lay down their lives in defense of the Union, until another stalwart Federal lifted the colors once more. 

After his Irish Brigade had fired six volleys and endured even more of the enemy’s massed musketry, Meagher surveyed both his own line and the Confederate position. His men still proudly waved their by now bullet-ridden emerald flag, but they had lost perhaps a third of their number in only ten minutes. Nevertheless, the well-aimed shots of each of the Irish’s own volleys had wreaked more carnage on the Southerners than all the fire unleashed by French’s division in the previous hour. Many of those of Anderson’s division who were shot at the wooden fence were blasted backward and landed dead on their backs in the now blood-soaked Sunken Road, which was more and more assuming the appearance of a long mass grave. In this way, the Sunken Road quickly transformed into the Bloody Lane, with the Irish Brigade deserving the lion’s share of the credit for this transformation.

[Photo: Anderson’s Confederates Killed in the Irish Brigade’s Attack Lie in the Sunken Road… ChatGPT generated this image.]

 

Yet despite his Irish Brigade’s unprecedented success against the Confederates in the Sunken Road, Meagher knew that no brigade ever assembled could endure firepower like the avalanche of Southern musket balls and artillery shells his troops were enduring for very long. Trusting, as he put it in his official report after the battle, in “the impetuosity and recklessness of Irish soldiers in a charge,” Meagher ordered his soldiers who were still standing to join him in a bold sally at the makeshift Confederate trench. “Boys,” Meagher shouted, “raise the colors and follow me!” With their bayonets fixed and their emerald flag flapping in the breeze, Meagher’s bloodied veterans now embarked on a desperate dash to force the Southerners to retire—by means of hand-to-hand combat, if need be.

After the Irish Brigade had surged forth a short distance, another color bearer was shot down by a Confederate musket ball. Now, Captain James McGee reached down for the staff to raise the flag back up, only for the staff to be broken in half by another Southern bullet. Quickly, McGee gathered himself and reached down to grab the remaining half of the staff still attached to the flag, but a bullet passed through the top of his cap while, somehow, leaving him unscathed. A third time McGee reached down to raise the flag, and this time he did so successfully. 

[Photo: Captain James McGee… Credit to NPS]

At once, the resilient Irish-American captain began defiantly waving the emerald banner at Anderson’s survivors still standing or crouching just behind the wooden picket fence above the Sunken Road. By almost miraculously good fortune, McGee—the ninth member of the Irish brigade to both have the honor and endure the mortal danger of personally flying the Irish flag—both stayed alive and kept the flag aloft amidst the chaos of shrieking shrapnel and screaming men. However, most of McGee’s comrades were not nearly so lucky. This included Meagher himself, who went into shock and was carried from the field after he was thrown from his horse when the animal was killed by a Confederate Minie ball.

But even with Meagher out of the fight, the Irish Brigade’s survivors soldiered on through the fiery maelstrom. When they had drawn to within thirty yards of the Sunken Road, they fired yet another volley at their gray-clad enemies. The Southerners responded in kind, knocking dozens more members of the Irish Brigade to the ground with grievous wounds. Although the Irish Brigade kept up a steady fire at their Confederate antagonists, thirty yards away would be the closest any Irishman came to penetrating the Confederate position in the Sunken Road. Meagher’s hardy warriors who were still physically capable would fire a round and then fall prostrate to both reload and make themselves as safe as they possibly could be from the deluge of incoming Confederate lead. 

[Photo: Irish Brigade Survivors Hug the Ground in Front of the Sunken Road… ChatGPT generated this image.]

Fortunately for the Union, however, while no Irishman would breach Anderson’s position in the Sunken Road, other members of the Irish Brigade—that is, troops of the non-Irish Massachusetts regiment which, before the battle, had been provided to Meagher—resolved to strike a knockout blow upon Anderson’s Confederates. With bayonets pointed straight ahead, they charged the now rapidly-tiring Southerners. “The shouts of our men, and their sudden dash toward the sunken road,” according to one of the regiment’s survivors, “so startled [the Confederates] that their fire visibly slackened, their line wavered, and squads of two and three began leaving the road and running.”

[Photo: Massachusetts Members of the Irish Brigade Fight Hand-To-Hand Against the Confederates in the Sunken Road… ChatGPT generated this image.]

 

 

The Collapse of the Bloody Lane and the Near Collapse of the Confederacy

Suddenly, after what had seemed for so long like an uneven fight favoring the Confederates, Anderson’s position was doomed. Roger Pryor, one of Anderson’s brigade commanders who had assumed command of the division when Anderson himself was wounded before even reaching the Sunken Road, now realized the deep wagon path was hopelessly clogged with both dead Confederates and living ones wandering aimlessly amidst the carnage.

To remedy this predicament, Pryor ordered one of his brigades to withdraw, but most of the confused and bloodied members of his entire division took this solitary order as merciful permission to quit the field. Soon, Pryor’s entire division had evacuated the entire right half of the Confederate position in the Sunken Road, just as Richardson’s second brigade swung in on its right flank to press its spent enemies.

With more than half of the defending Southerners having already fallen or fled and with Federal troops now able to blast enfilade fire down the length of the Bloody Lane, it became only a matter of time before Hill’s line, too, was flanked and broken. Still, the end for the Hill’s Confederates in the Sunken Road came about rather precipitously. 

By either misinterpreting or poorly relaying an order from his brigade commander, Robert Rodes, a Southern colonel convinced Rodes’ entire brigade—whose members, to be fair, were exhausted and did not need much prodding—to turn and run for their lives. As Longstreet’s artillery chief Edward Porter Alexander put it years later, “When Rodes’ brigade left the sunken road, Lee’s army was ruined, and the end of the Confederacy was in sight.” 

[Photo: A Modern-Day View from the Back Edge of the Sunken Road… Credit to NPS]

However, sadly for the Union, McClellan did not share Alexander’s perspective as to the extremity of the Confederate predicament. From his perch at the Pry House east of Antietam Creek, the Union army commander claimed the area and fighting in and around the Sunken Road to be “the most beautiful field I ever saw, and the grandest battle.” But that did not mean McClellan was prepared to commit reinforcements to exploit what was, in reality, Richardson’s obliteration of the center of Lee’s line. 

Richardson rushed an aide to McClellan pleading for reinforcements to exploit the obvious Union breakthrough and finish off the two now completely divided halves of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But McClellan balked. Imaginary Confederate divisions had continuously haunted McClellan since he first took command of the Army of the Potomac, but perhaps never so much as when Richardson—with the Irish Brigade leading the way—cleaved Robert E. Lee’s line in two at Antietam. Supremely confident in his prudence, McClellan held his V and VI Corps, both of which were completely fresh and within striking distance of the surviving pockets of Southerners, at bay. 

[Photo: An Unhappy President Abraham Lincoln Stares Down General George McClellan at Antietam After the Battle… Public Domain]

In the meantime, Richardson grew increasingly impatient with McClellan’s delay and wandered up a ridge just south of the Bloody Lane in search of the best spot at which to employ the reinforcements—which, in reality, would never materialize. Thusly exposed, Richardson was mortally wounded by Confederate shrapnel spewed by cannons commandeered by Longstreet from his fleeing troops and fired by members of the Southern wing commander’s staff.

Ultimately, just like the brash Union division commander’s remarkable energy, resolve, and, eventually, life, the entire Federal assault on the Confederate center would dissolve without reaping the dividends the sacrifice made by Meagher’s Irish Brigade had ensured the attack was capable of delivering. The casualties in the melee for control of the Bloody Lane were fairly equal—about 3,000 of Sumner’s troops fell, while approximately 2,600 of Longstreet’s men met the same unfortunate fate. But what to almost everyone on or near the battlefield except McClellan had been a resounding Union victory went so unexploited that, after the battle, many Federal participants considered their collective sacrifice to have been in vain.

But while Meagher’s survivors would have certainly preferred to end the Southern rebellion then and there at the Bloody Lane, they also appreciated that their day’s harrowing work—and all the suffering and devastation it had cost them—had been accomplished and endured as nobly and completely as possible. As other Federal units peered south from the Sunken Road, awaiting reinforcements McClellan had already resolved to withhold, the survivors of the Irish Brigade—flying their iconic, harp-emblazoned emerald banner as highly and proudly as ever—marched east, washed their sore feet in Antietam Creek, and rested. 

[Photo: Exhausted and Bloodied Iron Brigade Survivors Wash Their Feet in Antietam Creek… ChatGPT generated this image.]

In the end, since usually reliable sources offer differing estimates which collectively suggests that between 1,000 and 1,200 men took part in Meagher’s assault, it is impossible to know exactly how many members of the Irish Brigade advanced on the Sunken Road at Antietam. However, it is well-documented that 540 members of this unit fighting under the harp-emblazoned emerald flag—or somewhere close to half of the brigade’s strength at the battle’s start—were shot in front of the Bloody Lane. Clearly, there was no price too high for Irish-Americans to pay when it came to restoring the unity of their new nation: the United States of America. 

[Photo: The Monument to the Irish Brigade at Antietam… Credit to NPS]

Further Reading:

American Battlefield Trust. (2025). “Antietam.” 

American Battlefield Trust. (2025). “The Flags of Antietam.”

Cosgrove, Neil F. (2009). “The Irish Brigade at Antietam.” Pearl River Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Doyle, Jim. (2018). “The Battle of Antietam.” Seamus Dubhghaill.

Mackowski, Chris. (2020). “The Irish Brigade Monument at Antietam.” Emerging Civil War.

Mahr, Michael. (2023). “Under Erin’s Harp: The Irish Brigade.” National Museum of Civil War Medicine.

McPherson, James. (2002). Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War. Oxford University Press.

National Park Service (2023). “Flags at Antietam.” Antietam National Battlefield.

O’Hanlon, Ray. (2016). “Irish Have the Last Word at Antietam.” The Irish Echo.

Sears, Stephen. (2003).  Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. Mariner Books.