First off I’d like to apologize for this late issue. As school is nearing the end of the semester, I’ve had very little time to work on it—Ed.

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For our first time in a parade as large as the San Francisco’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade, things went well. The weather was horrible, the entire night and morning before the parade. Just as we were forming up, the rain let up. By the time the parade started, we could actually see some blue sky! Talk about the luck of the Irish!

There were many spectators along the length of the parade, and most seemed to appreciate our presence.

When we got in front of the judges and the City Hall, our drill fell somewhat apart. We managed to fire a rather ragged volley, and marched away to the cheers of the spectators.

In that parade we won 2^nd place in the Senior Marching category, and got a nice little spot on ABC-7s broadcast of the parade.

An interesting little note is that the NCWA’s Company A also marched in that parade. They did not get any TV coverage, and as far as I am aware, did not get any award. You boys can give yourselves a big pat on the back!

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Knights Ferry was rather interesting, from what I heard. All day Saturday it poured! (Cpl. Coye was telling me about fighting a battle in rubber gum blankets!) Despite that, most everyone sounded like they had some fun.

Over the course of the weekend the 20^th Maine extended it’s gracious hospitality to the Irish lads of the 69^th, which was greatly appreciated! I know everyone ate very well. Thank you 20^th!

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“Cuzz Sergeant Sezz!”

For those of you who did not march in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, you should have. Those of us that were there had the opportunity to fire a near perfect volley for the judges right in front of the city hall, not something everyone gets to do. It is surprising we pulled it off because some of our arms were rather sore from carrying our muskets, but that is only to be expected to after marching as far as we did.

In the end it certainly paid off. We were awarded 2nd place in the marching units. This was good, but next saint paddy's day I think we should try for first! The one and only way this can be accomplished is if we look perfect, in particular the way we march. We all know that the only way this can be accomplished is by drilling.

For those of you who don't like drilling keep in mind no one likes it. However, we have it extremely easy, as those of us who went on the Cow Mountain Campaign know all to well. We had a hard time marching less than ten miles (with a loaded knapsack), and yet the real Civil War soldiers marched more than thirty each day. Although we didn't march as far as was planned, we now have an appreciation for the soldier’s life.

2^nd Sgt. Matthew Gilbert

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Corporal’s Corner

Good day to ya lads,

Well another great event has come and gone. Knights Ferry this year was full of excitement and challenges. For the first two nights the weather was something less than to be desired, and trying to find a dry spot in your tent was more of a daunting task than anything else. On Sunday though the weather cleared and gave us a magnificent rainbow to fight under (I guess we had some Irish luck). For this event the 69th fell in the good ol’ boys of the 20th Maine, who also were ever so kind enough to provide us with food for the weekend. I would also like to thank Pvt. Brendan Coye for joining us this weekend and hope he joins us for many more events to come. Hope to see every one at Healdsburg.

Respectfully,

Corpral Billy Coye

69th NYVI Co. B

1st Div. 2nd Corp

Irish Brigade

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NEWSLETTER INFORMATION

For those of you who would like to save the company some money, (about $1 per month per person) I can stop sending you a hard copy of The Irish Volunteer, as it is now available online. The advantage to this is that all the back issues will be available. The unit roster is also available online, though it is protected by a password, available to company members only. Contact Lt. Joe Gilbert for the password.

To access the newsletter and roster, go to our web page, (www.69thNewYork.com), then click “Monthly Newsletter”. A link to each month’s newsletter is there, along with a link to our roster page.

Antietam: “Deck the Halls!”

Taken from Ghosts and Haunts of the Civil War, submitted by Pvt. Kevin Craig.

Mourn ye the blood on this steel rusted blade, ‘Tis all that is left of the Irish Brigade

--Major Lawrence Reynolds

The battle of Antietam, fought on September 17^th. 1862, was the bloodiest day in American history. Between sunrise and sunset some twenty-four thousand men were killed, wounded, or captured. The number of casualties at Antietam alone exceeds the total number of dead from all three of the nation’s previous wars combined: The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican American War.

Many were the heroic deeds done that day; many more were the groans of the wounded and dying when the shooting stopped. Farmhouses and churches were overflowing with a mass of casualties, and even then, the wounded overflowed to the surrounding grounds. In the fields, the ground was thick with a newly mown harvest of death.

While much has been written of the many deeds done that day, none was more bold of braver—or more futile—than the charge of the Irish Brigade against the Rebel lines at Bloody Lane. In the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of Irish, like the Germans, came to America in search of a better life and political liberties. Although looked down on by the Anglo-Saxon majority, both groups eagerly flocked to the flag when the Union was threatened with secession in 1861.

Large numbers of Irish volunteered for service with the Sixty-Ninth New York Militia. Although only in service for a brief time, they acquitted themselves honorably at the first Bull Run. The regiment was later reformed along more permanent lines, and then joined with similar units to form the legendary Irish Brigade. When the Confederates under General Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac River in the late summer of 1862 and invaded Maryland, the Irish Brigade was among those Union forces that marched to stop General Lee’s advance.

The dawn of September 17^th saw the Army of the Northern Virginia on the defensive, holding a line along Antietam Creek near the small community of Sharpsburg. For once, George McClellan, the Union commander, went on the offensive, hurling his huge force against Lee’s prepared positions.

By midmorning, the focus of the action had shifted to the center of the line, where General Sumner’s Second Corp. charged against D. H. hill’s Alabamans and North Carolinians. Although outnumbered by Sumner’s Federals, the Southerners had found a strong position: a sunken road running southeast of the Roulette Farm and forming a ready-made trench that faced an open field.

The Irish Brigade was ordered to attack across this field. They had earned a reputation for reckless bravery, and they more than justified it this day. Charging headlong across some 350 yards of flat, featureless ground, the Irish endured a withering fire.

The blue-clad ranks fell by the score, but for nearly four hours the Irish Brigade, emboldened by their weird war cry and their emerald-green banner, pressed their attack, losing 60 percent of their men in the process.

The sunken road the Irish men fought so hard to gain that day earned the name “Bloody Lane” as a result. After the battle, it was said one could walk end to end along the lane without ever touching the ground, so thick was it with corpses.

According to tradition, Lee asked what regiment had led the gallent charge against the bloody lane. When he was informed it was the Sixty-Ninth, Lee is reputed to have said, “Ah yes, that Fighting Sixty-Ninth!” From that day forth, the regiment retained that nickname.

Today, of course, it is hard to imagine that the placid fields and rolling hills, which surround the picturesque town of Sharpsburg, were the scene of so much carnage. The rural scenery and neatly manicured fields of a national park form a stark contrast to the scene that Stonewall’s Staff witnessed at twilight on the seventeenth.

By dusk, the sounds of battle had tapered off, only to be replaced by more terrible sounds—the moans and groans of thousands of wounded men. “Pitiable cries for water and pleas for help were much more terrible,” Henry Kyd Douglass tells us, “than the deadliest sounds of battle Silent were the dead and motionless, but here and there were raised stiff arms. Heads made a last effort to lift themselves from the ground. Prayers mingled with oaths, and midnight hid all distinction between blue and gray”.

But that is long vanished now, and the fields are host, not to the dead and dying, but to children and adults curios to see this particular field of glory. Over the years, many school groups have come to visit Antietam National Battlefield, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. For students, it is an edifying and educational experience—a chance to see history “come alive”.

For several years funning, one such school—the exclusive McDonogh school of Baltimore, Maryland—had routinely visited Antietam on class trips. For the blue-clad boys of the McDonogh school however, the experience has proved to be more than just an academic exercise. In fact, one seventh grade class even taught a thing or two about the supernatural to its teacher.

One of the teachers, Mr. O’Brien , was quite knowledgeable about American history, and with the aid of local park rangers and volunteer reenactors, he put on a comprehensive tour of the famed battlefield. It was a program, which combined history, English, and the social sciences.

Soon after they arrived at the park, the seventh graders would line up in their neat blue blazers and learn the parade drills and the manual of arms. Reenactors would demonstrate how to load and fire a Civil War musket and would give other details of a soldier’s life. Then, after lunch, the students would tramp about the battlefield, trying to absorb highlights from the history of the battle.

Toward dusk, the Mcdongh boys would end up at the bloody Lane with the zigzag split-rail fence now meticulously restored by the National Park Service. The boys were stationed one to a fence post, allowing them some quit time to reflect on the day’s events.

As they walked back to the buses, O’Brien told them to write an essay about what they had learned and what parts of the visit had impressed them the most. With memory of the visit still fresh in their minds, the boys took out their notebooks, and on the ride back to Baltimore, wrote down their impressions.

The essays were quite varied; some even writing bits of poetry. The Bloody Lane loomed large in their essays, it being the last stop on the tour, and freshest in their memories. Then too, the stillness at twilight, it seems, had allowed many of the students to perceive things going on around them, things that their adult chaperones and teachers were oblivious to.

As O’Brien was grading the essays a few days later, he began to notice some curious comments scattered among the papers. Some students mentioned hearing chanting, while others said they heard Christmas Carols sung in a foreign tounge.

The boys had not had a chance to talk to each other before writing their papers, so there was no possibility of a practical joke. They had definitely experienced something, but what? As O’Brian compared the accounts, he noticed a common thread. The boys had all heard the “caroling in a foreign toungue” as they sat along the fence bordering the Bloody Lane.

More specifically, those with the most vivid impressions of the caroling or chanting had been posted along the lane between the Anderson Cannon Monument and the War Department Observation Tower.

This, the teacher knew, was the exact segment of the line that the Irish Brigade had made their doomed charge against in 1862. A suspicion of what was going on here—however far-fetched it seemed—began to form in the educator’s mind. Students on previous trips had also had unusual experiences at that location—one year, for an example, seventh graders wrote of smelling the acrid sulfurous scent of gunpowder along that part of the Bloody Lane.

In class, the teacher questioned the boys more closely as to what it was they thought they’d heard. Some said they’d just heard an unintelligible chanting or cheering. Many, however, said the invisible voices seemed to be repeating the chorus to “Deck the Halls.”

Mr. O’Brien asked several students to vocalize the sound for him, as they remembered it. They rendered it to him as “Fa-la-la-lah.” The Teacher, being something of an expert on the War Between the States and the battle of Anitetam in particular, was thunderstruck at what he heard.

What Mr. O’Brien knew—and what the seventh graders could not have possibly known—was that their chant bore a remarkable resemblance to the Gaelic war cry of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. The war cry of the Irish regiment in English is rendered as “Clear the Way”; but in Gaelic it is “Faugh A Ballagh”—pronounced Fa-a-bah-lah. For an expert steeped in the lore of the Civil War, the parallel was obvious. But no ordinary visitor would have been so well versed –much less a group of seventh graders. In the quiet if the battlefield, sitting before the killing field where 540 men of the Irish Brigade fell before the withering fire of Hill’s corps, the students of McDonogh School had heard the war cry of the bold Fenian sons of Erin—a sound not heard there in over 120 years.

The experience of the seventh graders at Antietam was not an isolated incident, of course. At Pry House, “Burnsides Bridge”, and nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Civil War specters have been reported repeatedly. Even a local bed and breakfast is reputed to be haunted by restless dead of the Civil War.

While many reliable reports of the supernatural emanate from all over the battlefield of Antietam, the singular experience of the students of McDonogh School remain the most credible account to date. In the “Landscape turned red” of Antietam, memory of the valor of the Irish Brigade lingers on--in more ways than one.