Fighting Irish; Seasoned Journalist Goes Back To The Battlefield To Trace A N.O. Civil War Regiment With A Roster That 'Read Like A Dublin Pone Book.' Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005 Times Picayune 10-27-1998 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ For Jim Gannon, what was marching along as a Civil War novel about an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy and is buried in Greeenwood Cemetery took a hard right flank somewhere along the way. And the product of that change in direction is a poignant, serious and entertaining military history about a gritty, tenacious, largely Irish regiment from New Orleans that fought in almost every major battle in the War Between the States. "Irish Rebels, Confederate Tigers: A History of the 6th Louisiana Volunteers" (Savas Publishing) by retired newspaperman James P. Gannon, is the story of the rowdy, fierce fighting Irish unit from New Orleans with a roster, Gannon says, that "read like a Dublin phone book." Because of Ireland's great potato famine, immigrants flooded to this country in the mid-1840s But they took up the cause, 980 strong, fought the good fight under such Confederate generals as Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and surrendered with Lee at Appomattox in 1865 with 55 survivors. "I was so impressed by the distances they went," Gannon said this week during a visit to New Orleans. During his three years of research, Gannon traveled to all the battlefields on which the 6th Lousiana fought. "It took me two hours to drive from central Virginia to Gettysburg. They walked this. They did it day after day, week after week, month after month, for four years. They had poor rations, worn-out shoes and uniforms, and coats and blankets were a luxury." From Bull Run and bloody Sharpsburg to Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, Gannon dug through the letters of soldiers for insights into their ordeal. First Lt. George P. Ring was one of his main sources. He wrote to his wife frequently: "Our men are shoeless, pantless, jacketless, sockless and miserable ... God grant that our leaders may soon learn that men cannot march and fight when they are half naked and with feet that leave bloody marks wherever they step." "How did men do this and why did they do it?" asked Gannon. "Their endurance and sacrifice seems almost beyond normal human capacity. Most of them stayed (there were deserters) and most of them kept going, on both sides. But the 6th Louisiana kept going when it looked hopeless." The Irish Rebels, he said, "certainly weren't fighting to preserve slavery or their way of life. They were working-class. They had no slaves. They were recent arrivals. Those elements weren't there for them." But, he said, there was something more precious to them: honor and sticking together, a commitment to one another. To understand the mentality, a delve into their makeup is necessary: "The Irish fighting qualities are legendary. God knows the Irish are familiar with endurance and suffering." And lost causes. For hundreds of years they had fought to win their independence from England. "This is sort of the Irish way of life," Gannon said. "These were not soft people, these were hard people. They were turbulent and rowdy and undisciplined but ready to follow their leaders. There is enough testimony from officers that we know they were tough." Curiously, there had never been a history written of this regiment or of the Irish role in the war. The most obvious person to have done it was Col. Isaac G. Seymour, editor of the Commercial Bulletin, New Orleans' major business newspaper at the time. "He would have been a great chronicler of the war," said Gannon, but he was shot dead at Gaines' Mill. " The letters that Gannon read were gut-wrenching. "Letters 130 years old from soldiers writing to loved ones was kind of like listening in on ancient private conversations. I got to feel very close to these men, walking the battlefields they had fought on." The misery and suffering was unfathomable. A 21-year-old blacksmith from Waterproof, La., Allan S. Nethery, went to Virginia with the 6th Louisiana. He was wounded in the hip at the First Battle of Winchester in May of 1862. After he recovered, he was wounded seriously in the Battle of Ox Hill (Chantilly) later that same year. In 1863, he survived Gettysburg only to be wounded a third time at Mine Run. In the spring of 1864, fighting again at the Battle of the Wilderness, he was captured and eventually jailed at the notorious Elmira, N.Y., federal prison camp, where he caught smallpox during a brutal winter. Released in February of 1865, he went to a Richmond, Va., hospital. "Look at how much he went through and persevered," said Gannon. Then he died at 25, 10 days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. "It was a moving and sad story," he said. "How could you better illustrate that war is hell?" Gannon's intense and thorough research is impressive. "It's a lot like investigative reporting," he said, "but all your sources are dead." Gannon, now living at a country home in Rappahannock County, Va., said he "feels very good about my newspaper career. I enjoyed it, prospered in it." He should feel good. Among other things, while he was executive editor of The Des Moines Register, that paper won three Pulitzer prizes and was named to Time magazine's list of the 10 best daily newspapers. "But I had an urge to do something like this. The story was a way to trace the whole war by following this one group. It gave a sense of the big picture as well as the small. It combined my two keenest interests, things Irish and the Civil War. It was the first war in which the average soldier was literate and wrote. What," he asked, "are historians going to look at to see what soldiers in the Gulf War were thinking and feeling? Phone conversations? E-mail?" The art of letter writing, he lamented, is dying and that will make research difficult for future historians. As for Dennis Cavanaugh, Gannon's relative who was the original motivation for the research, this can be said: He fought in the war, but not for the 6th Louisiana; he died in 1917 a bachelor after living the last 18 years of his life in the Camp Nichols Confederate Soldiers' Home and is buried in a large grave named "Soldier's Home" at Greenwood Cemetery. Gannon stood at the gravesite this week and recalled an earlier visit. "You know what I was thinking?" he said, "that I bet I was his first visitor in 71 years."