“I was in the battle of Fredericksburg on the Confederate left wing, and engaged the same day when that brigade was led (at another part of the field) to slaughter. I think that there was a cruelty in the plan of Federal attack which cannot be excused. If I remember aright the splendid brigade was nearly destroyed. “Meagher’s Brigade was specially prominent at Gaines’ Mill (or Cold Harbor), June 27; at Antietam (Sharpsburg), September 17, and at Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862. The United States government has never sufficiently recognized the services of that brigade. I wish our friend Fleming would have a resolution passed in congress to show that appreciation of their valor which has never been accorded. I suppose that Burnside’s friends did not want to go too deeply into the story of the fearful error which he made. “Pat Cleburne is a name which is as lovingly mentioned among us who are soldiers as the name of Stonewall Jackson. He was actually loved by the army in the West, where he was best known. Cleburne was killed in the Confederate assault on the desperately defended trenches of the Federals at Franklin, Tenn., November 30, 1864. President Davis said: ‘Around Cleburne thickly lay the gallant men who in his desperate assault followed him with the implicit confidence that in another army was given to Stonewall Jackson, and in the one case as in the other, a vacancy was created which could never be filled.’ “I write immediately on reading your letter and on the idea that you simply want matters of my own memory. Some investigation would lead to a very interesting story of the Irish-Americans in our American wars, which I have been sometimes thinking of writing. “You will not forget that Father Ryan gave us the sweetest of our Southern poetry. I think also that the clergy in both armies should not be forgotten in any account of the Confederate struggle.” Col. C. C. Sanders of Gainesville, colonel of the 24th Georgia, favors me with a graphic description of the charge of Meagher’s Irish Brigade. He says: “The writer was an eye witness to the charge of the Irish brigade at Fredericksburg. General Lee had, at the time, the finest army in history. Two formidable lines of battle were protected by a rock wall and defended by Cobb’s and Kershaw’s brigades of McLaw’s division (one-fourth of whom, I suppose, were Irishmen or of Irish extraction), and the famous Washington Artillery. In our immediate front one could walk on the dead for hundreds of yards. We were pained to see the noble fellows coming up in steady columns to be mowed down before our lines of solid flames of fire from our entrenched position behind the rock wall and the terrible fire from the Washington Artillery on Marie’s Hill, just in our rear and commanding every inch of approach.