Angus R. McDonald

Captain Angus R. McDonald (1832 Eigg, Small Isles, Lochaber, Kingdom of Scotland, United Kingdom – 14 April 1879, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States) was a Scottish immigrant to the United States who served as a commissioned officer in the Union Army, and became one of Wisconsin's greatest battlefield heroes of the American Civil War.

Early life

The entrance to Cathedral Cave upon the isle of Eigg, with An Sgùrr in the background.

Angus McDonald was born on the Isle of Eigg, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, into the minor nobility (Scottish Gaelic: flath) and into a family descended from Somerled, King Robert the Bruce, and the Chiefs of Clan MacDonald of Clanranald. Angus McDonald's great-grandfather was the most important figure in the history of Scottish Gaelic literature; the war poet and national poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, alias "The Clanranald Bard", who famously served as Gaelic tutor to Prince Charles Edward Stuart during the Jacobite rising of 1745, which, according to literary scholar John Mackenzie, was an uprising which The Clanranald Bard's poetry had helped convince the Prince to sail to Scotland and launch.

Three years before his birth, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had ended the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Scotland, to which Angus MacDonald and his family belonged, that had been taking place since the Scottish Reformation Parliament in 1560. Even so, the laity of Eigg still attended Mass at a Mass stone inside a large high-roofed coastal cave, which can only be accessed during low tide and which is still known as the "cave of worship" (Scottish Gaelic: Uamh Chràbhaichd, lit. "Cave of Devotion"; referred to in Highland English as Cathedral Cave). Afterwards, Catholic worship moved, according to historian Odo Blundell of Fort Augustus Abbey, into, "the lower floor of an old farmhouse, the rest of the building being used as a presbytery", which remained the island's Mass house until 1910.

Angus McDonald at first carried on with his family's rented farm on Eigg after the death of his father. When he was 24-years old, he emigrated during the Highland Potato Famine to the United States with his mother and his either brother or cousin Allan, with whom he became one of the first settlers of Mazomanie, Wisconsin. In Mazomanie, the Allan and Angus McDonald built the town's first hotel, which they later donated to St. Barnabas Roman Catholic Church to be used as a Catholic parochial school.

American Civil War

Camp Randall during the Civil War. Sketch made from top of University Building, 20 May 1864, by W. F. Brown, Company B, 40th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Angus R. McDonald enlisted in Company A of the 11th Wisconsin Regiment at Mazomanie on 2 September 1861. Following basic training at Camp Randall in the State Capital of Madison, McDonald served under the command of Colonel Charles L. Harris and repeatedly, "distinguished himself by his gallantry during the operations of the Federal Army in Alabama and Mississippi." Angus McDonald was later described as, "a very large and powerful man, and brave almost to the point of temerity." He was promoted to 1st Lieutenant on 14 July 1864.

The Storming of Fort Blakeley.

During the Battle of Fort Blakeley, which was part of the Siege of Mobile, on 9 April 1865, Lieut. McDonald had drawn his sabre and was leading an advanced skirmish party in the storming of a Confederate earthenwork fortification, when a Confederate States Army officer and twelve enlisted men launched a counterattack while screaming, "No quarter to the damned Yankees!" As the Confederate attackers opened fire and indiscriminately shot down both Yankees and surrendered Rebels alike, Lt. McDonald first defended himself with his sword and killed two of the Confederate assailants. He then fell with a bullet through his thigh. He was then repeatedly bayoneted by a Confederate soldier until Sgt. Daniel B. Moore of Company E, who had also been wounded by a Confederate bayonet, picked up a fallen Rebel soldier's musket and shot Lt. McDonald's attacker dead. For this feat, Sgt. Daniel Moore was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. After a 15-minute long engagement, the regimental standard of the 11th Wisconsin Regiment was planted atop the captured Fort. The other Confederate fortifications then under Union attack, however, took much longer to fall.

Ironically, the eventual Union victory at the Battle of Fort Blakeley took place mere hours after Confederate States Army General Robert E. Lee's defeat and surrender at Appomattox. Fort Blakeley is accordingly considered the last major battle of the American Civil War.

Lt. Angus R. McDonald survived his wounds and was later known throughout Wisconsin as, "The Hero of Fort Blakeley".

Later life

Old Abe, the live war eagle of Wisconsin, 1876. From the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

After being promoted to captain, Angus R. McDonald was mustered out of the United States Army on 15 May 1865. He returned to Wisconsin and eventually settled into a shop keeping career and a position at the Wisconsin State Capitol as paid caretaker to Old Abe, the tame bald eagle who had famously served as the battlefield mascot for the 8th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. Captain McDonald never married and died without issue in Milwaukee on 14 April 1879. His body was returned to Mazomanie, where, following a Tridentine Requiem Mass at St. Barnabas Church, he was buried in the parish cemetery with full military honors and in the presence of his weeping fellow veterans, and the direct line of the Clanranald Bard became extinct.

Legacy

National Memorial to Scottish-American Union Soldiers of the American Civil War, Old Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mazomanie's Grand Army of the Republic A. R. McDonald Post #56, was named in honor of Captain Angus R. McDonald. An engraving of him is also held by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

On 21 August 1893, a statue of Abraham Lincoln, as a memorial to the role that Scottish-American soldiers in the Union Army, like Captain Angus R. McDonald, played in the preservation of the Union and the emancipation of African-American slaves was dedicated in the Old Calton Cemetery in the city centre of Edinburgh. The statue, which still stands, is engraved with a quote from President Lincoln, "To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of freedom."

More recently, literary scholar Michael Newton has cited Captain Angus R. McDonald as an example of the many voluntary recruits that the Highland Scottish diaspora in America provided in wartime to the United States military. According to Newton, "The Cameron Highlanders were formed in 1859 as a volunteer regiment in New York, drawing upon a resident force of ex-British soldiers. Although they wore the Cameron tartan kilt, they changed their uniform to standard Union regulation by the middle of their service in the American Civil War. Other Scottish regiments recruited from New York State, Illinois, [and] Maine... [also] fought in the Civil War, although details about the Gaelic dimensions of these units are still to be investigated in depth."

The Camp Randall memorial arch in Madison, Wisconsin, topped by a statue of the war eagle Old Abe.

This was rooted, according to Newton, in a deep sense of gratitude that many Highland Scots immigrants to the United States and their descendants felt towards their adopted country, most particularly because almost three centuries religious persecution of Catholics and Episcopalians, Bliadhna nan Creach ("The Year of the Pillaging") after the Battle of Culloden, the Highland Clearances, rackrenting Anglo-Scottish landlords, and how the ensuing dire poverty overwhelmingly worsened the already disastrous Highland Potato Famine were all still a very recent cultural memory.

External links

• From the Mazomanie Historical Society