“From the Archives” Father Joseph P. O’Hagan

Father Joseph P. O’Hagan, S.J., served as an assistant priest at Saint Mary in 1862. He also served as chaplain with the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. More than 1,500 soldiers, mostly from Irish Catholic New York regiments, attended Sunday Masses on the battlefields.

Father O’Hagan wrote a series of detailed letters describing his horrendous experiences. One of the most vivid was his description of the Battle of Fredericksburg (Marye’s Hill) in December 1862:

The Confederate troops, on the top of the hill, cut down the Union forces column after column…as fast as they could advance…and could never imagine as many dead could be left on one field. They were actually in heaps…I do not know, not do I care much, provided our poor men are not led to another butchery. It is horrible, and I am only surprised that the entire nation does not rise up against it unanimously.

Nearly 13,000 troops were killed or wounded in that engagement. After the war, Father O’Hagan returned to Georgetown to teach and later became president of Holy Cross College. He became ill and died while at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, while on a trip with Georgetown President Father Patrick F. Healy in 1878.

— Kitty Guy, Parish Historian

In 2020, to commemorate the 225th anniversary of our parish, we started “From the Archives” as a weekly feature online and in our bulletin to spotlight the history of Saint Mary’s. Due to its popularity, we are continuing the series in 2021. An archive of the features is located here.