ground. It was no small thing to have the patriot and revolutionary, a man still wanted by the British Empire for treason—one of us!—elevated to the highest ranks of the American military. In Meagher’s time, the Irish had been starved, bundled off to the penal colony and forced to flee to dank tenements in strange cities. But here, less than a decade after the end of the Great Hunger, a few years after the Know-Nothings had tried to deprive them of standing in their new nation, the Irish were ascendant in a conflict to save a halved democracy.
