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When it opened in 1796, Kilmainham Gaol was supposed to be a model prison—airy, perched atop a hill, large enough that prisoners were not just tossed into a heap, but given separate quarters. It soon became a byword for hell. Debtors were locked away and forgotten. In the famine years, the jail was a warehouse of the hungry, their crimes dominating the ledgers—“attacking a bread cart,” “stealing a goose,” “being in possession of stolen butter.” And the design was significantly flawed in one respect: the impenetrable fortress was made of limestone blocks, which not only held the moisture from
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This concentration of petty criminals, not far from the Castle, was also a favorite lockup for prisoners of conscience.
For a month, the Young Ireland Four—Meagher, Smith O’Brien, MacManus and a heavy-drinking law clerk named Patrick O’Donoghue—marked the days in Kilmainham. O’Donoghue, with his rough-whiskered face and mournful eyes, had been thrown in with the leaders of the uprising because he’d been a close associate of Smith O’Brien’s in the days leading up to the cabbage patch debacle. At summer’s end, the prison filled with people who preferred the loss of freedom over death by starvation. Each cell had a tiny
had plenty of regret—over the timing of the revolt, the failure to secure support from Catholic priests, the poor organization of the clubs, the foolish belief that starving people might put up a fight against the British Empire. Worst of all: two years of agitation never came to a climax—there was no showdown, nothing to rouse the Irish on three continents. “We were routed without a struggle,” Meagher said. “A humiliating fiasco.” But he had no remorse for his actions.
“Here I am, boys! Here I am and found guilty! And glad, too, that they did convict me, for if I had been acquitted, the people might say I had not done my duty. I am guilty and condemned for the old country . . . Come in, come in! I’m starved. Let us have one hour’s fun.”
His main argument was profit: the island needed the slave labor of convicts in order to prosper. Free men would mean costly wages for a land that relied on cheap exports of wool, mutton, timber and other goods. The principle of an unfettered free market, so revered in British policy that a million Irish were allowed to die of starvation, had no place in this colony.
Still, couldn’t he find someone more fitting of his class? Mitchel, Smith O’Brien, Martin—all may have hated Britain for its persecution of Ireland, but they adopted an English view of one’s proper place.
He kept thinking about what the census of Ireland had revealed: the shredding of a nation, one in four gone by emigration or starvation. The former would never forget; the latter would never be forgotten. That burden of memory was never heavier.
“Van Diemen’s Land could never be my home—not so long as the English flag flies here,” Meagher wrote to Duffy. After barely half a year of married life, Meagher was ready to chuck his domestic existence and take some risks again. “How my heart beats and pants for a quick deliverance from this abominable captivity.”
As Virginius, Meagher also set his pen to flight on behalf of a self-governing Tasmania. It was high time, he argued, to put an end to the humiliation of this land stocked with condemned human beings. How could people expect to live as a civilized community when the broken souls of Britain were regularly offloaded in its harbors?
The governor was appalled at the rise of “the democratic spirit” and said it “needs to be checked” immediately. “The elements of which society here is composed” could never rule themselves, he warned London. They were fatally flawed humans, with a “low estimate placed on everything which can distinguish a man from his fellows.” Most galling to Denison was that the political pot was being stirred by the Irish rebels—his prisoners—“attempting to sow dissension among the people of this Colony.”
accomplish something in the penal colony that they were never able to pull off in their native land. Meagher was behind the high prose of democracy, and Smith O’Brien was drawing up a constitution for the newly democratic state. A constitution from a convict. They were incorrigible!
He was taken from there to a trading ship, the Elizabeth Thompson. He sailed to Hawaii and then to San Francisco, arriving on June 5, 1851. In the gold rush boomtown, chock-full of Irish miners, MacManus was greeted like a hero. At a reception that included judges, a senator, and members of Congress, San Francisco Mayor Charles Brenham offered this toast to the fugitive: “Ireland gave him birth, England a dungeon; America a home, with a thousand welcomes.”
Although it was clear, with the election results in Van Diemen’s Land and a change in the political winds in England, that transportation of convicts was headed for history’s attic, Denison made life worse for those still tied to life sentences. Anyone trying to escape would be shot.
Crimean Peninsula, were recruiting Irish to carry their fight. The penal colony’s political prisoners were a sticking point. Why fight for a jailor nation? Smith O’Brien was beloved, with a global following. The other two had been model convicts. Under considerable pressure, the Crown pardoned all three. The reprieve was conditional at first—they could not return to Great Britain—then without restriction.
But the pardon left the escapees in America in a purgatory between New World and Old. These men would remain fugitives, the Crown declared. They had refused to apologize for their crimes or even admit to the wrongdoing of vexing Britain.
He started to drink. On one level, this was not new; alcohol was the mother’s milk of Irish schoolboys, served by the Jesuits. He had quaffed ale at Stonyhurst, in tandem with blasts from his clarinet. In the heady days leading to the uprising, whiskey had united the rebels in Dublin and lubricated the first drafts of seditious speeches. The ration of English porter was a highlight of long days at sea aboard the Swift, sailing toward the bottom of the earth.
When Meagher drank at banquets, at dinners after speeches, at parties, he was the life of the place, the hail-fellow-well-met. Now Meagher started to drink without purpose. His young wife was dead. His homeland was denied him forever.
In 1854, the Know-Nothings took all eleven congressional seats in Massachusetts, swept the Bay State legislature, captured nearly half of New York’s delegation and won six governorships.
By the end of 1855, the Know-Nothings were the second-largest political party in the nation, and the only one ever founded in opposition to a specific ethnic group.
Handbills in New Orleans shouted for action at election time. “Americans! Shall we be ruled by Irish?” Members promised to support only American-born Protestants, and pledged to never marry a Catholic.
To those who took the country’s founding principles to heart, the rise of the nativists was dispiriting. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal,’” Abraham Lincoln wrote a friend in 1855. “We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’”
Police arrived; both men were arrested. Now Meagher was back in jail, this time on a third continent.
“It is, undoubtedly, the worst accident by railroad collision that has occurred on this continent,” the New York Times reported. For Meagher, though hailed as heroic by witnesses and the press, it was another dark portent. A bullet off Broadway should have killed him. Moving from the back of the train to the front had saved him. Why? He was running out of lives.
If Meagher had stunned his friends by marrying below his class in the penal colony, he drew gasps of another kind by romancing above his standing with a Fifth Avenue daughter of American royalty.
Townsend was not involved in the politics of excess, whether abolition of slavery or liberation of the Irish. A Townsend was civic-minded, albeit without breaking a sweat. They were certainly not Know-Nothings, but sided with whatever politicians were less likely to imperil dynastic wealth.
He loved the American way of throwing off your past like last winter’s coat. It was so easy to start anew, with a fiction of a life crafted by your own hand. But he would always be the outcast, his fate tied to Ireland’s fate. This he finally understood. There was no getting away from it.
The world knows what Ireland—the land of my birth and early home—has been. For years and years, a mere wreck upon the sea, she has had nothing but a long list of sorrows, ignominies, and martyrdom to contribute to the history of nations. Believing that such has been her fate through the culpable design of those who rule her, every generation has witnessed an effort made by her sons to redeem her sinking fortunes . . . In the last attempt of the kind in Ireland, it was my fate to be involved. The papers I sent you explain all. Through much idle flattery and exaggerated colouring, the fact and
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Thomas Francis Meagher
As proof, he changed the course of his life. He’d planned to move to the West Coast, that frontier of gold. But after he met Elizabeth, he decided to stay in New York. Also, though it meant a career without the risk and drama that he’d tasted as an Irish revolutionary, he intended to become a lawyer, just like her brother-in-law Barlow. He would be a man that a Townsend could marry.
Command now fell to Meagher, whose cap had come off. He mounted his horse and waved the unfurled green banner of the 69th. “Look at that flag,” he yelled. “Think of Ireland!” Would the harp, outlaw instrument in the days of the British Penal Laws, still have power in a New World clash?
Nearby, on the rise that the Union had failed to take, Jefferson Davis rode up to view the battlefield. He had come from Richmond on the train, traveling over the rail line that was supposed to be turned into a Union one-way to the Confederate White House. The fussy Davis arrived in time to hear Stonewall Jackson’s boast on behalf of the slaveholding nation. “We have them whipped—they ran like dogs,” Jackson told him.
Lincoln’s soldiers limped back to Camp Corcoran, collapsing into their tents at 3 a.m. The Union reported these casualties: 625 men killed, 950 wounded, 1,200 captured. Confederate losses were 400 killed, about 1,600 wounded. Thirty-eight Irishmen from the 69th died at Bull Run, another 59 were seriously hurt, and nearly 200 were missing. Corcoran was presumed dead or captured.
The Irish had performed admirably, as even Sherman noted afterward in his official report. The “sewage from the city” won praise from both sides. The immigrants charged when others would not.
Still, a British correspondent from the Times of London ridiculed Meagher, saying the fall from his horse was due to drunkenness, a story reprinted in the American press. There may have been a larger motive behind the misinformation: if Meagher was serious about raising an army to eventually liberate Ireland, better that he be stopped now.
The day after the battle, Lincoln signed a bill authorizing the enlistment of 500,000 men for three years of duty—a professional army for the long haul. A second bill called for an additional half million men. Meagher was ready to follow Lincoln, but how? A citizen soldier for now, his tour of duty was up. He packed to go home to Elizabeth and an uncertain future. But William Tecumseh Sherman would have none of it. Eyes narrowed, hair unkempt, the colonel growled at Meagher.
“You are a soldier and must submit to orders until you are properly discharged.” To make his point, Sherman moved closer, and spoke loud enough for every one of the soldiers to hear, no cloaking his West Point training with a veneer of civilian manners. “If you attempt to leave without orders, it will be mutiny, and I will shoot you like a dog.” Meagher retreated to his tent. Sherman had shamed him before his friends; worse, he made it clear he had no respect for these men.
Sunday, the blue-sky day of battle, Lincoln had gone for a ride in the country outside the capital, reasonably confident of victory. That evening, he read a telegram of startling news from his War Department: “The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.”
Some supporters urged the president to give up the fight. “If it best for the country and mankind that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their terms, do not shrink even from that,” Horace Greeley wrote Lincoln. But the Confederates, despite Stonewall Jackson’s boast, were in no shape after Bull Run to storm the White House. A much bigger Union Army stood guard on the banks of the Potomac.
Sherman, despite his low regard for the Irish, knew what they were worth to him. “I have the Irish Sixty-Ninth New York, which will fight,” he wrote the War Department. Lincoln shook hands with the bedraggled Irishmen, offering encouragement. Bull Run was just one battle, not the war.
More than a nod to ethnic tolerance, Lincoln needed the nearly two million Irish in the country to fight for a splintered nation. Northern factory owners, businessmen and Main Street merchants weren’t about to give up their livelihoods to risk death in the South. The farmers, from whose ranks the American revolutionists had drawn some of their best marksmen, were seasonal soldiers—available mainly in the winter, when fields were dormant but fighting was a logistical nightmare. The urban poor, the immigrants without trades, might have to form the backbone of the new Union Army.
“This morning I went to Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me.” Lincoln tipped his head, puzzled. Unwilling to get in the middle of a spat between officers, he threw off a joke, with some truth to it. “If I were you,” he said, “and he threatened to shoot, I would trust him.” For one of the few times in his life, Meagher was speechless. Still, the 69th was mustered out of duty a few days later, free to return home, as the Irish captain had requested. Lincoln would remember Thomas Francis Meagher.
The rumors about Corcoran gave way to a letter in his hand from a cell in Richmond. He was held by the rebels, caught when he tried to defend the rear of the Union Army.
Someone had to fill the void, to lead the Irish. No sooner had Meagher returned to New York than requests poured in for him to take up where Corcoran had left off.
The War Department proposed to make him a captain in the regular army. Good pay, good post, perhaps mostly ceremonial, an Irish American on uniformed display. A better offer came from John C. Frémont—the Pathfinder!—onetime presidential candidate, now a major general in St. Louis, commander of the Department of the West. Meagher could be his aide-de-camp, as a colonel. Meagher turned down both requests. His fate was with the New York Irish.
An idea was taking hold: why not outfit an all-Irish brigade? The 69th was Hibernian to the core, but not formally established as such. This new creation would be a distinct ethnic unit of at least four regiments, with its own flag, its own pipe and drum corps, its own priests and surgeons, its own poet laureate.
William T. Sherman what it meant to lead men into battle, and yet bark out his orders with a brogue. But what would happen if the brigade was a bust? If the immigrants failed to fight, fell apart, deserted, turned on Meagher? If they only confirmed the low opinion held of them by the Know-Nothings? What if the Union lost? For what purpose, then, would Meagher have recruited people to risk death in a new country? To Meagher, the perils were outweighed by the draw: being part of something greater than any one Irishman or any one American.
66th to 75th Streets, was a pleasure ground for New Yorkers fleeing their tenement traps. It had beer gardens, games of chance and strength, amusements and oddities, picnic tables. On this Sunday, it was transformed into the largest rally of Irish yet on the continent. The festival was ostensibly a benefit to help the widows and families of those killed at Bull Run—admission, 25 cents a person. But it became a recruitment drive for an Irish brigade that would be formed out of the New York 69th, with units from other parts of the Northeast. Meagher on Slievenamon Mountain in 1848 was a boy
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Life is but a shadow that passes over the earth, swiftly gone, Meagher began, not unlike those who fell in Virginia. Think of the men “sealing their oath of American citizenship with their blood—whose doorways are now hung with blackest mourning, and whose tables miss the industrious hands that once furnished them with bread.” They perished for a nation that offered them refuge, “immigrants driven by devastating laws and practices from their native soil.” This Civil War was a test for a people who’d been offered a second chance in a new land. “What of the cause in which our countrymen fell
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“Will the Irishmen of New York stand by this cause—resolutely, heartily, with inexorable fidelity, despite all the sacrifices it may cost, despite all the dangers into which it may compel them, despite the bereavements and abiding gloom it may bring?”
