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“I know nothing”—giving rise to the party’s new name.
Church and saloon were the two main institutions. The Irish became Democrats almost to a man, because they were the enemies of the Know-Nothings.
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.
Members promised to support only American-born Protestants,
“Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens,”
“And no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have these same Irish people.
They are taught that he eats the bread that belongs to them.”
“Let us who hail from Ireland stand to the last by the stars and stripes!”
His strongest argument for the Irish was linking the Confederacy to the hated oppressor England, as he had done in New York. The Great Hunger was never far from Gaelic memory—loved ones “driven from their own land, their huts pulled down or burned above their heads, turned out by the roadside or into the ditches to die,”
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.
Sport and theater—the Irish way of war.
So there it was from on high, without filter or equivocation: the Irish would not fight to liberate enslaved blacks.
the men of the Irish Brigade had died to free the black slaves of America.
“The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory of the powers of evil,” said John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher. A year earlier, Russia had freed its serfs. Support for the American South meant support for slavery, nothing more. The peripheral reasons for breaking up the Union—states’ rights and defending a way of life—looked like a cloak for something civilized people would no longer tolerate. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed,” Lincoln said; “without slavery it could not continue.”
“You will no doubt be hard on us rioters tomorrow morning,” a man wrote the New York Times on the second day of anarchy, “but that 300-dollar law has made us nobodies, vagabonds, and cast-outs of a society, for whom nobody cares when we must go to war and be shot down. We are the poor rabble, and the rich rabble is our enemy by this law . . . Why don’t they let the nigger kill the slave-driving race and take possession of the South?”
In just four days’ time, the reputation of the Irish in America, a standing that Meagher’s Brigade had built at the cost of much loss of life, was in tatters.
“I am sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish,” wrote George Templeton Strong,
Archbishop Hughes defended the mobs. But Meagher could not.
So, at the very time the Irish American and other papers were attacking Meagher, he was negotiating to become a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish nationalist group whose members were well represented among the ranks of police officers
and military members throughout North America. When the Fenians were founded a few years earlier, Meagher had resisted joining, mindful that a political career in the United States would require him to reach beyond the Irish masses in Boston and New York. Four years later, after the deaths of so many of his countrymen, after being pilloried by Catholic clerics and press bullies who claimed to represent the exiles, Meagher had lost his hesitation. Free of caring about the fickle winds of public opinion, he took the oath. “I, Thomas Francis Meagher, solemnly pledge my sacred word of honor as a
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One thing: he had figured out a way to summon Ireland—in color and sound, scent and texture. No idle reminiscence, this was a trick, born of internal discipline, he had practiced in the first weeks of his banishment, then mastered during his bleakest hours in Tasmania.
“The wild birds, flashing and whirling over the waters, were my only companions,” he said of Lake Sorell. “But I peopled the lonely scene with friends who were far away, and made it teem with memories and visions of the land of my birth. That lake became the lake of Killarney. An island in the center of the lake was changed to Innisfallen, the ruined cloister of the monks . . . the round towers . . .
the castles...
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What was it, Kennedy asked, that got so many families through centuries of subjugation, through starvation, through mass eviction, through exile, through Know-Nothing persecutions, epics of tragedy broken only by temporary periods of joy? What was it that made people like Thomas Meagher never lose faith? The “quality of the Irish,” the president concluded, is “the remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination.”
