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by
Tim Egan
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September 21 - October 4, 2024
The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.” It was decreed that the rogue Irish Catholic Church, a mutt’s mash of Celtic, Druidic, Viking and Gaelic influences, had strayed too far from clerical authority, at a time when English monarchs still obeyed Rome.
English soldiers married Irish women and had big Irish families, and power grew ever more distant from the Crown. The sons of men named James and Edmund became Seamus and Eamann. The daughters of Mary and Evelyn became Maire and Eibhlin. To the horror of the royal court, these offspring of the invaders had become ipsis Hibernicis Hiberniores—more Irish than the Irish. They had gone native. The remedy was one of the most exhaustive campaigns to strip a people of their pride of place that any government had ever devised—the Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed.
English power was clustered around Dublin, an urban fortress, a nation within a nation. The siege mentality grew even stronger when a physical boundary went up—the Pale, from the Latin word palus, for stake. In places, it was an actual fence, marked by said stakes. By the late 1400s, the Pale covered four counties. Inside the Pale was an Anglo-Norman kingdom with armed security, a structured feudal system and a sense of settled superiority. Beyond the Pale—that was beyond all civilization, an unruly Ireland living on its own terms.
Under the Act of Settlement, Cromwell’s soldiers and their supporters would seize more than half of all the good land in Ireland, about eight million acres. Any landowner who took part in the fight against Cromwell was arrested and sentenced to a life of bondage, his land confiscated. In this way, another 40,000 Irish were deported to the West Indies as slaves on sugar plantations.
French journalist Gustave de Beaumont toured Ireland with his lifelong friend Alexis de Tocqueville, fresh off a thorough exploration of the United States. “I passed through the country traversed by Cromwell and found it still full of the terror of his name,” Beaumont wrote.
“I have seen the Indian in the forest, and the negro in his chains and thought that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland,” Beaumont wrote after two long reporting tours in 1835 and 1837. “An entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland.”
From a tenant farm in County Tipperary, a young man in a family with 700-year-old ties to the land had picked up in the 1780s and sailed for Newfoundland. The big island of broken rock and blistering winds off the east coast of the North American mainland was England’s oldest colony, but it offered the Irish a degree of respect unknown to them at home. They gave their adopted land a Gaelic name that meant “land of the fish.” In 1788, Newfoundland was host to the first recorded game of hurling in the New World.
His college choices were limited. Trinity, the Protestant hold founded by Queen Elizabeth in the days when her soldiers were hunting harpers, was the only university in Ireland. For just a few years now, the school had opened its doors to select Catholics, but families like the Meaghers distrusted the university.
Among those who were also stirred by the fresh winds of the Nation was a mystery poet whose cover letters were signed in the name of a gentleman of Dublin. Duffy set out to meet this man of great promise, showing up one day in the parlor of the verse maker. To the editor’s shock, there was no man but a tall young woman with dark hair, “flashing brown eyes and features cast in an heroic mold.” Duffy had never seen a more beautiful face of sedition. She introduced herself as Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, as much an establishment pillar as Smith O’Brien.
What motivated Meagher, the fount of his fury, was the fast-developing famine; it epitomized all the wrongs of Ireland. Through the winter of 1846 and into the spring, hundreds, then thousands of people dropped dead of starvation. Bellies of little children swelled, their faces went powdery, their hair fell by the handful, and they sniffled away to a corner of a hut or a roadside ditch, their parents soon to follow.
And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths.
William Bennett, a Quaker on one of the surveys of the sick and dying, sent this report back from County Mayo in 1847: My hand trembles while I write. The scenes of human misery and degradation we witnessed still haunt my imagination, with the vividness and power of some horrid and tyrannous delusion, rather than the feature of sober reality. We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly; their little limbs, on removing a
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Clarendon fired off a series of remarkably candid assessments to Prime Minister Russell. “A great social revolution is now going on in Ireland, the accumulated evils of misgovernment and mismanagement are now coming to a crisis.” As to the cause: “No one could venture to dispute the fact that Ireland has been sacrificed” to British economic policy, he wrote. “No distress would have occurred if the exportation of Irish grain had been prohibited.” And there it was, official acknowledgment of the deep complicity by England in one of the world’s worst human atrocities.
Meagher conceived an idea for a flag: one third green, one third orange, as a nod to the Protestant north, and a unifying white in the center.
A cabin the size of a closet in the Meagher family home held some of the most loquacious, best-educated, daring young men in Great Britain, on their way to a dumping ground for robbers and pickpockets, forgers and whores. “Brave men,” John Mitchel said of his coconspirators, “who fought for an honorable chance of throwing their lives away.”
By 1849, the Crown had sent almost 40,000 Irish to the penal colony of Australia, a fourth of them women. Only about 1 percent were political prisoners. The rest were transported for stealing bread or shoes, dodging rent, cutting down a tree, housing a fugitive or other petty crimes.
In 1847 alone, 17,000 Irish died in the Atlantic crossing, almost one in fifteen—most from the dreaded “fever” that spread through lice in the coffin ships. Only the slave trade, the Middle Passage shipment of 12.5 million blacks from Africa to the New World, had a higher death rate on the Atlantic. The bodies of the dead were buried at sea. Thus a ship that had departed with intact families would arrive with orphans, widows and broken men.
The Irish had no word in Gaelic for “emigrant”; the closest approximation was deorai—exile. The passage in the North Atlantic made many of those exiles feel that the greatest gamble of their young lives was a terrible mistake.
The Irish sent to the West Indies were simply human property. Barbados, Jamaica, Bermuda and other isles under a hot sun relied on slave labor, usually African, for the tobacco and sugar trades. These shackled ranks were increased by the conquered of Ireland. In a seven-year span after Cromwell crushed the Irish, more than 50,000 men, women and children were sold into slavery in Barbados and surrounding islands.
Now, to people it. The Aborigines, having lived there for about 30,000 years, were considered a minor nuisance, part of the exotic fauna of the land down under. They were hunters and gatherers, black and naked, dismissed by the English as Stone Age relics. Britain planned a series of settlements on the eastern shore of Australia, as a source of food, fiber and timber, and to ward off the French. But it proved nearly impossible to persuade enough free citizens of London or Manchester to sail more than halfway around the world to start life fresh in the eighteenth-century version of Mars.
Over the next eighty years, Great Britain would force 164,000 people to cross the oceans for penance there. One in four were Irish, the minority within a minority—colonized twice.
Many had been “assigned” to farmers. In a system where banishment was called transportation, “assignment” was the Empire’s euphemism for slave labor.
A few months earlier, Queen Victoria had granted the island province a degree of self-government. Property-owning male settlers in the penal colony would now be free to elect representatives to their own regional parliament. Imagine. On Van Diemen’s Land, a legislative council of twenty-four members could write their own laws, appoint their own judges, levy some taxes for roads and schools. Certainly, the political prisoners of Ireland were happy that the chokehold of England had been loosened in one of its territories. But they could not shake the magnitude of this irony. Here they were,
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Never had so many Irish come ashore than the year leading up to Meagher’s first day in America’s biggest city. They were rural peasants, mostly, without skills or trades, illiterate, swept across an ocean by catastrophe, the first big wave of the largest transfer of people the world had yet experienced in so short a time. They left more than 20,000 tiny villages to press into one large village of wretchedness in lower Manhattan. Between 1847 and 1851, about 1.8 million immigrants landed in New York City, of which 848,000 were Irish.
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.
“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.’”
Donovan said that the rebels who interrogated him in Richmond had little fear of Union soldiers—except for the Irish. His captors told him if they knew of the brigade’s precise whereabouts during the Peninsula campaign, “they would have sent a whole division to take it and General Meagher prisoners, and hang the exiled traitor from the highest tree in Richmond.” Another government wanted to hang Thomas Francis Meagher. Imagine that.
The God that had saved Michael Corcoran was the one that Meagher prayed to now.
McCarter saw an elderly black woman, shoeless, with three crying children clinging to her tattered dress. She stood at an intersection in the town, dazed and in shock. A minute later, she was hit by a Confederate shell and cut in two. The fragments killed the children as well.
But just as he had made merry music with his clarinet at Stonyhurst while under suspension, as he had grinned his way through readings of verse while awaiting execution at his cell in Clonmel, as he had “laughed till the woods rang around” in a shepherd’s hut reunion in Tasmania, Meagher always found a way to find scraps of joy in a cellar of despair. He needed those moments, needed to mark them in memory in order to call on them later in melancholy, to keep himself from giving up.
the mob moved without any design save the unpredictable direction of rage. They attacked symbols of wealth: Brooks Brothers, the clothing store, was plundered. They attacked symbols of authority: the mayor’s residence was pelted with stones. And they attacked voices of emancipation: Horace Greeley was a target. The editor of the New York Times, Henry Richmond, manned a Gatling gun outside his building near City Hall.
He was starting to build a case, born in his lowest moments after Fredericksburg, that the Irish had sacrificed their lives for the cause of a nation that must live up to the egalitarian promise of its founding.
“There are some vicious bigots, men of small brains and smaller hearts, men of more gall than blood, who even here assert that love of Ireland, devotion to her cause, active sympathy with the protracted contest for her redemption, revoke an unequivocal allegiance to the United States.”
“Let the woods and swamps of the deadly Chickahominy, the slopes of Malvern Hill, the waters of Antietam, the defiant heights of Fredericksburg, the thickets of the Wilderness—a thousand fields now billowed with Irish graves, declare that love for Ireland blends in ecstasy with loyalty to America.”
“It is the soulless American who has no heart, who has no thought beyond putting a mighty dollar out at mighty interest, who has no zest for any other book than his soulless ledger.”
She had to love her pioneer husband after he escorted her to the governor’s residence: their new home was the leaky log cabin in a town that could collapse in a sneeze. Tiny, mouse-infested and primitive the shack may have been, but with two Meaghers now occupying the crude cabin, it became a parlor—the “gubernatorial mansion,” they dubbed it.
It was a hard town, hazardous and dirty, winter-cold for half a year. But the Irish flourished there, establishing literary societies and patriotic clubs, opera houses and theaters, schools and churches, raising large families in two-story houses. In the Rocky Mountains, their stories found a home. At one point, more Gaelic was spoken in Daly’s mines than anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. New Ireland, when it finally came to the American West, was Butte, Montana.
Cut out of her father’s inheritance by her marriage to Meagher, she lived modestly in a small cottage, subsisting on a Civil War widow’s pension of $50 a month. She never remarried, never stopped stoking the memory of the Irishman whose life became hers.
The Declaration of Independence was read, every miner’s head nodding at the fistful of fighting words aimed at England. A still moment followed. On command, solemn-faced men removed the large American flag that had been wrapped around an imposing object. The crowd gasped: there stood a bronze equestrian statue mounted on a massive block of granite. It was Thomas Francis Meagher, forever young, forever defiant, facing the distant Big Belt Mountains and the waters of the Missouri. Chiseled on the side were excerpts from the 1846 speech he gave in Dublin at the age of twenty-two—his attempt to
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The version of Montana’s early days that children would learn would come from the vigilante Wilbur Sanders. In A History of Montana, the author wrote that the killers Sanders had unleashed were a force for good, the summary executions necessary, the hangings all justified, for they “had the support of every decent, law-abiding citizen of the community.” The writer was Helen Sanders, daughter-in-law of Wilbur, who presumably had an easy job of sourcing.
They found that the governor’s death was a homicide, and Wilbur Sanders was the culprit. If true, it meant that Thomas Meagher had lost his life for standing up to people who committed murder in the name of authority.
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was knighted in 1873 by the very monarch, Queen Victoria, who had jailed him in his youth. His book Four Years of Irish History stands as the definitive account of the uprising of poets and orators.
In 2015, the new Waterford Bridge over the river, the longest single-span crossing in Ireland, was named for the favorite son of the nation’s oldest city. Across the Atlantic, in the same year, the artist Ron Tunison was commissioned to create a bronze portrait of Meagher. The general’s visage will be placed next to the grave of his widow in the country that took him in, at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
It is the living, of course, who need these markers of the dead in order to make sense of their place in this world—more than eighty million people with some Irish blood, most of them no longer looking for a country to call home. For them, memory is not an unwelcome burden but the raw material of stories that will always be passed on, in song, verse or tale, the great survival skill of the Irish.
