The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

by Tim Egan

But—damn it all—why does money have to be the marker of a man? That was the thing about America he most despised, measuring existence by the size of one’s pile.

Patrick traveled with his own brewer; the saint’s ale may have been a more persuasive selling point for Christianity than the trinity symbol of the shamrock.

Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed. Nearly three dozen laws criminalized Irish dress, Irish hairstyle, Irish sport, down to a detailed description of the lawful way to mount a horse.

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.

Beyond the Pale—that was beyond all civilization, an unruly Ireland living on its own terms.

The most horrific slaughter arrived in the form of Oliver Cromwell, leading his New Model Army of 12,000 men, with another 7,000 in reserve. North of Dublin, he laid siege to the well-fortified town of Drogheda.

On September 11, troops stormed the broken city, using Irish children as human shields.

By Cromwell’s own account, only 30 people from a town of 4,000 survived. Those who lived were sold as slaves to Barbados.

In his letters and official papers back to England, Cromwell gloated.

“It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors at Drogheda,” he wrote.

The Penal Laws would show the world how a well-armed minority could snuff out the native worshiping habits of a majority by criminalizing the faith of eight out of ten residents of Ireland.

“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.”

This blight had first appeared on the Isle of Wight; the news was then forwarded to Prime Minister Peel. Spores from diseased potatoes had come across the Atlantic from the United States, most likely in the holds of trading ships. A fungus later diagnosed as Phytophthora infestans, it spread quickly, needing only water to thrive. The tragic turnover of millions of acres, from life-supporting earth to a garden cemetery, happened without warning,

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. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported.

Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

1846 was worse: nearly all of Ireland’s potatoes were ruined. And yet, in that year the nation grew more food than all the people of Ireland could have consumed, most of it bound for export. The harvest in corn, wheat and barley was said to be the biggest ever.

the rural Irish had nothing at summer’s end, when the rent was due. Now they were thrown off the land—mass evictions to go with mass hunger.

If a family refused to leave, as many thousands did, their home was torn down by the authorities.

a single crew sometimes destroying twenty or more thatch-roofed huts in a half day’s time.

The British ruling class was in thrall to the idea of unfettered free markets. The term laissez faire was not just a fancy import but a governing principle. To interfere would be to upset the natural economic order. The market, in time, would make all things well.

“It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food,” Trevelyan said in 1846.

County Mayo in 1847:

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 portion of the filthy covering, perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation. Crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all but naked, scarcely human in appearance . . . We entered upwards of fifty of these tenements. The scene was invariably the same.

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.

Passage to Canada cost about £6 for a family of five, more than triple that to get to the United States on one of the better ships. It took five to eight weeks to sail to the American mainland, four months or more to Australia. The English wanted them gone, particularly to Canada and Australia, two of the Empire’s big empties in need of field hands and laborers.

By law, each passenger on an emigrant ship was entitled to ten cubic feet in steerage. But once at sea, captains did what they pleased.

In the cheap ships, where humans were cargo on the way to North America, just as timber was on the return, nearly one in five emigrants died that year. Thus a new term was added to the pile of Irish miseries: the coffin ships.

A warm summer in Ireland had produced a huge harvest in grain, bound once more for stomachs in foreign lands.

Despite the rejection by the French, the lift of a Paris spring proved lasting in one respect. 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. He presented it at a gathering in Dublin. On stage was a harpist—the oldest of political prisoners in Ireland—dressed in the musician’s costume that had been outlawed by the Penal Laws. The silken flag of three colors was unveiled. “I present it to my native land,” said Meagher. “And I trust that the old country will not refuse this symbol of new life from one of her youngest children.” A few days later, the banner flew over Waterford, and in time became the national flag of Ireland.

Meagher had no sooner left for Kilkenny than the British government dropped a legal bomb on the Irish: habeas corpus was suspended immediately, the country placed under martial law.

Optimism, as always, was the blind spot of youth.

Famine was supposed to be the motivation for revolt. Instead, it was the undoing of it.

The Irish left their homes unwillingly, as convicts or rejects to Australia, men to build roads in the Antipodes, orphan girls to become house servants. And they left willingly, forming the scattered parts of the global Irish diaspora—the Lennons from County Down to Liverpool, eventually to produce John of the Beatles; the Kennedys from County Wexford to Boston, eventually to produce another John, the first Irish Catholic president of the United States; and the Kearneys from County Offaly to New York, to produce a second American president, Barack Obama.

The emptiness, from lack of company, was a sickness in itself, dragging a bright man to his depths. He was sinking with every passing day, he admitted, his innate high spirits drained away, under “the thought that our lives as far as we can see are purposeless.”

But in naming his boat, he showed that he had not completely forgotten about a woman who had been dazzled by him in Ireland. This Speranza gave Thomas Meagher days of lonely pleasure on the open water of the lake, gliding from imaginary Ross Castle to the island holding Innisfallen. Back in Dublin, the inspiration for the boat’s name, the poet Jane Elgee, had married Sir William Wilde, onetime oculist to Queen Victoria. They kept a strain of Irish nationalism alive, though contained within the parlor of their sumptuous home. Jane also gave birth to a boy who would become a brilliant dramatist, and be jailed for another Victorian crime: the love of another man. He was Oscar Wilde, but was better known to the Irish worldwide as the son of Speranza.

Martin was serving a ten-year sentence for writing a single editorial encouraging Irish home rule.

Around one turn, the smells were unpleasant in the late-spring humidity, sweat twined with horseshit, dogshit and pigshit, the piles to be swept into the river by day’s end—6,000 cartloads a night.

On May 27, the day Meagher stepped ashore, this New York was home to just under 20,000 Jews, 12,000 African Americans, 60,000 Germans, at least 160,000 Irish. It was the densest concentration of Irish anywhere: more than one in four New Yorkers in a city of nearly 600,000 had been born in Meagher’s homeland.

The Bowery itself, once a footpath for the native Lenape, had the distinction of being the only major thoroughfare in New York City never to have a single church built on it.

More political than territorial, the Irish gangs were trying to get a piece of New York action before Tammany Hall refined municipal mayhem into a smooth-running graft machine.

Between 1847 and 1851, about 1.8 million immigrants landed in New York City, of which 848,000 were Irish. Some dispersed

But most settled among the clot of fellow Irish, barely a mile from where their ships had landed, rarely wandering north of 14th Street.

America was a fascinating mess, O’Gorman told Meagher: wild, profane, dangerous, but it worked.

Still, there wasn’t quite the passion for politics on this side of the Atlantic. More than anything, Americans were “a money-making people,” O’Gorman said. Get rich, no matter how, and you could walk anywhere and prompt a tip of the hat.

The Know-Nothings had grown out of the American Nativist Party, which was violently anti-Catholic. In 1844, they unleashed a terror campaign against the Irish in Philadelphia. The party called for American-born citizens to arm themselves against the “bloody hand of the Pope,” and formed a paramilitary arm—the Wide Awakes.

The Irish became Democrats almost to a man, because they were the enemies of the Know-Nothings. And in New York they became Tammany Hall Democrats, whose first order of business before every meeting was to read aloud parts of the Declaration of Independence, that robust denunciation of all the British wrongs against a subject people.

In an age when well-crafted, finely delivered speech was king, in parlor or theater, Meagher was soon a sought-after celebrity. Along the way, in the fall, he put in many good words on behalf of the Democratic candidate for the highest office in the land.

In less than a year, the convict Tom Meagher had gone from muttering dirty jokes around a smoky fire in a Tasmanian shepherd’s hut to gold-rimmed tea service with the most powerful man in America.

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. He wasn’t sure how long the public speaking could continue before he became a minstrel act with a brogue.

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. In Boston, moving swiftly to blunt the power of the second-largest population of Irish in America, newly elected nativist Governor Henry Gardner tried to rush through laws making it harder for immigrants to become police officers or hold office. 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?”