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

by Tim Egan

“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.’”

Elizabeth’s great-grandfather had amassed a 23,000-acre tract of land straddling the colonies of New York and New Jersey in the mid-1700s. With this holding, he built an empire of iron, the furnaces going full bore to feed the ambitions of the Americans. He was best known for forging a chain, weighing in excess of 100 tons, that was strung across the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War to prevent British ships from sailing above West Point. The English held New York, but the Townsend metal chain kept them tied up at the mouth of the main water entrance to the interior.

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.

The democracy turned ugly and violent, as the gauze of compromise that held together the largest slaveholding nation in the world started to tear. Americans would kill fellow Americans, it was now clear, over the fate of people with fewer rights than a horse.

Ruling 7–2 in the Dred Scott decision, the country’s final judicial arbiter held that blacks, free or chained, could never be citizens. Dating to colonial times, the nation had always looked at a Negro as property—“he was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise,” the court wrote. And what property it was: the total market value of slaves in the South at the time of the ruling was $3 billion, more than all the railroads, all the banks, any other American asset. To the founders, blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race,” explained Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the written opinion, “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The phrase “all men are created equal,” in the Declaration of Independence, did not cover black people, said Taney. “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included.” Regarding runaways, that history must be honored and upheld.

Lincoln lost the Senate race of 1858, but became the moral voice of a new political party, the Republicans.

“I am not in favor of slavery,” Meagher replied. “I am devoted to the Union. The Union accepts slavery.” This was the Democratic Party position and that of its standard-bearer in the 1856 election, James Buchanan.

Religion, ethnicity (to a degree), economic standing—these were secondary concerns in the masterpiece of the Constitution, Meagher believed. The Old World’s fatal flaw, enforced in Ireland for centuries by England, was the establishment of a governing religion. “I set my face against the alliance of Church and State—here and elsewhere—now and for all time,” he said in San Francisco, further alarming his enemies in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. “I protest against it for Ireland, if Ireland so wills it. I protest against it for Rome, if Rome so wills it. Is this to be an infidel? . . . I am opposed to the exercise in political affairs of any and every clerical influence whatsoever.”

The Republicans, after three ballots, settled on the former one-term congressman, Lincoln, as their candidate. Honest Abe could speak and had a compelling personal story, raised from an earthen-floored cabin. He did not promise to abolish slavery. In Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, Lincoln was not even on the ballot. He did not get a single vote from any of them. In Virginia, where his name was listed, he tallied 1,887 votes—a mere 1 percent. On election night, Lincoln won with just under 40 percent of the total. He got 1,865,908 votes, but the other candidates combined outpolled him by more than a million ballots. Lincoln carried every Northern state but New Jersey. He lost New York City by a sizable margin but took the state. The Irish voted Northern Democrat. They’d been warned of the consequences of a Republican victory. “If Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of 4 million emancipated Negroes,” wrote the New York Tribune.

Lincoln assumed the presidency on March 4, a cold day with a persistent wind lashing at the 10,000 people gathered near a Capitol dome bracketed by construction scaffolding. Chief Justice Taney, the former slaveholder who had written the Dred Scott decision, administered the oath. In his address, Lincoln tried to reassure the South: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

At the founding convention of the Confederate States of America, one of the first orders of business was to enshrine slavery in its constitution, in Article I. “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

“African slavery as it exists in the United States,” said President Jefferson Davis, “is a moral, a social and a political blessing.” A committed white supremacist, Davis owned 137 people on his cotton plantation in Mississippi. The rebel vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, was even more explicit. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea” of racial equality, he said. “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery is his natural and normal condition.”

New York looked to break away, not with the South but as an independent city republic, open for business. Mayor Wood would try to play both sides, but first he suggested that New York secede and declare itself a free city, loyal to neither.

The South had been gracious to Mr. and Mrs. Meagher in ways that Protestants of the North never had been.

Sumter stood for a nation cleaved but not yet bloodied. South Carolina refused to let food in or soldiers out, except under the white flag of surrender.

The harbor was lined with cannons, a lethal semicircle poised to “reduce the fort” at the call of President Jefferson Davis. Commanding one of those Confederate guns, with the 1st South Carolina Artillery, was John C. Mitchel, the eldest son of the Irish polemicist. The boy stood ready to level the outpost of the nation that had given his family refuge.

Meagher joined a variant of the debate he had walked away from at the Townsend home. The South, he argued, had done nothing to harm the North. Why go to war?

By midnight, much of Charleston was giddy. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, they got their war. The inaugural shot was a long, graceful arc of red light, like the start of a fireworks show, illuminating the bay. At dawn and throughout the day, the shells became a deadly shower. Fort Sumter caught fire, though it was quickly put out. In town, people cheered from rooftops and in seats along the harbor, watching brother lob cannonballs against brother. For thirty-three hours the fort was hammered, more than 4,000 rounds. Before the weekend was over, Anderson surrendered. No one died from the rain of fire, but the garrison had nothing left—it was out of ammunition and out of food. The flag of the United States was lowered. Victory was declared in Charleston. The South had fired first.

reaction was swift and visceral. The unimaginable had happened; it changed everything. People poured into the streets. Newspaper headlines screamed: the Union has been assaulted!

Lincoln called for immediate help: the formation of a 75,000-man force from state militias to serve for ninety days. Surely, three months was all it would take to subjugate the South. The existing national army, all of it, was barely 16,000 soldiers, and many of those men were scattered on the far western frontier. Washington was defenseless.

the full Confederacy now numbered eleven states, with a population of 5.5 million free, 3.5 million in bondage. As a new nation, it became the largest slaveholding country in the world,

The charge of disloyalty was immediately dropped, and Corcoran sprang into action, offering the services of his Irish-born troops to the president. He said he would provide 1,000 men; 5,000 applied. Meagher joined his friend from the 1848 rebellion.

Meagher’s Irishmen walked past the nearly abandoned Willard Hotel, the forsaken White House, and out to Georgetown College, where the 69th was bivouacked.

To detractors, these men were motley, laughable, immigrant garbage—“gathered from the sewers of the cities, the degraded, beastly outsourcing of all the quarters of the world,”

On May 23, the Northern volunteers crossed the Potomac to the rebel state of Virginia and reclaimed Arlington Heights for the nation. They assembled a large, loud headquarters in the mud from May rains and named it for their commander: Camp Corcoran.

the Union Irish were put under the larger command of General Irvin McDowell, who had an army of 35,000 men and a diminishing allowance of time to use them. The ninety days of duty that these citizen soldiers had agreed to in the upheaval of April would soon be up.

They would move first to Manassas Junction, about thirty-two miles away, and cut off key rail connections to the rebel capital. From there, the path would be clear all the way to the commode of Jefferson Davis. Quick and decisive.

Sherman treated Meagher’s men like farm animals, with a stench to go with them. They disgusted him, these excitable Micks, unfit for a grand army. Blacks were inferior to all whites, Sherman believed, but the Irish were just a notch above them.

“No cohesion, no real discipline, no respect for authority,” Sherman wrote.

No surprise, then, that Meagher developed a distinct distaste for his commander. William Tecumseh Sherman, he told a reporter, was “a rude and envenomed martinet.”

The mood was festive among the spectators settled on blankets with a view—war would be good entertainment, and a shame to miss.

“Mr. President, I have a cause of grievance.” “Yes.” “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.

Meagher begged to go home. McClellan agreed to grant him a short leave of absence. But not for the purpose of seeing Libby. He would let him go to rustle up fresh recruits.

The Copperheads, those venomous Democrats who wanted to negotiate an immediate settlement, were ascendant.

His task was to fortify the case for a war that was not going well. The draft talk did not help. In Irish neighborhoods of East Coast cities, protests had broken out, some of the marchers carrying a bannered proclamation: “We won’t fight to free the nigger.”

Archbishop John Hughes.

was not happy with the horrific number of Irish deaths. Surely the casualty rate was higher for them than for other Union troops. Even if not by design, it was too much sacrifice. And the latest rumors from Washington—a military draft on the way, yes, but worse than that, word that Lincoln might free the slaves—made a dyspeptic cleric clutch his stomach. He’d issued a declaration, embossed with the imprimatur of the archdiocese, aimed at Lincoln. It was read in parishes throughout New York. “We, Catholics and a vast majority of our troops in the field, have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to justify a clique of abolitionists in the North.” So there it was from on high, without filter or equivocation: the Irish would not fight to liberate enslaved blacks.

The soldiers were moved like set pieces within a set piece, seldom told of the master war game. Generals drew up schemes on maps and sent divisions to certain death. Then they reassembled them a few miles away and did it again. As a grunt, you could drop weapons and flee, and many did, but if caught you’d be shot. A man could make $30 for every stray he rounded up for execution. You could feign malaria or typhoid, but it would take an actor of rare skill to pull it off. You could shoot yourself, with a wound of convenience that might be a ticket to a hospital bed. More likely, the self-inflicted tear would kill you, given the high mortality rate in the primitive medical trenches. The best thing to do was to curse and follow orders. The odds of getting out of this thing alive were still better in a soldier’s uniform than a deserter’s rags. As for motivation, whatever Meagher had said at Jones’s Woods or the 7th Regiment Armory was now vapor. Survival was the only reason to expose a face to a shower of musketry.

What was the point of claiming a victory when one side had lost 12,000 men and the other 11,000? At the White House, Abraham Lincoln had no trouble finding meaning in the graveyard of Antietam. On September 22, five days after the battle, he assembled his cabinet and let them in on a secret. He told them he’d made a promise when the Southerners entered Northern territory: if Lee could be driven back across the Potomac, the president would make good on the idea he’d first floated to these advisers in July. “I said nothing to anyone. But I made the promise to myself . . . to my Maker. The rebel army is driven out now, and I am going to fulfill that promise.” He then read them the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

The next day, Lincoln released this proclamation to the press. Democrats were outraged. McClellan was stunned. Leading Catholic clerics, Archbishop John Hughes among them, fumed.

Still, from September 22 onward, there would be no doubt about why so many Americans had been killed at Antietam,

But there was no getting around history’s anchor: the men of the Irish Brigade had died to free the black slaves of America.

Lincoln’s gamble with England had worked out brilliantly. The proclamation put the Empire on the defensive.

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.

Meagher, if honest with himself, knew hatred of England could no longer be used to carry a tattered, bullet-riddled green flag up a hostile hill. He couldn’t lie.

General Ambrose Burnside, presented himself as a mass of fussed-over facial hair running down the sides of his cheeks and curling up into his nostrils, bald on top. (“Sideburns” would be his legacy to the English language.)

On the Union side, officers tried to dissuade Burnside from continuing with the attack. “It’s a useless waste of life,” said General Hooker, no faint heart to a fight. Burnside would not budge.

No one associated with Marye’s Heights tried to put a gloss of glory on it. “Oh! It was a terrible day,” Captain William Nagle wrote his father. “Irish blood and bones cover that field today.” An Irish Brigade historian, Henry Clay Heisler, summarized it this way: “It was not a battle—it was wholesale slaughter of human beings.” The Union suffered nearly 13,000 dead and wounded, to a loss of about 5,000 for the Confederacy.

On Sunday, a cold rain fell. Humiliated in his one chance to shine, General Burnside gave the order to retreat. He would soon lose command of the Army of the Potomac.

In closing, Meagher drew attention to a dessert tray presented by a soldier waiter on a center table. A few minutes earlier, the man had been sent on a mission. Now the lid of the serving tray was lifted, revealing a cannonball that had bounced down a street outside the theater—dessert. Great gasps of horror filled the crowd. With that, Meagher left the room, ending a Death Feast for the bloodiest single day of the Irish Brigade.