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

by Tim Egan

His last battle with the brigade got under way in late April 1863.

This “ungenerous and inconsiderate treatment of a gallant remnant of a brigade that had never once failed to do its duty” left him deeply depressed, he wrote. Still, he remained faithful to the Union cause, and offered to serve in any other capacity but one: he could no longer send Irishmen to their deaths. The resignation was accepted on May 14.

The draft law, as long rumored, had allowed an exemption for the rich: for $300 you could buy your way out of service to the United States. Either that or come up with a substitute.

For many of the poor Irish cursing in the humidity on July 13, the price of freedom was equal to a year’s wages. For the well-off, it was a trifling.

An hour before noon, a pistol shot was fired outside that Third Avenue location of the draft lottery. No one was sure where it originated. But it became a starter’s signal for the worst riot in American history.

The cops who had tried to hold back the fisted crowd ran for their lives.

A tailor’s shop nearby was ransacked, the Irish proprietor beaten to a pulp. A colonel in the Union Army, Henry O’Brien, was lashed and pummeled until he died. The Irish, at least those in uniform or owning a business, would not be spared the wrath of other Irish.

A handful of troops who’d been convalescing from wounds of Fredericksburg arrived to try to keep the peace. They were overwhelmed, losing their weapons, many knifed in the face or back.

A black man, William Jones, was grabbed as he walked toward a fruit vendor’s store. He was stabbed, beaten, a noose coiled around his neck, and he was strung from a lamppost. They burned him as he died.

the mob moved to the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street. The rioters took the children’s bedding and clothing, then torched the orphanage. They cheered as walls collapsed and the roof crumbled. When fire crews arrived, they were stoned, and their hoses cut. Some of the firemen dropped their axes and joined the rioters. The 200 orphans who lived at the asylum were rushed out a back entrance, narrowly escaping death

They moved outward and uptown, toward homes of the rich, breaking in and looting,

In the days leading up to the riot, race-baiting Democrats fanned ethnic flames, and anti-Lincoln politicians worked up class rage.

The editor of the New York Times, Henry Richmond, manned a Gatling gun outside his building near City Hall. The mayor sent a desperate telegram to Washington, pleading for Union troops to save the city—it

The secretary of war dispatched five regiments to Manhattan;

Democratic politicians looked the other way, as d...

“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 . . . W...

On the fourth and final day, nearly 6,000 soldiers fought house to house, tenement to tenement on the Lower East Side, artillery to go with musketry. By week’s end, following the announcement that the draft had been temporarily suspended in New York, the city looked as if it had been shelled by Lee’s army. Officials put the death toll at 105, though it was later found to be closer to 500.

Failing to grab Meagher, the mob marched on the house of his top lieutenant in the Irish Brigade, Colonel Robert Nugent, wounded at Fredericksburg by a bullet to the stomach. They sacked his house, cursing him as a “nigger-lover,” and raised cheers for Jefferson Davis. In the colonel’s den, enraged men slashed a portrait of Meagher. The face of the general, the man who had been hailed a decade earlier as the Irish American savior—“a chief to unite and guide them”—was cut and trampled and burned in the bonfire of hatred in Nugent’s home.

“I am sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish,” wrote George Templeton Strong, the influential New York lawyer and diarist, a pillar of the city’s Episcopalian elite. “They are brutal, base, cruel cowards.” Further, he saw them as subhuman, as he recorded in his private notes—“creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest.” He wanted them gone from the country.

Meagher had gone to war as an agnostic on slavery, something he shrugged off. “It cannot be changed,” he’d said. Now he was evangelical in his opposition to it, as he tried to find a larger meaning for the deaths of so many of his young countrymen he’d led to battle.

“How was it I could bring myself to be an apologist of the slavery existing in the South?” How indeed. Ambition was the simple answer.

He was castigated in the Irish American press, called a fool, a Lincoln lover, a “negrophiliac,” among the printable epithets.

He visited Lincoln in late November 1863. The president had been in bed for much of the prior two weeks. He had looked ghostly, people noticed, when he rose to speak the 272 words of the Gettysburg Address on November 19. On the train ride back to Washington, he felt feverish and weak.

His doctors diagnosed the illness as a form of smallpox. On the twenty-sixth, the day he met Meagher and a fellow Irish officer, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries wrote, “The President is quite unwell.” Meagher, a general without soldiers, meant enough to Lincoln that he was the only guest the sick president consented to see over the course of several days.

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.

“You may ‘emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free,” the Confederate president declared, even “if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”

In the three years since the first big battle of the war, Meagher had lost his brigade. But Sherman had lost his mind. The cinnamon-haired officer fell into an unshakable depression in the fall of 1861.

Newspaper headlines proclaimed what Sherman himself had feared: the general was “insane.”

At the start of a new year, 1862, the darkness passed. He revived his career under General Grant. “He stood by me when I was crazy,” Sherman said of Grant. “And I stood by him when he was drunk.”

No one expected Meagher’s wounded warriors to do anything more than put up a show of limping bluecoats to keep a desperate cadre of graybacks from attacking the railroad between Chattanooga and Knoxville.

As Meagher had molded immigrants from Five Points into some of the best fighters in the Union Army, he made this provisional army into a formidable force.

Over three months, Meagher’s convalescents did what was asked of them: the rebels were rebuffed, allowing the Northerners to march freely to the sea.

Meagher won high praise from his commanding officer. “Your splendid success . . . and the harmony and good order maintained by your men throughout the district have given me much satisfaction,” wrote General James B. Steedman. “The officers of the entire command” were proud of him. Well, not the entire command. Sherman withheld any praise for the Irish general.

Out of harm’s way, with idle days on the railroad, the provisional army lived up to the earlier low expectations.

By the time they arrived in Pittsburgh, in January of 1865, the 6,500 remaining convalescents were more trouble than help.

“The whole command is but a mob of men in uniform,” one general complained to Sherman. That was it. The Union brass had seen enough of the Irish general. Meagher was mustered out of the army in March.

Richmond was abandoned on April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis and his war cabinet fleeing town on one of the last operating rail lines.

Mobs ran through Richmond, elegant no more, setting flame to Confederate currency, axing open barrels of liquor from the cellars of Virginia aristocrats. By dawn, the capital of the Confederacy looked like a garbage dump, smoke curling from piles of rubble. Lincoln went to Richmond with his twelve-year-old son, Tad, sat in the very seat of the rebel president, the American flag overhead.

In January, the president had cajoled reluctant Democrats to join Republicans in Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery in every part of the United States.

Nearly 140,000 men of Irish birth fought for the Union, a third of them from New York City. Only two other units suffered greater battlefield losses than the Irish Brigade—a casualty rate of more than 50 percent.

Thomas and Libby would close out their New York life, their military life, their eastern life. The wilds of Montana Territory called. Meagher was forty-one years old when he lit out for the sunset side of the continent.

Free land: the two most powerful words in the nineteenth-century American West. Single women, former slaves, immigrants—all qualified.

After forming the Vigilance Committee, two dozen men swore out an oath: “We the undersigned uniting ourselves in a party for the laudable purpos of arresting thievs & murderers & recovering stollen property do pledge ourselves upon our sacred honor each to all others & solemnly swear that we will reveal no secrets, violate no laws of right & never desert each other or our standard of justice so help us God as our witness our hand & seal this 23rd of December 1863.” The “laws of right” weren’t written down. Right was what the Vigilance Committee, meeting in secret, judged to be right.

Wilbur Sanders, an attorney, the leading voice of the Vigilance Committee, joined the abductors at the moment of the killing. Stone-faced, he addressed the sheriff. “It is useless for you to beg for your life,” he said. “You are to be hanged. You cannot feel harder about it than I do, but I cannot help it if I could.” Plummer still begged. Just a year or so earlier, he’d opened his home and his town to Sanders and Edgerton, given them Thanksgiving dinner. What were the charges? He had the right to a trial. At the gallows, the rope was tied around Plummer’s neck and pulled tight. The doomed man asked for a good drop.

By the end of that month, twenty people had been killed after being targeted by the Vigilance Committee. Meagher knew nothing of these citizen-sanctioned murders. He had only just arrived in the territory. But here, meet one of the good men. Governor Edgerton introduced him to his nephew, Wilbur Sanders—the same Wilbur Sanders who was the guiding voice and moral authority behind the wave of hangings, burnings and assorted homicides committed under the cover of do-it-yourself justice.

Meagher threw himself into governing.

The most prominent vigilantes and Republican leaders were also Freemasons. Their leader, Wilbur Sanders, was the Right Worshipful Grand Master of Virginia City’s Masonic Lodge. The Masons and vigilantes were coconspirators in a raft of executions.

Their stated goal was “the protection, improvement and purification of our little society.” In practice, that translated to meetings that were boiler room hot with anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant rhetorical steam.

Viewed with suspicion when he arrived, Meagher was, by midfall, an enemy of the secretive syndicate that had been running Montana by terror.

As 1865 came to a close, the executioners had murdered thirty-seven people in barely two years’ time—“the deadliest campaign of vigilante killing in American history,” the author Frederick Allen later concluded.