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

by Tim Egan

Fear, like self-pity, is a prison of its own making.

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.

Meagher felt there had to be a coda of grand consequence. He had lived through the genocidal horror of the famine, said goodbye to friends swept out in the migration of two million Irish. He was bound to the penal colony of Australia, had become a free man in the most clamorous of free nations, fought and nearly died trying to hold this new nation together and now was looking for a home under the big sky of Montana. He had known the Liberator of the Old World, Daniel O’Connell, and the Great Emancipator of the New World, Abraham Lincoln. He had lived a dozen lives in his two score and three—lived an abundance of horror and no small number of triumphs. But more than that, he’d shaped his times. There were newly free men and women in the penal colony down under, in part because of him. There were free blacks in America, in part because of him. There would one day be a free Ireland, in part because of him. To escape England’s gallows, Tasmania’s sharks, the Confederacy’s shells, even a train wreck that killed most of the people in his car—this was more than ordinary luck. Surely, something magnificent was still in store for him, something befitting this life.

His vanishing is one of the longest-lasting mysteries of the American West. His life is the story of Ireland.

For the better part of seven centuries, to be Irish in Ireland was to live in a land not your own.

The Virgin Queen allowed Shakespeare and Marlowe to reach great heights during her long reign, but Elizabeth had not a thimble of tolerance for a people she considered primitive. To encourage the elimination of one musical aspect of that culture, the government paid a bounty to anyone who turned in outlaws of the harp.

What had the Irish done to deserve these cruelties? They had refused to become English.

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.

Does it matter that this Adrian IV, the former Nicholas Breakspear, was history’s only English pope? Or that the language of the original papal bull, with all its authoritative aspersions on the character of the Irish, has never been authenticated?

So with the blessing of God, a Norman force landed not far from Wexford in 1169, followed by an invasion of Henry and his army two years later in Waterford. He was the first English king to leave a footprint on Irish soil, and would not be the last to pronounce the people ungovernable. He could have learned from the Romans, who called the island Hibernia and deemed it not worth the lost lives needed to force it into their empire.

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.

Irish Catholics were ordered to become Anglicans or forfeit their land and all their holdings. Outside the Pale, this edict had the effect of a mortal ordering the sun to rise at midnight on a winter’s eve.

Throughout Ireland, Cromwell left behind “a name for cruelty such as the passage of three hundred years has scarcely erased from memory,” wrote the historian Giovanni Costigan.

Even as the Renaissance brought fresh light, art and thought to Europe, as the Reformation prompted half of the continent to turn away from the medieval mandates of Rome, as the Age of Enlightenment spawned thousands of conversions from belief to reason, the Irish clung to their Roman Catholicism. For the same reason that hurling never died, that the harp became a national symbol, that epic poems were still recited in Gaelic, religion was a way for a conquered nation to remain defiantly Irish.

From the Peruvian Andes, the potato found its way across the Atlantic in the 1500s. No one can say with certainty how it came to Ireland, though one consistent story has it that potatoes washed ashore after the wreck of the Spanish fleet in 1588. Scholars have disproven a long-held English version: that Sir Walter Raleigh first planted this miracle of starch and nutrition on his estate near Cork in 1589. And it likely didn’t come from Scotland, where clerics banned the potato because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.

“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.”

English rule had produced the poorest country in Europe, and also a nation whose most ambitious people left for better lives.

Why was there no future for them at home, he wondered in a later recollection, “compelled to surrender the land of their love and pride?”

Thomas pestered the Jesuits in the same way he had bothered his father. Why are we not allowed to govern ourselves? Why can’t we speak our language? (Gaelic was still the primary tongue for one and a half million Irish.) And what future is there for a nation whose landowners live in another country, collecting rents from the native inhabitants? To these queries, the priests told the boy to mind his mouth. The Jesuits spoke a half-dozen languages, but Irish nationalism was not one of them.

“As far as Ireland was concerned, they left us like blind and crippled children, in the dark,” he said. “They never spoke of Ireland. Never gave us, even what is left of it, her history to read.”

On the eve of his departure, he vowed never to hold his tongue, and with the courage of someone yet to shave his first whisker, he laughed when warned that such a trait would buy him a death sentence in Ireland. He dashed off an ode to seizing life’s moments, concluding that “no one should be secure of reaching a happy old age.”

From the start, one thing was clear about this Irish student Meagher: the lad could talk. He enrolled in the School of Rhetoric, and dominated the debate society. He studied the great orators, learning how to build his case without letting sarcasm sink it. His memory of epic poems was startling—he could spring through the marathon, not missing a stanza. When the words weren’t coming out of his mouth, they poured forth on paper. He won a medal for a crisp essay on the evils of slavery in America.

The Act of Union, in the words of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, was “the union of a shark with its prey.”

An American visitor, the former slave Frederick Douglass, toured Ireland in the fall on a speaking tour, just as people were beginning to starve. Elegant in his tailored suits, quoting Dickens and Shakespeare, Douglass drew enormous crowds. “I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man—not as a thing, but as a child of the common Father of us all,” he wrote. But he was not prepared for the misery of hungry Irish peasants, living “in much the same degradation as the American slave.” He saw families in windowless mud hovels, ragged-dressed, listless on straw beds, gaunt from malnutrition. It was shocking.

Still, the English government took some precautions against a revolt of the hungry: boats laden with grain grown on Irish soil now left port under armed escort. When Thomas Meagher saw this curious sight in Waterford, he knew the struggle ahead was about much more than the science of potato blight.

What motivated Meagher, the fount of his fury, was the fast-developing famine; it epitomized all the wrongs of Ireland.

The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned.

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.

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

In 1845, the blight had destroyed nearly half of all the potatoes grown in Ireland, just as the government panel had predicted. But 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.

To the leaders of Young Ireland, the solution was obvious: shut down the ports and feed Irish-grown food to the dying.

Without slop to feed the pigs, which meant money to pay the landlord, 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.

Europe had not seen a famine on this scale since the Dark Ages.

As a country, Ireland could not do anything about the famine, for it had no government of its own.

The Americans sent corn, flour, clothing, from Jewish synagogues, from Quaker churches, from Catholic parishes in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The Choctaw Nation was particularly generous. The Indians were sympathetic, they said, because of the hunger they had endured during their Trail of Tears march out of their homeland nearly twenty years earlier. In England there was considerable debate over whether to even allow these food ships into Irish ports. What would that mean to the free market? To the price of grain grown by English farmers?

If anything, the new British authorities made life even more painful, passing a law that forbade a head of household from getting food relief if he held a quarter acre or more and had refused to give it up to the landlord. This swelled the ranks of the dispossessed, the homeless, the hungry.

At the same time, Russell also fortified the Irish garrisons. This, then, was the latest British response to Ireland’s national tragedy: let food flow freely out of the country, arrest and jail those who spoke for the famished, make it more difficult for peasants to stay on the land, and restock the army barricades—bullets over bread.

Thus the workhouse produced a reliable result: you went in a man, it was said, and came out a pauper.

And now was news of another, more efficient killer of the Irish—typhus, the disease that found its home in filthy, crowded spaces.

As press accounts of this latest scourge spread, even residents of Calcutta now sent relief.

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.

So it was simple after all, just as Meagher had stated: the Great Hunger was unfolding in the midst of great plenty.

What started as a trickle became a river of out-migrating people: almost a quarter million in 1847.

“The language of sedition,” he told a cheering crowd, “is the language of freedom.”

At the prime minister’s urging, Parliament rushed through a much harsher, much broader law: the Treason Felony Act, essentially making it a crime to be an Irish nationalist. Any slight against the Crown or Her Majesty’s government in Ireland would be considered grounds for a hard felony. This offense carried the penalty of “transportation”—the inventive British term for shipping someone out of the country to one of the Empire’s distant colonies, for labor or imprisonment. In fact, it was a vanishing.

two months earlier, Charles Trevelyan had declared the famine over, despite all evidence to the contrary. He’d seen early reports of peasant fields growing free of blight, and took the opportunity to proclaim victory and bring what passed for British relief efforts to a close once and for all. For his work during the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan had been knighted.

the British government dropped a legal bomb on the Irish: habeas corpus was suspended immediately, the country placed under martial law. Anyone could be arrested and held without cause, without hearing, without bail, even without being told what they were held for—indefinitely. As of July 22, 1848, the leading journalists, poets, barristers and orators of Young Ireland were criminals in the eyes of the Empire.

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

From the U.S. Congress, from newspapers in New York, Sydney, Toronto and even London, the Crown was castigated for sentencing these young men to death. How dare England condemn the savagery of other nations when it was throwing body parts of its brightest Irish subjects into the streets.

The royal clemency was transportation for life, which meant that four men who had been willing to die for Ireland would never see it again. They were crushed by the new sentence: they had expected execution or a pardon, but not purgatory at the other end of the world.