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

by Tim Egan

The next census would show that the nation’s population had fallen by nearly two million—one in four people had died or emigrated. Even Lord Lieutenant Clarendon felt England had committed something close to mass murder in the Ireland he oversaw.

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.

Peasants who had never been more than a few miles from their rural homes found themselves propelled through an ever larger, unfamiliar world: from the doorstep of a hut reclaimed by a landlord, to a fetid workhouse in the city, to the dank, crowded hold of a typhus-infected ship on the high seas. 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.

In a system where banishment was called transportation, “assignment” was the Empire’s euphemism for slave labor.

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.

As he had written while a schoolboy at Stonyhurst against slavery in the United States, he now mounted a vigorous takedown of state-sanctioned human bondage in Van Diemen’s Land. Coming from a convict, these words carried more than a hint of self-interest. But Meagher was on the side of inevitability. Of late, the Young Ireland felons had been welcomed into the homes of solid, landowning citizens of impeccable English lineage. In just a few years’ time, Her Majesty’s proper subjects in the penal colony had been won over by the Irish poets, orators, statesmen and wits exiled in their midst.

On election day, in a political triumph unmatched in Ireland, the ideas helped along by Meagher carried the day in the most distant outpost of the British Empire. The results sent a resounding message: those who wanted to put an end to the penal colony routed Denison’s loyalists and took control of the new legislative council. In short order, that council called for transportation’s demise. The governor was appalled at the rise of “the democratic spirit” and said it “needs to be checked” immediately.

Although it was clear, with the election results in Van Diemen’s Land and a change in the political winds in England, that transportation of convicts was headed for history’s attic, Denison made life worse for those still tied to life sentences. Anyone trying to escape would be shot.

Gold made Australia more profitable as a free man’s destination than a prisoner’s hold. The next year, the last convicts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, including another thousand Irish. Three years after that, in an effort to shake a half century of notoriety, the island changed its name to Tasmania. Transportation was over for all but the far western coast of Australia, north of Perth. And while the end of the convict ships did not mean that those who were under sentence were paroled or given more liberties, it took away whatever justification remained for the British Empire to discard its undesirables 14,000 miles from home.

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.

The Irish in America could write anything they wanted, mount a stage and vent without restraint against Britain, ridicule the queen, condemn the prime minister, slam Parliament, defy the Anglican Church, call out the men who let their ragged nation starve—and the Crown couldn’t touch them.

“Several churches have already been set on fire, and there is open talk of murder and pillage.” By the end of the year, De Smet feared for his life in a dangerous and hate-filled land. “I cannot say much about the United States,” he said. “American liberty and tolerance, so highly boasted, exists less in this Great Republic than in the most oppressed country of Europe.”

What a country: they would pay him to talk.

Thomas Senior was ageless in his energy, a family trait, but dour as before about the adventures of his globe-roaming criminal son. He was a member of the British Parliament still, reelected the year before, serving the government that had jailed, banished and continued to pursue his namesake son. While the younger Meagher seldom held a thought that went unspoken, his father had opened his mouth a mere half-dozen times during a decade in Parliament—and those were mostly formal utterances.

But the pardon left the escapees in America in a purgatory between New World and Old. These men would remain fugitives, the Crown declared. They had refused to apologize for their crimes or even admit to the wrongdoing of vexing Britain. The new prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was initially thought to be open to giving a pass to the prominent Irishmen in America. He soon made his intentions clear: this would never happen, for they “had broken all ties of honour” by escaping.

He called himself a “homeless exile”—out of opportunities to liberate his old country. There was an outside chance, though, to help liberate the enslaved millions of his new one.

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.

To those who took the country’s founding principles to heart, the rise of the nativists was dispiriting. “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.’”

In all, forty-eight people were killed. “It is, undoubtedly, the worst accident by railroad collision that has occurred on this continent,” the New York Times reported. For Meagher, though hailed as heroic by witnesses and the press, it was another dark portent.

But Irish and blacks, having found much in common in their shared misery, now found much that ripped them apart. The competition for jobs at the bottom stiffened during the latest of the periodic panics that crashed the economy.

Lincoln refused to pander to the nativists shopping for a political home. “I am not a Know-Nothing,” he said. “That is certain. How can I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?”

The Know-Nothings, organized behind the new American Party, ran Millard Fillmore, the former president. He stood for nothing, and was routed, finishing third.

Without comment, Meagher also ran a few of John Mitchel’s letters from the South. His old partner for freedom in Ireland had become a vigorous promoter of human bondage in America, even as the South fell further behind the rest of the world, backward and isolated.

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.”

Mitchel started a proslavery paper out of Knoxville, baited the leading voices of the North and inflated the most radical voices in the South. The same muscular wordsmith who had backed the risky speeches of Thomas Meagher for a free Ireland, who saw nobility in the lowliest peasant dying of fever in the corner of a grass hut, now put his prose to work on behalf of white supremacy.

When Smith O’Brien, on his tour of the United States in 1859, met with his former conspirator in Irish liberation, he was appalled at the change in Mitchel. The man he thought he knew so well, Smith O’Brien wrote, had become “a formidable monster.”

Frederick Douglass could not understand this. During his trip to Ireland in 1845, then about the same age as most of the well-spoken rebels, Douglass had found a country of empty pantries that still opened its doors to him. “One of the most pleasing features of my visit thus far has been the total absence of all manifestations of prejudice against me on account of my color,” he wrote. But in the late 1850s in America, he saw a hardening of Irish attitudes toward blacks. “Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens,” he said. “And no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have these same Irish people. The Irish who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro. They are taught that he eats the bread that belongs to them.”

“What do you think of affairs now?” “I don’t know what to think,” said Meagher. “I never saw such a change in public opinion. I feel like one carried away by a torrent.” Would Irish America’s best-known voice join the volunteers to defend the capital? Where, exactly, was his heart? Hadn’t he expressed sympathy for the South? “Damn them!” he snapped. “Damn them that didn’t let that flag alone!” “If you feel that way, perhaps you might think of coming with us,” a member of New York’s 69th suggested. “I’ll think of it.”

Jumping into the fray, he pumped up crowds with daily speeches, cajoled the comfortable among his influential friends, roused immigrants in the tenements. His rallying cry was consistent: rarely a mention of slavery or Lincoln, but a fight for America coupled with the promise of an eventual fight for Ireland,

For this, the South could not forgive him, for many Confederates had hoped Meagher would join Mitchel in the rebel cause. “Never again shall the name Thomas Francis Meagher be united with any of our Southern institutions,” wrote one Virginia paper. If anything, such slights only hastened the transition Meagher had to make in order to kill Virginians.

Meagher was at the front, his wife at his side, each on a horse. He scoffed at those who said a woman did not belong at the head of an army going off to war.

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 Irish had performed admirably, as even Sherman noted afterward in his official report. The “sewage from the city” won praise from both sides. The immigrants charged when others would not. They held firm and fired back when others threw down their weapons. They were among the last of the Union soldiers to retreat.

Someone had to fill the void, to lead the Irish. No sooner had Meagher returned to New York than requests poured in for him to take up where Corcoran had left off. Orator, barrister, scholar, journalist, revolutionary, adventurer and part-time soldier he was, but a commanding military officer? His little Zouave unit of volunteers had put up a fight at Bull Run, yes, but they’d been routed along with the other New Yorkers. Still, there would be no sitting out this war for Meagher. After a few days at home, he went back to Washington to look after the wounded from the 69th.

“It is a fact that after all her denunciations and horror of slavery, England is for the South, where slavery is in full blast, and against the North, where it has long been extinct,” he thundered in Boston’s Music Hall one night in September 1861. “In spite of Shakespeare and Bacon, England is no sentimentalist, no poet, and no philosopher,” he said. It is a nation where “cotton is more precious than political principle.”

The Empire was outraged by the seizure. “You may stand for this,” Prime Minister Palmerston told his cabinet. “But damned if I will!” He ordered troops to Canada, a menace on the American border, and demanded an apology from Lincoln. A red-faced England, bullying and saber-rattling, making demands of the United States on behalf of the South: Meagher could scarcely have asked for better material.

Shiloh, the surprise attack against Grant’s soldiers on the Tennessee River, had produced a deadly marker: more people fell in that one battle than in all the wars in American history up to that point.

War made them belong.

So there it was from on high, without filter or equivocation: the Irish would not fight to liberate enslaved blacks. God himself may well have spoken. Line drawn. In his defiance, the archbishop had the support of the Irish American press.

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 story produced a hearty rumble of claps. The Irish loved being told they were fearless bastards, crazy and unpredictable. And Meagher loved being called reckless, half mad, a life of improbable invulnerability riding along on a white horse—let ’em talk down south.

A political general was the insulting term for those high-ranking officers who never had any formal military training, never went to West Point or fought in the Mexican War. General Burnside, the career military man responsible for the most incompetent, wasteful battle of the war, was considered a real general. And Meagher’s appointment, it was said by many, was Lincoln’s sop to the Irish—the most glaring example of a political general. But after he’d held the line of a panicky retreat by other regiments at Bull Run, after he’d saved a division outside Richmond, after he took the Sunken Road at Antietam and now had seen his most hardened men cut to flesh bits on the cold ground below Marye’s Heights, after he’d been twice thrown from his horse in this war—the political general was due some respect.

Jackson had always believed that a righteous God had directed the general in battles on behalf of the slaveholders. If so, the providential design at the end was a cruel twist: shot by his own men, Stonewall Jackson died eight days later.

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.

One of the New Yorkers who had hired a substitute to fill his place in the army was a philanthropist and active Republican—Theodore Roosevelt Sr. The decision haunted his son Teddy; the guilt would roll over into another generation of family warriors trying to make up for the missed call to duty.

The Irish, at least those in uniform or owning a business, would not be spared the wrath of other Irish.

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.

He remembered the saintly Smith O’Brien shaming him with a question: “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. Meagher never shied from the role so many of the Irish wanted him to play as their leader in America. His fellow exiles were Democrats—foes of abolition—and so was he, by his earlier silence.

After ex-slaves—paid less than other Northern soldiers, mistreated, fighting for a nation that would not let most of them vote or hold office—had fought and died for the Union, Meagher came out publicly for full rights to “our black comrades on the battlefield.” He defended them as he had defended starving Irish peasants grabbing pitchforks to stare down British artillery.