The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan
Ignorant of his future burden, Meagher thumbed through Doggett’s Directory in search of familiar names. For one day more, he was a stranger in a new land. Dublin’s loss, following the uprising of 1848, was New York’s gain. Young Ireland’s prominent plotters did not dwell in Five Points. They lived well, as barristers, publishers, journalists and politicians—power brokers many of them, still in their twenties. They joined the company of other Irish who had prospered in the city. That archbishop, John Hughes, was the son of poor farmers in County Tyrone. Now he was the most influential cleric in the country, signing his letters to the editor, his church edicts and personal notes with his signature cross, which looked like a dagger. And so he was known as Dagger John. Another Tyrone man, Charles P. Daly, would soon be chief justice of the city’s common courts. The district attorney—the law in New York City—was John McKeon. “What he is,” a profile in the weekly Irish American exulted, “any of us might be.” In the Old World, the police were enforcers of a brutal system that kept the natives in their place. In the New World, they were heroic, and many spoke Gaelic. Half the cops in the Sixth Ward were Irish.
Meagher’s destination on this day was 39 William Street, in a hive of silk-vested prosperity a few steps from Wall Street. Here were the law offices of Richard O’Gorman and John Blake Dillon—two great friends of Meagher’s, and two men who might have been hanged, drawn and quartered had they not fled. Dillon, a cofounder of the Nation, had been with Meagher in the shadows during the last days of the uprising. After the Empire put a bounty on his head, he escaped to France and New York. A family friend and schoolboy chum from Clongowes Wood, O’Gorman had joined Meagher in Paris in 1848 for the ill-fated mission to enlist the help of a new French government. After the failure of the revolt, O’Gorman hid out in the wilds of County Clare for a month, the subject of a manhunt aided by a huge reward for his capture. Four years after the debacle in a Tipperary cabbage patch, both rebels were well-compensated, well-connected elites in the fastest-growing city in the world.
When the partners greeted the man who walked into their office, they did a double take. The guest was stout, no longer boyish, his face the color of stained walnut. But when Meagher opened his mouth, all doubt dissipated—he was the same sparkler of a man they had known in Dublin, his declarative sentences delivered with customary snap and punch. They embraced and pinched each other’s cheeks as if they were ghosts brought to full-fleshed form.
Many other Young Ireland coconspirators were building new lives in New York, Meagher’s mates informed him. Michael Corcoran was living above a tavern at 42 Prince Street. Corcoran had Ireland’s struggles in his blood: his great-great-great-great-grandfather was Patrick Sarsfield, defender of Galway and Limerick against William of Orange in the late seventeenth century. Born to a modest family in County Sligo, Corcoran joined the Royal Irish Constabulary at nineteen, but didn’t last long as an enforcer of the Empire. The famine radicalized him. He became a double agent, working for the Crown by day, undermining it by night. At last he took off his badge and took up with Young Ireland. Corcoran, O’Gorman, Dillon and Meagher—all outlaws in Ireland. Here, free men. And get this—we have the run of the city! This could happen, one day soon perhaps, in Waterford or Cork. British troops, don’t forget, had taken over New York for seven years of the American Revolution. They torched buildings, forced people out of their homes, harassed Catholics—so true to form, the Empire. Under occupation, the city dwindled to 12,000 people. General Howe had landed on Staten Island with the largest expeditionary force that England had yet raised. And now look at this town: New York’s population had quadrupled in the last thirty years, with nary a bewigged old Tory in sight. 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.
America was a fascinating mess, O’Gorman told Meagher: wild, profane, dangerous, but it worked. At least he thought it worked. The fastest-growing political party in the United States at the time—the Know-Nothings—did not. To them, the former colonies were losing their Englishness, too fast, to the Irish, to the Germans, to the Jews, to all the foreigners clamoring for rights. The Know-Nothings vowed to close the gates and keep the newly arrived from becoming citizens. 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.
Word galloped around the city that the daring escapee was on American soil. It spread from the law office on William Street to Five Points, to the saloons, to the armory. A young acolyte, Michael Cavanagh, who had seen dozens of Meagher speeches in Dublin, tracked him down in the city of Brooklyn. “When I knew him in Ireland, he was a handsome, well-built young fellow,” Cavanagh recalled. “Now his form was much more robust in appearance and his features bronzed by exposure to the southern sun and the sea breeze during his circumnavigation of the globe . . . His youthful lightheartedness and tone of voice had undergone no perceptible changes with the vicissitudes of his fortunes. Frank and free, he was Tom Meagher—the best beloved of his race and generation . . . On him were centered the hopes of his exiled countrymen on this continent, to unite them in one solid organized body for the attainment of Ireland’s freedom.”
Expectations, expectations. Meagher couldn’t slip into everyday anonymity, couldn’t keep leisurely hours in the office of Dillon & O’Gorman. During his second night in America, soldiers from the 69th New York State Militia showed up outside O’Gorman’s home in lower Manhattan, where Meagher had gone for dinner. The regiment was Irish, with a tougher edge and less blarney than any of the dozen or so formal organizations of expatriate Hibernians. On this occasion, they brought the Brooklyn Coronet Band with them. The crowd swelled to more than 7,000 people. They serenaded the fugitive, cheered and fired guns into the air. Irishmen with guns—what fantasy was this? They demanded he speak: a few words, please, from the greatest orator of his generation. He was flabbergasted. He had done little of merit, he protested. The uprising of 1848 was a bust. He had escaped the Crown’s noose, yes, and its pitiful island prison in the Antipodes, but had nothing to show for his time on earth. A million people had died of starvation in his homeland, and yet England never displayed a hint of remorse for its role. And it was not right to exult in his freedom while his friends—five of the seven Young Ireland leaders, Smith O’Brien, Mitchel, Martin, O’Donoghue, O’Doherty—remained bound to Van Diemen’s Land. These few words did not still the crowd. People demanded more. A parade. A feast. A citywide celebration.
ESCAPE OF THOS. F. MEAGHER
HIS ARRIVAL IN THIS CITY
The New York Times greeted the escape as a great feat. “His arrival has created universal satisfaction here.” The Irish American splashed a drawing of his handsome visage across the top of its front page, recounting his life and the details of his getaway. The story quoted from a dozen papers across the United States, after the news had gone out by telegraph.
POWERFUL ENTHUSIASM
THE WHOLE COUNTRY RISING
Here was the man the Irish had been waiting for. They hailed him for resisting family wealth and comfort, for his call to arms when his country had been “turned into a huge cemetery.” This “apostle of freedom,” as the paper labeled him, had “looked danger and death in the face like a man.” A hero, without doubt, perhaps a savior. “All honor to Thomas Francis Meagher.” The press in Ireland was equally effusive, a few weeks later. “Meagher in America!” wrote the Nation. “What a triumph, what happiness in the words!” They had high hopes for the next act of a man who had yet to reach his twenty-ninth birthday. “We conceive a great career for him under the flag of Washington. He does not go there as a political speculator . . . He goes there to lead and amalgamate the Irish ra
More expectations. Within weeks, Meagher clubs sprang up in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Boston to Baltimore, west in Ohio, south in Charleston. Soon the clubmen were singing a song, “The Escape of Meagher.” In Philadelphia, a militia calling itself the Meagher Guard was formed, setting a pattern for other cities. Speaking invitations poured in. The governor of Maryland asked for a visit. The governor of Indiana opened his mansion—at your service. Colleges, state legislatures, mayors, parish priests. In the nation’s capital, senators, congressmen and judges insisted they be allowed to pay tribute to him. Even the president asked for Meagher. But Millard Fillmore would have to wait.
He needed a drink, to collect his thoughts, some time alone, rest. This welcome had gotten out of hand. It was too much, too fast, a dizzying clamor for a man just days removed from nearly a half year on a small ship on the open seas. He couldn’t walk outside without being recognized, slapped on the back, sloppy-kissed on the cheek. Thousands of people wanted a chance to “grasp you by the hand, to testify to you their adoration,” as a resolution from Brooklyn’s governing council had it. This was read to his face, in the street, after dignitaries waited for him outside his temporary residence. Meagher spent most of a week responding to the glut of correspondence and a stack of invitations. They could not be stopped. The Common Council of New York honored Meagher at the Astor House, a hotel whose master suites were larger than the Lake Sorell cottage. It would be an insult, they let him know, not to show up. Here they outlined plans for a citywide public reception, and offered to put all the services of New York at his disposal. Again Meagher deferred with just a few words.
“Whilst my country remains in sorrow and subjection, it would be indelicate of me to participate in the festivities you propose,” he said at the Astor House. Even so short a response produced a call for more. Nonsense. Speak! As was said at Clongowes, at Stonyhurst, in Conciliation Hall, from the stumps of eucalyptus trees in Tasmania: the boy could talk. He brought up “the companions of my exile,” saying, “my heart is with them at this hour.” He said he had lost none of the vigor to fight for a free Ireland. He longed to see his country, to see his wife, to see his father, to see soggy old Waterford and the River Suir, to walk the Burren up north, to toss a twig into the Shannon. He wanted the English boot off Ireland’s throat. But he could not return—he was forbidden—so long as a life sentence hung over him. He was a fugitive, albeit a suddenly famous one; as such, he would always have to look over his shoulder. Mostly, he wanted New Yorkers to know how grateful he was to them. “To this land I came, as an outcast to seek an honorable home, as an outlaw to claim the protection of a flag that is inviolable . . . a quiet sanctuary in the home of Washington.” Quiet it would never be.
He lost a son before he ever saw him. Catherine gave birth while Meagher was in the middle of the South Pacific. A boy. But sickly, just like his mother. They had planned in advance to name the child, if a lad, Henry Emmet Fitzgerald Meagher. Smith O’Brien comforted Catherine, as did her highwayman father. The dead infant was carried down to a cemetery in a small cedar coffin and buried behind St. John’s Church in Richmond, Van Diemen’s Land. The baby had lived only a few months, his remains now forever a part of penal colony soil. When he died, on June 8, 1852, Meagher had no idea even of his birth. The mails were four to six months behind the news. He had expected his Tasmanian wife to start making her way to Ireland, to be with the Meagher family, and then to join him in America. In the days of his expansive reception, he looked forward to a reunion of a young family of three.
The accolades continued to pour in. St. John’s College—later Fordham—situated on an old farm off the Bronx River, gave him an honorary degree. This from the Jesuits, who used to torture him at Stonyhurst. And speaking of school days, here was Patrick Smyth, the devil—his favorite mate. They’d known each other since their parents had dressed them in short pants. Smyth was full of international mischief, working with the Irish Directory to get political prisoners out of Tasmania using funds from wealthy New York donors. He had plans to spring John Mitchel. Smyth joined Meagher for a morning neither man could resist: a review of the New York state militias on the Fourth of July. Hundreds of soldiers on horse and on foot passed by, bayonets gleaming in the sun, swords at their sides, hurrahs with every step. The exile was delighted. “Would to God that we had these men upon the old sod,” he said to his friend. At the end of the review, the major general proposed a cheer: “To Thomas Francis Meagher—a traitor to England!”
Three weeks later, another review, this one much larger, at Castle Garden, the old fort at the tip of Manhattan, designed to repel the British in the War of 1812, soon to be an immigrant landing depot. This was the parade he had tried to resist, but after two months of pressure, he gave in. Soldiers again, from militias all around the Northeast, “a great muster of the exiled children of the Gael,” as one witness remembered it. This time, the orator orated—for almost an hour, his first speech before an American audience. What some listeners remembered were two passages, one an ode to a people whose past was soaked in sorrow, the other a celebration of the new nation that gave them refuge. “The history of Ireland suggests despondency, and reconciles us, by anticipation, to the worst. Yet, as her sufferings have been long, her happiness shall be great.” And then, to the United States: “Here, the poorest trader that drives an honest bargain in the meanest quarter of the city—the poorest merchant who sheds his sweat upon the garret for his bread—is cheered by the proud thought that he, as well as the wealthiest, is an active and essential component of the State.”
As atop the mountain of Slievenamon, the July sun did not make the words spoil or the crowds wither. The Famine Irish in America wanted him to lead. Meagher was reluctant to get involved in national affairs; he was in a no man’s land, as strange in its way as his Australian prison. He was not a citizen, had no rights of the republic. His passport was English and convict. The Empire wanted him for high crimes against the Crown. He was living day to day, at the mercy of his host nation. He quickly tried to change that. On August 9, Meagher appeared in Superior Court and announced his plan to become an American, taking an oath of intent. With relish, he unshackled himself from his jailer. “I, Thomas Francis Meagher, do declare on oath this is my intention to become a citizen of the United States and to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign Prince, Potentate, State or Sovereignty whatever, and particularly the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” Damn, that felt good, Meagher confided.
It wasn’t long before the attacks began. The ranks of the Know-Nothings swelled. What was happening to the United States was a conquest, they claimed, indirect and unplanned, by foreign hordes, unknowing of our ways, with foreign values. No country on earth had tried to form a common bond without common ancestry—it could not be done. And America was not by design a haven for the world’s rejects. It was a Protestant nation, Anglo-Saxon, and would descend into Babylon if it allowed itself to be mixed with “mongrel races” and “Papists,” the Know-Nothings charged. There was yet no statue welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. The young country had thrown off a monarch, yes, and the superficial trappings of class, rank and title, but it was full of Anglophiles still.
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. At a huge rally in Kensington, Pennsylvania, where immigrant textile mill workers and factory hands lived, one speaker said the Irish were “scum unloaded on American wharves.” The nativists stormed through Irish neighborhoods, burning St. Michael’s Church, St. Charles Seminary and St. Augustine’s Church. The mobs moved on to Philadelphia proper, forcing the mayor to declare martial law. When a nun stood in the door o
Refining their tactics in the 1850s, the Know-Nothings joined forces with the temperance movement and pushed for prohibition of alcohol, restricted immigration and no citizenship for the masses filling the tenements. They counted a million members nationwide. “Every day the papers tell of attacks on Catholics, especially the Irish,” Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, an influential French-born Jesuit, wrote a friend in the summer of 1854. “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.”