The Immortal Irishman

  The Know-Nothings went directly after Meagher, trying to scuff the hero with planted newspaper stories about his bad character, and with a song to counter the one celebrating his escape. In the nativist version, he was a coward, a wife abandoner, a whoremonger. “This reptile snake,” the song’s lyrics proclaimed. “This wordy-warrior knave!” He was shamed for the way he fled Tasmania, a disreputable act for a man living by a gentleman’s code. Further, his freedom would never have been possible without “Papist aid”—that global Catholic conspiracy, a centerpiece of Know-Nothing obsessions. Of course, the nativists didn’t particularly care about the British Empire’s code of honor for transported prisoners. But they did care about preventing a leader rising from the Hibernians of New York. “As there is no word in the Irish language synonymous with Scoundrel,” went one takedown, anonymously written and widely reprinted, “henceforth let us use the name of Meagher.”

  To the Irish, the attacks on them went to the heart of their ambitions and character. They had left genocidal starvation in a conquered land to thrive in a free one. Without citizenship, stepping up would be difficult. As for the campaign to ban liquor, whiskey was uisge baugh—the water of life. The pubs and basement bars, more than 500 of them on the Lower East Side alone, served as communal dens and political wards. Church and saloon were the two main institutions. The Irish became Democrats almost to a man, because they were the enemies of the Know-Nothings. And in New York they became Tammany Hall Democrats, whose first order of business before every meeting was to read aloud parts of the Declaration of Independence, that robust denunciation of all the British wrongs against a subject people. New York needed muscle to build a vast sewage system, to pave the streets, to install the web of tracks for streetcars that would carry thirty-five million passengers a year by decade’s end. Tammany would provide the labor, and get a piece of every dime to the public works.

  Meagher followed a hurried route to citizenship before the Know-Nothings could close the way. But he also had to make a living. He could study for the New York bar and join Dillon & O’Gorman. Writing was a brighter prospect. Yet a prose-cloistered Hermit of New York City would fare no better than the Hermit on the Lake. What could he do? For a man with a restless tongue, the solution was obvious: speak. In the fall of 1852, he was booked into New York’s Metropolitan Hall for his first lecture, on the penal colony of Australia. A crush of people showed up, including many non-Irish, waiting in line for hours before the doors opened, paying 50 cents to hear the Young Tribune. He did not disappoint. The New York Times reported that 6,000 people packed the hall. The New York Herald wrote, “Never has that building so filled with human beings before.” Afterward, Meagher was given a check for $1,650—more money than he had ever earned for anything. What a country: they would pay him to talk.

  He toured for a year. Albany and Utica, Buffalo and St. Louis. He was greeted with a thirty-two-gun salute in Massachusetts, and feted by the Meagher Guard in the Know-Nothing war zones around Philadelphia. In an age when well-crafted, finely delivered speech was king, in parlor or theater, Meagher was soon a sought-after celebrity. Along the way, in the fall, he put in many good words on behalf of the Democratic candidate for the highest office in the land. And that candidate repaid the favor. President-elect Franklin Pierce invited Meagher to his inauguration. Pierce huddled in private with the exile at the Willard Hotel, the city’s finest, where incoming power resided before moving a few blocks over to the White House. In less than a year, the convict Tom Meagher had gone from muttering dirty jokes around a smoky fire in a Tasmanian shepherd’s hut to gold-rimmed tea service with the most powerful man in America. “I am rejoiced to see that the brilliance of his oratory has been in no respect diminished by the long eclipse which he has endured in Irish prisons and the forests of Van Diemen’s Land,” Smith O’Brien wrote a friend upon hearing of Meagher’s reception.

  Meagher’s wife got a similar welcome in Ireland. When Catherine arrived in Waterford in June of 1853, upwards of 20,000 people turned out to greet her. The mayor spoke of her as a patriot’s angel, leading the town’s favorite son out of the despair of his banishment. “You found him a lonely exile, separated from all that could comfort and console him, and you renounced home and friends to cheer and soothe his sorrows . . . You crossed twelve thousand miles of ocean in search of him.” Considerable searching remained. She was not a public person; she recoiled at the crowds and the rapturous treatment from the Irish press. She preferred not to speak. The elder Meagher welcomed Bennie as a lost daughter. And in the sixty-four-year-old patriarch she found a comforting hand and a steady soul. Together, they sailed for America.

  Meagher had moved into the Metropolitan Hotel, at Broadway and Prince Street, living off the earnings of his lecture circuit. His father and Bennie arrived in late July, peak cruelty of the city’s humid summers. It had been four years since Thomas had seen his father, and nineteen months since he had kissed his wife. 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. His wealth was fabulous, said by the New York Times to be in excess of $700,000—an exaggeration, but not by much. The famine had subsided at last, after the nation had been emptied of its people. The country was exhausted and hollowed out. As to the exile: what ungodly thing was he up to in this loud, steaming city? Young Meagher shared his enthusiasm for the big land—full of Irish, full of young people, full of opportunity. A convict anywhere in the British Empire, here he counted a president and senators among his friends. And down the street, at Niblo’s Theater, the “T. F. Meagher Polka” was performed nightly, rousing the sweaty masses to the dance floor.

  All of this meant little to Bennie. She had been happiest in the Lake Sorell cottage. The heat, the noise, the filth, the crowds of New York made her ill. Husband and wife shared grief at the loss of an infant son, and their lovemaking held the promise of another. He took her to Niagara Falls, to the Catskills, to the lake country of upstate New York, in search of air that was closer to the cool breezes of Ireland. The more he showed her of his new life, the less connected she felt to him. He had a destiny, he insisted, still vague, but some great purpose for living. He would love to return to Ireland, but it was impossible. The only hope was a blanket pardon for the seven leaders who’d been banished to Tasmania, currently the subject of considerable international lobbying. Friends who saw the couple commented on how oddly matched they were: he the extrovert, she the shrinking violet; he the sponge of others’ passions for causes and ideas, she the lover of solitude; he the verse-quoting, music-loving performer, she the early-to-bed keeper of her thoughts. “It is said they do not suit,” Smith O’Brien’s wife Lucy had noted in a letter, sharing the consensus view of the gossips. “His fault, I am told.”

  Thomas had a big birthday coming up on August 3—his thirtieth—just a few days away. The Meagher Club of Boston wanted to honor him at a banquet with all the cacophonous fixings of Irish sentimentality. His father and Bennie declined to join him, citing the weather: it was too unbearably sticky and hot to travel. At the same time, Meagher was weighing a fresh round of lecture invitations, out west in the fall. But Bennie was not inclined to sail down to Nicaragua, cross the isthmus of Central America, then journey up the coast to San Francisco. Instead, at summer’s end she opted for first-class passage and a quick trip back to Ireland with her unexcitable father-in-law. The plan was to reunite with her husband next spring. She was pregnant again. Maybe things would change.

  In Waterford, Catherine gave birth to a boy, aided by the best medical help in the province. It was not enough. The complications of the baby’s entry killed her on May 9, 1
854. She was twenty-two. Catherine was buried among Meagher family members at Faithlegg Cemetery. Meagher got the news a few weeks later. An Ireland he was prohibited from seeing now held the corpse of his young wife and the living presence of his son—Thomas Bennett Meagher. He had to find a way to get back to Waterford.

  In Tasmania, Patrick O’Donoghue plotted his escape. He had no money, and was not on the list of exiles chosen for subsidized freedom by New York’s Irish Directory. Between his binge drinking, incendiary essays and time in the Crown’s hard labor camps, the former law clerk put together his plan. In December 1852, nearly a year after Meagher had left the island, O’Donoghue disappeared into the Tasmanian wild—gentleman’s code be damned. He found his way to Melbourne, where he stowed away on a ship at anchor, at one point hiding in the idled stove of the engine room. After changing vessels in Tahiti, he arrived in San Francisco, a journey of 185 days. From there he went to Brooklyn, and summoned his wife and child from Ireland. No festivities, no press attention, no military parades awaited O’Donoghue. He was unknown, except as a steady friend to a well-spoken rebel. Meagher tried to renew ties with the man he once read to as the Swift sailed to banishment. He invited him to be his guest at the birthday party in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. At the event, O’Donoghue couldn’t control himself; a falling-down drunk, he became quarrelsome and incoherent. When he insisted on speaking before the assembly, a fight broke out with the organizers. O’Donoghue spent the night in jail, bloodied and dehydrated. In Brooklyn, in the week that his family was going through the quarantine process at Staten Island, O’Donoghue became violently ill with severe diarrhea. He sweated, stumbled and vomited, hugging the water closet. He died on January 22, 1854, without ever seeing the wife and child who were only a few miles across the water. The papers said he was estranged from his fellow escapees. In distance, that was true: Meagher was then in California, as was MacManus.

  John Mitchel fared better. He had Patrick Smyth and the Directory working for his family. The scheme was to get Mitchel’s clan and Smith O’Brien out, but the old man of Young Ireland refused. “This is your chance,” he told Mitchel. On June 9, 1853, Mitchel resigned his ticket-of-leave and headed for the bush on horseback. For the next seven weeks he hid out, disguised at one point as a priest. The sympathies of the island, in its last days as a convict destination, were with the escapee. He had many new friends. He found his getaway ship in Melbourne. In Tahiti, he boarded an American vessel, the Julia Ann. The asthmatic Mitchel, pinch-faced and thin, bowed to the flag of the country where he would next make his home.

  His arrival in New York, on November 29, 1853, was second only to Meagher’s. Four of Young Ireland’s seven had now done a bolt. An immense crowd met him at the harbor. Meagher jumped aboard the ship to welcome his fellow exile to America. In characteristic form, Mitchel told the press he intended to stir up trouble, and soon. Barely a month passed before he was putting out a newspaper, the Irish Citizen, a forum for his fire-breathing pen. His intent was to “expose the odious designs of England.” He soon turned to other targets: the Know-Nothings and, curiously, the Catholic Church, enemy of those same nativists. The clerics had betrayed Young Ireland, Mitchel felt, when they could have been at the front of the pitchfork brigade.

  Meagher was nominally a partner in this journalistic arson, but he spent most of 1854 in California. While he was gone, Mitchel offended some of New York’s most influential citizens and appalled his readers. He published letters that were sympathetic to slavery and its outspoken supporters. He attacked the book that had shaken the conscience of many Americans—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had sold 300,000 copies in a year. The novel was a response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made the free North an accomplice to the slaveholding South. All runaways were now property, to be returned by law to their masters. Posters in Boston warned blacks to avoid the police, for they had been empowered by the federal law to act as “kidnappers and slave catchers.” Where did Mitchel’s sympathy for slavery come from? The Irish, as Frederick Douglass had observed, were the blacks of Great Britain, barely a step above field hands in Alabama. Mitchel had written tough, passionate prose on behalf of starving peasants in bondage to absentee landlords. How could he view slavery as a benign institution? His friends were flummoxed. Charles Duffy, who once employed Mitchel as an editor at the Nation, was one of the few in his circle who had seen this side of him, while working with the writer in Dublin. He kept those views out of the Nation, a patron of free men everywhere. “Mitchel tried my patience sorely by defending Negro slavery and denouncing the emancipation of the Jews,” Duffy wrote. “I could not permit the Nation to be carried over to the side of oppression.”

  At his new home in Brooklyn, with his mother, his wife Jenny and their teenage boys, the Mitchel household was a refuge of plantation sympathy in the Yankee North. “My objection to slavery is the injury it does to the white masters,” Jenny wrote a friend in the spring of 1854. “You will find this hard to believe (as I did myself at first) but it is no less true that Negroes are happier in their state of slavery than when they get their freedom.” She wrote just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, allowing an expansion of slavery, by vote of the people, into the territories. With this, the human property market pushed north and west, to ground fast filling with people who had left countries where fate was determined at birth.

  In New York, which had abolished slavery in 1827, Mitchel was in the wrong state with the wrong cause in the wrong year. The South was much more receptive. He gave the commencement speech at the University of Virginia. Traveling farther, he found Richmond a charming rascal of a town, Charleston most welcoming and the grassy hills of Tennessee to be heaven. In a letter to an abolitionist, he described how he wanted a plantation of his own—“well-stocked with healthy Negroes.” Barely a year after arriving in New York, Mitchel closed his failing paper and moved to the South. There, nearly four million people—more than half the size of depleted Ireland—were property.

  That year, the last three of Young Ireland’s prominent convicts in Tasmania—William Smith O’Brien, John Martin, and Kevin O’Doherty—got the break they’d been waiting for. The British, at war with Russia in the Crimean Peninsula, were recruiting Irish to carry their fight. The penal colony’s political prisoners were a sticking point. Why fight for a jailor nation? Smith O’Brien was beloved, with a global following. The other two had been model convicts. Under considerable pressure, the Crown pardoned all three. The reprieve was conditional at first—they could not return to Great Britain—then without restriction. As they left the island, one of the banished, Martin, lamented that the land he’d come to as a prisoner was now more liberated than the one he was returning to as a free man. “Would to God that there were in my unhappy country a government to which I might be a loyal subject.” O’Doherty, who had kept Meagher company through lunches on that bridge in Tasmania, was reunited with his lover Eva, the poet, in Paris. They married, and he opened a practice in surgery, having completed all his medical requirements. Smith O’Brien decided to see the world before returning to his ancestral castle: India, the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, finally back in the embrace of Lucy and their seven children. He thought about running for Parliament again or touring the United States.

  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. Meagher was crushed. Had he not fled Tasmania, he would be free to return home and pick up his life. Now he would never see Waterford, never sit beside the slow-moving Liffey on a spring afternoon, never reminisce inside the stone walls of his first school, never again see Dublin or the Dingle Peninsula, never take the
stage at Conciliation Hall, never reunite with Speranza over dinner or share the verse of Thomas Davis with Duffy. Never see his father in the house that was meant to be his someday. Never walk hand in hand with his son on soil where Meaghers had walked for centuries. 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.

  10

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  Identity

  He started to drink. On one level, this was not new; alcohol was the mother’s milk of Irish schoolboys, served by the Jesuits. He had quaffed ale at Stonyhurst, in tandem with blasts from his clarinet. In the heady days leading to the uprising, whiskey had united the rebels in Dublin and lubricated the first drafts of seditious speeches. The ration of English porter was a highlight of long days at sea aboard the Swift, sailing toward the bottom of the earth. Tasmanian grog had taken some of the sorrow off the fog of life in Van Diemen’s Land. In New York, the saloon was a living room, because most Irish did not have a den to call their own, and because there was no warmer place on cold nights. Also, every respectable pub, including one that just opened in 1854, McSorley’s, had a shank of the old country’s turf in the window—the only grass in Five Points, it was said. When Meagher drank at banquets, at dinners after speeches, at parties, he was the life of the place, the hail-fellow-well-met. Now Meagher started to drink without purpose. His young wife was dead. His homeland was denied him forever. He wasn’t sure how long the public speaking could continue before he became a minstrel act with a brogue. He knew what the drinking could do to him, for he had seen what it did to O’Donoghue. And he knew that nothing bothered his father more than a fluthered Irishman.