The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became and American Hero
This week’s book of the week is a random find at my favorite local book store...yes I shop local as often as I can....making this week’s book The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became and American Hero by Timothy Egan.
This book is about one of the more remarkable men to come out of the 19th century, Thomas Francis Meagher, who lived on three continents, fought in two wars, and died a mystery in Montana. Here’s the story.
Thomas Francis Meagher was born August 3, 1823, in Waterford Ireland, and he was born to one of the wealthier families in Ireland, the family having made money as tradesmen in Newfoundland before returning to the ancestral home in Ireland.
Now, the author does an amazing job breaking down just what it meant to be Irish in Ireland in the 19th century. It does not mean what it meant to be say...American. Ok....to be perfectly fair and intellectually honest, it does not mean what it meant to be white American in the 19th century. Trust me.... That distinction really is relevant to the story.
Being Irish in Ireland in the 19th century meant you were not even really a second-class citizen in your own country. The English held dominance over basically the entire island, with English property owners and lords holding first and second-class status, and even the wealthy Irish were a distant third and God help you if you were poor Irish.
So, Meagher, given that his family was wealthy, did get him a gentleman’s education, one of the best schools in Ireland and when he I believe was kicked out of that school, he was sent to England for a proper education. Which he completed before returning to Ireland to be one of her most favorite sons. And he truly had the Irish gift of gab and tons of Irish luck.
He became involved in the Young Ireland movement, becoming a political author and public speaker, and when the Potato Famine hit Ireland, he became a loud voice against English tyranny. And understand, the tyranny had been ongoing for literally hundreds of years, going back to like the 11th century with the first rounds of English suppression, and culminating in the Kilkenny laws that forbade English from marrying the Irish and if they DID marry, then no child of the union could inherit any property in Ireland. The island LITERALLY belonged to the English. In case you were wondering why there is so much phenomenal hatred between two neighboring nations even into the 21st century.
Now, the soil of Ireland is incredibly fertile, and Ireland was essentially the breadbasket of Great Britain, used to grow fields of wheat, barley, and rye, and the pasture land was outstanding at feeding large herds of sheep and cattle. However, THOSE crops belonged to the English landlords. The Irish, in order to maximize food for the home table, grew potatoes. Potatoes are actually NOT a native crop to Ireland and were imported from the America’s several hundred years before when England started sending ships across the Atlantic.
And that catch all root crop grew exceptionally well in Irish soil, and as little as an acre of planted potatoes could feed a family of four with zero nutritional deficits because potatoes are truly one of the healthiest plants on the planet. Until 1845 when blight struck and decimated the potato crops. This led to famine in 1845, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation. And the horror of this is, just like in the Ukraine during the Holodomor, other crops grew, exceptionally well. But since the Irish barely counted as human, rather than using those growing crops of wheat, barley, and rye to feed the native population, THOSE crops were shipped out of country for cash, and the Irish were left to starve.
And this famine continued for the next SEVEN YEARS. Seven years, the Irish planted potatoes and then watched the crops rot in the soil from this blight. The famine was absolutely infamous. I mean in the 19th century, well before the internet, radio, TV, and the Internet, international forces joined together to send aid to Ireland, including most famously the Choctaw nation, fresh off their own struggle with famine, sent what aid they could to Ireland.
The English, in a spectacularly dickish move, blocked the aid from landing, claiming that giving food to the Irish would interfere with the free markets. I have not yet read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to see how he believes free markets should handle charitable contributions, but I DO know that laissez faire maintains anytime government gets involved, bad things happen. The Government directly interfered with deliveries, and while they might have claimed it was to keep the markets opened, I think the likely end goal was to kill as many Irish as they could. And it worked....by the time the famine ended, millions had starved to death. And millions more had immigrated to other parts of the planet, including America where they began overrunning the tenements in Five Points bureau of New York City.
Meagher began using his incredibly powerful oration skills to compose essays, which were published in Young Ireland publications, and making speeches. He actually designed what would become Irelands flag, sewing the three vertical bars of green, white, and orange that Ireland would later adopt as its own. Unbeknownst to the Young Ireland movement, which included the future mother of Oscar Wilde, so that was cool to learn, they held a viper to their breast. Seems St. Patrick didn’t drive ALL the snakes out of Ireland. The one that betrayed them all was John Donnellan Balfe, who began feeding information to the British about the Young Ireland movement, resulting in the arrest of the movements leaders. And initially, they were all slated to be hanged for treason. But public pressure and other changes in political climate, got them deported to the prison colony in Tasmania...it’s called something else in the book because it wasn’t yet Tasmania, but it is NOW so for easy reference, Meagher was deported to Tasmania.
And he spent several years there, meeting and marrying his first wife, the daughter of another deportee, although this one was for, I think robbery. Ironically, even though they were ALL convicts (except for Catherine Bennett “Bennie” Meagher...she was born a free woman in Tasmania, but was the daughter of a thief, not a political prisoner, so was considered “lower status”)....his friends believed Meagher had married beneath himself.
He did not think so though and was in love with his wife. However, he also knew that agreeing to stay in prison when escape was a possibility, was basically bowing to the yoke the English had placed on his neck. So, after carefully laid plans, Meagher revoked his own parole, and escaped. Parole was basically just his word as a gentleman that he would not attempt to escape. He gave the English a few hours’ notice that he was no longer going to honor that word, and bugged out, eventually making it to New York City, where he joined the Democrats at Tammany Hall.
This is not an odd choice. He landed in NYC in May 1852, the Republican party did not yet exist but the Irish in New York were almost all Democrats and certainly heavily influential in Tammany Hall, and the other rising political party at that time were the Know Nothings, who were basically extremely anti-immigration, ESPECIALLY anti- IRISH immigration, and got their name for starting fights and riots and when questioned, claimed to “know nothing” about it.
So, he joined the Democrats. But whereas quite a few of the immigrant Irish were openly and fully racist and agreed with segregation and slavery, mostly for psychological reasons believe it or not....They may be of the lowest social strata, being Irish and being Immigrants, but hey, at least they weren’t slaves....Meagher’s generally take on the matter was that whether he agreed with it or not, Slavery was legal in his adopted country.
Now while in New York, his bride joined him by way of Ireland, where she got on very well with Meagher Sr, and Bennie and Meagher Sr came to New York, and while there, Bennie became pregnant with their second child. She was pregnant with their first when Meagher escaped, but the baby didn’t live long past birth. And since she was a free woman, there was nothing to stop her from traveling to Ireland and from there to New York to rejoin her husband. However, she disliked New York and returned to Ireland with her father-in-law when he went home. And she was pregnant when the ship sailed. Sadly, she was the one who did not survive the next child’s birth, leaving Meagher’s only child, a son Thomas Bennett Meagher, who would be raised by Meagher’s Irish relatives, and Meagher would never meet him.
Following the death of his first wife, Meagher would go on to meet the love of his life...not that he didn’t love his first wife, but his second wife, Elizabeth “Libby” Townsend, was his equal in intellect and passion. And if his friends thought his first wife was beneath him, no one doubted that his second wife was well outside his league. Literally, she was the oldest daughter of the very wealthy Peter Townsend, who, as a protestant and NOT a Democrat (although I don’t think he was a “know nothing”) did NOT approve of his daughter’s marriage to the Irish Catholic Meagher. But he eventually relented and granted his permission, disinheriting his daughter, but granting the couple a place to live while they were in New York.
Meagher initially set about to make a living as a public speaker, and he commanded enormous speaking fees, earning as much as $1500 for a single speech, which is approximately $37,182 in 2023 currency. And he got licensed to practice law, although that was not to be his forte, as just 4 years after marrying, Lincoln would be elected President, and the country would break out in war.
And just like the Civil War would tear apart families, some of Meagher’s former Young Ireland brethren would fight for the south, and they would never speak again. And these were guys he was exiled to Tasmania with, who had made their own escapes, so brothers in truth if not in biology.
Meagher, while he still didn’t necessarily have an opinion on slavery, agreed with Lincoln’s sentiment that the important thing was to keep the country as the UNITED States, and set about recruiting the Irish to fight for the Union. And as he was a hero of Ireland, and an effective public speaker, he quickly mustered the 69th Irish Regiment...the link for the cocktail that’s in the description, says that after the battle at Fredericksburg he wanted to mix up his favorite drink, whiskey and sparkling water. Since they did not have sparkling water, they went with champagne, and the Regimental Cocktail was born.
The fighting Irish, under brigadier general Thomas Francis Meagher, fought in basically every single engagement the Army of the Potomac fought in. Which, if you know anything about the Civil War, means that was basically the whole damn war. He briefly resigned his commission and I think missed Gettysburg, before being drawn back into it following the riots in New York.
The riots, if you don’t know, were race riots, which started after the emancipation proclamation, and the Irish most definitely did not think they should be spending their blood to free the slaves. Save the nation that gave them harbor during the height of the famine? That was a bill Meagher was able to sell them on. Free the slaves? Well....that was definitely not an easy sell, and Meagher’s popularity plummeted.
As the war reached its conclusion, Meagher and Libby started trying to plan their next move. They could not, realistically, keep living in her father’s residence. So, they started planning to move west. Meagher went ahead, and when he was in Minnesota, received word from newly sworn in President Johnson that he was appointed Secretary of the Montana Territory. So, he headed to the gold fields of Montana and upon arriving, the governor of Montana said he needed to leave and was leaving Meagher in charge. And so, Meagher became acting governor of Montana for basically the rest of his life.
And this was a problem, because he remained a Democrat, and a not insignificant portion of the other settlers were Republicans. And violently so, leading multiple lynch mobs in the name of vigilante justice, hanging anyone they basically just didn’t like. And they did not like Meagher, who had the audacity to issue a pardon for someone the vigilantes had marked for death. They hung the guy, anyway, leaving Meagher’s pardon in his back pocket.
For all that, Libby joined Meagher and the last year of his life was spent exploring the beauty of Montana, and he recommended Yellowstone be made into some sort of national monument, and it would actually become the first national park in the world based on his recommendation.
In 1867, he and Libby were trying to figure out their next move. Montana was hostile to the Irish, and Meagher really wanted to find a way to see Ireland again. On July 1, 1867, he was in Fort Benton to receive a shipment of firearms from General William Tecumseh Sherman who, while not a fan of Meagher’s, recognized the need for firearms in Montana to fight off the hostile Sioux nations. And when on the steamboat that would have returned him home, Meagher disappeared, presumably over the side of the ship, and became one of the mysteries of the old west. No one really knows what happened.
However, the most plausible explanation is that the vigilante crowd, led by Wilbur Sanders, had hired basically an assassin. Meagher was too well known and entirely too popular to be hung from a tree and was a likely candidate to be a representative of the territory to the Senate in DC. He was an exceptional swimmer, having grown up swimming the rivers and lakes of Ireland, kept up his skills in Tasmania, and the Missouri river, while fast paced, was certainly not white-water rapids, and he should have been able to swim them easily.
While he definitely enjoyed his whiskey, witnesses all testified he was definitely not drunk when he retired that evening. So, if he had stumbled and fallen overboard, he could have swum to the shore easily. An inquest held in 2012...so one hundred forty years after he vanished into the Missouri River....determined that he was murdered, either directly by or at the behest of Sanders.
Now obviously, we don’t know if that’s true. But it is the most likely explanation.
Libby returned to New York, where she remained disinherited, and lived off her military widows’ pension of $50 per month, about $1239 in modern currency. While Meagher never met his son, Libby did, and Thomas Bennett Meagher lived with her for a time before heading west, eventually dying in the Philippines in 1909. Libby died July 5, 1906, at 75, having never remarried after the death of Thomas.
This book was a wild ride, it was exceptionally well written, very easy to follow, and provided an excellent account of one of the 19th centuries true heroes, a man who fought for what was right, and gave voice to a people held down by centuries of repression. It’s heartbreaking that he never got to see home again, never got to see his son. It definitely makes me want to get in touch with my local Celtic society, and the daughters of Erin...I’m Scots/Irish, after all. Any Norse blood in me is by way of Ireland.
