The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  And here in Conciliation Hall, Meagher was witness to the jaw-dropping transformation of William Smith O’Brien at a midnight gathering. This well-manicured, flawlessly tailored man on the cusp of middle age was the unlikeliest of rebels: born into a baronial estate in Limerick, a Protestant who claimed direct lineage to the tenth-century high king Brian Boru. He looked every bit the part of the castle-owning gentleman, Church of England parishioner and member of Parliament that he was—a Tory as well, with a brother who’d been knighted. Tall, his voice bearing the accent of privilege, he rose now to stand with Young Ireland—a stunning betrayal.

  “I have come here to tell the attorney general that, though I am not ambitious of martyrdom, if he wants another victim, I present myself to him.” Meagher leapt to his feet. Hear, hear, Smith O’Brien! “Why are we forbidden the name and rights of a nation? The Englishman is proud of his country. The Scotchman is proud of his country. The Frenchman thinks there is no country in the world like his own . . . Shall Ireland be the only country in which nationality is forbidden?”

  After the speech, Meagher introduced himself to Smith O’Brien, offering his services. Anything, sir. Smith O’Brien put him to work. Over the months, Meagher labored daily on repeal language for a parliamentary committee. Nights were spent back in Conciliation Hall. And in the margins, he wrote poetry and sent it off to Charles Gavan Duffy, a cofounder and the editor of the Nation, a man more level-headed than his writers, perfect ballast for unrefined voices such as Meagher’s.

  “He was at that time a youth of two-and-twenty, who had scarcely heard his own voice except in a college debating society,” Duffy recalled of Meagher. “But there was a mesmerism in his language which touched me. I speedily made his acquaintance, and soon had the happiness of counting him among my friends.” What he liked in young Meagher was what others found appealing: his humor, his loyalty, the blaze of passion in his eyes, his unparalleled gift of gab.

  Among those who were also stirred by the fresh winds of the Nation was a mystery poet whose cover letters were signed in the name of a gentleman of Dublin. Duffy set out to meet this man of great promise, showing up one day in the parlor of the verse maker. To the editor’s shock, there was no man but a tall young woman with dark hair, “flashing brown eyes and features cast in an heroic mold.” Duffy had never seen a more beautiful face of sedition. She introduced herself as Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, as much an establishment pillar as Smith O’Brien. Daughter of a Protestant, from a family of starchy loyalists, Jane had cast off her past and reinvented herself as a distant descendant of Dante. A silly conceit to some; a conscience in full flower to others. She was now an aspiring rebel, signing her poetry as Speranza, an Italian name for hope. “All the literature of Irish wrongs and sufferings had an enthralling interest for me,” she said. “Then it was I discovered I could write poetry.”

  Jane was drawn to Dublin’s sexually liberated crowd, those who rejected the teachings of the Catholic Church and the manners of the Victorian state, and took their opinions from the Nation. The talk was wild and promiscuous. Drink flowed, but a stronger intoxicant was a shared sense of invulnerability. Jane boasted that the best political voices of her land were rhymers, a trade-in-words that would have meant banishment centuries earlier. “They are all poets,” she said of Young Ireland, “and I know of no genius outside their circle in Ireland.” Her family was appalled that she would write for “a seditious paper fit only for the fire,” as an uncle of hers had put it. She wore their disapproval like a black corsage at a ball. In her hands, rebellion was ambrosial. Personal notes were scented and sealed with bright red wax, to keep the allure alive when she was not present. Soon, Speranza was one of the Nation’s stars—“a substantial force in Irish politics,” as the editor Duffy called her, “the vehement will of a woman of genius.”

  When the poetess saw Thomas Meagher for the first time, she swooned. His voice, his wit, the way he carried himself for one so young. Thomas was Jane’s age, and shared with her an eloquent rage. “He was handsome, daring, reckless of consequences,” she wrote a friend, “with wild, bright, flashing eyes, glowing colour and the most beautiful mouth, teeth and smile I ever beheld.”

  Summers were the “meal months” in Ireland, more than sixteen hours of daylight, when the nation grew enough to feed itself but also had to purchase food while awaiting the harvest. The potato was the easiest crop to cultivate. The New World import required so little care that merchant seamen put seed tubers in the ground in the spring and came back after months of absence to reap their bounty. But more than two million people—about a fourth of the population—did not earn regular wages, getting by on what they could scrounge from their patch of dirt, with a little bartering and piecework on the side. It was subsistence life, not unlike an Alaska native who feeds his family with what comes from the sea. And the rural Irish more than got by: a family derived most of its nutrition from potatoes. Many varieties were tried—rocks, cups, codders, thistlewhippers, skerry blues. The most popular were lumpers, large and knobby, with pale brown skin and yellow flesh, not particularly tasty; they looked like unevenly shaped stones. Living in tiny huts on rented acreage, a family could get ten months of food out of their potato patch, with some left for the pig. Meat and bread were rare. Meals were simple: a pot of boiled spuds, lathered in butter if lucky, a little bacon fat, with mustard at the center of the table, cabbage as well, pickled for preservation or fresh. At this setting, an adult could consume more than a day’s worth of carbohydrates, potassium, Vitamin C and fiber.

  June of 1845 broke hot and dry, the most incongruous kind of Irish weather. In peasant plots, even in bogs and on mountain slopes, green shoots sprouted quickly and flowered—the gorgeous lilac-and-gold heralding of a healthy potato crop, beauty and food. July turned gray, the woolen coat of a heavy fog lying over the land. August was unusually rainy, as it was throughout much of Europe, and cold as well. Not ideal potato weather, but nothing people hadn’t seen before. Lumpers didn’t need much, even in weak soil. But in September, taking a carriage ride through the wet country on the way home to Waterford, Meagher saw something quite frightening in the land that rolled away to the horizon: potato fields, black-topped and broken. He was startled. It was not just a patch of coal-dark foliage here and there, but ruin and spoilage everywhere, as if someone had come through and sprayed acid over the green of Ireland’s living pantry. And the stench—it was foul and stomach-turning.

  This blight had first appeared on the Isle of Wight; the news was then forwarded to Prime Minister Peel. Spores from diseased potatoes had come across the Atlantic from the United States, most likely in the holds of trading ships. A fungus later diagnosed as Phytophthora infestans, it spread quickly, needing only water to thrive. The tragic turnover of millions of acres, from life-supporting earth to a garden cemetery, happened without warning, a swift pox on the land. Some blamed static electricity from trains, newly introduced to the countryside, though the blight spread far beyond the rail tracks. One day fields were upright and promising; a week or so later the crop collapsed in a fetid heap. A single plant could release millions of deathly spores. Below ground held the true horror: dark, moldy, stinky masses of inedible tubers. Even potatoes that looked healthy at harvest turned to gray mush that fall, touched by the hand of the blight.

  In short order, Ireland was the focus of one of the world’s great agricultural mysteries: what was this crop-killing fungus, and why had it spread so quickly? And then, more urgently: what could be done to keep the population from starving? The Gardeners’ Chronicle was one of the first publications to raise an alarm. “The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing,” a government botanist announced in London, holding up the journal. He then asked a question of fatal consequences: “Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?” Two months later, a delegation of government experts who had toured the fields came back with an answer. “We can come to no other conclusion than that one half of the actual potato crop of I
reland is either destroyed or . . . unfit for the food of man.” One half. Which meant, by a rough calculation, at least 500,000 Irish could starve.

  Stories came in from Munster and Moneygall, from Cork and Connaught. All anecdotal, but all with the same grim conclusion: the sole source of food for thousands of Her Majesty’s Irish subjects had collapsed. “I cannot recollect any former example of a calamitous failure being anything near so great and alarming as the present,” wrote an Anglo-Irish landlord, Lord Mounteagle. “I know not how the peasantry will get through the winter.”

  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.

  Prime Minister Peel dismissed the early reports from Ireland. In his younger days, he’d been one of the Crown’s overlords in the country, and liked to think he knew the people all too well—“cordially detested” them, he once said. The Irish: good God, everyone knows they’re prone to high drama. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” he wrote in October of 1845. 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.

  At the very time the spores of starvation were blowing over a year’s worth of Ireland’s food, dark news hit Dublin. In a stroll through town, Meagher came upon a mournful crowd outside the offices of the Nation. People were howling, teary, others walking around dumbstruck. “Thomas Davis is dead!” The bard of Young Ireland was thirty years old, preparing to be married. The poet took ill one day after guiding the latest issue of his paper to bed, and retired to his mother’s house. His temperature shot up. He shivered and sweated. His throat turned red and sore, and a hideous rash appeared over his back. It was nothing, he told the editor Charles Duffy, a minor bit of cholera. He was gone within a week, a victim of scarlet fever. His last day was September 16, 1845.

  The brow of Ireland turned gray overnight, it was said. Mourners packed into Conciliation Hall. Irish soil, wrote the Nation, would hold no more precious dust than his. Meagher was beside himself. Davis had written more than eighty ballads, poems and songs. His essays numbered in the hundreds. Meagher called him “my prophet and guide.” Without Davis, he was lost. Sharing his thoughts at a memorial, Meagher touched others who felt as he did. They urged him to take the stage. Without introduction, Meagher walked solemnly from his usual back bench to the front of the hall and gave his first speech in the most prominent venue for Irish ideas. His words were not polished or planned.

  “He is no more. He is not here. His meteoric genius has ceased to be, his noble heart to beat. But there are thoughts of his, generous sentiments, liberal views, enlightened principles of his, which death could not strike down. These shall dwell among us.”

  Over the next year, the death of one voice gave way to the other. Through the spring and into the summer of 1846, Meagher crafted a rallying cry, picking up where the poet had left off. He could sound naïve or too indignant. He still had that trace of Stonyhurst when he spoke formally. But he was devoid of cynicism. “Let earnest truth, stern fidelity to principle, love for all who bear the name of an Irishman sustain, ennoble and immortalize this cause,” he said. “Thus shall we reverse the dark fortunes of the Irish race and call forth here a new nation from the ruins of the old.” Quickly, Meagher picked up a following. “As handsome and chivalrous as he was eloquent, he became something of a popular idol,” wrote Arthur Griffith, a later fan. When word of a coming oration was announced, Conciliation Hall was packed. And his speeches were printed, sometimes word for word, in the Nation.

  “It was like listening to mystical, sonorous music to hear Meagher pour out passion and pathos and humour,” wrote Duffy, whose red pen had snuffed many a fulsome line. This man of “rare and splendid gifts” did not look the part of voice of a nation. He couldn’t shake his youth, the dew still on the boy; but he spoke like someone who had seen much more than his actual years. “To the common eye, indeed, the new recruit was a dandified youngster, with a languid air and mincing accent obviously derived from an English education; but it was a vulgar error,” said Duffy. “Nature had made him a great orator, and training had made him an accomplished gentleman.”

  A gentleman, also, who kept his barbs within the constricted bounds of allowed public discourse. “I am not one who wantonly would run down the English name,” Meagher said in 1846. “I have learned to respect that country for many fine virtues, for many great deeds. With just a few exceptions, her conduct toward other countries has always been just, generous and magnanimous.” But why, he wondered aloud, did those virtues stop at the Irish Sea? “Toward Ireland, her conduct has been mean, unjust, contemptuous.”

  The Young Tribune, the Dublin crowd started calling him—and not always in praise. O’Connell’s men laughed at Meagher for his age, his face unlined and unlived in. Who was this beardless lad from Waterford? And by what authority did he challenge the Liberator’s gradual progress toward repeal of the act that bound Ireland to England? On what authority did this upstart speak for anyone? No authority. Meagher had been elected to nothing. Only one of his poems had been printed in the Nation. All his power came from the spoken word. In Conciliation Hall, Meagher asked for some reprieve for his age. “Youth is a season of promise more than retrospect.”

  O’Connell took him aside, urging him to come over to the house for a private talk. In his library at the Merrion Square home, he slapped a big arm around Meagher.

  “Surely, your father is not a Young Irelander?”

  “No, he is not,” Meagher answered. “But at least he is for repeal.”

  “Why not walk in his footsteps?”

  “For the plain reason that I have a head and legs of my own.”

  Abruptly showing Meagher the door, the Liberator said, “Beware the danger that Young Irelandism will lead you to.”

  “It may lead me to danger. But it will guard me from dishonor.”

  What motivated Meagher, the fount of his fury, was the fast-developing famine; it epitomized all the wrongs of Ireland. Through the winter of 1846 and into the spring, hundreds, then thousands of people dropped dead of starvation. Bellies of little children swelled, their faces went powdery, their hair fell by the handful, and they sniffled away to a corner of a hut or a roadside ditch, their parents soon to follow. Others were sickened by scurvy, their gums swollen and bleeding, skin blue-splotched. They had subsisted, for a time, on nettles, blackberries and raw cabbage, none of which could be foraged during the cold months. A doctor in Skibbereen found seven people under a single blanket, unable to move; one had been dead for hours. Coffins were reused after hasty ceremonies, the bottoms cut out, the deceased dropped into the ground.

  “I saw wretched people seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly at the destruction that had left them foodless,” wrote Father Theobald Mathew in a letter to British high authorities. Mathew was no mere observer; he was the “temperance priest,” the best-known cleric in Ireland, who had prompted more than a million people to pledge to abstain from alcohol. But for all that drink had done to his countrymen, he said, it was no match for the indiscriminate sweep of hunger. An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to
exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.”

  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. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665.

  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. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

  Meagher and his allies tried to comprehend this incongruity while moving to the larger questions. If English rule was to blame for death by hunger—a preposterous idea in Westminster—could English rule now keep people alive? What responsibility did one of the most advanced nations on earth have for a sibling ravaged by a primitive scourge?