The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

The new growing season, spring of 1846, was a chance to start clean with a crop that had not been contaminated. Potato shoots came up strong, unblemished, and with that, an indulgence of hope: perhaps the killer had run its course. But by midsummer the blight reappeared, arriving without portent as it had the year before. Hungry people clawed at the ground, digging for small, half-formed, blackish tubers—an effort to salvage something. In 1845, the blight had destroyed nearly half of all the potatoes grown in Ireland, just as the government panel had predicted. But 1846 was worse: nearly all of Ireland’s potatoes were ruined. And yet, in that year the nation grew more food than all the people of Ireland could have consumed, most of it bound for export. The harvest in corn, wheat and barley was said to be the biggest ever.

  To the leaders of Young Ireland, the solution was obvious: shut down the ports and feed Irish-grown food to the dying. In speeches, Meagher read a list of the tonnage of cereals and grains, beef and pork sailing out of Ireland daily—one column of export numbers, followed by a column of death tallies taken from those same harbors. “Close the ports!” he cried. Verse in the Nation demanded the same thing:

  Not a grain should leave our shore, not for England’s golden store;

  They who hunger where it grew, they whom Heaven has sent it to,

  They who reared with sweat of brow—they, or none, should have it now.

  Without slop to feed the pigs, which meant money to pay the landlord, the rural Irish had nothing at summer’s end, when the rent was due. Now they were thrown off the land—mass evictions to go with mass hunger. Potato patches were never worth much to landlords as it was; here was a chance to clear the estate of tired tenants and crops that didn’t pay. “What the devil do we care about your black potatoes,” a landlord shouted to one family, as reported in a Dublin paper. “It was not us that made them black. You will get two days to pay the rent, and if you don’t, you know the consequences.”

  If a family refused to leave, as many thousands did, their home was torn down by the authorities. The battering ram in full swing—a thick piece of timber thrust back and forth from a tri-pole frame—was the last image that many poor Irish saw of their cottages. British troops assisted British-trained police in home-dismantling missions, and their work was swift: a single crew sometimes destroying twenty or more thatch-roofed huts in a half day’s time. In the villages that Meagher visited that year, he followed the sound of commotion and crying, witness to the same scene numerous times: soldiers with loaded muskets enforcing an eviction, the roof yanked or torched, walls pulled to the ground with a horse-drawn heave.

  “A savagery unmatched by Cromwell,” he called it. Then, out, out, out—to the elements. “They sleep in their rags and have pawned their bedding,” a police inspector wrote.

  A poem in the Nation, by Speranza, spoke of increased desperation:

  There is woe, there is clamour, in our desolated land,

  And wailing lamentation from a famine-stricken band;

  And weeping are the multitudes in sorrow and despair,

  For the green fields of Munster are lying desolate and bare.

  “The Ejectment,” from the Illustrated London News, shows a family being evicted from their home in 1848, at the height of the famine. As with thousands of similar evictions, the roof was torn down and the dwelling destroyed. More than a million Irish died during the Great Hunger.

  COURTESY OF IRELAND’S GREAT HUNGER MUSEUM, QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY, HAMDEN, CT

  Europe had not seen a famine on this scale since the Dark Ages. William Smith O’Brien, the Irish aristocrat who had joined with the younger voices, took up the call in Parliament, where he had a seat in the Commons. Furious, he ripped into the Empire, jabbing at the complacency of fellow members. This was a moral crisis, not a food crisis. One half of the United Kingdom of England and Ireland was falling apart, and what did the other half do but sit and watch—bystanders to a mortal disaster. If a foreign army had landed on shores under the Union Jack and moved to wipe out entire cities, would not the British throw off the invader? As a country, Ireland could not do anything about the famine, for it had no government of its own. The Irish were dependent on the will and whim of England. The Crown had to do something. In protest, Smith O’Brien refused to attend any official business until Parliament acted. For his defiance, he was arrested and confined to a cell for three weeks. Meagher visited him in London. He was moved by the sight of the older, gentleman rebel giving up his freedom to jab the conscience of England. Meagher and Smith O’Brien, joined by the Nation, spoke as one: Shut the ports. Pay the exporters to redirect their goods to the people, if you must, but keep the food in Ireland. At the least, send relief, immediately.

  There was the rub—interference. The British ruling class was in thrall to the idea of unfettered free markets. The term laissez faire was not just a fancy import but a governing principle. To interfere would be to upset the natural economic order. The market, in time, would make all things well. The Americans sent corn, flour, clothing, from Jewish synagogues, from Quaker churches, from Catholic parishes in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The Choctaw Nation was particularly generous. The Indians were sympathetic, they said, because of the hunger they had endured during their Trail of Tears march out of their homeland nearly twenty years earlier. In England there was considerable debate over whether to even allow these food ships into Irish ports. What would that mean to the free market? To the price of grain grown by English farmers?

  The task of doing something about Irish starvation fell to Charles Trevelyan, an inflexible nobleman from one of England’s oldest families. He was thirty-eight when given the job. Facing a torrent of criticism from the United States and Europe, the English agreed to let the relief ships dock in Ireland, and to supplement them with Indian corn purchased by the government. But this food would not simply be handed out. You couldn’t just give it away. No, no, no—the Irish must pay for it, so as not to upset the hand of private enterprise. Much of it would be stored, under guard, at major cities and distributed only after it had been purchased. Some would be distributed at segregated workhouses, where a man had to move stones all day, and a woman knit till her fingers bled, in order to get a portion of stirabout, a poor substitute for oatmeal. Of course, if the Irish wanted to raise money through local taxation and buy the relief food for themselves—splendid! The magic of the market would remain undisturbed.

  “It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food,” Trevelyan said in 1846. And to his subordinates in Ireland he delivered a stern message: “Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports . . . Perfect free trade is the right course.” His biggest fear was not that a quarter million of Her Majesty’s subjects would die on his watch, but social change: “Dependence on charity is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

  Not to worry. The donor corn was too hard for the stomachs of the hungry. It was indigestible, causing cramps and violent diarrhea. And, little surprise, those at death’s door had no money. Relief was a failure, just as Trevelyan predicted. The starving wanted to be fed without paying for it, which he would never allow. Trevelyan shut down the food depots. “The only way to prevent the people from becoming habitually dependent is to bring the relief operations to a close,” he said. He was cheered by many in the English press. The Irish were cunning dogs who would no doubt have traded donor bread for pistols. And, surely, famine reports were exaggerated. “Is it possible,” wrote the Times of London, “to have heard the tale of sorrow too often?” Indeed, the men who herded contemporary thought for the most influential British minds believed so.

  In Cork, a riot broke out at a food warehouse. Troops fired into the crowd of emaciated Irish. Nearby, when the hungry tried to prevent a boat laden with oats from sailing out of the port of Youghal, soldiers crushed them at the dock. Shots were sprayed into protesters in Waterford who had begged and then threatened merchants who exported grain. Two people were left for dead, twenty-seven wounded. Refugees poured
into the cities, quivering beggars carrying all their possessions in a bundle, into more workhouses thrown together by the Crown. The young, their teeth stained green from chewing weeds, their skin dripping from bones, their feet hardened and bare and black, presented the most tragic sight. “No words can describe this peculiar appearance of the famished children,” wrote Elihu Burritt in a letter to America in 1846. “Never have I seen such bright, blue clear eyes looking so steadfastly at nothing.”

  As the Great Hunger escalated, some of England’s most educated thinkers provided an explanation that allowed them to sleep better at night. Perhaps the Irish deserved their fate, what with their large families and foolish farming of a single crop. Monoculture, the oafs—don’t they know any better? What’s more, the Irish national character was “defective,” as Trevelyan himself confided to a fellow aristocrat. The Irish are a “selfish, perverse and turbulent people,” said the man in charge of relieving their plight. Also, there was something to be said for this business of Malthusian thinning. It was nasty, the famine—no doubt. But all for the better in the long run: “an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population,” said Trevelyan. Ireland had grown by 70 percent in a few decades. This excessive breeding was unsustainable, the girls too bloody fertile. The famine was a culling, nature at work. Through the summer of 1846, death tallies bore this out. Entire villages were disappearing. In Skibbereen, the most southerly town in Ireland, more than 50 percent of the children enrolled in a workhouse died within a few weeks of admission. At the edge of town, soil that once held potatoes was turned for mass graves.

  Certainly, not all of Britain displayed a cold heart to the Irish. Quakers from London offered their services, and sent back withering critiques of their government. Residents of County Donegal “were scarcely able to crawl,” wrote a Quaker minister, William Forster. Starvation, he noted, had disfigured the children, leaving them with faces of old people. In Galway these British clerics found “walking skeletons, the men stamped with the livid mark of hunger, the children crying with pain, the women too weak to stand.” And at higher levels, Sir Randolph Routh, chairman of the Relief Commission, repeatedly took issue with Trevelyan. He blamed English landlords, not the character flaws of Irish peasants.

  In public, Trevelyan was sympathetic to the most awful sorrow ever to sweep over Ireland. In private, as the famine dragged on, he saw something larger at work—divine design. The Great Hunger, he wrote to a concerned landlord, could very well be “the judgement of God,” the Almighty’s answer to overpopulation. How so? And what kind of God was this? “Being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence.”

  The cure.

  In Conciliation Hall, hatred of the English hardened. And no one in Dublin nurtured this loathing more than John Mitchel. The son of a minister from the north, Mitchel married his girlfriend Jenny when she was sixteen, then moved to Dublin to practice law. The life of a barrister bored him. He craved conflict, and the best way to get it was to spit in the eye of the British lion. Mitchel was an unabashed nationalist; he couldn’t give a damn for religion, holy poetry or mythic Celts. Nor did his sympathies for the downtrodden extend beyond Irish shores. His every breath was suffused with hatred of England. The Nation had published a string of Mitchel’s strongest rants. So when Thomas Davis died, Duffy approached the fire-breathing lawyer about becoming an editor. Mitchel agreed. Writing from the influential perch of his new forum, his pen was unbound, laced with bite and sarcasm. “My dear surplus brethren,” he began one open letter to his fellow Irish. “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine,” he wrote in another essay. He called England “a ferocious monster” and “the most base and hostile tyranny that has ever scandalized the face of the earth.”

  When the new editor met Thomas Meagher, he wasn’t impressed. Meagher was just a boy in nobleman’s clothes, and “rather foppish” at that. Mitchel had soon gained stature for his essays, and had about him the air of a man who knew he was good. He had no time for taking on someone who might need training wheels, despite his following. Meagher showed up at the Nation’s office in Dublin, blabbering a blue streak to Mitchel, a blunt assault of his personality. The famine! And this bastard Trevelyan! Tangled up in talk, the pair walked out of the building on D’Olier Street, away from the river, through College Green, Grafton Street, beyond the city, toward Donnybrook, to the country, drawing out most of a day. As it turned out, Meagher and Mitchel shared a similar metabolism and a passion for political vandalism. One could speak, the other could write. A cynic with a dour view of humanity, Mitchel was yet moved by Meagher’s high-flown spirit. Perhaps he was the only man in Dublin who could draw out something other than Mitchel’s dark side.

  Thomas Meagher, in a sketch done when he was a leader of the Young Ireland uprising. Barely out of school, Meagher found his voice and helped stir a starving nation. He was known as the Young Tribune.

  COURTESY OF THE ALLPORT LIBRARY AND MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, TASMANIAN ARCHIVE AND HERITAGE OFFICE

  “What talk!” Mitchel recalled. “What eloquence of talk was his! How fresh and clear and strong! What wealth of imagination and princely generosity of feeling! To me it was the revelation of a new and great nature, and I reveled in it.” Over several months, the friendship deepened. When Meagher staked out a risky position at Conciliation Hall, the editor had his back.

  And the Young Tribune certainly needed it. Into the summer, with the death of a nation under way for all to see, Meagher sharpened his attacks on the inaction of O’Connell’s organization. This was no time for taking time. That year, 1846, the Tory government of Robert Peel fell in England, giving way to a possible Whig coalition led by the diminutive Lord John Russell. The Liberator wanted to align his members with a new Russell coalition—they’d surely be more likely to help the starving, open to some sort of Irish independence, he reasoned. O’Connell was delusional, but no one in power would say so. He went so far as to back a Whig candidate in Ireland over his own party built around repeal of the Act of Union. This infuriated Meagher. An alliance with the Whigs would only swap one form of “vassalage” for another, he said. It was a sellout.

  Another sketch, drawn about the same time by John Joseph Egan. Lines from Meagher’s famous Conciliation Hall speech were printed below.

  COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-USZ62-97750

  “Go into the churchyard,” Meagher thundered, “write Fool upon every tombstone that commemorates a Volunteer, and thank your God that you live in an age of common sense, with philosophy and starvation.”

  Meagher’s instincts were correct. Not long after Russell became prime minister with O’Connell’s help, he arranged to have the editor Duffy arrested. And he made it clear the Irish would get no further food relief unless they paid for it. Change of government, but no change of heart. Trevelyan’s philosophy still ruled. If anything, the new British authorities made life even more painful, passing a law that forbade a head of household from getting food relief if he held a quarter acre or more and had refused to give it up to the landlord. This swelled the ranks of the dispossessed, the homeless, the hungry. Duffy’s troublesome journal, the Nation, was preaching social disorder, stirring the starving, in the new prime minister’s view. At the same time, Russell also fortified the Irish garrisons. This, then, was the latest British response to Ireland’s national tragedy: let food flow freely out of the country, arrest and jail those who spoke for the famished, make it more difficult for peasants to stay on the land, and restock the army barricades—bullets over bread. Smith O’Brien, the statesman and member of Parliament, was no more a criminal than the erudite editor Charles Duffy. They were both manacled for free speech. O’Connell made excuses for the Whigs. Meagher, alone among the leaders not yet thrown in jail, seemed capable of stating the case clearly. His was “the language of popular passion,” said Duffy.

  Young Ireland was with the boy from Waterford. His ca
use, he said, was carried by a fierce urgency. No person of conscience could sit by, could wait out another election hoping for good will from London, as people fell to their deaths by the thousands. To counter Meagher’s insurgency within, O’Connell set a trap. At the next formal meeting of his Repeal association, he would propose a vote. Either you sided with the Liberator or followed the “clap traps of juvenile orators.” His loyalty test came in the form of a resolution: whether to denounce any use of force against England. The stage was set. A vote was called: everyone on record.

  On July 28, 1846, Conciliation Hall was packed, almost as many women as men. Lines formed outside the doors. The poet known as Speranza, Jane Francesca Elgee, took a seat up front and met Mea- gher’s eyes—prompting a whippet of whispered gossip. O’Connell stayed away, sending his two sons, and some muscle as well. Gathered in this assembly were the lucky few of Ireland. They had food, money, an education, while their starving fellow citizens scavenged the streets, looking for scraps. The winds of summer carried the deadly potato spores to all parts of the island, even the prosperous north. There, loyalty to the Crown could not buy immunity from the blight. Meagher, just a few years out of college, was preparing to take on the titan of nineteenth-century Ireland, a man he’d been “trained to love,” as Duffy said, for his entire life. Indeed, Meagher had worshiped the Liberator.

  The O’Connell proposal, called a peace resolution, was put to the floor. Meagher had thought about his heroes in the United States, a nation barely fifty years old, thought about the philosopher Thomas Jefferson but also the warrior George Washington. That new country was not formed by words alone. Much blood had been shed. When Meagher rose to state the case for struggle with arms, he was met with catcalls and hisses from the old guard.