by Timothy Egan
“Let him speak!”
Meagher turned to face the O’Connell family, with praise for the Liberator.
“I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters from my arms, whilst I was yet a child; and by whose influence my father—the first Catholic who did so for two hundred years—sat for the last two years in the civic chair of an ancient city.”
With warm words for the old patriarch of Ireland, Meagher softened some of those with knives in the crowd. It was temporary, a rhetorical tactic.
“But the same God who gave to that great man the power to strike down an odious ascendancy in this country, and enabled him to institute in this land the glorious law of religious equality—that same God gave to me a mind that is my own—”
Here the crowd seemed to come Meagher’s way, ripples of approval and support.
“—a mind that has not been mortgaged to the opinions of any man or any set of men. A mind that I was to use and not surrender.”
Applause, much more than a smattering, followed. Meagher reminded everyone of his movement’s motto: Ireland for the Irish. Now to the big question: would the people in this room remain passive, or stand and fight for their starving brothers and sisters?
“The man who will listen to reason, let him be reasoned with. But it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can alone prevail against battalioned despotism. Then, my lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral.” He went through countless examples of history, the pivot points where mortal risks had to be taken. He reached now for his best example of this, the American Revolution.
“Abhor the sword? Stigmatize the sword? No, my lord, for at its blow a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud republic—prosperous, limitless and invincible!”
The crowd was on its feet. Meagher had clearly won the day—“it was thrilling music,” in Duffy’s words, for someone to finally shake the Irish from a national coma. Jane was mesmerized; writing as Speranza she penned the rough outline of a poem: “In his beauty and his youth, the Apostle of the truth . . .” Another witness called it “perhaps the greatest speech” ever delivered in Conciliation Hall.
O’Connell’s men moved to cut the boy off. Meagher, in his defiance, had just divorced himself from the Repeal organization. He would not be allowed to continue. Tempers flared, punches flew. Meagher walked out, joined by the member of Parliament Smith O’Brien, by the writer Mitchel, the editor Duffy, the poet Speranza and many others. They would never return. O’Connell’s day was done, his organization broken. The zest to fight followed Meagher out the door. Everything still inside the hall was yesterday. To save Ireland in its darkest hour would now fall to a handful of young men and women who knew more about sonnets than sidearms, who thought a few well-chosen words and a charge of peasants with farm tools could blunt an empire.
4
* * *
Pitchfork Paddies
Winter was severe. Between slashing rains, snow swiped at the bare side of Ireland, five months of ashen chill. Peat smoke drifted from thatched hovels holding families bundled in nothing but the vaporous heat of their bodies. Big white whooper swans pecked for grass in the Shannon River marshlands, the flash of their yellow beaks one of the few signs of normalcy in a year of the walking dead. Nature was not out of whack: there was no drought, nor shortage of fish and birds. The human ecology was sick, a still life of starvation. In damp corners of workhouses, bony clumps shivered—the Scarecrow Irish, they were called. These dormitories for hunger exiles were supposed to be places of relief and rebound. But they charged for bread, charged for tea, charged for a bunk. All to be paid for by digging roads that no one would travel on and ditches that would never drain a field. In 1847, the workhouse was home to almost three quarters of a million people. Families were separated, children from parents, wives from husbands. The poor were required to wear a uniform, not unlike the clothes of a convict. Those who left without paying for their government outfits could be jailed for stealing. Those who couldn’t keep up the staged labor were listed as debtors. Thus the workhouse produced a reliable result: you went in a man, it was said, and came out a pauper. The British relief system was tidy, the simple life summaries of the starving noted on handwritten single lines that filled pages bound in leather and constantly updated. Name. Age. Address. Condition. The latter had three general categories: helpless poor, able-bodied poor, dead.
In the spring of 1847, the English opted for a new approach: soup kitchens. These had been tried, in a different form, by Protestant Bible societies. They were schools for famished Irish children, who were fed on the condition that they accept the proselytizing of a hated religion—forcing parents to choose between starvation and giving up their faith. People who consented were derided as “soupers,” or those who “took the soup.” The Crown now offered a secular alternative. To supplement the workhouses, they would open communal food stations, clean and modern. A prominent French chef, Alexis Soyer, was named Head Cook to the people of Ireland. He devised a formula to feed a hundred people a day for less than a pound sterling. And no, it wouldn’t be gruel for the dying, but a fine soup, very tasty, one that he’d served to noblemen and members of Parliament. Each person would be allowed up to a quart of the Frenchman’s broth a day. For that portion, the recipe called for one half ounce of meat, a quarter ounce of dripping fat, one ounce of flour, a snippet of brown sugar, and turnip shavings, onions and celery tops.
To great fanfare, the first of Monsieur Soyer’s kitchens opened in Dublin on April 5, under a portrait of Queen Victoria, the Union Jack flying next to a chimney. The well dressed and well fed paid a few shillings in donations to watch the poor sip their soup, as a sketch in the Illustrated London News showed. A line formed outside. Inside was a 300-gallon boiler, with ladles attached to a chain. At the ring of a bell, the starving shuffled to group tables, there to consume their ration with their own bowls brought to the soup kitchen. The bell rang again after six minutes, time up. The press was encouraged to report on this development—dispensaries of flavored hot water, presented to the world as evidence of England’s benevolence. But within weeks it was clear that an all-liquid diet, while keeping some people alive, made matters worse for many others. When experts at the Lancet, the British medical journal, examined the contents of Soyer’s broth, they were appalled. They found a typical portion to be far below minimum daily requirements for calories and nutrition, a thin substitute for genuine relief. They called it “soup quackery.”
Just as Meagher feared, the new government was a disaster for Ireland. The Whigs that O’Connell had joined forces with did less for the people than the Tory administration had done. Prime Minister Russell, mocked as a midget in physical stature—he stood five foot four by the most charitable sizing—was no giant in the political realm either. To cover his right flank, he pushed ever harsher against the Irish, sending extra troops to assist in the increasingly hostile evictions of peasants from their ramshackle homes. He announced that food would continue to flow freely out of Irish ports—hands off, no interference with free trade. Laissez faire, following Trevelyan’s advice, would continue to guide British policy. For those still with illusions, Russell made it clear several months into his leadership what to expect. “It must be thoroughly understood,” he said, “that we cannot feed the people.” And by summer’s end of 1847, he made good on that declarative: the soup kitchens were closed, a failure even at saving face for England. What’s more, the government felt the Irish had been ungrateful through two years of the famine. “They have hardly been decent while they have had their bellies full of our corn and their pockets of our money,” said Charles Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer.
The public voice of the opposition now fell to young Meagher. His writer friend John Mitchel matched him, with less eloquence and more bitterness, in the Nation. Duffy was out of a prison. He’d soon be back in,
held for publishing Mitchel’s prose. And the middle-aged gentleman Smith O’Brien took the cause anew to the heart of Parliament. Meagher’s “Sword” speech was a turning point. It made him famous; copies were printed and consumed in the cities, passed on and memorized in the country, studied for clues inside Dublin Castle. The political lethargy of Ireland was gone, replaced by a desperate urgency. Meagher had not called for armed uprising, nor violence in blocking the food ships from leaving Irish ports. His message was in the abstract—a philosophical what if? Those who were not hungry, who had standing and the promise of a good life like Meagher, were now bound by conscience to take a great risk. Otherwise they should be counted among “the genteel nobodies, nervous aristocrats, friends of order and starvation, of speedy hangings,” as Meagher framed the choice. The hard shove of his words worked. By year’s end, it was clear, in meetings where the new Irish Confederation was formed to organize clubs against England, that the young, the connected, those who might otherwise govern an independent nation, were with Meagher’s forces. Speranza wrote “The Young Patriot Leader,” a poetic tribute that had been started earlier in Conciliation Hall. It was also a public love letter to the voice of the fledglingrebels. In part, it read:
Oh! He stands beneath the sun, that glorious Fated One . . .
In his beauty and his youth, the Apostle of the Truth,
Goes he forth with the words of Salvation,
And a noble madness falls on each spirit he enthralls,
As he chants his wild paeans to the nation . . .
See our pale cheeks how they flush, as the noble visions rush,
On our soul’s most dark desolation—
And the glorious lyric words, Right, Freedom, and our Swords!
Wake the strong chords of life to vibration.
Ireland’s lowest ebb brought the poets of protest closer to each other, even as Britain moved to scatter and isolate them. Under new Coercion Acts passed in Parliament, the authorities could declare early curfews and restrictions on movement. It was a crime on many a night for the Irish to be outside their homes between dusk and dawn. “Has it come to this, that a citizen of Dublin can’t walk the streets of his native city?” asked a doctor who was stopped by police during an evening stroll. For others, defying the nighttime shackling made the heart skip. Young Ireland’s leaders held secret dinners, breaking the law while breaking bread. They sang songs that had been outlawed during the Penal Era, kissed and drank and made eyes at each other—“much wooing and some marrying,” in Duffy’s recollection. Planning more than a few months ahead seemed an impossible eternity. The flushing of pale cheeks, the “noble madness” that Meagher had fired in Speranza, was expressed away from the pages of the Nation as well. Jane Elgee made clear in her letters that she was a woman who acted on her passions, while not naming her lovers. Her red-sealed and scented notes landed with regularity. “I don’t care for a friendship unless it’s fringed with—not quite love, perhaps—but something that is always on the point of becoming so,” she said.
At home in Waterford, father and son fought. The elder Meagher was running for a seat in the House of Commons on O’Connell’s ticket, allied with the British prime minister. Thomas loved his father, he told him, but he had to be true to his conscience: he could not vote for him, not as a partner of the English government. The patriarch warned his son that he was traveling with a dangerous crowd in Dublin, perilously close to becoming an outlaw. And to what end? Did he have any career ambitions? There was time, still, for a gentleman’s life, the Waterford Club, formal dinners, family wealth, a proper young lady not given over to seditious verse, working steadily, evenly, lawfully, respectfully for change. This held no appeal for Tom. He could not look at a table set with the world’s finest crystal without thinking of all the images he’d seen of the Scarecrow Irish. He felt a sense of duty that made for sleepless nights.
“The people will not consent to live another year in a graveyard!” he proclaimed upon returning to the public forum in Dublin. “Ireland will be burnt into one black, unpeopled field of ashes rather than this should last.”
And, a few days later, he posed two questions: “Do you prefer a soup kitchen to a customs house? Do you prefer cemeteries to cornfields?” As a student of rhetoric in college, Meagher had learned a thing or two about poetic license. But if anything, he understated the calamity facing Ireland. William Bennett, a Quaker on one of the surveys of the sick and dying, sent this report back from County Mayo in 1847:
My hand trembles while I write. The scenes of human misery and degradation we witnessed still haunt my imagination, with the vividness and power of some horrid and tyrannous delusion, rather than the feature of sober reality. We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly; their little limbs, on removing a portion of the filthy covering, perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation. Crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all but naked, scarcely human in appearance . . . We entered upwards of fifty of these tenements. The scene was invariably the same.
Meagher played the prosecutor. To the charge that the famine was the fault of a “defective part of the national character,” as Trevelyan and the British press had insisted in year two of the Great Hunger, Meagher again drew attention to how much food was still leaving a land of the starving. “England has bound this island hand and foot. The island is her slave. She robs the island of its food, for it has not the power to guard it. If the island does not break its fetters, England will write its epitaph. Listen to a few facts . . .” He then cited an astonishing tonnage of beef, butter, pork, bacon and flour that had sailed out of Ireland. “Tell the minister, sir, that a new race of men now act in Ireland—men who will be neither starved as the victims nor serve as the vassals of the British Empire.”
That minister, Lord Russell, was hearing the same thing from his chief overseer in Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon. “Distress, discontent and hatred of English rule are increasing everywhere,” Clarendon wrote to London. Reports came in daily of people dying on city streets and country lanes, dropping at the doorsteps of workhouses. And now was news of another, more efficient killer of the Irish—typhus, the disease that found its home in filthy, crowded spaces. The hard winter drove more people to cluster for shelter and warmth; even jail was better than freezing to death. But the public places, holding people in dirty rags, were perfect incubators for a mortal disease conveyed by lice. The more the starving huddled for warmth, the likelier they would bring themselves to quick death. Typhus was a corporal torture of a week to ten days, disfiguring and befouling victims before it killed them. Cheeks swelled. Rashes and sores appeared all over the body. Limbs shook and twitched. Fingers and toes went black and gangrenous. The faces of handsome Irish children became heavy with age and ugliness, their eyes colorless. And just before dying, the sick emitted a distinct odor—the grim stench of typhus. As press accounts of this latest scourge spread, even residents of Calcutta now sent relief.
In the countryside, peasants shot their landlords with the weapons of their masters. Stolen guns were stockpiled, pikes sharpened and stashed. As defeated and weak as the people were, the Irish were showing signs of an uprising. Confederation clubs based on the principles of Young Ireland were formed around the country. For now, their meetings consisted of passing on stories of atrocities and singing underground songs, including one that alluded to a ban on wearing shamrocks by Irish soldiers in Great Britain’s army—“They’re hanging men and women for the wearin’ of the green.” They awaited further word on how to act.
From Dublin Castle, Clarendon recruited fresh informants. He needed to know all the plans of Young Ireland and would pay handsomely for inside information. At the same time, Clarendon fired off a series of remarkably candid assessments to Prime Minister Russell. “A great social revolu
tion is now going on in Ireland, the accumulated evils of misgovernment and mismanagement are now coming to a crisis.” As to the cause: “No one could venture to dispute the fact that Ireland has been sacrificed” to British economic policy, he wrote. “No distress would have occurred if the exportation of Irish grain had been prohibited.” And there it was, official acknowledgment of the deep complicity by England in one of the world’s worst human atrocities.
So it was simple after all, just as Meagher had stated: the Great Hunger was unfolding in the midst of great plenty. There would have been no famine—“no distress,” in Clarendon’s words—if food produced in Ireland had been kept in Ireland. This startling admission was contained in a private correspondence, not made public at the time. Outwardly, Clarendon stiffened his resolve. He warned the Dublin leaders that they would face arrest if they continued with their provocations on paper and from podiums. After closing the soup kitchens, the government announced that no further relief would be forthcoming that year unless the Irish paid for it. In place of food, Russell sent another 16,000 troops to Ireland.
In the spring, Daniel O’Connell left for a pilgrimage to Rome. The end was near, he told his family, and he wanted to see the Vatican before he died. Enfeebled, sick and slow-footed, he’d given one last speech in Parliament, a pathetic plea to help the hungry across the water. “Ireland is in your hands, and in your power,” he whispered, a sliver of his old self. “If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.” He made it to Paris, on to Lyon, Marseille. After sailing to Genoa, he was bedridden, his breath labored. He would not take another step, dying on May 16, 1847. In accordance with his wishes, his heart was carved from his chest, put in a silver cask and forwarded to Rome. His body was to be entombed in Ireland. In the United States he was hailed by Frederick Douglass as a friend of the slaves, throughout Europe as a friend of the Jews. At home he would always be the Liberator, the man who freed the Catholics. In mourning, in anger, his supporters did not follow his lifelong philosophy of nonviolence, but turned on those who had challenged him in old age. Meagher was assaulted, as was Mitchel; the office of the Nation was vandalized. The Music Hall, on Lower Abbey Street, where Young Ireland held rallies after breaking with O’Connell, was attacked by a mob. Leaping from the crowd, a man lunged for Meagher with a knife, just missing him.