The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  “I am a teetotaler myself,” the elder Meagher had declared in 1847, “and I do not like to see any man drunk.”

  The attacks became more personal. The Know-Nothings continued to go after Meagher’s character, heckling him on stage and in print. They were emboldened and ascendant. In 1854, the Know-Nothings took all eleven congressional seats in Massachusetts, swept the Bay State legislature, captured nearly half of New York’s delegation and won six governorships. In Boston, moving swiftly to blunt the power of the second-largest population of Irish in America, newly elected nativist Governor Henry Gardner tried to rush through laws making it harder for immigrants to become police officers or hold office. By the end of 1855, the Know-Nothings were the second-largest political party in the nation, and the only one ever founded in opposition to a specific ethnic group. Handbills in New Orleans shouted for action at election time. “Americans! Shall we be ruled by Irish?” Members promised to support only American-born Protestants, and pledged to never marry a Catholic. In Congress, they pushed legislation that required an immigrant to live in the United States for twenty-five years before becoming eligible for citizenship. This at a time when life expectancy at birth was thirty-eight years. Another bill would cut the allowable cubic footage for a ship arriving with castoffs from Ireland. Through legislation to shrink vessel size, the Know-Nothings would try to hold back the human tide.

  To those who took the country’s founding principles to heart, the rise of the nativists was dispiriting. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal,’” Abraham Lincoln wrote a friend in 1855. “We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’”

  Meagher had to contend not only with the Know-Nothings but with their enemy the Roman Catholic Church. He had criticized the clerics who interfered with European campaigns for democracy, and resented, still, the Church’s stance in his own rebellion. Embracing women as political equals, as the Young Ireland rebels did, put further distance between Meagher and the Church. His faith had not lapsed. His doubt, bordering on scorn, was for the men who ran that faith. “For this I was denounced from pulpits and throughout the bigoted Catholic press,” he told Smith O’Brien in a letter. One of the harshest assaults came from James McMaster, a New Yorker who ran Freeman’s Journal, a billboard for the archdiocese. In the summer of 1854, the editor went after Meagher and Mitchel—“these very silly, bad and contemptible boys.” He wrote that their failed rebellion had made Ireland “a laughingstock to the world.” He not only ridiculed the cause for which they had risked their lives, but mocked their escapes.

  Meagher exploded. This man knew nothing of life in the penal colony, the perils of Bass Strait, the meaning of that overused word—honor. The more it gnawed at him, the angrier he became. If drink pushed him over the edge, so be it. On July 18, 1854, Meagher stormed down to McMaster’s office, past the fresh-planted rows of telegraph poles on roads ripped open for streetcar lines. He called loudly on the editor to come out and confront him. Fists clenched, Meagher ordered the editor to print a retraction.

  “Act like a man!”

  McMaster refused. He locked the front door of his building, leaving Meagher to steam out on the street. Returning to his room at the Metropolitan Hotel, he could not sit still. He grabbed a small riding whip and went out again, in the insufferable afternoon humidity, to confront McMaster. He found the man walking near his home and called on him once more to print a retraction. When the editor scoffed at him, Meagher attacked. The two men tumbled to the ground, a whirl of bloodied fists and spit. McMaster pulled a gun from his vest pocket, aimed it at Meagher’s head and fired. The bullet grazed his forehead, leaving a powder burn over one eyebrow. Failing to kill the Irishman, McMaster pointed the revolver square at Meagher’s face. Before he could get off a second shot, Meagher lunged for the weapon. Police arrived; both men were arrested. Now Meagher was back in jail, this time on a third continent. He posted $500 bail, though no criminal charges were ever filed. But friends noticed: far from an Irish messiah, Meagher was a mess. And a humbled man.

  “It is full time for me to be kindly let down from my ‘distinguished stranger’ position,” he wrote a friend.

  In November, traveling over the rails through Michigan, he could not sleep in the 3 a.m. murk of a fog-encased night, his car overheated by engine steam. The train was full of immigrants—mostly Germans, but a significant number of Irish—going west with their belongings. Meagher found an empty seat in the front row of a cooler car and fell into a slumber. A horrid sound jarred him awake. A jolt threw him forward. A piece of the ceiling fell off and hit him on the head, a gash that drew blood. From above, exposed timbers crunched and tumbled. Underfoot, metal buckled and folded. Meagher would have been tossed from the car, but his foot was trapped by the collapsing floor. He was pinned. Fire raged through the train. He heard screams, moans and cries of people with severed limbs. The train had collided head-on with an eastbound gravel train. Wiggling out of his boot, Meagher was able to free himself. He staggered forward through hot smoke, tripping over a brakeman bleeding profusely.

  Meagher jumped from his crumbled, steaming car. Outside, hunks of metal smoldered on wet grass, blood-splattered figures staggered about and wailed on the ground, an upside-down engine hissed with steam. The train had been shattered as if from an explosion. Meagher held a lifeless child who had a thick sliver of metal thrust through his head. He helped an old woman who bled from open wounds in both legs. A black porter cried for his life, two broken bones protruding from the skin of each leg. Meagher wiped foam from the man’s mouth and offered a few words of encouragement. Another porter lay face-down in a pile of gravel, both legs torn off at the thigh. Looking away, Meagher caught sight of a thick-chested body, beheaded in the crash. A conductor shouted for help—a passenger was trapped in a car, bleeding to death. He and Meagher took turns sawing through the wreckage to cut the man out, a half hour of labor. The dead were thrown against an embankment, bodies atop other bodies, Irish and Germans with shattered bits of blankets and bindles and books meant to start a life. In all, forty-eight people were killed. “It is, undoubtedly, the worst accident by railroad collision that has occurred on this continent,” the New York Times reported. For Meagher, though hailed as heroic by witnesses and the press, it was another dark portent. A bullet off Broadway should have killed him. Moving from the back of the train to the front had saved him. Why? He was running out of lives.

  He found Elizabeth Townsend, or she found him. She was twenty-four, self-confident, bright, witty, with trellises of raven-black hair and the kind of smile that could prompt a grin from the grumpy—dimples, implying something more. She was everything the Irish in New York were not: different tribe, different religion, different financial circumstances. If Meagher had stunned his friends by marrying below his class in the penal colony, he drew gasps of another kind by romancing above his standing with a Fifth Avenue daughter of American royalty. By a consensus of those close to him, the love affair was doomed. He was Catholic, she Protestant. He was a Celt, she Anglo-Saxon. He was a convict, she the progeny of refined Yankee bloodlines. She knew nothing of Cromwell’s cruelty or Brian Boru’s bravery. He knew nothing of the Townsends of New York. To her, the Great Hunger was something that forced thousands of filthy wretches to wash up on Manhattan’s shores and chase pigs down 57th Street. She could not tell a Gaelic word from a hairbrush. He was clueless about the rules of courtship for well-bred WASPs of New York. In one telling of the romance, Elizabeth had shown up at a Meagher speech and was instantly smitten by the charming exile. In another version, they met at a dinner party and could not take their eyes off each other. No matter the precise origin, by the end of 1854 the two were never apart, outcasts within their circles.

  An Englishman of means, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather had amassed a 23,000-acre tract of land straddling t
he colonies of New York and New Jersey in the mid-1700s. With this holding, he built an empire of iron, the furnaces going full bore to feed the ambitions of the Americans. He was best known for forging a chain, weighing in excess of 100 tons, that was strung across the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War to prevent British ships from sailing above West Point. The English held New York, but the Townsend metal chain kept them tied up at the mouth of the main water entrance to the interior. Thereafter, Sterling Iron Works was synonymous with the growth of the United States—its ships, it rails, its carriages, its carts, nuts and bolts. Elizabeth was the oldest of three daughters. She divided her time between the family estate of Southfield, New Jersey, and a sumptuous home on Fifth Avenue in New York, far enough from the dreadful clutter of Five Points.

  Her father was no fan of Meagher or the Irish. He had brought up his girls to be among their kind. Daughter number two, Alice, had married a New York corporate lawyer and art collector, Samuel L. M. Barlow, a man very good at making money and making the right kind of friends. In short order, Barlow became fabulously wealthy. A Townsend was not involved in the politics of excess, whether abolition of slavery or liberation of the Irish. A Townsend was civic-minded, albeit without breaking a sweat. They were certainly not Know-Nothings, but sided with whatever politicians were less likely to imperil dynastic wealth. A Townsend could never be a Catholic; the family was a pillar of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. When Elizabeth brought her Irish lover home to the family residence at 129 Fifth Avenue, he encountered a stern-faced, 250-pound millionaire who would not suffer any silly poetry or penal colony tales. Mr. Townsend cared not a whit for what it was like to rot in Kilmainham Gaol or sleep within earshot of a scaffold being built to hang you. Well, at least they had wartime entanglements with the British Empire in common, yes? The iron chain across the Hudson? That was Grandfather’s business. Should Elizabeth stay with this man, the New York papers reported, she would be disinherited.

  On the second day of January 1855, Meagher decided to risk all. He was sure of very little about himself, except this: he wanted to spend his life with Elizabeth Townsend. And he wanted her to be the mother to his distant son. He knew her family could never accept him. But could she? During his low points, he tallied up the events of his life to date and found himself wanting—a man without success or standing, widowed, wanted as a fugitive by the world’s mightiest power. As he said many a time, he had done nothing to leave his mark. He was famous for his noble failure in Ireland and his escape from a penal colony. Neither initiative had done anything to ease the plight of his countrymen.

  Now he would not hold back; she must know about the doubts, the failures, the political passions, the need for someone to love and something to show for his life. He had been planning to move to California, where his fellow Young Ireland escapee Terence MacManus lived on a ranch near the little town of San Jose. But he was having a change of heart after meeting Elizabeth. Yes, he was sure of it now: she must know everything about him. He took pen in hand, writing in the winter chill of his room at the Metropolitan just before leaving on a months-long lecture tour.

  He trembled. His instinct was to gush. “My dear, dear Miss Townsend,” he began. Meeting her was like waking from a bad dream, he wrote, snapping him out of the purposeless life. She left him breathless. More surprising, she left him speechless. But these words were mush, the residual drag of the Stonyhurst schoolboy. Who was the Meagher who wanted the hand of a Townsend? He had confessed, days earlier, the words a man can be slow to say—I love you. And she had not slapped him, or walked away, or grimaced. She said she loved him back! He also sent her papers and newspaper clippings detailing his life. These sketches had not turned her from him.

  I can, therefore speak to you now more fearlessly and fully than I have hitherto done. The cowardice has fled. Heart, hand and tongue—all are free. The story can easily be told. The more easily, since, if I mistake not, you know most of it already. You know I was a “rebel”—and you know I am an “exile.” You know I was married, and you know there has been left to me a little fellow who knows not what a mother would have been. Of other aspects of my life, you may not be aware. But . . . you know the worst, and you know the best.

  That was the most important part. If Elizabeth should bind her life to his, those labels—rebel, exile—would be attached to her as well as him. For much of his life he was known simply as the son of another Thomas Meagher. He loved the American way of throwing off your past like last winter’s coat. It was so easy to start anew, with a fiction of a life crafted by your own hand. But he would always be the outcast, his fate tied to Ireland’s fate. This he finally understood. There was no getting away from it.

  The world knows what Ireland—the land of my birth and early home—has been. For years and years, a mere wreck upon the sea, she has had nothing but a long list of sorrows, ignominies, and martyrdom to contribute to the history of nations. Believing that such has been her fate through the culpable design of those who rule her, every generation has witnessed an effort made by her sons to redeem her sinking fortunes . . . In the last attempt of the kind in Ireland, it was my fate to be involved. The papers I sent you explain all. Through much idle flattery and exaggerated colouring, the fact and the truth of my short course in public life are clear enough, and that there is nothing in it—not a word, an act, a sentiment, from first to last—you would fear to own, or blush to own.

  So, his past would be her past. Which meant the penal colony as well.

  Banished to an island in the South Pacific—sixteen thousand miles from home—compelled by the Government to move away into the very heart of the forest and there to stay my weary feet, left alone with my memories, my thoughts, and the pale shadows that had once been my hopes, I grew sad and sick of life. In the darkest hour of that sick life, a solitary star shone upon me, making bright and beautiful the desolate waters of the mournful wild lake on the shore of which I lived in that wilderness. I met her who has left me the poor child, for whom as yet I have no home, and who knows not the warmth of a mother’s breast . . . I had not been four months married when I saw she had to share the privations and indignities to which her husband himself was subject. A prisoner myself, I had led another from the altar to share with me an odious captivity. This I could not bear . . . We were three years married. Of those three years, but eight months we were together . . . It is a dream! . . . And I wake beside you to tell the dream.

  He feared she would not love him back, that she was too good for him, or he not good enough for her. Better to commit all of this to paper: did she feel the same way?

  I felt it would be a relief to me, even though my love was not returned, to let you know that I loved, and deeply loved you . . . But when I heard from you that “you could deeply love me,” there passed through me a wild delight which made my pulse beat quick and my brain reel, a thousand suns to flash in the giddy air about me. Oh! I felt myself a generous, guileless, joyous, bounding, loving, hopeful boy again.

  More gush, but damn it was how he felt. He couldn’t bottle up the boy. He moved to confront the issue of money and social class. She may have thought, as many in New York did, that Meagher was a wealthy man, kept in high style by his father. Not so. And he wanted her to understand that her circle would shun them; life as Mrs. Thomas Francis Meagher would mean living with the insults, the cruelty, the whispers.

  That there would be—that there will be—objections to our union I foresaw, and yet foresee. I had learned little of the world, if to these objections I had been blind. I saw them the moment I looked upon and loved you. In the bloom and pride, and the genial glorious dawn of womanhood, stationed in the highest social rank in a community of the wealthiest in the world—the eldest unmarried daughter of a family affluent in its circumstances, and by long descent and residence in the country rendered most noticeable and attractive—I was fully sensible that in claiming the honour to be your husband, I should have to meet no slight contributions and rebuke.
For I have no fortune, at least nothing that I know of. I never asked my father a single question on the subject. I have fought my own way through the world and will fight it to the end. I am, as I have already told you, a homeless exile.

  A Townsend would have to accept an Irishman without money or station, a man with a price on his head, a man without a country. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Meagher did just that. No secrets. He had given up a lot when he walked away from the life grooved for him in Waterford.

  I am here alone. Family, old friends, the familiar interest which sustains, the honours which naturally attend on one in the land of his birth and boyhood—I parted from, to be true to my convictions, my conscience, my cause . . . Would to God I had a wound to show! But I have nothing to show. Nothing to give you. Nothing to promise you but a true heart and a willing hand. And that heart you shall have, with the fullest measure of its love, to the last beat it gives. And that hand, with all the strength and industry, and pride of manhood that is in it, you shall have.

  As proof, he changed the course of his life. He’d planned to move to the West Coast, that frontier of gold. But after he met Elizabeth, he decided to stay in New York. Also, though it meant a career without the risk and drama that he’d tasted as an Irish revolutionary, he intended to become a lawyer, just like her brother-in-law Barlow. He would be a man that a Townsend could marry.

  For some time past, I had been thinking of going to California and there permanently settling. But, from the moment I first saw you, this purpose began to waver. And now that I have the assurance of your love, now that I am to act and live and die for you, I shall remain here in the city of New York, and practice at the bar. To win distinction in this profession shall be my study and ambition—that so I may reflect honour on the noble girl, who in giving her hand and heart to one so humble and downcast, conferred upon him a dignity higher and more precious than even citizenship to which it has been my glory to aspire.