The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  One last thing: he considered Elizabeth an equal. The salons of Dublin in the ferment of 1848—where he came to admire the views of Speranza and Eva as much as the political poetry of Thomas Davis—had been formative on the young man. In an age when women were expected to speak passively, to never question their husbands in the big decisions that chart a life, Meagher wanted a companion who was unafraid to ask him anything. If she were to be a co-owner of his past, she must have access to his doubts and his deepest thoughts.

  This brings me to the end of what I have, and had, to write. But I cannot close this letter without renewing the request I have already made—that you will never, never hesitate to question me concerning anything which interests you, painfully or otherwise, in my regard.

  Rest assured, I shall ever prove to you most truthful, frank and upright, and shall forever remain, as now, with fondest, deepest esteem and love, your devoted and betrothed, Thomas Francis Meagher.

  They married on November 14, 1855, at the Madison Avenue residence of Archbishop John Hughes. “Dagger John” presided as well. The New York Times reported that Peter Townsend’s reasons for disapproving of his new son-in-law “were of a serious nature, and based on some unpleasant antecedents” in the Irishman’s life.

  In defiance, Elizabeth took his name, his faith and his past, traveling on her own to Ireland to see Waterford, the boy and the elder Meagher, to take in the small world that had fostered her husband. The time was not yet right, the family felt, for the motherless child to move to New York and join the father he’d never seen. He was doing well with a doting grandfather. As promised, Thomas studied for the bar and passed; he tried to become a proper New York barrister, hanging out his shingle in an office near City Hall. Criminal law was his specialty, using the golden tongue to sway juries, the power of narrative being the best weapon of an attorney in court. As one newspaper had noted of Meagher’s talents, “He has mastered the English language and bent all of its best powers to the purposes of his richest fancies.” He became a citizen, not by marriage, but by statutory process that at the time allowed an immigrant to naturalize after five years. To hell with the Know-Nothings. As a new American, he used the First Amendment as a license to fly. And he wanted to see more of the world, and more of the expanding United States, as did Elizabeth. Less than five years after landing on these shores, America had changed Meagher. Now he looked for his chance to change it.

  11

  * * *

  The Fever

  The democracy turned ugly and violent, as the gauze of compromise that held together the largest slaveholding nation in the world started to tear. Americans would kill fellow Americans, it was now clear, over the fate of people with fewer rights than a horse. In Kansas, a mob led by a sheriff stormed into Lawrence and ransacked the river town where antislavery settlers had made a stand. They burned the Free State Hotel, broke apart two printing presses, barged through houses and businesses, smashing anything in their path. In retaliation, John Brown and his sons dragged proslavery settlers from their homes in the territory and hacked five of them to death, splitting their heads open as if they were melons. “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood,” Brown wrote not long before he was hanged for another violent outburst. In 1856, a congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, attacked Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a walking stick in the chamber of the world’s great deliberative body. He beat Sumner over the head until his cane snapped, until his victim staggered to the ground, skull fractured, nose split, blood running onto the marble floor. The senator never fully recovered. New canes were sent to the assailant congressman, inscribed Hit Him Again. He became a hero in the South, alongside Senator David Atchison of Missouri, who had urged his constituents to “kill every goddamn abolitionist in the district.”

  The next year, the Supreme Court attempted to settle things once and for all. Ruling 7–2 in the Dred Scott decision, the country’s final judicial arbiter held that blacks, free or chained, could never be citizens. Dating to colonial times, the nation had always looked at a Negro as property—“he was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise,” the court wrote. And what property it was: the total market value of slaves in the South at the time of the ruling was $3 billion, more than all the railroads, all the banks, any other American asset. To the founders, blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race,” explained Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the written opinion, “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The phrase “all men are created equal,” in the Declaration of Independence, did not cover black people, said Taney. “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included.” Regarding runaways, that history must be honored and upheld. The ruling fortified the South, with its vision to “carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean,” as Senator Atchison had outlined. But it settled nothing. Northerners continued to help fugitives—“stealing our property,” Georgia Senator Robert Toombs said. To harbor a slave from his master, said Toombs, was “a good and sufficient cause for war.”

  The decision moved Abraham Lincoln to make another run for public office. Ousted after one term in Congress, he was searching for some larger purpose in his life at the same time Thomas Meagher was floundering. Lincoln felt, as did Meagher, that he might have missed his chance. “Oh, how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better off than if one had never lived,” Lincoln said. Self-educated, a reader whose tastes ranged from Shakespeare to self-improvement manuals, always tinkering with his speaking style, the praying mantis–limbed lawyer decided to take on the little senator who had authored the bill allowing slavery to expand, Stephen Douglas. “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that all men are created equal, and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man making a slave of another,” he said in one of their debates. Lincoln lost the Senate race of 1858, but became the moral voice of a new political party, the Republicans.

  Meagher could not avoid the Great Question. Everywhere he went, speaking from a stage or in a saloon, he was asked about slavery. The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, had been an abolitionist. “Irishmen and Irishwomen: treat the colored people as your equal, your brethren,” O’Connell had said in a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. But Irish and blacks, having found much in common in their shared misery, now found much that ripped them apart. The competition for jobs at the bottom stiffened during the latest of the periodic panics that crashed the economy. Somebody was always willing to work cheaper on the docks, as a maid, a servant, a street cleaner, and that somebody became the hated face of his or her race. The Sixth Ward of New York, once home to Abyssinian Baptist churches, mixed marriages and nighttime entertainments where color was less important than a fiddler’s tune, lost half its black population over the decade of the 1850s. In the newspaper caricatures, where the Irish had been drawn with tails, hirsute necks and exaggerated foreheads, African Americans were the monkeys now.

  When Meagher and his wife traveled to the South, they were treated with the hospitality accorded visitors of standing and eloquence. In the parlors of stately old homes, slavery was dismissed as a Yankee obsession—and they had it all wrong. Writing after a tour of the region, Meagher was of two minds on the institution that threatened to shatter his adopted country. “It would be well if America could get rid of slavery,” he said. “But we can’t, in our time, and should therefore confine our efforts to alleviating the evils that accompany it.”

  During a reunion with Smith O’Brien in America, the two Irish rebels agreed on all the great issues of the day but one.

  “How can you be an apologist for slavery in the South?” asked the elder conscience of Young Ireland.

  “I am not in favor of slavery,” Meagher replied. “I am devoted to the Union. The Union accepts slavery.”

  This was the Democr
atic Party position and that of its standard-bearer in the 1856 election, James Buchanan. By contrast, at their national convention that year, the Know-Nothings took up a platform in full support of slavery’s expansion. The Southern delegates favored it, the Northerners less so. The Republicans were closest to abolition. They considered nominating Lincoln as a vice presidential candidate, before rejecting him, at their first national convention in 1856. Lincoln refused to pander to the nativists shopping for a political home. “I am not a Know-Nothing,” he said. “That is certain. How can I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” The Know-Nothings, organized behind the new American Party, ran Millard Fillmore, the former president. He stood for nothing, and was routed, finishing third.

  Meagher built a forum for his opinions, the Irish News, in 1856. With his newspaper he was back in the arena. The News dedicated itself to the smudge-faced immigrants of the tenements, and beyond. Many of his readers were in and out of jail: the Irish accounted for less than 30 percent of New York City’s population but 55 percent of all arrests in the second half of the decade. Meagher would give them a voice, he declared. It shamed him to see his countrymen wasting away in their squalid newcomer hives, susceptible to “drinking, debauchery and riotousness.” After fleeing starvation across the Atlantic, they should not have to fester in the lethal slums of New York. Nor should they ever accept a drastic proposal floated by the Know-Nothings: to remove Irish children from their foul homes on the East Coast and assign them to non-Catholic families in the Midwest—an American version of the Penal Laws. But fresh air on fresh land was a good idea, Meagher felt. He urged the Irish to get out, to go west, to aspire and climb, to take advantage of the open country beyond New York.

  “The tenement which the immigrant, in the vast majority of cases, is forced to resort to is by a thousand degrees less wholesome and affords less shelter than the rudest hut which could be thrown upon the prairie or within the forest.” His paper was filled with such advice, as well as poetry, commentary, world news, odd items. It quickly gained a circulation in excess of 50,000, making it one of the top reads in New York. The Irish News carried things like a travel piece, “Three Months in Greece with William Smith O’Brien,” and a long explanatory essay under the headline “Why Are Irishmen Democrats?” Without comment, Meagher also ran a few of John Mitchel’s letters from the South. His old partner for freedom in Ireland had become a vigorous promoter of human bondage in America, even as the South fell further behind the rest of the world, backward and isolated.

  With Elizabeth at his side, Meagher was sure of his step. The temper was contained, the drinking moderated, the speeches sharper. Almost a year after his marriage, he still could not believe his good luck. No longer “my dear, dear Miss Townsend.” Now she was Libby—his Libby. He loved everything about her. The pride for his bride jumped off the page. “She is so intelligent, so cultivated, so generous, so gentle and unaffected,” he wrote Smith O’Brien in 1856. He glowed in her presence and wanted to show her off. “I long, earnestly and fondly, to see Ireland and especially poor Waterford. The desire is all the more restless and intense owing from the fact of my having a very noble and very beautiful American wife . . . I would feel proud beyond measure to introduce her to my Irish friends. I would give anything if you could see her.”

  The Meaghers were frequently on the road. But when at home, they stayed at the Townsend house in New York, a place large enough to give them their privacy. Meagher was starting to understand what he could be in his new country. The Constitution was not only a governing document, but a blueprint for how people of dissimilar backgrounds could live under a single flag. Religion, ethnicity (to a degree), economic standing—these were secondary concerns in the masterpiece of the Constitution, Meagher believed. The Old World’s fatal flaw, enforced in Ireland for centuries by England, was the establishment of a governing religion.

  “I set my face against the alliance of Church and State—here and elsewhere—now and for all time,” he said in San Francisco, further alarming his enemies in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. “I protest against it for Ireland, if Ireland so wills it. I protest against it for Rome, if Rome so wills it. Is this to be an infidel? . . . I am opposed to the exercise in political affairs of any and every clerical influence whatsoever.”

  He also praised his new country for the experiment of taking in people from all over the world. “Everywhere throughout this immense community, everywhere upon this prodigious territory, within which so many families, races, nationalities under a generous system of laws are indissolubly blended—everywhere an irrepressible vitality is evident.”

  The Irishman had found his American voice. In Dublin, the fine words had been in service of futility, tapping into an ancient vein of grievance. The United States was still forming, a fast-changing, fast-growing nation of thirty million people. An immigrant, barely five years from the penal colony, could influence its shape. Meagher’s speeches continued to draw huge crowds—predominantly Irish on one occasion in New York, predominantly Jewish at another Manhattan venue. Even at the most convivial events he tried to keep alive the memory of the million who died in the Great Hunger. “There is a skeleton at this feast,” he said at a Friends of St. Patrick banquet. “Some few may not behold it. But to me the shroud and the sealed lips and the cold hands and the beautiful head are visible . . . It is a festival of memory.”

  But he did not speak out on slavery. New York in the late 1850s was an ambiguous island in a rising sea of Northeast abolitionism. Yes, the influential publisher Horace Greeley expended barrels of printer’s ink on behalf of ending the Peculiar Institution. And Henry Ward Beecher, the most popular preacher in the country, was tearing up the pulpit with fiery denunciations of legalized inhumanity, backing the sentiment of a sibling whose novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had become America’s best-selling book of its time. Reverend Beecher’s Plymouth Church was the top tourist destination in the city. But New York’s mayor, an artful dandy named Fernando Wood, wanted no part of the do-gooders. In that sentiment, the Irish on the Lower East Side were with him, as was Tammany Hall. Wood was first elected in 1854, in part because the Sixth Ward had delivered several thousand votes from people who never existed. The mayor’s real loyalty was to lining his pockets, and to the merchant class that had grown prosperous on the global cotton trade.

  New York’s animating cause was money, Wood said; the city would never risk its garment factories, its free port, its brokers who kept the South rolling, for liberation of the Negro. With forced labor, the American South provided three fourths of the world’s cotton supply, yielding a stream of cash that flushed through the hands of his city’s bankers. New York financial institutions even offered mortgages to plantation owners on their enslaved human machines in the field. Wood was manifestly corrupt: he was the first mayor to be physically yanked from City Hall and arrested. He survived the scandal, and after being out of office for several years, he won a second term in 1860, openly proclaiming his pro-Southern views. John Hughes, who had joined the Meaghers in marriage, was no abolitionist either. The archbishop made it clear that the Irish masses he presumed to speak for were not interested in a crusade that could bring thousands of free blacks north, to compete with Erin’s unskilled workers in the basement of American opportunity.

  Still, the Catholic cleric’s declarations were soft-breeze diplomacy compared to the heat blast from John Mitchel. Slavery might have died a natural death, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted. But the technical great leap of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made the South all the more dependent on what it harvested with people in bondage, now on an industrial scale. Cotton became the chief U.S. export. Mills in New England and Olde England spun fine sheets and soft garments from raw material that had been picked by people whose backs bore the same mark of the lash as those of Irish convicts in Australia. Mitchel was blind to these parallels. “Those emigrants who have education, refined taste and means to
buy Negroes had better come South for a living,” he wrote from his home in Tennessee.

  Mitchel started a proslavery paper out of Knoxville, baited the leading voices of the North and inflated the most radical voices in the South. The same muscular wordsmith who had backed the risky speeches of Thomas Meagher for a free Ireland, who saw nobility in the lowliest peasant dying of fever in the corner of a grass hut, now put his prose to work on behalf of white supremacy. “I am continuing to the best of my ability to ‘save the South’ from her enemies and oppressors and to break up the Union,” he wrote a friend. “A great many people regard me as an incendiary and madman.” He moved to Washington, there to be closer to his allies in the slaveholding cause. Just a few miles from Alexandria, Virginia, where people were kept in pens while waiting to be auctioned, Mitchel belittled those who called slavery a great evil. Blacks, he wrote, were far better off in chains in America than running free in Africa. When Smith O’Brien, on his tour of the United States in 1859, met with his former conspirator in Irish liberation, he was appalled at the change in Mitchel. The man he thought he knew so well, Smith O’Brien wrote, had become “a formidable monster.”

  Frederick Douglass could not understand this. During his trip to Ireland in 1845, then about the same age as most of the well-spoken rebels, Douglass had found a country of empty pantries that still opened its doors to him. “One of the most pleasing features of my visit thus far has been the total absence of all manifestations of prejudice against me on account of my color,” he wrote. But in the late 1850s in America, he saw a hardening of Irish attitudes toward blacks. “Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens,” he said. “And no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have these same Irish people. The Irish who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro. They are taught that he eats the bread that belongs to them.”