The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Questions of hatred and loyalty dogged the Irish in America, with Meagher in the middle of it. The immigrants were tenants, it was said, renting out a country as a staging ground to go after Britain. The critics weren’t entirely wrong—a view affirmed by the defiance of Meagher’s friend Michael Corcoran, the onetime constable for the Empire, now commander of the 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia. Since coming to America as a fugitive, Corcoran had sold oysters in the street, worked as a bookkeeper for a tavern and a clerk at the post office, and finally found his calling in the militia. By 1860, he was the commander of a unit full of Irish American volunteers, his reputation on the rise. But when asked to parade his soldiers in honor of the Prince of Wales, Colonel Corcoran balked. “I cannot in good conscience order out a regiment composed of Irish-born citizens to parade in honor of a sovereign under whose reign Ireland was made a desert and her sons forced into exile,” Corcoran said. “In the Prince of Wales I recognize the representative of my country’s oppressors.” He was arrested, thrown in jail and ordered to face a court-martial.

  His stand caused a national furor. Here was proof of the dual loyalties of the Irish fresh to America. As it was, they were thieves and scofflaws, violent and unruly, the nativists said. New terms—paddy wagon, hooligan—were coined for Ireland’s lawbreaking outcasts. “Nearly seventy-five percent of our criminals and paupers are Irish,” wrote Harper’s Weekly, and “fully seventy-five percent of the crimes of violence committed among us are the work of Irishmen.” Further, the Irish in America showed “an incapacity for self-government,” the paper asserted. Now Colonel Corcoran’s insubordination had proved that his people could not be trusted in military command and should be run out of the service. When it was revealed that Corcoran was a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish independence movement founded in 1858, it only added to the case against him and his people.

  As influential voices called for Corcoran to be deported, Meagher rushed to his defense. The Irish were ready to shed blood against any enemy of the country that had taken them in, Meagher said. That should never be in doubt. Corcoran had done what a man of conscience must do, he argued. He had not refused a military order in time of battle. Rather, he simply did not have his men show up at a parade for a foreign royal. Were these men of Ireland to honor the Prince of Wales, he wrote, it would show that “her people are satisfied” being serfs of England. They could never forget the famine—the skeleton at the feast. These arguments did Meagher no good with the general public. In an election year, the most consequential in the young republic’s history, with the country ready to break, a view of the Irish hardened in many parts of the land: they could not be counted on to hold firm against a renegade South, nor could they be trusted in the uniform of their adopted country.

  Restless as always, Meagher sold his newspaper and left for Central America with Libby. He had been there before, in stopovers on the way to the American West Coast. He’d used those travels for writing assignments, climbing volcanoes, sailing across Lake Nicaragua, hacking through the jungle with Indian guides. This time, he and his wife were looking for fresh stimulation, lecture material, and to earn a healthy fee on behalf of a wealthy American who wanted to build a route to connect the seas, a dream of centuries. He also did diplomatic work on the side for the increasingly feckless President Buchanan, who had shown no stomach for holding the nation together. The Irishman and his New York wife were welcomed by the president of Costa Rica, and worked the survey and government circle for months. He thought he had a deal for a right-of-way in place, and hoped to return triumphant with a plan to build a rail route across the isthmus. But it fell through, snagged by doubters in Congress and obstructionists in Costa Rica.

  Meagher despaired. Was he doomed to life as a serial dilettante? Many starts, nothing finished. He worried that he was an oratorical ornament who had lost his luster—yesterday’s man, less than a decade after arriving in America. “I was then a dazzling novelty,” he wrote one of the Meagher clubs that still invited him to speak. “A lock of my hair would have fetched consistently more than what most people would give now for a foot of the Trans-Atlantic submarine cable. But the most favorable novelties must fade.”

  The depression that found him whenever he was bereft of a cause returned. “I’ve ceased to be a participator in historic motions,” he wrote Smith O’Brien. “I’ve become an impassive spectator. Yet, a spark might re-light the fire, the materials of which have not been exhausted.”

  Abraham Lincoln had few friends in New York. Or so it would appear. Mayor Wood said he was unwelcome. So did half the newspapers. But Lincoln was determined to press his case against the great sickness infecting the country. From the Midwest, he took five trains over three days to reach Manhattan in the dead of winter, 1860. He arrived exhausted, his suit soiled, and checked into the Astor House. A change of venue was announced for his speech: because of advance interest, it was moved from Reverend Beecher’s Plymouth Church to the basement hall of the Cooper Union, an institution dedicated to free education for the working class, regardless of color, then barely a year old. On the day of the speech, February 27, Lincoln stopped off at a studio on the corner of Bleecker Street and Broadway and had his portrait taken by Mathew Brady. He was fifty-one, beardless and sad-eyed, with a prominent mole on his right cheek, his facial features disproportionate to his gangly frame—a six-foot-four-inch paste-up of a man. He had learned to joke about his ugliness. Later, when an opponent called him two-faced, he said, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” In the evening, he took the stage in a room that was supposed to hold no more than 900 people; 1,500 showed up. Lincoln talked for an hour and then some, tearing apart the Dred Scott decision, trying to prove that the Constitution could never be used to expand slavery in the territories. He was cheered wildly. Four newspapers carried the full 7,000-word text of his remarks. One paper noted, “No man had ever made such an impression on his first appearance to a New York audience.” The speech propelled him toward the presidency.

  When the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina, to choose a candidate for the high office, they could not hold the Southern delegates together. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s old political sparring opponent, was the nominee, but he had committed the unpardonable sin of allowing the territories to choose to be free or slave by popular vote. This, the slavery-or-nothing South could not tolerate; its delegates stormed out. For the general election, each faction of Democrats nominated a candidate: Douglas for the Northern wing; a vice president, John C. Breckinridge, for the Southern. Another party, a meld of Know-Nothings and aging Whigs, put forth a slaveholder, John Bell. The Republicans, after three ballots, settled on the former one-term congressman, Lincoln, as their candidate. Honest Abe could speak and had a compelling personal story, raised from an earthen-floored cabin. He did not promise to abolish slavery. In Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, Lincoln was not even on the ballot. He did not get a single vote from any of them. In Virginia, where his name was listed, he tallied 1,887 votes—a mere 1 percent. On election night, Lincoln won with just under 40 percent of the total. He got 1,865,908 votes, but the other candidates combined outpolled him by more than a million ballots. Lincoln carried every Northern state but New Jersey. He lost New York City by a sizable margin but took the state. The Irish voted Northern Democrat. They’d been warned of the consequences of a Republican victory. “If Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of 4 million emancipated Negroes,” wrote the New York Tribune.

  The Meaghers returned home in January 1861 from a yearlong absence in Central America to find a nation they did not recognize—tense, fractured, cutthroat. By March 1, in the last days before Lincoln was sworn into office, more than half of the South had deserted the Union. South Carolina went out first, on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas—seven states in all, with slaves making up 47
percent of their population. Lincoln assumed the presidency on March 4, a cold day with a persistent wind lashing at the 10,000 people gathered near a Capitol dome bracketed by construction scaffolding. Chief Justice Taney, the former slaveholder who had written the Dred Scott decision, administered the oath. In his address, Lincoln tried to reassure the South: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He appealed to the runaway states to come home, bound by “the mystic chords of memory.” He tried to play peacemaker, conciliator. “A husband and wife may be divorced,” he said, “but the different parts of our country cannot do this.”

  The new Confederate nation soon removed all doubt about the reason for its existence. At the founding convention of the Confederate States of America, one of the first orders of business was to enshrine slavery in its constitution, in Article I. “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” And if the legal footings of the rebel republic did not make the point clear enough, the Confederate leadership did. “African slavery as it exists in the United States,” said President Jefferson Davis, “is a moral, a social and a political blessing.” A committed white supremacist, Davis owned 137 people on his cotton plantation in Mississippi. The rebel vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, was even more explicit. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea” of racial equality, he said. “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery is his natural and normal condition.”

  Meagher’s New York looked to break away, not with the South but as an independent city republic, open for business. Mayor Wood would try to play both sides, but first he suggested that New York secede and declare itself a free city, loyal to neither. “With our aggrieved brethren of the slave states, we have friendly relations and a common sympathy,” the mayor said at the start of 1861.

  Meagher continued to respect the South’s sovereign right to its institution, so long as it was the law of the land, but not to leave the Union. And if war came, how would the Irish respond? They had been forewarned about what a Lincoln presidency would mean to them—he was head of “a party that says a nigger is better than an Irishman,” the Albany Argus cautioned. “We will not move an inch when you command us to march to a fratricidal war!” wrote the Boston Pilot.

  Colonel Corcoran, who could rally his countrymen to one side or the other, was awaiting his court-martial, having endured the lash of Northern public sentiment for snubbing the Prince of Wales. The South exploited this opening: the Irish should not fight for those who hated them, Confederate leaders argued. They added a further disincentive: about 80,000 Irish immigrants lived in the breakaway states, the combustible John Mitchel among them. These are your brothers, not the Yankees. Meagher would not argue with this sentiment. The South had been gracious to Mr. and Mrs. Meagher in ways that Protestants of the North never had been. Was this rogue nation really an enemy? These thoughts simmered, all a moral muddle, until what happened on April 12 of that year made it clear to Meagher what he must do, and do without hesitation. He’d been called.

  12

  * * *

  War

  The man-made island of Fort Sumter was a smidge of American will in Charleston Harbor, surrounded by the guns of a renegade republic. By early April of 1861, the soldiers isolated in that brick-walled compound were facing starvation. The military, the government, even the currency of the United States no longer had any official standing in the seven states of the newborn Confederacy. Only four forts remained in the hands of the Union, and three of them were insignificant. Sumter meant something, with its masonry perimeter twelve feet thick in parts, its hollow-stomached officers a source of federal pride and its commander, Robert Anderson, a West Point instructor who had taught the general who now aimed his cannons at him how to use the big guns. Sumter stood for a nation cleaved but not yet bloodied. South Carolina refused to let food in or soldiers out, except under the white flag of surrender. The new president still thought war could be averted. “We must not be enemies,” Lincoln pleaded in his first hour on the job. As a concession, he would send life supplies to the garrison of eighty-five or so men, and nothing more provocative.

  But the time for words was over. War was a thrilling prospect. It excited the young, who knew nothing of its consequences, and the old, who drew blood by proxy. “Strike a blow!” one Southern politician urged the citizens of Charleston, barking from a balcony. They did not need the nudge, for many had already crossed a line; they were eager to kill their former countrymen. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” wrote a London Times correspondent from Charleston. The harbor was lined with cannons, a lethal semicircle poised to “reduce the fort” at the call of President Jefferson Davis. Commanding one of those Confederate guns, with the 1st South Carolina Artillery, was John C. Mitchel, the eldest son of the Irish polemicist. The boy stood ready to level the outpost of the nation that had given his family refuge.

  In New York, a man who had risked his life for John Mitchel in Ireland tried to walk away from an argument with his father-in-law. Thomas Meagher was a Democrat. He could never vote for Lincoln. On this spring morning, Peter Townsend fumed about the former Democrats agitating in the South. They were traitors, knaves, yahoos. Meagher, never shying from debate, countered. Don’t call them outlaws, he said, “call them revolutionists.” The voice that never went quiet on behalf of landless and starving Irish tenants, and the pen that pulsed with indignation against treatment of convicts in the penal colony of Australia, had been missing in the great debate that broke up America. Meagher and his father-in-law left their morning dispute at the table, nothing resolved. It was yet another reason for the Townsend patriarch—Peter the Great, as Meagher now called him—to wonder what his oldest daughter saw in this Irishman. Meagher strolled over to Delmonico’s for lunch. There, a few blocks from O’Gorman’s law office, in a restaurant with the city’s largest wine cellar, Meagher joined a variant of the debate he had walked away from at the Townsend home. The South, he argued, had done nothing to harm the North. Why go to war?

  The same message was being conveyed, in more extortionate terms, to the American commander of Fort Sumter. The secessionist General P.G.T. Beauregard sent two men to the garrison in a rowboat. They handed a note to Major Anderson: get out or get killed. A few rations of dried pork, and very little water, were all that kept the men alive. “Gentlemen,” Anderson replied, “if you do not batter us to pieces we shall be starved out in a few days.” Darkness fell with no sign of retreat. By midnight, much of Charleston was giddy. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, they got their war. The inaugural shot was a long, graceful arc of red light, like the start of a fireworks show, illuminating the bay. At dawn and throughout the day, the shells became a deadly shower. Fort Sumter caught fire, though it was quickly put out. In town, people cheered from rooftops and in seats along the harbor, watching brother lob cannonballs against brother. For thirty-three hours the fort was hammered, more than 4,000 rounds. Before the weekend was over, Anderson surrendered. No one died from the rain of fire, but the garrison had nothing left—it was out of ammunition and out of food. The flag of the United States was lowered. Victory was declared in Charleston. The South had fired first. And one of those shots that had launched the bloodiest conflict in American history, it was reported in the Charleston Mercury, came at the hand of John C. Mitchel, “the worthy son of that patriot sire.”

  In New York, in Boston, in Chicago, in small towns and on farms where a majority of Americans lived, reaction was swift and visceral. The unimaginable had happened; it changed everything. People poured into the streets. Newspaper headlines screamed: the Union has been assaulted! Walt Whitman was walking down Broadway toward the Fulton Fer
ry just after midnight on April 13 when he heard the cry of newsboys, louder than ever before. He bought a broadsheet and joined a cluster of people reading telegraphed dispatches from South Carolina. Whitman felt himself swept away in “a volcanic upheaval.” Having claimed a Union trophy, what would the South do next? March on Washington, was the great fear. With the capital exposed, Lincoln called for immediate help: the formation of a 75,000-man force from state militias to serve for ninety days. Surely, three months was all it would take to subjugate the South. The existing national army, all of it, was barely 16,000 soldiers, and many of those men were scattered on the far western frontier. Washington was defenseless.

  Lincoln’s plea was not a declaration of war—not technically. But his summons infuriated the slave states. Virginia, the mother of presidents, home to Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, was the next to secede, though the western half felt no sympathy with the tobacco masters in the east. It was followed by Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. The border states with slave populations—Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and Delaware—remained in the Union, for now. Chest out, fully committed to abandon its sovereign ties to the North, the full Confederacy now numbered eleven states, with a population of 5.5 million free, 3.5 million in bondage. As a new nation, it became the largest slaveholding country in the world, relieving the United States of the distinction.