The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Elizabeth Meagher had sent her regrets: “I am there in spirit,” she wrote by telegraph from her home in Rye, Westchester County, north of New York City. She had returned to Montana but once, in the summer of 1887, to visit Yellowstone National Park. She was informed, as later scholars would discover, that her husband’s suggestion that the area be explored and considered as a preserve of some sort had contributed in a small way to the formation of what would become the world’s first national park. Cut out of her father’s inheritance by her marriage to Meagher, she lived modestly in a small cottage, subsisting on a Civil War widow’s pension of $50 a month. She never remarried, never stopped stoking the memory of the Irishman whose life became hers.

  At the noon hour, silence fell over the capitol grounds in Helena. The Declaration of Independence was read, every miner’s head nodding at the fistful of fighting words aimed at England. A still moment followed. On command, solemn-faced men removed the large American flag that had been wrapped around an imposing object. The crowd gasped: there stood a bronze equestrian statue mounted on a massive block of granite. It was Thomas Francis Meagher, forever young, forever defiant, facing the distant Big Belt Mountains and the waters of the Missouri. Chiseled on the side were excerpts from the 1846 speech he gave in Dublin at the age of twenty-two—his attempt to rouse the starving to resistance.

  A few blocks away, Wilbur Sanders was huddled inside his three-story manse, close enough to hear the music and cheers that went up during the dedication of Meagher’s life. He was dying, and probably knew that he might not live to see summer’s end. For almost forty years, Sanders had been determined to have the last word. He had cofounded the Montana Historical Society, serving as its president for a quarter century. In that position, he guided the accepted narrative of how the land under the big sky was settled by righteous pioneers. The version of Montana’s early days that children would learn would come from the vigilante Wilbur Sanders. In A History of Montana, the author wrote that the killers Sanders had unleashed were a force for good, the summary executions necessary, the hangings all justified, for they “had the support of every decent, law-abiding citizen of the community.” The writer was Helen Sanders, daughter-in-law of Wilbur, who presumably had an easy job of sourcing. The Freemasons worked with the vigilantes, in secret, to assure this order, she explained. And if they got a few things wrong, if an innocent man was strangled to death or a family banished without cause, if the Constitution was trampled on, so be it. “The planting of civilization, like all experiments, is subject to many mutations, miscarriages and much mistaken toil,” Wilbur San- ders had said in a Pioneer Day address in 1903.

  The equestrian statue of Meagher at the Montana state capitol in Helena, erected in 1905. Words from his most defiant speech in Ireland are etched into the stone’s pedestal.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  In the burnished twilight of his final years, Sanders had added a few details to his story of what happened to Thomas Meagher. On the day of his disappearance, he recalled, the Irishman was his talkative self. “General Meagher seemed at his best in a conversational way,” Sanders said. “But he resolutely and undeviatingly declined that form of hospitality with which Fort Benton then abounded”—that is, he didn’t drink, gamble or buy himself a whore, a backhanded compliment at best. He next saw the general at sunset. And by then he was a different man—not drunk, but mad. Sanders had no idea why Meagher felt so defensive, “loudly demanding a revolver to defend himself against the citizens of Fort Benton, who in his disturbed mental condition he declared were hostile to him.” Sanders claimed again that he helped escort Meagher to his stateroom “on the starboard side of the boat.” He saw him change to nightclothes and put to bed. “We did not apprehend there would be further trouble.” And it was Sanders who broke the awful news to the general’s wife, implying that Meagher had killed himself. “It seemed my duty to tell her the sad story.” All of this came from a man who had insisted, barely a year before his death, that “we must put a quietus” on Thomas Meagher.

  Among those who had been with Meagher on that last day, no one backed the Sanders story. “He has been charged by the ungenerous with suicide, but with no grounds of possibility,” said I. G. Baker, the merchant who welcomed Meagher into his house on July 1, 1867. He spoke, years later, to an army officer who was compiling a history of Fort Benton. Logic alone reinforced Baker’s conclusion. For what man of words would leave the world without a final word? What man readying to close out his final day would write his best friend on that day to outline ambitious plans for the future, a speaking tour of Europe, a family reunion, meeting a son for the first time? What suicidal husband would send a note of routine details and love to his wife? And what taker of his own life would cry for help in the grip of the river that carried him away?

  Meagher did not kill himself—that seems clear. But this leaves another explanation that some of those closest to him could never believe: that he died in a tipsy tumble from the deck of the G. A. Thompson. It’s easy to blame it all on a drunken fall, as if that were the only fatal destiny for an Irishman who lived large. But that version also conflicts with witness accounts. The merchant Baker said Meagher drank only the medicinal pouring of blackberry wine he’d given him for his stomach troubles in the afternoon. “I am prepared to state that he was stone, cold sober,” Baker said in 1901. Doran, the river pilot, said the same thing.

  In his eulogy, Richard O’Gorman had told of an ordinary ending for a most extraordinary man: Meagher tripped and fell. Drink was not involved. Perhaps it was a coiled rope that snagged him. Or the deck railings had been damaged earlier, as had been reported. But these versions do not explain Meagher’s lack of an apparent struggle to save himself. If he fell on his own, sober or intoxicated, and shouted for help, he was conscious enough to make for the shore, or stay afloat long enough to land on one of the many small islands and sandbars just downstream. The Missouri currents at Fort Benton were strong, but white water they were not. A decent swimmer could make some progress moving to shallow depths, and Meagher was more than a decent swimmer.

  A few of Sanders’s other recollections give credence, inadvertently, to the assassination theory: Meagher fearing for his life, calling for a gun to defend himself, and suspicion of those skulking around the Bloodiest Block in the West. Why would Meagher, a man whose unerring sense of survival had never failed him through a lifetime of peril, “loudly demand a revolver” if he had not seen killers in the shadows? And the notion that Sanders, fresh from the trip to Washington, where he had manipulated the undoing of all of the legislative work of his archenemy, would join Meagher solely for convivial conversation seems a fabrication at best. Also, Sanders got at least one significant detail wrong: he said he put Meagher to bed on the starboard side of the steamship, facing town. This claim was at odds with all eyewitnesses. If Meagher had fallen from the starboard side, he would have been only a few feet from shore, an easy swim.

  How could Sanders be so wrong about the side of the boat where Meagher was put to bed? One explanation emerged a few years later. On May 29, 1913, a newspaper in Missoula printed the startling confession of a man calling himself Frank Diamond. An aging convict, sick and facing death, Diamond told the paper he’d been paid $8,000 by the vigilantes to murder Meagher on the night of July 1, 1867. The blood money was an enormous sum in the day. Diamond said he pushed the governor into the river, then slipped away in the commotion of “Man overboard!” Here was the break the Irish had been waiting for, justification for a half century of suspicion. Did Sanders not know the whereabouts of Meagher’s guest room because it was Diamond—bankrolled by the vigilantes—who had been to Meagher’s room in his final minutes? And did Sanders concoct a story about Meagher committing suicide to divert any suspicion from his own role in a murder plot? The answers awaited a formal inquiry. But within a few days of the convict’s story appearing, Diamond’s health recovered. Facing prosecution for a homicide case with no statute of limitations, he reca
nted the confession, saying he must have been hallucinating.

  Finally, Sanders appears to have lied about breaking the news of Meagher’s death to the widow. A Catholic priest, not the vigilante leader, notified Libby of her loss, according to several Montana newspapers.

  As for motive: Sanders desperately wanted to be the territorial representative to Congress. Meagher stood in the way, and Sanders probably knew nothing of Meagher’s last-minute intention to get out of politics. Statehood was on the way eventually, meaning a pair of Senate seats would open up. Had he run, a Democrat from a place where Republicans were a feeble minority, Meagher would have crushed Sanders. He was the best-known man in Montana, and judging by the crowds that turned out for his speeches, the lines snaking down dust-choked wagon roads outside halls that he warmed with his words and his wit, he was revered. Sanders, after being rejected by voters five times in various runs for office, was finally named a U.S. senator in 1890, by Republicans in the Montana legislature. His seat was disputed from the start. He served one term and was ousted in a reelection bid.

  Sanders was never forced to explain the many contradictions in his telling of Meagher’s final night. By the time the Frank Diamond story broke, it was too late for a prosecutor to formally question Sanders. The vigilante leader had died in 1905—three days after the statue of Thomas Meagher was unveiled in Helena. From that week onward, no governor, legislator, lobbyist or citizen could walk up the steps of the Montana capitol without passing the imposing sculpture of the Irish revolutionary.

  Nor could some of them ever forget the mystery surrounding Meagher’s death. And so, on June 9, 2012, at the courthouse of the hollowed-out little town of Virginia City, a coroner’s inquest was staged as a play, using all the available evidence. Paul Wylie, an attorney, author and Montana historian, felt the need to close a circle, since no original inquest had ever been done. He assembled a real judge, lawyers and medical professionals to examine Meagher’s last night. Witnesses were called. Evidence was presented. Closing arguments were made. At the conclusion, a jury of six was asked to render a verdict. They found that the governor’s death was a homicide, and Wilbur Sanders was the culprit. If true, it meant that Thomas Meagher had lost his life for standing up to people who committed murder in the name of authority.

  More than a half century after Meagher was cast in bronze against the Rocky Mountains, President John F. Kennedy arrived in Ireland to pay homage to the land of his ancestors. One of them, Patrick Kennedy, a laborer, had left New Ross, County Wexford, in the worst year of the famine, the same time that Meagher was sentenced to death by hanging—1848. Like Meagher, Patrick would never see his father again, nor his brother and sister. When the great-grandson of that exiled Kennedy touched down in 1963, he was greeted as royalty, the Last Prince of Ireland—“like a rainbow coming off a plane,” as one historian wrote of his arrival on June 26. Kennedy was the first American president to visit Ireland during his term in office. He was feted at a parade through the streets of Dublin, riding past statues of the rebel William Smith O’Brien and the liberator Daniel O’Connell, showered in shredded bus tickets, used for lack of ticker tape. In New Ross, he ate salmon sandwiches with a cousin, and joked that he might be working at the local factory had Patrick not left for Boston.

  “It took 115 years to make this trip,” said Kennedy. He was traveling with a few precious remnants of Thomas Meagher’s life, and was mulling a speech that included a section about the general. He wanted to explain why the words and deeds of an Irishman long dead still mattered.

  The rebels of 1848 had done well. The prison sentences, the harassment, the banishments by the British Empire, had only delayed the careers of a generation of brilliant Irish. Richard O’Gorman, Meagher’s eulogist, a fugitive, became one of New York’s most prominent legal authorities and a superior court judge. Another Clongowes Wood school friend, Patrick J. Smyth, was elected to the House of Commons on an Irish home rule ticket, serving three terms. For his work on behalf of democratic movements worldwide, he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in France.

  Kevin O’Doherty, the doctor whose presence was a palliative for Meagher’s loneliness, sharing grog and laughs on a bridge touching both of their prison districts in Tasmania, moved to Paris and married his lover, Eva the poet. After being pardoned, he was allowed to return to Dublin, where he became a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons and set up a practice. But degraded Ireland did not suit him. He and Eva moved to Australia, where he pioneered medical societies, set up hospitals and schools. The couple had eight children.

  Charles Gavan Duffy, the editor who was overjoyed by the “thrilling music” of Meagher’s voice in 1846 and counseled the lad through the days of the uprising, lived to become a bewigged and honored figure on two continents. He also was elected to the House of Commons, representing New Ross, using his voice in London the same way he used his pen in Dublin—advocating Irish independence. Disgusted at British intransigence, he moved to Australia in 1856. He rose to become the premier of Victoria and the speaker of the Legislative Assembly—a popular and dashing figure among the large population of Irish whose families had been taken to the penal colony in chains. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was knighted in 1873 by the very monarch, Queen Victoria, who had jailed him in his youth. His book Four Years of Irish History stands as the definitive account of the uprising of poets and orators.

  The man who had betrayed the Young Ireland leaders, John Donnellan Balfe, spent his remaining years in Tasmania, auctioning his principles to the highest bidder. Denounced at a public dinner not long after Meagher had unmasked him, he was jailed in 1852 for attacking one of his accusers. Balfe was arrested again 1863, for assault. After being elected to the legislature in 1868, Balfe was censured for selling his vote—“a more nefarious transaction cannot be instanced in the miserable annals of parliamentary corruption,” one newspaper noted.

  John Mitchel, the most gifted writer and most flawed human among the Young Ireland leaders, was released from Fort Monroe in 1865 after spending four and a half months as a prisoner of the United States. A proud racist, he was “a traitor to humanity,” in the words of Frederick Douglass. For a brief time after his release, Mitchel was editor of the New York Daily News. He moved to Paris, and then was allowed back into Ireland. In 1875 he was elected to Parliament, from Tipperary, even though British authorities said his status as a convicted felon disqualified him. It didn’t matter: Mitchel said he would never serve in the British House of Commons. In 1914, his grandson, John P. Mitchel, was elected mayor of New York City at the age of thirty-four.

  As for the Meaghers, the elder Thomas Francis always stood by the son whose temperament could not have been more different from his own. While the boy was imprisoned, he had paid his legal fees and was a regular visitor. Though he seldom showed it, his “affection for his son is extreme,” his hometown newspaper reported during the days that Thomas awaited execution. The Meagher patriarch lived well into his eighties, dying in 1874. Elizabeth Meagher grew close to the son that her late husband never saw, Thomas Bennett Meagher. On her suggestion, the boy moved to the United States, living with her for a time in New York. He bore an uncanny resemblance to his father. He enrolled at West Point but, showing another family trait, was kicked out of the military academy for multiple demerits. Libby died in 1906, at the age of seventy-five. Young Thomas wandered, moving west, then to the Philippines, where he died in 1909. His son, Thomas Francis Meagher III, lived a quiet life in California, dying in 1943. He is buried in the lovely Napa Valley town of St. Helena.

  Two days after landing in Dublin, President Kennedy addressed the parliament of an independent Irish republic—the centerpiece of his visit. It had taken two more rebellions, in 1867, led by the Fenians, and the 1916 Easter Rising, led by a linguist with a love of Gaelic, for the little island to finally break free of the 800-year hold of England.

  Meagher’s words had been resurrected by leaders of the fight in 1916. His speeches were rep
rinted, passed around in underground posts, muscled into service before blood was shed. When the rebels took over key government buildings, they read a proclamation in the streets of Dublin: “We declare the rights of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”—an echo of Meagher’s rallying slogan, “Ireland for the Irish.” The proclamation was signed by seven men. Within days, those men were captured and imprisoned at Kilmainham Gaol, where Meagher had awaited his execution; a picture of him and Smith O’Brien, shadowed by guards, was still in the archives. One by one, on select days in May, the seven leaders of the Easter Rising were dragged into a graveled courtyard of the jail and shot to death. The last man to be executed, James Connolly, was unable to stand because of wounds to his legs. The killings outraged the Irish in America, the Irish in Europe, the Irish in Australia and millions of others. The executions were followed by an outright war for independence against the exhausted rulers of the British Empire. This conflict ended in 1922 with the establishment of the Irish Free State, consisting of 26 of the island’s 32 counties; the 6 in the northeast opted to stay with England. The terms were contentious, and civil war followed, families killing families from the same counties, the same villages where they lived. That fratricide ended in 1923. With the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, the nation formally severed all ties to the British monarchy and the Commonwealth, and bound itself to a constitution that guaranteed freedom of worship. Gaelic was recognized as the national language, along with English.