The furore continued for days. ‘For the first week,’ Jenny wrote, ‘we did not get to our beds before two or three in the morning.’ One day that week, the mayor of Brooklyn collected Mitchel for a triumphal procession through the streets, followed by a civic reception. Beautiful women threw bouquets from balconies. ‘Good God! What is all this for?’ he asked Dillon. ‘What value am I to give for it?’ Going to Manhattan, Mitchel encountered the Fulton Street markets. ‘A thoroughly disgraceful and squalid mass of shanties.’ But across from the splendid Astor House, he was honoured at City Hall, where he joyfully made his first notable American mistake. During his reception, he declared that he accepted American honours of this kind ‘expressly as an insult to the British Government.’ A friendly journalist took Mitchel aside and told him not to speak in those terms. These people did not mean any affront to the British government; ‘they mean to pay you a passing tribute of respect.’ He restrained himself and fell back on being impressed by the way New York and its environs operated as an absorber of immigrants. In the few days since he arrived many thousands of Irish men and women had been emptied out of immigrant ships. ‘They are not to be seen crowding the streets and making mobs … they get railroad cars on the very evening of their arrival, and are whirled away to where loving friends are awaiting them on the banks of the Wabash, or hard by some bright lake of Michigan; or else they get immediate occupation in the city itself.’
Escape celebrations were still rolling the week before Christmas, when a huge dinner was held in Mitchel’s honour at the Broadway Theater. A speech was expected of Meagher, as it was of Horace Greeley, the lawyers Richard O’Gorman and John Blake Dillon, and others. As 600 diners sat in the stalls, and 600 ladies and their attendants watched from a balcony, while Bloomfield’s Brass Band from Governor’s Island provided the music, Mitchel told the crowd: ‘The Monarchical East casts me out—the Republican West welcomes and embraces me. One slave the less in Europe—one free man more, America, to Thee!’ He confessed unwisely that he might use the United States chiefly as a base for Ireland’s liberation. ‘I am a professional revolutionist now, an adventurer, a seditious propagandist.’ The irony which attended this statement was that he would so swiftly and painfully become involved in American politics.
Jenny found Brooklyn’s winter hard, but Mitchel was full of plans. On 7 January 1854, from premises at 3 Spruce Street, New York, he began publishing a newspaper, the Irish Citizen, to appear every Saturday. The newspaper’s prospectus stated that the ‘principal Conductors,’ himself and Meagher, were Irish by birth, had ‘endured years of penal exile at the hands of the British government’ and were now ‘refugees on American soil … They refuse to believe that prostrate and broken as the Irish nation is now, the cause of Irish independence is utterly lost.’
Meagher may have put some initiating money into the journal but was only nominally associated with it, and distanced himself more and more from it with the passage of time. When, on an early-blooming revolutionary impulse, Mitchel went to see Baron Stockl, the Russian ambassador, in Georgetown Heights, DC, he left the paper in the care not of Meagher, but of McClenehan and Savage, his two Young Irelander journalists.
Baron Stockl met the famed escaper with much warmth and said he was a ‘constant reader’ of the Citizen. Mitchel raised the possibility of Russia enabling the Irish to open a second front against Britain, ‘if some material aid could be only furnished to them to make a beginning.’ Baron Stockl asked how Russia could stretch a hand to Ireland when the British fleet had bottled up the Baltic in the north and the Black Sea in the south? With this rebuff ‘ended my tentative effort to make the Crimean War available for our Irish purposes.’ The war Mitchel did fight was against the anti-Papist, anti-Irish Know-Nothings. The Protestant Association of New York held a procession in Newark, which led to a riot in which a Catholic was killed. The Citizen wrote, ‘Newark, it seems, has no adequate police force … Out of an armed mob who sack a church in open noonday not one has been arrested.’ Mitchel mistakenly believed these sectarian forces were as one with the forces of abolition. ‘Whether all this meant Know-Nothing or Abolition fury, it signifies little now to enquire and determine.’ He began to publish his classic Jail Journal in instalments in the Citizen on 14 January of the new year.
But the Citizen and Mitchel took on targets who hurt them more proximately than abolitionists and the Know-Nothings. He poked fun at the Irish-Catholic idea that the causes of Hungary, Italian and Sicilian revolution were red republicanism, and the cause of Ireland somehow holier than, and thus separate from, the others. Concerning the Italians, he argued that ‘there is no occasion why the Bishop of Rome should also be the Prince of Rome. And perhaps he would be more a Bishop if he were less a Prince.’ As Mitchel wrote later: ‘Archbishop Hughes came out and scathed us in the newspapers.’
Did that other Young Ireland newspaperman, the ailing O’Donohoe, read the opening instalment of the Jail Journal? He was certainly in no state to read the second slab, for the day it appeared, a witheringly cold Saturday, 28 January, the former editor of Van Diemen’s Land’s Irish Exile perished in Brooklyn at 42 Hamilton Street. In dreadful weather two days before, he had caught the ferry to Manhattan to attempt to board the ship waiting in the harbour on which his wife, daughter and brother had travelled from Ireland. In that weather, no boatman would take him out. On the next afternoon, a Saturday, O’Donohoe’s brother visited the Citizen office to ask for his address, but was treated with suspicion, as if he were a British agent. Before he discovered his brother’s correct location, O’Donohoe had died. The death certificate nominated diarrhoea as the immediate cause, but melancholy, alcoholism, Denison and irregular diet had all had a hand. At the inquest his landlords, the Henrys, and their housekeeper all said the journey to the dock on the Friday before had much weakened him. The housekeeper told the Brooklyn coroner that the deceased had drunk brandy bought for him by the Henrys, but did not drink in the last three days of his life. The Irish American wrote a fair assessment: ‘Through nervous irritability and a mind shattered by suffering, producing jealousy and mistrust of all who came within his reach, O’Donohoe had become estranged from those who, under other circumstances, would have been his fast and ardent supporters.’
Mitchel himself wrote in the Citizen, ‘If that excitable disposition, stung by insolent injustice, ever hurried him into error, we lay his errors as we lay his blood, at the door of the liberal and ameliorative statesmen of England.’ But John Mitchel was not listed amongst those who attended the funeral in Brooklyn—the pall-bearers were all leading émigré Young Irelanders, including Michael Doheny and John O’Mahony. These men founded a fund for the support of Mrs O’Donohoe, but it was not well subscribed.
A further instance of Young Ireland alienation, this time transoceanic, arose when Charles Gavan Duffy bravely published the early excerpts of Mitchel’s Jail Journal in the Nation, but became offended that Mitchel called him ‘unfortunate’ for having produced at his trial ‘evidence of character,’ and for having tried ‘to evade the responsibility of some of the prosecuted articles, by proving they were not written by himself’ Duffy responded with exceptional fury. Ingrate Mitchel had not escaped Van Diemen’s Land with honour, said Duffy, and his friends in America hung their heads in shame over his withdrawal of parole. Duffy now published an open letter in the Nation of 29 April 1854, calling on Meagher to stand aside from Mitchel, and so to avoid accusations that Meagher too was a radical anti-clerical. Meagher replied that he would not communicate with Duffy at all until the slur against Mitchel was retracted.
Quite apart from Duffy and the question of escape and anti-papal bias, Mitchel was becoming a scandal on a secular American level. He published such material as a pro-slavery letter from Mr Scoville, former secretary to John Calhoun. ‘If the South are forced to a separation to save ourselves, grass will grow in the streets of New York. The slave states are the producing states.’ By the early spring of 1854, the Citizen was in
full cry too against Harriet Beecher Stowe’s recent Uncle Tom’s Cabin, depicting it as a weapon used by abolitionists in alliance with ‘the British oligarchy’ to create a split between North and South. Irish seamstresses and navvies were in greatest need of liberation, Mitchel argued, whereas Christian slavery redeemed the slave from African darkness. He conducted a notorious correspondence with the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, a celebrated New York pulpit orator. Mitchel saw Beecher as the dominating influence over Harriet, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the more recent Stowe work, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as virtually Beecher’s voice. Mitchel was, however, forced to confess, as circulation dropped, that his slavery doctrine was ‘the subject of much surprise and general rebuke.’ In his spring and summer of defiance, he greeted with glee and re-published all the vituperative headlines against him: ‘the immortal hero of two months ago reads now that he is an “imposter” (Hartford Republican), that he is a “suicide” (New York Tribune) and a “hideous lag” (Independent).’
‘Do not be alarmed for me,’ Jenny Mitchel told her girlhood friend Miss Thompson. ‘… I am not likely to become—no—nothing would induce me to become the mistress of a slave household … My objection to Slavery is the injury it does to the white masters.’
As the North closed down on Mitchel, the South opened. He received overtures from the mayor and council of the city of Richmond, Virginia. He expatiated on architecture to the Journal Constitution, and took up an invitation to give the commencement address at the University of Virginia in June 1854. He loved the sociability of Virginians, and the landscape of Albemarle County ‘blooming like some great pleasure ground.’
That spring Nicaragua Smyth had been preparing a new expedition to liberate Smith O’Brien. Nicaragua had a personal reason to return to Australia. Before he had made his exit from VDL he had left a message with Kevin O’Doherty asking Jenny O’Regan, the Hobart woman he had fallen in love with during his illness, to signal acceptance of a marriage proposal he had sent her by writing to him care of the law offices of Dillon & O’Gorman in New York City. Apparently Miss O’Regan’s positive response had now arrived.
Politics might forestall him. Isaac Butt, Irish MP, had planned to ask Home Secretary Lord Palmerston in the House on 22 February whether, given the fall of Russell’s Whig government, O’Brien could now be pardoned. Butt was late getting to question time in the House, and a colleague asked the question. Palmerston’s reply was that though other prisoners had violated their word of honour, ‘Mr Smith O’Brien himself, whatever might have been his faults and guilt, has acted like a gentleman’ and should be rewarded by clemency from the Crown. O’Brien was conditionally pardoned, and could live anywhere outside Britain. No confession of regret was required of him.
In the House that evening, Butt made a plea that the pardon be also extended to John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty. He cited as a reason the readiness with which the Irish were recruiting for the war against Russia in the Crimea. These were terms of pleading Mitchel despised, but they worked. The news of O’Brien’s pardon reached Dromoland Castle on Friday 24 February: two huge bonfires were built, houses illuminated.
By early March Palmerston announced that the pardons would also be granted to Martin, O’Doherty and three English Chartists, Frost, Williams and Jones. Palmerston’s offer of conditional pardon hung in the air, as Smyth doubled the Cape of Good Hope and headed across the Indian Ocean. O’Brien had heard rumours of pardon but believed Palmerston would make repentance an essential condition, and since O’Brien could have none of that, he believed himself under permanent capture. He was still agitated and suddenly homeless as well. In March 1854 Mr Elwin had sold his hotel and there was a ‘consequent breaking up of the establishment.’ Father Dunne of Richmond offered O’Brien the chance to live rent-free in the Catholic Presbytery, an offer proud O’Brien was uneasy in accepting.
Meagher had not attended O’Donohoe’s funeral because he was in California. The previous autumn, 1853, the release from the awkward intimacy of his life with Catherine and Thomas Meagher senior had presented itself. The California Steamship Company had offered Meagher a free passage to San Francisco. He argued he must take it to generate income from a speaking tour. As Meagher was about to start on his journey west, it was decided that Catherine would return to Ireland with Meagher senior. Her health, and even the balance of her spirit, were uncertain. Neither man thought it advisable she be in a hotel room on her own in such a challenging city, and Catherine wistfully agreed. Jenny Mitchel, who found Catherine potentially tragic, wrote, ‘Thus, the girl who had come half way around the world to join her husband had been able to stay with him only four short months.’ After an early Christmas dinner and exchange of presents at the Metropolitan, Catherine would sail the Atlantic in some comfort but in midwinter. She left no account of feelings of confusion or rejection, but she had had one triumph—she had conceived a child of the susceptible Meagher. A new child might enable a new claim on his affection.
Meagher landed at San Juan del Norte, where Mitchel had been lately, and embarked on a 7-year phase of enchantment with Central America. He travelled by mule up the jungle terraces and, pitching down volcanic inclines on a mule’s back, he had become a disciple of Manifest Destiny. Since this section of Central America was the best route between the American east and the west, it was at once obvious to him that the United States had special interests here, and that they should be pursued.
In early 1854, he spoke at the San Francisco Music-Hall, and in Oakland, and took oratory into the lovely mountain country of the golden hinterland, and to desert towns such as Sacramento. But at the bottom of each evening’s adulation lay the Catherine impasse. Back in New York that spring, he received news of the birth of a son, Thomas Francis Meagher III, in Ireland. Catherine had intentions, when she had her strength back and the baby was of a satisfactory age, to return to New York. The uneasy marriage had been converted into a family again. But soon further and horrifying information arrived. Weakened by the birth, on 9 May Catherine had died of typhus, the evil Famine fever, at the age of twenty-two years. Her body was taken from the Meagher house on ‘the Mall’ and, followed by a numerous crowd, was buried in the Meagher family vault at Faithlegg churchyard some 8 miles outside Waterford. Meagher’s father and various doting women relatives and servants tended the child. An uneasy compact was struck—the child would be raised in Waterford, educated at Clongowes, and perhaps in some years’ time he could join his father in New York.
Meagher became an edgy presence in the Manhattan streets. A mixture of guilt and grief made him vulnerable. He had a brutal confrontation with James McMaster, editor of the Freeman’s Journal, the clerically obedient Catholic paper of New York. An article in McMaster’s Freeman’s Journal accused him of dishonour in the breaking of his parole. Meagher went to McMaster’s office to demand a withdrawal, but did not get one. According to the New York Times, he lay in wait for McMaster at his residence in East Sixth Street, and when McMaster appeared, took out a riding whip and ‘struck him severely and repeatedly.’ McMaster drew and fired his revolver and grazed Meagher’s forehead and eyebrow, leaving his face burned from the powder flash. A policeman arrived and both men were charged at the watch-house and bound over by a magistrate for the sum of $500 each. Meagher tried at summer’s height to recover from loss, guilty deliverance and shame, on the shore of Long Island Sound.
Returned from the South, Mitchel found the Citizen office stifling. So was Brooklyn. The Mitchels went holidaying with John Blake Dillon and his wife at Stonington, a Berkshire Hills watering place for New Yorkers. Mitchel wrote to Miss Thompson, an admirer of the North, ‘We live … in a huge hotel with public table, the guests almost all the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a righteous horror of the South … On the whole, I like Virginia much better than this region; and if I had only “a good plantation” there—but I will shock you.’ Simultaneously, he and Jenny, like O’Mahony, remained furiously
disgruntled by the lack of action by Irish groups as Britain became further enmeshed in what looked like a scandalous and expensive war in the Crimea. ‘What are they about in Ireland?’ Jenny would ask Miss Thompson. ‘Are they all dead or asleep or mad?’ Mitchel, she said, was outraged that Meagher and Dillon, the latter about to return to Ireland under an amnesty, were not consumed with urgency.
The conditional pardons of the Young Irelanders and Chartists put O’Doherty and Martin in a much better position than O’Brien: they could return home when their ten years’ treason-felony sentences had expired, Martin’s in August 1858, O’Doherty’s in October the same year. Martin had decided in protest, however, not to return to Ireland until it achieved independence. That was a matter of choice; O’Brien though was apparently to be, of necessity, an eternal exile.
Nicaragua Smyth arrived in Melbourne before the pardons. He did not believe his task was at an end. He held £1,650 belonging to the Irish Directory of New York, and he used it to encourage the Irish of the boom city of Melbourne to plan resonant festivities. A welcoming committee having been set up, Smyth moved to Hobart Town to establish a similar committee. But on their own initiative, the citizens of Launceston were already at work. There was an unlucky delay: on the steamer Queen of the South only twenty-eight bags of newspapers could be found. But at last the crew discovered the dispatch bag. Denison announced the state pardons on 26 June. With the pardons, came Sir George Grey’s orders to Denison himself; despite his bad repute with settler progressives, he was to become governor of New South Wales.
O’Brien wrote to Lucy for once like a man resurrected. ‘I need not tell you I am in excellent spirits.’ A splendid dinner was held in the Old Bush Inn in New Norfolk under the chairmanship of his friend Captain Fenton. Smith O’Brien had won the struggle with Denison, and Fenton and the other anti-transportationists were waving Denison off also, so the conviviality of the evening was compounded. Mr William Carter, now mayor of the city, chaired the Hobart Town dinner, and the future premier of Tasmania, Richard Dry, the one in Launceston. At each occasion O’Brien declared that with increasing self-rule Tasmania had a government they could respect, and that this was a poignant contrast to the relationship between the Irish and their government.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 40