For Esther Larkin, widowed first by transportation and then by Hugh’s death, there is no record of death. We could surmise she perished some time in the late 1850s, before registration of deaths became compulsory in Ireland, although the requirement to register deaths was often ignored by the anti-authoritarian Irish even after 1860. She lies un-united in one or other of the little rural cemeteries folded into the groins of grazing land around East Galway, probably in Clonfert.
The Australian grandchildren of Hugh Larkin and Mary Shields either were not told their grandparents’ story or, out of a sense of propriety, did not repeat it. The faint shame which hung over the meeting and marriage marked, by the standards of booming Australia, a scandal best forgotten. It was when the Irish government made their gift of a database on Irish convicts to the Commonwealth of Australia that Esther Larkin’s plaintive appeal appeared on a screen at the National Library in Canberra and set off a search through the convict records for the sometimes indefinite, sometimes precise, outline of these lost Irish souls.
BOOK II
17
YOUNG IRELAND AND THE ISMS OF YANKEEDOM
A Revolutionist under a Monarchy, I am a Conservative under a Republic. This sentiment I boldly utter on behalf of thousands of Irish immigrants, invested with and aspiring to the sovereignty of American citizenship.
Thomas Francis Meagher,
to the Democratic Party of Massachusetts,
Boston, 1 December 1856
Irish eviction numbers were falling in the year of Hugh Larkin’s death. Between 1849 and 1851, nearly 45,000 families had been evicted, close on a quarter of a million people. By comparison, though the psychological weight of the idea of eviction was still powerful in the Irish mind, 913 families faced eviction in 1857, and 795 in 1858. There was a subtle complex of reasons: more advanced farming methods used by landlords; the fact that the land had—by the standards of twenty years before—already been depopulated. People were also less likely now to divide up family land to the point where farming became unfeasible, and that meant younger sons emigrated rather than founded vulnerable Irish farming families.
The numbers of Ribbon-style outrages of the kind for which Hugh was sent to Australia had also declined by the late 1850s. Outrages reported in 1847 were just under 20,000. In 1858 there were a little under 3,500.
But though Ireland had settled, it had settled not like a creature confirmed and comforted, but like one exhausted and deprived of options. The brute fact was that Famine and other forces had by 1851 reduced the population from a probable eight and a half million to six and a half million. Irish population was in a free fall unique in Europe, one that would not be arrested until modern times, if then. The supposedly lucky eldest son waited to tend his parents and inherit the farm entire and viable. Thus he helped create a sense which endured till modern times: that Ireland was becoming a land of the solitary and the aged, pared to the limit.
‘Maguire was faithful unto the death,’ wrote Patrick Kavanagh in his poem of 1942, ‘The Great Hunger’:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety one.
She stayed too long
Wife and mother in one
When she died
The knuckle bones were cutting
The skin of her son’s backside
And he was sixty-five.
After an edgy winter with her husband William in their hotel in Brussels, and some travels during the summer of 1855 in Germany, Lucy O’Brien and most of the children, together with their patient Aunt Grace, went back home to Ireland. O’Brien and his son Edward began in the autumn a journey to southern Europe. Over the coming winter the Crimean War would near a successful close for Britain, and 150 members of the Commons petitioned Lord Palmerston, now Prime Minister, for a full pardon for O’Brien and his associates. So too did a large proportion of the Canadian legislature. From Athens on 17 March 1856, O’Brien—nursing a foot injury from an ill-fitting boot—remarked to Lucy that a full pardon would be very convenient. Waiting for the next session of Parliament, he and Edward travelled on, in mutual respect but without a meeting of minds.
On 9 May 1856, in answer to a question from the floor, Palmerston announced that the Queen would reward the unexampled loyalty of her dominions by granting a full pardon for the State prisoners, excepting ‘those unhappy men who had broken all the ties of honour and fled from their place of banishment.’ O’Brien was with Edward in rural and mountainous northern Greece when he heard the news. Kevin O’Doherty was illegally at his mother’s house at Monkstown, where Eva had given birth, and now needed to return incognito to Paris to conclude his studies and then make a legal reentry to Britain. John Martin heard the news in Paris, but, according to his vow, stayed in place.
In absolute freedom at last, O’Brien faced economic dependence which would never cease to wear at him. He was worried even about the gold cup the Melbourne people had given him. Through Stephen de Vere, an influential cousin, and other connections, he tried to arrange to have the cup ‘admitted free of duty.’ Yet as he crossed from France he was now and then overtaken by simple happiness. ‘How different are the sensations with which an exile returns to his country from those with which he left it!’ Bonfires marked his path through Limerick at the height of the summer of 1856. Once back in the house at Cahirmoyle, though he no longer managed the estate, he would frequently surrender to delight. During one of Lucy’s absences, he wrote exuberantly to her: ‘The tone of your short note is more in harmony with my feelings than the singing of birds on a May morning, the chant of a Cathedral, the airs of an opera and even than the melody of an old Irish ballad.’
He was asked at once to stand for the seat of Tipperary, but decided, with his usual fixity of intent, not to re-enter Parliament with its unsatisfactory outfalls and dubious frenzies. ‘In 1843, after having attended Parliament with continuous assiduity, I arrived at the conclusion that my time would have been much more usefully occupied if I had remained in Ireland.’ In mid-September, to the disgruntlement of his family, a procession of 10,000 men, women and children crowded up the drive of Cahirmoyle to beg him to assume the position of Irish leader, whether in the House or in some other form. O’Brien came out to tell them that he had no political or revolutionary aims, though in 1848, when ‘this country was reduced by misgovernment to a condition more abject than any that it had known … I thought, and I still think, that resistance was justifiable.’
By contrast, at Dromoland and at Cahirmoyle, his family tried to pretend that 1848 had not occurred. His daughter Lucy harboured a primal fear for him and if he said anything political would run crying from the room. Edward would soon inherit the control of Cahirmoyle from the hands of the family trust and, though filial, he had in all their chats in the streets of Florence or the ruins of Athens resisted his father’s politics. Shorn of domestic power, O’Brien would in part occupy himself by addressing occasional letters to Ireland and the Irish people. He urged the Irish not to boast of their willingness to die for Ireland—they had failed to take the chance to do so in 1848. He noted that during the Irish Famine, £8,000,000 had been loaned for relief in a gesture of what some considered ‘unparalleled generosity.’ But in 1855, ‘An addition of £30,000,000 was made to the ordinary war estimates of the United Kingdom with scarcely a murmur of dissension.’ This amount would have been sufficient in the Famine not only to save the lives ‘of the myriads’ but to render the Famine period ‘an era of unprecedented improvement.’
The New York attorney Thomas Francis Meagher heard the news of the full pardon of O’Brien, Martin and O’Doherty, but without any self-regret for having escaped. Answering American demands and affections, he was disappointed that over the winter of 1855–6, he had attracted to his premises at 20 Anne Street only a scatter of minor court briefs; he had begun to toy with the next obvious Irish option—to found a weekly newspaper, the Irish News, from the same building as his law offices. The New York Herald, generally ki
nd to Meagher, said: ‘With the warnings he has before him—especially the pregnant example of John Mitchel who ran through an unexampled popularity in six months, all for the want of a little common sense—Mr Meagher ought not to fail.’
Meagher told Elizabeth and the Townsends that he wanted not only to be a Democrat voice (an objective of which all the Townsends approved), but also to speak for that army of Irish who had not done themselves a great favour by emigrating. A quarter of the city’s population of 800,000 were Irish-born, and this figure did not include the American-born children of immigrant Irish. They were the city’s poorest quarter. They lived without running water or sewage systems, and frequently with their economic buffer of a pig, in wooden tenements around the Five Ways, where Worth, Baxter and Park Streets met, north-east of City Hall. In the Sixth Ward in 1854, one in seventeen persons had died. But downtown on the Eastside, in the tenements named Sweeney’s Shambles in the Fourth Ward, over the 2-year period from 1854, one of every five adults died, and throughout the 1850s that remained the average death-rate of Irish families in Manhattan. So too over in Brooklyn, where a similarly disease-prone Irishtown was situated. Attending Sunday Mass at the nearby Fifth Avenue Jesuit Church of St Ignatius, Meagher and Libby took for granted the coughing paroxysms of devout Irish. Archbishop Hughes called tuberculosis ‘the natural death of Irish emigrants.’
Many families and clans were shattered by the slum environment, and its challenges to body and soul, and so, on top of other griefs, the Irish were seen in disproportionate numbers in all the city’s almshouses, shelters, hospitals and asylums, and also amongst the 50,000 or more prostitutes of New York. These were the American domestic issues Meagher intended to address in his newspaper. He meant, for example, to attack such institutions as the Brooklyn navy yard for refusing, on grounds of racial and religious prejudice, to employ Irish.
In foreign policy, Meagher aligned the Irish News with the phenomenon called ‘American filibustering’—American incursions into Central America—and he particularly admired the most notable filibuster William Walker, a lawyer, newspaperman and adventurer in his late twenties, who had led an expedition of volunteers from San Francisco to luscious Nicaragua in May 1855, to free it from Costa Rican rule and establish American settlements. Had not California itself been seized and liberated in the same way? Walker’s expedition was financed by the magnates Cornelius K. Garrison and Charles Morgan, who hoped to take away from Cornelius Vanderbilt the control of the staging operations across the isthmus. But Walker himself had nobler and more romantic ends—democracy, settlement, destiny and renown—and so did the American volunteers who made up his ranks. The American press observed with intense interest the success of Walker’s tough filibustering forces in Nicaragua as they won a number of early victories, seized the capital Managua and established a national government. The United States and President Franklin Pierce gave recognition to the new government Walker installed in May 1856, but withdrew it when he assumed the presidency of Nicaragua in July.
Meagher, his friends and in-laws believed that if America did not occupy the region, passage of Americans from the east to the west coast of the United States could be regulated by the dismal powers of the old world. The Irish News asked whether America would consent to pay the toll for crossing the isthmus, arrived at by the same Parliament whose Stamp Act had been cut to pieces by American patriots in 1775 ‘and flung in the foolish face of King George’? The British had already claimed San Juan del Norte on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and had been prepared to outflank the United States by occupying the whole of Central America; and now the hero Walker had forestalled that. Tom Meagher was excited by the example of a young man who could bend a hemisphere to serve purposes so dear to his own heart. He called the invader Walker ‘a brave soldier of republicanism … Nicaragua shall be free! The Democracy of America increased.’
Some officials, however, felt Walker should be discouraged from single-handedly forcing American policy. Colonel Farbins, Walker’s ‘Director of Colonization’ in New York, was arrested by a Federal marshal for violating the Neutrality Act of 1818. Meagher saw the hand of Cornelius Vanderbilt in this, and was happy to be appointed a member of the legal team to defend the colonel before Special Commissioner Morell in New York.
This was a notable case, a good chance for Meagher, and he intended to make a mark. In early February 1857, at the Commissioners’ Court downtown, the hearing began. It would run until late February. Meagher, taking like a terrier to this issue, seemed to have a political as well as a forensic motive. He may have wanted something greater than merely winning this case: he may have wished to force his old friend, the about-to-retire President Pierce, to declare America frankly and fully in favour of settling the isthmus and making it U.S. territory! This was big business indeed.
With typical daring, he asked Robert Fuller, one of the complainants, whether President Pierce had any interest in the Mosquito Grant, land on the east coast of Nicaragua. Fuller denied it. But Meagher held a potent card: a letter Colonel Farbins had given him, carrying the frank of the President, and written by the presidential secretary, Sydney Webster, ‘reporting a peculiar interest in Nicaraguan lands and colonization.’ If the White House tacitly approved of the Nicaraguan endeavour, why should Farbins be blamed for acting on the signals he received from that august direction? Meagher let it be known that if the written proof he held in his hand were not admitted in evidence, then he would permit it to appear in print. McKeon, the district attorney representing the government, telegraphed the Attorney General in Washington for instructions.
Attorney General Cushing, perhaps expecting that Meagher would, when it came down to it, suppress the letter, telegraphed back that the President did not have any interest in the production or non-production of any of the letters. An abashed Meagher had now ethically to choose his client over the President, and indeed as an American non-citizen patriot to make clear that the Democrat government had a quite proper sympathy for Walker. Meagher therefore produced in court the White House correspondence with Farbins and, when the prosecution denied that the transfer had been effected, presented an attorney-executed deed of transfer of lands in Central America from Farbins to Sydney Webster and his brother. The hearing closed. Embarrassment for the White House impended, for if President Pierce looked with favour on expeditions like Walker’s, he could not say so for fear of international opinion. Zealous Commissioner Morell committed the case to the grand jury, but it went no further.
So Farbins was free. President Walker did not fare quite as well. A coalition of Central American States, led by Costa Rica and financed in part by Vanderbilt, invaded Nicaragua, captured Managua and drove Walker to the Atlantic coast, where he sought asylum with the US Navy in May 1857.
The Irish News’s first presidential election in 1856 saw the rise of a new coalition named the Republican Party. Under the banner ‘Free soil, free speech and Fremont,’ James C. Fremont, Californian military hero and western explorer, was its presidential nominee. James Buchanan, the ageing former American minister to the court of St James, was the Democratic candidate, and the fact that his father had been a Donegal man was a powerful aid to him in attracting Irish support. Buchanan had also guaranteed the South that he believed there were no constitutional grounds for abolition. The Irish News applauded Buchanan and his policy of Popular Sovereignty, which made the acceptance or rejection of slavery a matter for the people of each new state. Above all, the News supported Buchanan’s intention to open up American citizenship to newly arriving Irish, a policy which would convert Irish immigrants to the United States legally into an instant and huge electoral army.
Buchanan was successful, and though he failed to carry New York State, he won New York City, in which Barlow and the rowdiest Irish carter from the Sixth Ward both believed that for the sake of the Union, the South should not be interfered with. Meagher’s characteristically Democrat feelings about the South had been reinforced by a new visit there
in Libby’s pleasant company. Meagher expressed his impressions of this visit with fresh vigour in his series ‘Glimpses of the South,’ in the Irish News. As for Southerners, they had ‘no penchant for isms.’ This was perhaps a swipe at abolitionism. But unlike Mitchel, Meagher did not defend slavery; merely his freedom to like the South despite slavery. ‘It would be well if America could get rid of slavery. But we can’t, in our time, and should therefore confine our efforts to alleviating the evils that accompany it.’
The question Meagher was least keen to address, that of his parole, had annoyingly arisen again in the last days of 1856. The controversy grew from a quarrel with Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times and Republican lieutenant-governor of New York. Raymond’s editorial ‘Poltroonery’ made fun of Irish immigrants and servant girls, and Meagher attacked it in the Irish News. In vengefully re-examining Meagher’s account of his escape, the New York Times judged that Meagher’s own account admitted ‘that friends were collected, horses procured, routes selected, and all the arrangements for an escape made, under the protection of the parole; and that their execution was all that was postponed until after its surrender.’ According to Meagher’s argument, said the New York Times, ‘he informs the magistrate that his parole will cease twenty four hours after he receives this notice; and that if he attempts in consequence of it to arrest him, it will terminate instantly. This sounds very much like an Irish bull.’ Raymond’s attack must have marred the jollity of the Meaghers at New Year 1857, and tightened the features of Libby, ever a zealous partisan of her talented husband.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 43