But Meagher had the prospect of achieving citizenship—it would come in May 1857—and early in the year asked President-elect Buchanan for a diplomatic appointment in South or Central America. He was fascinated by the region and may have seen himself as a potential champion of Buchanan’s expansionist policies. Despite the News, ‘privately speaking, I am in rather sad want of a position, with some emolument attached to it.’ Meagher cited Quito, New Granada, Guatemala, Havana, Rio de Janeiro as suitable. Waiting for the President’s inauguration, he wrote to O’Brien: ‘My disinclination to “place-hunting” no longer exists … The same feelings which induced me to regard such gifts with contempt and enmity in Ireland, operate in the contrary direction here. I would rejoice and feel proud in serving the American Republic’ Friends from Tammany Hall, Horatio Seymour, former governor of New York, and Amasa Parker, Democrat candidate for that post in the last campaign, wrote supporting letters. Other referees indicated the width of the connections Meagher had made. The historian, George Bancroft, Democrat Senator Stephen E. Douglas and Congressman Daniel Sickles of New York, a personal and, some said, pandering friend of the President, were also in favour of the candidate. But perhaps Meagher’s very enthusiasm for filibustering caused Buchanan to note on the margin of Meagher’s letter that it would be ‘incompatible with the National interest’ to give the Irish exile a diplomatic position.
Imagine a most lovely valley, five miles long,’ John Mitchel had written to Miss Thompson from the farm in Tuckaleechee Cove, ‘varying in breadth from a quarter of a mile to a mile and a half, and lying among parallel folds of the Alleghanies … Now, young lady, at the very head of the above mentioned valley … I have pitched my tent or wigwam.’ He had horses, cows, and ‘a multitude of pigs.’ An orchard of various apple trees and peaches varied the diet. He told his sister Mrs Matilda Dixon in the north of Ireland, ‘in quitting New York, I have emancipated myself from much blatherumskite.’
James, in early adolescence, and Willy, barely more than twelve, took to the mountains like naturals. Mitchel left the two boys, James and Willy, on the farm while he went to fetch Jenny and the girls, ‘and by Tuesday last, when we came up to our habitation, James had a quarter of venison for us.’ For sixteen months or more the Mitchels would live at Tuckaleechee, Jenny Mitchel and her youngest daughter Isabelle disliking the isolation of the place. Bothwell, Van Diemen’s Land, had boasted of livelier company. Mitchel engaged his hearty sons, however, in country rambles and long rides. His explorations saw him sheltering in farmers’ houses and dining on bacon and cornbread. But while on his farm he worked hard. James and his father milked the cows twice daily, which Mitchel found ‘a task of much labor and sweat,’ fed horses, raised new fences. As winter came on he built extensions. A tree that he was chopping fell the wrong way and altered the shape of his nose for good, but he bore the injury like an agricultural badge of honour. He wrote patronisingly yet affectionately about visiting neighbours. One asked him, ‘Was it true as we have hearn, that the water of the sea is all salted?’ Mitchel began experiencing the effect upon the mind of being without congenial society. ‘In this respect Tuckaleechee was worse than VDL.’
By December 1855 too, he needed to supplement the poor income from his farming, and ironically declared, ‘I am coming down from my mountains in the winter like the wolves, and with the same object—prey.’ Leaving his family in the care of James, he undertook a new lecture tour. To Tuckaleechee Cove came, via occasional newspaper clippings, the distant thunder of Mitchel’s themes this year—an attack in equal measure on Britain’s imperial methods in India and on American Know-Nothingism. His lecturing done, he was able to visit New York again, and his mother, his son John, his brother. They knew that he liked to dance, so they organised a party. ‘I remember one large dancing-party we had on New Year’s night (1856 I think), at which Mr and Mrs Meagher were present.’
From New York he returned home by rail from Charleston via Atlanta to a Knoxville newly self-important from its rail connection with the world. To make up for his absence, with some of his lecture earnings he bought Jenny a well-trained saddle mare and a side-saddle. He was appalled now to see that Know-Nothingism had made advances not only in Knoxville but in Tuckaleechee Cove itself. At a political meeting at Snyder’s Store, the Whig candidate ‘horrified the Cove people by his picture of a bloody conspiracy organized by the Pope and Jesuits to take away from free and enlightened Americans the liberty they had acquired by their revolution.’
The dull routine of the farm set in again, and as summer came on, Mitchel made up his mind to give up farming only a year after having moved to the Cove and to bring his family down to Knoxville at the end of the growing season. In preparation for moving back to the town, he had acquired in March 1856, from a certain Mrs Isabella French for the sum of $527.34, a town site on First Creek, ‘near the first bridge of the Tennessee and Virginia Rail Road.’ Because Mitchel had not yet sold his farm in the Cove, the deal was financed by William G. Swan.
Mitchel began to build his house amongst tall oak, walnut and cedars fifteen minutes’ walk from town. Knoxville now had 5,000 souls and three newspapers. Yet he sensed he would not last there either. ‘I will make no permanent home in Knoxville,’ he punned, ‘nor perhaps anywhere till I arrive at Nox-ville and Erebus-ville—if even there. Jenny might as well be married to a Tartar of the Orient or to a Bedouin Arab.’ The farm in the Cove did not sell until the following May, and, as often happened when sophisticates went temporarily rural, he took $50 less for the farm than he had paid for it.
By the late summer of 1857, he had become predictably restless, and advertised his new home for sale. But he knew Jenny ‘would be well content to stay here, as we really have a pretty place, and the climate is lovely.’ Mr McAdoo, one day to become professor of English and History at the University of Tennessee, helped by offering Mitchel a law partnership, and though Mitchel politely declined he also amused himself by borrowing and reading McAdoo’s copies of the Times of London, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review and Westminster Review. It was William G. Swan who, to Jenny’s relief, offered her husband the focus he sought, proposing a new weekly paper to uphold the views he and Mitchel held; the writing to be done by Mitchel, the business by Swan. Mitchel described the journal as ‘an organ of the extreme Southern sentiment,’ one of its aims being ‘to advocate earnestly the re-opening of the African slave trade in the interest both of blacks and whites.’
So the Mitchels held on to their house and the first number of the Southern Citizen appeared in October 1857, to be published weekly for a subscription of $2 yearly. Though it was not monetarily successful, Swan was willing to bear the cost, and it enjoyed an influential circulation and attracted attention both North and South. The ironies inherent in Mitchel arguing the slavery case so ardently were accentuated by the fact that he intended never to own any slaves, that no one in the poor white enclave of Tuckaleechee Cove had owned slaves, and that they were rare in Knoxville itself. As a political bloc East Tennessee had favoured the abolition of the slave trade. Mitchel sent his friend Father Kenyon, now a parish priest in Tipperary, a prospectus for the proposed paper, and in the fall got a scandalised reply. ‘Actively to promote the system for its own sake would be something monstrous,’ said the priest. Mitchel defended himself. ‘All my behavior from November ’45 down to this November ’57 seems to myself to be consistent, to be of one piece.’ He told Miss Thompson, ‘I consider negro slavery the best state of existence for the negro, and the best for his master; and if negro slavery in itself be good, then the taking of negroes out of their brutal slavery in Africa and promoting them to a humane and reasonable slavery here is also good.’
There are not many extant copies of the Southern Citizen, but those which exist show his devotion to the causes he had embraced in his past, most especially to slavery and the upholding and praising of Southern society. The paper received wide support from advertisers, sufficient to show that a
significant part of the community found its editorial policy appetising. Advertisers included the agents for Conger’s Turbine Water Wheel; the wholesale grocers C. Powell & Company; Floyd City Collegiate Institute; and Nashville Sash, Blind and Door Factory. In the 4 February 1858 edition, amidst notices of the sale of a thousand peach trees and testimonials for Camphor Wash Mixture, is found the following chilling notice: ‘SALE OF NEGROES—ON THE FIRST Monday in February Next I will offer for sale, in Knoxville, six valuable NEGROES, one third cash and balance in six and twelve months. The same may be purchased private. J. I. Dixon.’
That winter, Mitchel was able to stay at home in Knoxville and attack abolitionist fervour in the new state of Kansas. ‘If the rascals who infest that country, and are constantly trying to hatch up trouble, would kill each other occasionally, that would give some variety and afford relief, but they are too prudent for all that.’ Even in reviewing Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa by David Livingstone, Mitchel pursued his hardline Southern position: the benefit to Africans of American slavery: ‘Lander has already told us of the Fellatah having killed a number of their slaves when food was scarce.’ Southern slaveholders never devoured their slaves!
He was in the meantime, like Meagher, all for the filibusters of Nicaragua. When the US frigate Susquehanna arrested Walker’s associate Colonel Anderson, Mitchel objected to the military hubris of that. Mitchel’s spectrum of political furies, his scalding prose, the uncongenial political climate of East Tennessee, and the recession which had hit in 1857 and deepened in 1858, guaranteed a merely average performance for the Southern Citizen, and caused Swan and Mitchel to consider moving it to Washington, to attract subscriptions as a national newspaper.
In the new, spiritually vacant Ireland he was now permitted to inhabit, Kevin O’Doherty saw his two brothers as typical of the national poverty of soul. They had no enthusiasm at all for his or Eva’s principles and continued to tie up much of what was rightfully his in a family trust. Eva wrote to her mentor John Martin in June 1857 and gave a dismal picture of family dissent between a sick Kevin and his brothers, William and John. ‘Wm is still persisting in the course he first adopted—the irritation this man is causing him, I know, is one cause of his being ill … John I scarcely blame for he is passive—a mere tool in his brother’s hands—the women are small and spiteful.’ Martin, in reply to his friend Kevin, expressed sorrow that ‘To be sure in Ireland you will meet very often with instances of flunkeyism and a moral shabbiness.’
That summer, Kevin O’Doherty passed the examination his long medical service in Van Diemen’s Land had equipped him for and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. He practised medicine at 18 Hume Street, was a surgeon to St Vincent’s Hospital and lectured in anatomy and physiology at Ledwich Medical School. He also became a licentiate of the College of Physicians and acquired a diploma in obstetrics. But he remained short of money, and deplored the stunned, impotent, supine spirit of post-Famine Ireland.
Eva’s problems were to do with the dour reality of domestic life, and the normal but chronic gynaecological ills of the time. In August 1858, she confessed to John Martin, ‘I have had many tormenting troubles of the mean and earthy sort which, by the way, more acutely try a body strongly inclined to live in the moon apart from such influences, than even the sable woes of tragedy.’ She had given birth to a second son, Edward, and would be delivered of a third, Vincent, the following year. She had been offered a literary career of a sort, however, and was excited about it. ‘Lietch Ritchie, Messrs Chambers’ literary hack, wrote to me and seems to have rather a good opinion of my powers … Mr Ritchie says that after a little time I may expect to be paid one pound per page.’
Meanwhile, O’Doherty had written to Meagher asking advice about New York. After consulting experts, Meagher advised his old dining partner from the bridge over the Blackwater against trying to establish himself in New York relatively late in life.
Through his work as a surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital Kevin got to know the Reverend Dr James Quinn, president of the St Laurence O’Toole Seminary in Harcourt Street. Quinn was something of a pioneer, having recruited Sisters of Mercy to nurse in the Crimea, and was a director of the Mater Misericordiae Hospital. The autocratic cast which would mar his later life was not as apparent yet, and Kevin was grateful to find amongst a clergy that treated him with wariness such a thorough friend. In April 1859, Dr Quinn was appointed Bishop of Queensland. This huge region, formerly the northern section of New South Wales, was administered from Brisbane. After some research into the Australian medical market, Saint Kevin approached the Black Ball line, owners of the James Baines on which he had travelled illegally years before. The company agreed to employ him as surgeon on board one of their handsome Australia-bound ships, the Ocean Chief. Dr and Mrs O’Doherty were saloon passengers, as were their children, William, Edward and Vincent, and their servant Edith Mills. Eva, Ireland’s muse, was five months pregnant, and taking her children out of the Ireland which had once been personified for her by Kevin.
After a longer than normal passage of eighty-nine days, the family landed in Melbourne, and Eva gave birth to a fourth son, Kevin, in November 1860 in Geelong. She stayed with Melbourne friends—the Duffys and the Callans were happy to have in their houses the lustrous Eva of the Nation—while Dr O’Doherty went on to Sydney, and by the New Year of 1861 opened consulting rooms at 27 Botany Street.
In this her early Australian period, between January and November 1861, Eva contributed more than forty poems to the pages of the Sydney Freeman’s Journal. She spoke to homesick Irish immigrants in such lines as ‘A Flight across the Sea’:
O Ireland of that springtime fairest!
O Ireland of the murmuring streams! …
Across that waste of waters shining,
The exile flees to thee again!
However trite, these verses were a call to that part of her soul which Eva had left in Ireland. Though Australia was—as she wrote—of the ‘Glorious future’s rosy dawning,’ it seemed that the move had been more Saint Kevin’s concept than Eva’s. In a public sense he would deal with it well. She would be for ever the exile.
Meagher would prove to be more of a dilettante newspaperman than Mitchel: he did not devote to the Irish News the time or volume of copy which John Mitchel did to the Southern Citizen. He had nonetheless employed a reliable young editor, an Irishman named James Roche, who kept the paper consistent and entertaining. Meagher meanwhile lectured widely and still had at least the hope of the law. The deposed Nicaraguan President William Walker arrived in New York towards the end of 1857 and was soon taken into custody by a US marshal for violating the Neutrality Act. The filibuster’s legal team was led by Malcolm Campbell, Meagher’s legal partner, and included Meagher.
Mrs Elizabeth Meagher did not accompany her husband to Washington for the trial—she had recently left to visit her father-in-law in Waterford. There is no evidence she did not get on well with the elder Mr Meagher, or was unwilling to bring back Meagher’s son to Fifth Avenue. By now she must have suspected that for whatever reason she and Meagher would be childless. But Meagher himself might have been ambiguous about receiving the boy, and in any case the elder Meagher retained care of his grandson, both in the name of the child’s education and of his own fondness.
In Libby’s absence, Meagher was pleased by the trip down to the capital, where support for Walker was effortlessly brought into play. In the Southern Citizen, Mitchel reported with approval the defence of Walker in the House by Alexander Stephens of Georgia. ‘Nicaragua had no sovereignty,’ said Stephens. ‘The only elected President by popular vote was William Walker; the only legitimate sovereign of that country was William Walker.’ To Meagher’s disappointment—for he needed opportunities to shine in court—the United States Attorney General ordered that charges be dropped. The freed Walker thanked his counsel and went south to Mobile to launch another expedition from there. But further Walker attempts to
reclaim Nicaragua would end first in arrest by the United States Navy and ultimately, in September 1860, in his execution by firing squad when he rashly landed in British Honduras and was handed over to the Honduran authorities.
Given the lack of activity in his legal practice, Meagher declared he needed new material for the lecture circuit. He informed Roche on 5 March 1858 saying that he would leave for Costa Rica the next day and would be gone for three months. The intention to visit Costa Rica seemed to emerge suddenly and randomly. ‘I visit Central America—Costa Rica especially—for the purpose of ascertaining the true condition of things there,’ he informed Roche. ‘I need not tell you I have no political object—none whatever—in visiting Central America.’ People nevertheless began to suspect he might be gathering information for government and business purposes. He carried a letter with him from Samuel Molina, the Costa Rican minister in Washington, and travelled with Ramon Páez, a former student of Clongowes, son of the Venezuelan rebel against Spanish rule, Antonio Páez. His old comrade in the South, John Mitchel, published in the Southern Citizen of 18 March 1858, a report that Meagher had denied his mission to Central America was political. His intentions were literary and his companion, Ramon Páez, ‘botanist, geologist, artist,’ was to provide the graphics and expert advice.
The best way to Costa Rica was through Nicaragua, where travel was helped by the fact that one could steam across massive Lake Nicaragua, and then down the Pacific coast to Punta Arenas, Costa Rica. Once there, Meagher and Páez headed east by mule, ascending the volcanic mountains of the Cordillera Central, and so reached the delightful capital, San José, where Meagher began writing of his experience with typical brio. Their letters of introduction to the President, the Bishop of San José, and other notables ‘obtained an unmolested passage for our luggage. It was on the road, miles behind us, jolting and smashing along in the rear of two ponderous bullocks; but whenever it arrived, the commandant at the Goreta in the pleasantest accents assured us the formality of an inspection would be dispensed with. It was due to literature and science, he said … Moreover it was due to the son of the illustrious General Páez.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 44