In San José, which he found temperate and tranquil, he attended the presidential ball in a good suit. Páez’s drawing of the ball at President Mora’s palace is superbly atmospheric, conveying a sense of the sweat beneath the dazzling uniforms. In the midst of the company stands M. Felix Belly, a Frenchman, who had been given a 99-year canal concession by Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Accompanied by a huge French mercenary in zouave uniform, a man who had hired himself out to Costa Rica to fight Walker’s filibusters in Nicaragua, Belly was a figure of subtlety and old world malice. Meagher sniffed a possible intrusion by the French, and sent back to the Irish News an article entitled ‘Casus Belly,’ advocating war if necessary to keep the French out of Central America.
Meagher found an Irish doctor in the capital’s hospital, a Dr Hogan, who had amongst his patients two Costa Rican soldiers wounded in battle against the filibusters at Lake Nicaragua. Opposite them lay three of Walker’s men suffering acutely from ulcers. One of these told Meagher he was from New York. Another was a boy soldier from Quebec, of Irish parents, who had joined the filibusters in the hope of receiving land as a colonist: ‘he would not be eighteen until June, and yet he had been in every battle the filibusters had fought, from the burning of Granada to the last attempt of the Allies against Rivas.’ Meagher would later advertise in New York papers for the parents to come to Costa Rica and fetch their boy, but no one appeared.
On the way to the Atlantic coast through Cartago he ascended the volcanic slopes of Irazu and looked down into its awful cauldron. Now successive ridges had to be crossed, thickly set with thorny forest. Meagher was unable on the steeper parts to travel on muleback but had to scramble on all fours. Whatever his purpose, to enrich a lecture or provide a magazine article, to inform American capital or American policy, it would be churlish to deny the rigorous, boyish effort Meagher put into this Central American adventure.
From the Pacific coast at Boca del Toro, Don Ramon Páez sailed for Venezuela where his father had been reinstalled as president, while Meagher went by coastal steamer to San Juan del Norte and boarded the US sloop of war Jamestown as guest of the captain. He wrote to his friend Judge Charles P. Daly in New York that, viable as the trans-isthmus railroad might be, he thought Costa Rica was not a suitable place for immigration.
Meagher’s lecture tour on Costa Rica did not stimulate as much interest as he had hoped. He gave up plans to write a book on the subject, and instead prepared three long magazine articles, ‘Holidays in Costa Rica,’ for publication in Harper’s. He wrote a large part of them, as Christmas 1858 approached, while with Libby in Charleston, a popular winter retreat for Northerners.
That magnificent Australian gold cup was a heartache to O’Brien still. ‘It is wholly unsuited for Cahirmoyle, or rather our home,’ O’Brien told Mitchel, ‘… I consider it to be a national memorial … and wish therefore to reserve it for public inspection.’ But O’Brien could not evade paying duty on it, a distressing £130 and 6 shillings.
As well as hearing from ageing Young Ireland in this way, Mitchel encountered—in his last days in Knoxville—the new Irish revolutionary phenomenon. About two weeks before the Mitchels moved to Washington, a balding, slight though muscular Irishman appeared at their house in Knoxville. His name was James Stephens. Mitchel knew that as a youth Stephens had ‘turned out with Smith O’Brien in 1848 with his pike in good repair.’ After escaping, disguised as a maid, to France in 1848, Stephens had belonged to socialist cells in Paris. He was now visiting all the Young Ireland heroes, asking both for money and moral support for a new endeavour to liberate Ireland through a body he led and had named the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He had had an indifferent reaction from William Smith O’Brien in Cahirmoyle, where he had not fully approved of the tenant housing the O’Briens provided on the estate. Meagher in New York had been lukewarm. Mitchel gave Stephens $50 and certain introductions, but would not publicly declare for his cause.
Stephens gone, Jenny, as party to the Southern Citizens move to Washington, braced herself for making her sixth home in as many years. The Mitchels found a large, pleasant family home on Capitol Hill, not unlike the one they had just sold in Knoxville. Jenny and John found Washington turbulent, acrimonious and demanding, and in a letter written to his friend the widow Mrs Williams in Tasmania on 1 May 1859, Mitchel confessed to dwelling fondly and ‘almost with a species of perverse regret, upon memories and associations of Bothwell.’ Casting his net widely, however, in the pages of the Citizen Mitchel published a series of letters addressed to the famous Georgian statesman Alexander Stephens, explaining the history of the Young Ireland Movement. These would later be collected and published in book form, entitled The Last Conquest of Ireland.
A few months after the Mitchels moved to Washington, Smith O’Brien, to enormous popular enthusiasm, arrived in America, landing in New York on 25 February 1859, as a snowstorm raged, having journeyed from Galway with his servant Dan. He was warmly greeted by Meagher, bronzed from recent adventures in Costa Rica. And though at Cahirmoyle Smith O’Brien might be a guest at his own table, he was welcome at the finest American tables.
He still possessed a political nose and was soon in Washington visiting the Mitchels. When it was known at the Capitol that O’Brien was at the Mitchels’, great numbers of both houses flocked to see him. The Senate was about to adjourn, and a number of Southern senators invited O’Brien to visit their estates and plantations. Mitchel confided to O’Brien that in the view of the Southern Citizen, many people ‘don’t wonder that the British Government found it necessary to get rid of me.’ O’Brien wrote to Lucy of the Mitchel couple: ‘She is really a charming person and though neither you nor I agree with the political views of Mr Mitchel there are few persons more beloved by his private friends and family than this formidable monster.’
Mitchel took O’Brien to visit Richmond, Virginia’s and perhaps the South’s self-possessed capital. In the South too O’Brien was so celebrated that the only chance he got to write to Lucy was aboard riverboats. He visited the plantation homes of Senator Hammond of South Carolina, and of the leading Congressmen Toombs and Alexander Stephens of Georgia. On Hammond’s estate, he attended an impressive Negro service. ‘All these arrangements seem very patriarchal and very different from the picture conceived by the imaginations of those who read anti-slavery works … Nonetheless I am not converted in the subject of slavery … I cannot understand why the natural virtues which they [the slaves] possess should be extinguished by freedom.’
On the steamer Mississippi, he met a number of filibusters, determined to capture Cuba. The open sewers of New Orleans made him wonder why cholera did not occur every day of the week, but he was pleased to find there many Irish connections. He visited the plantation of Mr Maunsell White, originally of Limerick, and in the office of the Delta newspaper he met a cousin of Maurice Lenahan, editor of the Limerick Reporter. Moving up the Mississippi to Memphis, he commented that the saloon of the Nebraska was nearly 200 feet long. ‘The living is similar to that provided by a first class hotel.’
North, in Chicago, he found that 8,000 people lined up to shake hands with him. He was in Portland, Maine, in mid-May when the Irish elections were on, and told his daughter Lucy that he was delighted to be out of Ireland, ‘lest in a moment of weakness I might be tempted to accept the offer of a Seat in Parliament.’
O’Brien’s march of glory through the United States was overshadowed for Meagher by a murder in Washington involving people he knew well. Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, the author of the American anthem, was involved in a love affair with Teresa Bagioli Sickles. The daughter of a renowned Italian musician, Teresa was the wife of Congressman Dan Sickles, a Nassau Street lawyer and a powerful Tammany figure to whom the Townsend family had frequent recourse. Having served in the London embassy under Buchanan, who was now President of the United States, Sickles had a firm friend in the White House. Gossips claimed that the President himself had had an affair with Teresa, condoned by
her husband.
One Sunday that spring of 1859, the smitten Key, US district attorney for Washington, was seen by Congressman Sickles to be in the street outside the Sickles residence in Lafayette Square, spying through opera glasses and signalling to Mrs Teresa Sickles as she stood at a window. At the time, Congressman Sickles was entertaining as guest his friend Sam Butterworth, a Tammany ally from New York. Outraged, he confronted his wife and then, accompanied by his friend Butterworth, left the house, caught up with a retreating Key in nearby Madison Street near the entrance of a club for eminent Washingtonians, took out a revolver and shot him twice, in the liver and the thigh. As Key pleaded with him, witnesses, including Butterworth, stopped Sickles from delivering a coup de grâce to Key’s head. The dying lover was carried bleeding into the Club House.
A White House page took news of the killing straight across Pennsylvania Avenue to President ‘Old Buck’ Buchanan. Buchanan immediately moved the page out of Washington, to prevent his giving evidence against Sickles. Meanwhile Sickles surrendered himself and the revolver to the Attorney-General and was put in the District of Columbia gaol.
Many leaders of Irish America flocked to Sickles. He was a splendid Democrat, a friend to the Irish in Tammany, and a friend to the Irish cause. It is hard to believe too, given the sensitivity of the case, and the closeness of Sickles to Buchanan, that the President was not informally consulted on the matter of Sickles’s legal team. Amongst the 8-man legal phalanx assembled to defend Sickles were Buchanan’s friend Edwin Stanton, soon to be rewarded with the post of Attorney-General, and future Secretary of War; Irishman James Topham Brady of New York was included for jurisprudence; and Tom Meagher, for his lustre and oratory. Only Key’s successor as district attorney, and one assistant DA, were to appear for the prosecution.
The most famous murder case of the era began in the Criminal Court for the District of Columbia on 4 April, with Republicans hoping to see Democrat wickedness exposed. Sickles’s case was helped by a signed confession of adultery which he had extorted from his wife before he left the house to kill Key. The production of Key’s blood-encrusted underclothing in court by the coroner was the prosecution’s riposte. But a counter-sensation was created by a note Sickles had received before the killing, now produced by the defence, warning Sickles that Key had rented a house on 15th Street from a black man ‘for no other purpose than to meet your wife Mrs Sickles … With these few hints I leave the rest for you to imagine.’
Comments would be made on the delicacy of the prosecution in not cataloguing Sickles’s own infidelities, and many saw in this the influence of the President. So Sickles’s legal team got their client through to the closing arguments with his character, and the President’s, unstained. Key, said Brady, was responsible for his own death by continuing to hang around the Sickles house and not providing a ‘cooling time.’ Brady then read into the record robust arguments which, he said, had been prepared by his learned fellow counsel Tom Meagher against a guilty verdict. ‘Do this, do it if you can, and then, having consigned the prisoner to the scaffold, return to your homes, and there, within those endangered sanctuaries, following your ignoble verdict, set to and teach your imperilled wives a lesson in the vulgar arithmetic of a compromising morality …’ After a 19-day trial, the verdict of not guilty came back within seventy minutes.
The Irish had shown their power to save their allies in the Democrat compact. And Meagher hoped again that his participation in a famous trial would ensure new success. During the trial indeed, a formal notice of Meagher’s sale of the News to a New York Irishman was posted, which cleared the decks for legal clients. But people did not see him as a practical lawyer. So 1859 proved a disappointing year. He had still not found a career in the Townsend-Barlow sense. He wrote to O’Brien in Ireland: ‘Perhaps I’ve lost too much faith … I’ve ceased to be a participator in historic motions. I’ve become an impassive spectator.’ But at the breakfast table one morning in late 1859 he was energised by news of a supposedly spectacular gold rush in Central America, centred in the province of Chiriqui, far to the south of Meagher’s previous trip with Páez. Chiriqui lies in what is now Panama but was then part of a greater Costa Rica, and ultimately of federated New Granada, or Colombia. The source of the gold was in fact suspect—gold trinkets dug out of the graves of Indians. But it revived the question of the best place to build a trans-isthmus railroad.
About this time, too, a formidable New York couple, the Dalys, introduced Meagher socially to Ambrose Thompson, a young entrepreneur and shipbuilder from Philadelphia. Meagher thought Thompson had Yankee initiative, and Thompson intrigued him by mentioning that he had an option to build a railroad across Chiriqui. He had also read Meagher’s Costa Rica articles with admiration. Might Mr Meagher do a reconnaissance of Chiriqui, then act on Thompson’s behalf in approaching the President of Costa Rica and tying up the rights? Meagher’s soul breathed anew at the concept. He had got on very well with the Costa Ricans, even if they had defeated his old friend Walker. Meagher would take Libby with him—to stay in lovely San José while he did his transit of Chiriqui. He thanked Mrs Maria Lydig Daly for arranging the introduction and for ‘having enabled me to step into a new field of life … My noble American wife will thank you too.’
The Dalys were habitual associates of the Meaghers. Maria Lydig Daly herself came, like Elizabeth Meagher, from an old New York family; Dutch-German by descent, she was Irish not by blood but by marriage to Judge Charles Patrick Daly, an Irish farmer’s son, in 1856. At thirty-nine, seven years older than Meagher, Daly had the hunger for scholarship which marked many Irish immigrants, and was considered an eminent Shakespearean scholar. Columbia University would award him a doctorate in Laws in 1860, and he taught at Columbia Law School. He served on the Court of Common Pleas from his twenty-eighth to his seventieth year, and was the Chief Justice of that court, the highest in the New York area, from 1859 onwards. A Tammany man and, like Barlow, a supporter and friend of George B. McClellan, former soldier, businessman and Democrat, he possessed unexpected enthusiasms—an intense fellow feeling for Jewish emigrants, for example. He had written A History of the Jews in North America, and was a member of the committee which founded the New York Jewish Orphans’ Home.
Maria Lydig not only married one Irish jurist herself but successfully married off her younger sister Catherine to James Topham Brady. Thus did poor Irish immigrant boys advance to the centre of American life. Maria and her husband had an excellent home at 84 Clinton Place above Canal Street, provided by Maria’s father and beyond all Daly’s boyhood expectations. Like her husband, Maria Daly was a hearty Democrat, and referred to Abraham Lincoln, both as he emerged and as he assumed the presidency, as ‘Uncle Ape’ and ‘King Log.’
From 1859 until the end of his life Meagher would remain a friend of the Dalys, though the coming American conflict would render the relationship ambiguous.
The State Department asked Meagher this time to carry documents to Costa Rica, for delivery to the newly placed American delegation. Having agreed to this, he sailed with an enthusiastic Libby on the Northern Light, and crossed again by way of massive Lake Nicaragua from San Juan del Norte to Punta Arenas, described by Meagher as the Newport of Costa Rica, and by cart to San José.
Libby was gratified to see that her personable husband had obviously made a social impact with the Costa Rican Cabinet on his last trip. Meagher had liked them in return, particularly what he saw as their democratic, egalitarian style. The President, Juan Mora, this time took the Meaghers into his palace. Meagher began, both informally and formally, the work of persuading Senor Mora, a tough-minded man who had led the army of Central American allies against the filibusters, to settle favourably the dispute over rights between Ambrose Thompson’s Chiriqui Improvement Company and the Panama Railroad Company. Not that Mora’s power on the matter was absolute—Costa Rica was a self-governing state of the federation of New Granada, whose federal capital was at far-off Bogota, Colombia. But on 6 May that yea
r, Juan Mora’s government made out exclusive, conditional rights to Ambrose Thompson for construction of a railroad across the territory of Chiriqui between Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic and Punta Mala on the Pacific. One of the conditions was that the United States Navy would advance payments for the use of the ports at either end of the line.
Ambrose Thompson’s Chiriqui Improvement Company would later have its charter ratified both by the Pennsylvania legislature and by the Colombian Parliament, and Thompson was thus given proprietary right to ‘a body of land on the Isthmus of Chiriqui, in the United States of Colombia, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific,’ including the right to deliver mail and introduce colonists.
More than two months later, on 13 July 1860, the Meagher-Thompson Grant of cross-isthmus rights was approved by Congress. Congress of course did not have sovereignty over the isthmus, but its recognition and commitments reflected Meagher’s successful dealings with Mora, and served to warn off other American interests. An exultant Meagher now left Libby as a guest of the President and went off to reconnoitre Chiriqui. Taking ship in Punta Arenas, he brought the same literary enthusiasm to describing the aged schooner, Fruta Dorada, in which he travelled south some 200 miles to Boca Chica, as he had ten years earlier to describing the Swift. The Fruta was ‘porous all over … Cockroaches, spiders, three or five scorpions … had the principal cabin to themselves.’ The other passenger was a Mexican war veteran, a retired colonel of the Indiana militia who narrated ‘how he tore his way through miles of cacti to the bastions of Chapultepec’ The volcano of Chiriqui overhung their coastal passage to Boca Chica. ‘And there—in the midst of oranges and mangos, the fragrance of which was borne on the fresh breeze of the Pedrigal far out to sea—was a swarm of huts, with the shy Naiads of the river gliding in and out of them in their white chemisettes.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 45