August 3,
1823, saw the birth of Thomas Francis Meagher,
Irish nationalist, and later transported convict, escapee,
American Civil War general, and Governor of Montana.
In the 1840s, at the time of
An
Gorta Mor,
the Great Irish Famine, a
party of radical Irish nationalists called the ‘Young Irelanders’
wrote articles in The Nation and The United Irishman
newspapers arguing that the Irish people, if they had an Irish
Parliament, could better deal with ‘the great hunger’, than could British
parliamentarians sitting in London so removed from the Irish peasants
dying by the hundreds of thousands.
One of the Young Irelanders who came to prominence, at a
young age, was Thomas Meagher. Educated in Jesuit colleges,
allowing him to receive a better education than most Catholics at the
time, Meagher left college in 1843 with a reputation as a great patriot
and orator. He took his fervour and oratorical ability to the Loyal National Repeal
Association, the nationalist party of ‘the Great Liberator’, the
elderly Daniel
O'Connell. However, Meagher was of an impetuous nature and
O’Connell’s devotion to non-violence could not keep Meagher in
O’Connell’s ranks. The Young Irelanders had no such reservations
about the use of force, and in 1848 Meagher, aged only 23, gave a
firebrand speech that earned him the nickname ‘Meagher of the
Sword’.
Abhor the sword – stigmatize the sword?
No, my lord, for at its blow, a giant nation was started across the
waters of the Atlantic, … the crippled colony sprang into the
attitude of a proud Republic – prosperous, limitless, and
invincible!
It must have taken tremendous political, and
physical courage for a youth to stand before hundreds of O'Connell's
supporters and so defy the great man. Young Meagher’s eloquence drew
great attention to his cause, and many Irish were stirred by his words.
Thomas Meagher and the Irish flag
On
April 15, 1848, Meagher
presented the tricolor national flag of Ireland to the public for
the first time at a meeting of the Young Irelander Party. Earlier that
year – the year
of revolutions in Europe, he had travelled to Paris with a YI
delegation. Inspired by the tricolor French flag, he came up with
similar design for the Irish flag, with orange, white and green stripes.
The colours symbolized the uniting of the two traditions, Protestant
orange, and Catholic green, in one new nation. In 1916, Meagher's flag
was revived by the Irish
Volunteers, who were Irish soldiers in the American Civil War, and
later adopted by Sinn
Fein. Today, it is the flag of the Republic of Ireland, though
Meagher's version had the orange stripe closest to the staff, while the
modern version has the green stripe in that position.
Van Diemen's Land: Not as pretty as it looks
A fearsome sentence
In May, 1849, he was tried
for “exciting the people to rise in rebellion”, but the trial was aborted.
In July, the Young Irelanders attempted a rising among a people then suffering
through some of the worst ravages of An Gorta Mor, which the British
called the Potato Famine. The rising had no real prospects of success, and was
soon crushed. Meagher was among those arrested, tried for high treason, and
sentenced on October 23
to be hanged, drawn, and
quartered – the British punishment for high treason:
That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of
execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your
privy members [genitals]
shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head
severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed
of at the Queen’s pleasure.
Before
passing sentence the Judge asked if there were any words that anyone wished to
say. Meagher, speaking on behalf of his comrades, and knowing what torments
probably awaited him, showed his characteristic amazing fortitude and spirit
once again:
My Lord, this is our
first offence but not our last.
If you will be easy with us this once, we
promise,
on our word as gentlemen, to try better next time –
sure we won't
be fools, and get caught.
Following passionate support from all round the
globe, Queen Victoria commuted the barbaric sentence but another was passed:
penal servitude for life in the cruellest prison of the British Empire. On
July 29, 1849, with O'Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus, he was transported to
Van
Diemen’s Land, as the brutal ‘worst offenders’ penal colony was
known before it became Tasmania, now the southernmost state of Australia.
Though few men or women ever found a way out, Meagher escaped from Van
Diemen’s Land three years later and headed for New York, where Irish
expatriates gave him a warm welcome.
Meagher and the US Civil War
There he became a popular speaker, and studied law, being admitted to the
bar in 1855, and he started a paper called the Irish News on April 12,
1856. In 1858 he became an explorer, leading an expedition in Central America,
and his tales from that place were published in Harper's Magazine. When
the Civil War began Meagher's sympathies were with the South. However, when
Fort Sumter was attacked, he quickly made the decision to support the cause of
the Union, saying,
It is not only our duty
to America, but also to Ireland. We could not hope to succeed in our effort to
make Ireland a Republic without the moral and material support of the
liberty-loving citizens of these United States.
He raised a company of Zouaves and went to to the
front with the 69th New York
Volunteers, participating in the first battle of Bull Run, and was one of
the last members of the unit left on the field during that massacre.
The battle was over,
the dead lay in heaps,
Pat Murphy lay bleeding and gory.
A hole in his head, from a rifleman's shot
Had ended his passion for glory.
No more in the camp shall his laughter be heard,
Or his songs he was singin' so gaily.
He died like a hero, in the Land of the Free,
Far away from the Land of Shillelagh.
Pat Murphy of the Irish Brigade
Always a man of action as well as words, Meagher then
organized other ‘Wild
Geese’ – the famous Irish
Brigade, and was commissioned its brigadier-general, and fought with the
Army of the Potomac with distinction. He was given command of a military
district in Tennessee, and when the war finished he was made, in July, 1865,
Territorial Secretary of Montana. It was while he held this office that he
fell overboard from a Missouri River steamer one night and was presumed drowned,
for his body was never found.
'Paddy's Lament'
Traditional
Well it's by the hush, me boys, and sure that's to hold your noise
And listen to poor Paddy's sad narration
I was by hunger stressed, and in poverty distressed
So I took a thought I'd leave the Irish nation
Well I sold me ass and cow, my little pigs and sow
My little plot of land I soon did part with
And me sweetheart Bid McGee, I'm afraid I'll never see
For I left her there that morning broken-hearted
Here's you boys, now take my advice
To America I'll have ye's not be going
There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar
And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin
Well myself and a hundred more, to America sailed o'er
Our fortunes to be making we were thinkin'
When we got to Yankee land, they put guns into our hands
"Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln"
Here's you boys, now take my advice
To America I'll have ye's not be going
There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar
And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin
General Meagher to us he said, if you get shot or lose your head
Every murdered soul of youse will get a pension
Well in the war lost me leg, they gave me a wooden peg
And by soul it is the truth to you I mention
Here's you boys, now take my advice
To America I'll have ye's not be going
There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar
And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin
Well I think myself in luck, if I get fed on Indianbuck
And old Ireland is the country I delight in
To the devil, I would say, it's curse Americay
For the truth I've had enough of your hard fightin
Here's you boys, now take my advice
To America I'll have ye's not be going
There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar
And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin
I wish I was at home
I wish I was at home
I wish I was at home
I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin
John Mitchel and the pro-slavery cause
Perhaps
ironically, most of the Irish in the southern states were pro-slavery, and as
ever, "the hip-pocket nerve" was behind it, because they feared that
if the slaves were freed, they themselves would find it harder to compete for
jobs, such as work on the docks and railroads.
Even more ironically, Meagher's Young Irelander
colleague John
Mitchel (1815 - 1875) published The
Citizen in New York, as an expression of
radical Irish-American
anti-British opinion but the paper became controversial for its passionate
defence of slavery
and famously published a letter by Mitchel to the clergyman and reformer, Henry Ward Beecher, in defence of slavery.
Later, in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1857, Mitchel established the pro-slavery
journal, Southern Citizen, before returning to Ireland to become a
politician. Three of Mitchell's sons fought for the South, and one imagines
them firing on Meagher's Wild Geese, though I know of no record of this.
Mitchel had left the Young Irelanders by
January 1848. He was described by historian Cecil Woodham-Smith as:
... the most remarkable and the most formidable of the Young Ireland leaders ... and the principal leader-writer on the 'Nation'. His abilities were outstanding, and his 'Jail Journal', a minor masterpiece, has won him immortality. John Mitchel possessed an extraordinary capacity for hatred directed at the British Government, and an equal talent for burning invective. He had also the gift, which the other leaders of Young Ireland lacked, of arousing the masses of the people and inspiring them with intense devotion... Yet side by side with outstanding qualities of leadership, courage, integrity and fanatical sincerity, Mitchel possessed fatal defects. He was wildly unpractical, he was obstinate, he did not foresee the consequences of his actions, he did not merely lack organising ability, he regarded method, organisation and system with lofty
contempt.
At the end of the
Civil War, Mitchel
was imprisoned by the Federal authorities for aiding the Rebellion, but a deputation of Irishmen asked President Johnson for his release on the
grounds that he was vital for the cause of Irish freedom, and this was
granted. In 1874 he returned to Ireland and was elected to parliament from
Tipperary ("the people in their enthusiasm took the horses from his carriage and dragged it themselves through the
streets"), but was declared ineligible on the grounds that he was a
convicted felon, and not allowed to take his seat. He contested the seat again
in the resulting by-election, again being elected, this time with an increased
vote. However his sudden death avoided a constitutional crisis, with his
opponent being returned unopposed in the third by-election. He was the
grandfather of John Purroy
Mitchel, who was Mayor of New York City, 1914 - 17.
Young Ireland
- 
Listen
(RAM)
|
What
became of the others?
These Young
Irelanders were compatriots of Meagher, and many were sentenced with him.
The later careers of these traitors and terrorists were remarkable, to say
the least:
Charles
Gavan Duffy (1816 - 1903): Became Member of Parliament for New Ross, County
Wexford, Ireland in 1852. He emigrated to Australia in 1855, becoming a
moderately liberal Premier of Victoria, Australia in 1871. Knighted in
1873 he also became Speaker of the Australian Assembly in 1877. One
of his sons, John Gavan Duffy, was a Victorian politician between 1874 and
1904. Another, Frank
Gavan Duffy, was Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia 1931 -
1935. Yet another son, George
Gavan Duffy (born 1882) was an Irish politician and later (from 1936)
a judge of the Irish High Court, becoming its President from 1946 until
his death in 1951.
Thomas D'Arcy
McGee (1825 - 1868): Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of
Agriculture and president of Council Dominion of Canada, and 'Father of Confederation';
assassinated 1868;
John
Mitchel (1815 - 1875): Became a public voice for the pro-slavery
viewpoint in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s before ending up
elected to the British House of Commons, only to be disqualified because
he was a convicted felon;
Thomas Devin Reilly: Evaded the authorities in a remarkable series
of Houdini-type escapes, before eventually making his way to America.
NB:
Many Internet sources say that Morris Lyne (or Morris Lyene) and Michael
Ireland each became Attorney
General of Australia, the latter succeeding the former. However, I can
find no evidence to support this claim and believe it to be incorrect;
perhaps they were attorneys general of some Australian State, but I have
found no evidence of that either. Likewise, many sources say Richard
O'Gorman became Governor-General of Newfoundland. I have been unable to
trace him in either the lists of Lieutenant-Governors
of Newfoundland nor Governors
General of Canada. Many sources also say Patrick Donahue (O'Donoghue)
and Terrence McManus both became Brigadier-Generals in the United States
Army. I have no evidence for these assertions and would be very pleased if
anyone could provide further information.
|
The Young Irelanders in battle, Ireland
|
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The
Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World
by Thomas
Keneally (Australian author of Schindler’s Ark, which became Schindler’s
List, the movie)
The Exile
(Fictional biography of Meagher)
Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847
Out of Ireland
The Irish in America
Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America
Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century
The Fatal Shore
An
Gorta Mor Irish History: The
'Famine' and Emigration An Gorta Mor
An Gorta Mor, the
"famine"
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