Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 44. The Irish News

Part of the front page of the first edition of Meagher’s The Irish News, published April 12, 1856. Photo: Author’s collection

Irish nationalists had a new cause to support in 1855. Britain had entered the Crimean War with France on the side of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. British military needs in the east had depleted its Irish garrisons and in New York a new revolutionary society called the Emmet Monument Association pledged to fight for Irish freedom. The organisation’s pointed name came from the words from the dock of 1803 revolutionary Robert Emmet which instructed no-one to write his epitaph until Ireland “takes her place among the nations of the earth.” Its leaders included Michael Doheny and John O’Mahony who had escaped to Paris with James Stephens after the 1848 rebellion and then emigrated to America in 1853. It also included a Sligo emigrant named Michael Corcoran who would later play an important role in Meagher’s civil war story and who was a well known figure in Tammany Hall who could deliver the Irish vote. They held confidential discussions with Russian representatives in New York and Washington about the possibility of Russia arming a revolution of 5000 trained volunteers in Ireland. Meagher was not an official member of the Emmet Monument Association but he supported its aims. Though the movement fizzled out after Russia sued for peace in March 1856, it would be the inspiration for a more lasting organisation formed two years later called the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or in America, the Fenians.

Though Meagher had initially supported Mitchel’s paper the Citizen, their different political outlooks was causing tension and Meagher felt it did not carry enough news from Ireland. In any case Mitchel had exhausted his goodwill in the North by the end of 1854 and moved his family south to Knoxville, Tennessee. He and second son James proceeded on foot to the nearby mountains where they bought a farm. Meagher now planned to start a weekly newspaper called The Irish News which he would run from his law offices. In a letter to Smith O’Brien, Meagher said that now he was married he could no longer roam the lecture circuit. “Not knowing enough law to realize speedily a profitable practice…I decided on the paper as the best project within reach.” Meagher wanted the paper to be a voice for the Irish, which were a quarter of the population of New York and its most disadvantaged residents. The New York Herald believed him well qualified, saying he “possesses literary and oratorical talent of the highest order” and unlike Mitchel, “who ran through an unexampled popularity in six months,” Meagher appeared to have “more judgement and discretion.”

The first issue of the Irish News appeared on Saturday April 12, 1856 and it had a similar look and feel to Mitchel’s paper. The 16-page paper sold for 6c a copy or $3 a year and was immediately successful, quickly establishing a circulation of 50,000. Meagher was ably assisted by assistant editor James Roche, former editor of the Kilkenny Journal and literary editor John Savage. Savage had helped found the Irish Tribune in 1848 and taken part in O’Mahony’s assault on Portlaw Barracks in 1849, and after escaping to America edited and wrote historical chapters for Meagher’s Speeches on Ireland (1853) and was literary editor at Mitchel’s The Citizen. Page 1 proclaimed it was edited by the proprietor Thomas Francis Meagher and was “dedicated to the service of the Irish People at home and abroad”. The chief news from abroad was about Crimea where “the great European war is at an end.” Nothing “particular” had transpired regarding American affairs though America’s minister to London James Buchanan delivered his letter of recall. In the coming weeks and months the Irish News would be of big help to Buchanan as he launched his Democratic candidacy for the presidential election that year. Meagher’s friend T.W. Condon wrote letters from Waterford signed as “The Metal-Man” (from the name of the monument that warns off shipping from entering dangerous Tramore Bay) while the ever reliable Patrick Smyth was his Dublin correspondent signing off his letters as “Kilmainham” signifying both the name of the suburb Smyth came from and the prison Meagher had served time in before transportation. In the first edition Smyth noted Irish MPs were petitioning prime minister Lord Palmerston for a full pardon for Smith O’Brien.

Smith O’Brien finally received a full unconditional pardon in May 1856. He turned down an invite to stand for the seat of Tipperary and satisfied himself with writing open letters to the Irish people. He noted caustically that Britain had loaned £8 million for Famine relief in 1848 in what it claimed was “unparalleled generosity” while in 1855 Britain allotted £30 million to the Crimean war effort “with scarcely a murmur of dissension”. Meagher did not benefit from the May pardons. As Smyth put it in Meagher’s Irish News the amnesty was for all the Tasmanian state prisoners “except those bad boys who escaped to America”.

Meagher contributed his “personal recollections” to the Irish News with reminiscences of his times in Ireland and Tasmania, beginning with memories of Clongowes and Stonyhurst. Later he would write of America and how much the south impressed him after he visited. “I found a people sober, intelligent, high-minded, patriotic, and kind-hearted. One thing I missed, to-wit — the squalid misery of the labouring classes of the North.” After having avoided giving an opinion in 1855, Meagher finally put on record his position on slavery in the south. “Slavery, like every other social institution, has its dark side; and it would be well, perhaps, if we could get rid of it. But we can’t, in our time, and should therefore confine our efforts to alleviating the evils that accompany it.”

The acrimony over the north-south split on the issue took a turn for the worse in the summer of 1856 after Free Soil Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts’ two-day oration entitled “The Crime Against Kansas” where he railed at length against slavery, slave-holders and Southern politicians in violent and sexually-charged language. He particularly attacked on South Carolina senator Andrew Butler who “has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows…I mean the harlot, slavery.” Congressman Preston Brooks, Butler’s cousin, could not let the insults to his family and state go unpunished. After consulting with three southern Congressmen friends, Brooks concluded that Sumner could be treated the way a southern planter and gentleman would treat someone beneath him in rank and station.

The Irish News told the story of what happened next when Brooks entered the chamber on May 21, “approaching the seat of Mr. Sumner, struck him a powerful blow with a cane, at the time accusing him of libeling South Carolina and his gray-headed relative, Senator Butler. Mr. Sumner fell from the effects of the blow, and Brooks continued beating him. Mr. Sumner soon recovered sufficiently to call for help, but no one interposed, and Brooks repeated the blows until Mr. Sumner was deprived of the power of speech.” Brooks’ constituents applauded the action sending him replacements for his shattered cane, one with the message “hit him again”. Coming at the same time as a southern raid on Lawrence, Kansas, the incident gave the Republicans perfectly matched themes of “Bleeding Sumner” and “Bleeding Kansas” for the 1856 presidential campaign.

The new Republican party’s platform called for repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Act and its first presidential nominee was Californian military hero, John C. Fremont with the slogan “free soil, free speech and Fremont.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act was also the reason Pierce failed to win the Democratic Party renomination for the 1856 election. Meagher threw the support of the Irish News behind Democrat candidate James Buchanan, whose father came from Donegal. Buchanan had been ambassador to London and untainted by domestic political problems. Buchanan’s policy on Kansas-Nebraska was “popular sovereignty” which made slavery a matter for each new state to decide, which Meagher agreed was a “supreme dogma.” Meagher had personal reasons to support another Buchanan policy, “the integrity of American citizenship, irrespective of creed or birthplace.” Buchanan won the election and Meagher became an American citizen in May 1857.

Meagher remained sensitive to rumours about his escape. In November 1856 Henry Raymond, lieutenant governor of New York and editor of the New York Daily Times, wrote a sarcastic article about Meagher’s bravery saying he mourned “over the days, departed long ago, when he could, at discretion, fight without breaking the law, or run away without breaking his parole.” Meagher asked whether Raymond meant he broke his parole and hinted he would be prepared to duel for satisfaction in the matter. Reporting the incident with delight the Boston Pilot said Raymond wrote “three wriggling notes” which did not meet Meagher’s demand before writing on December 4, “I can say with pleasure that I did not intend by the expression you quote to charge that you had at any time broken your parole. The language of the article does not seem to me to import any opinion on that subject; it certainly was not intended to express any such opinion.” 

Meagher also aligned his paper with the filibustering of Tennessean William Walker in Central America. Walker led an invasion of Nicaragua in 1855 and Meagher saw in him the best opportunity to defeat British interests in Central America. Walker captured Managua and president Pierce recognised his new government in May 1856. Meagher hailed the fact Walker had outflanked the British. The question said Meagher was whether England or America would control the right of way between the two oceans, “Will the United States give way, leaving England to put up a toll-gate?” In his anti-English rhetoric, Meagher was prepared to overlook the fact that Walker, “this brave soldier of Republicanism,” had re-legalised slavery as one of his first actions. The Pilot called Meagher’s plotting “an infatuation for disturbing existing governments, whether right or wrong” and asked reasonably how the Irish in America would benefit from Walker’s success. Walker’s move also upset France which regarded his invasion as a threat to its trade. After the Crimean war Costa Rica requested France to join the English naval forces to protect San Juan del North from Walker’s freebooters. By October Walker’s government unravelled as neighbouring countries Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica invaded in support of the former president. Walker returned to America where he was arrested for violation of the 1818 Neutrality Act. Walker’s failure did not deter him – or Meagher – from continuing to boost American Manifest Destiny objectives in Central America.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 43. Slavery

Statue of third president Thomas Jefferson at the Jefferson Memorial, Washington DC. Photo: Author’s collection

The Whigs and Democrats had taken turns to dominate what was called America’s “Second Party System” since the two-term presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. The Democrats won the presidency in 1836, 1844 and 1852 while Whig presidents were elected in 1840 and 1848. However by the time Meagher arrived in America, the issue of slavery was fracturing the Second Party System. The Whigs were under pressure from internal leaders like New York’s William Seward and Liberty party leader Salmon P. Chase to take a stronger pro-abolition line while the Democrats were fracturing along north-south lines between those for and against slavery.

America’s relationship to slavery remains controversial to this day thanks to critical race theory, an academic framework centred on the idea that racism is systemic. Critics say that the 21st century bans on teaching critical race theory in Republican-dominated legislatures such as Louisiana’s is simply “a bid to downplay slavery and other grim chapters in both Louisiana’s and the nation’s history.” Slavery has been an issue for America since colonial times and the African slave population rose in the late 17th and early 18th century to meet labour demands in southern plantations.

The Atlantic slave trade was a vital part of 18th century triangular commerce involving European merchants, African traders and American planters and slaves made a a harrowing journey in the “middle passage” mainly to tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake and rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery was less crucial to the northern economy but slaves were still used as servants, farm hands and dockers. By 1776 one in five of the population were black and with the revolutionary focus on “liberty” African Americans saw the war with Britain as an opportunity to claim freedom. However slavery existed in every colony and nearly all the founding fathers were slave owners, as were 10 of the first 12 presidents (John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams the exceptions). Anti-slavery essayist John Jay Chapman called the issue “a sleeping serpent” which lay “coiled up under the table” during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The first Constitution did not mention slavery but had protections for the institution including the fugitive slave clause which require runaways to be returned, and the three-fifths clause which gave the slave states increased representation in Congress by counting part of their disenfranchised slave population.

Between 1777 and 1804 every state north of Maryland took steps towards emancipation and abolitionists hoped slavery would also die out in the south. Then came the cotton engine. Cotton had been a fairly minor crop until 1793 when northerner Eli Whitney invented a gin to make it easier to separate cotton from its seeds. Beforehand it took a worker ten hours to produce a single pound of lint, but now the cotton gin could produce a thousand pounds a day. Demand for slaves increased as production soared. Cotton rose dramatically in importance from 70,000 bales annually in 1800 to four million by the time of the civil war, and became, by far, America’s largest export commodity.

Slavery was the south’s “peculiar institution,” an apt euphemism as by the middle of the 19th century, slavery set it apart from the north and increasingly, the rest of the world. Cotton farms were the bedrock of the southern economy. Out of a population of nine million in the south there were 3.5 million slaves, men, women and children of all ages. Most toiled in the fields six days a week from “can see to can’t see” (sunrise to sundown) while families lived in constant fear of being destroyed by sale. Owners held all rights to slaves including sexual rights. After the Missouri slave Celia was charged for killing her master Newsome while resisting sexual assault in 1855, the prosecution successfully argued her acting in self-defence in such circumstances by claiming slaves were not “women”. Celia had no right to kill Newsome even if “he was in the habit of having intercourse with the defendant who was his slave.” She was found guilty and sentenced to death. Popular opinion has it that her execution was postponed so as not to deprive the owners of the property rights of her unborn child, however Celia’s biographer doubts she was pregnant at the time of the trial.

Laws across the south such as in Maryland prevented slaves like Frederick Douglass, born 1818, from learning to read and write. But with the help of his owner’s wife and white children, Douglass disobeyed the law, understanding that knowledge “was the pathway from slavery to freedom” and he escaped to the north in 1838. Another who thought deeply about the pathway to freedom was third president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was one of the founding father slave owners though he was opposed to the institution. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance to ban slavery in the northwest territories but Congress rejected it by a single vote. Jefferson’s contradictions showed in his Notes on the State of Virginia written a year later where he said slavery had a negative effect on “the manners of our people” while he also claimed blacks lacked reason and advanced the “suspicion” they were inferior to whites “in body and mind.” He maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process and abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property. Under his presidency the size of America was doubled with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. However Jefferson refused to bar slavery in the new territory, having been scared off by Haiti’s successful slave rebellion (which had ironically convinced Napoleon to sell the territory in the first place) and South Carolina’s aggressive pro-slavery attitude and threats to leave the union.

The Mason-Dixon line, the colonial era boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland became a line dividing the slave states from free. New York was well north of the line but it was dependent on slavery having rose to commercial dominance on the strength of its control of the transatlantic cotton trade. Though the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, American slavery was crucial for Britain too. Around 80 percent of its cotton came from the south and by 1860 the cotton trade was a $600 million a year business which provided employment for five million people in the north of England.

By 1819 the 13 colonies had become 22 states, split evenly between free and slave states. The 1820 Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to keep the balance in the Senate where each state elected two senators regardless of size. The compromise prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line. But Jefferson worried that the extension of slavery in the west would destroy the union. In an 1820 letter to one of Maine’s new senators, he wrote: “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go”. Anti-slavery societies sprung determine to release the wolf though racism was as rife in the north as the south – Lincoln’s own Illinois barred African-Americans from entering the state while abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejay was murdered by a mob in Alton. While property qualifications for voting were eliminated in nearly every state between 1800 and 1828, few free black men could vote even in the North. No women could vote, though Abraham Lincoln suggested they should as early as 1836.

As the border moved westward the slavery problem went with it. In 1846 Congressman David Wilmot proposed the Wilmot Proviso requiring slavery to be prohibited in any territory acquired from Mexico. It passed the House but died in the Senate split along sectional lines. But when California wanted to join the union as a free state in 1849, it had the potential to upset the equilibrium between slave and free states in the Senate. Congress passed a series of bills known as the compromise of 1850 which allowed entry to California but pacified slave states with an even stricter Fugitive Slave Act which required all states to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves, denied slaves the right to a jury trial, and made assisting them an offence. Resentment towards the Act further heightened tensions between North and South.

Democrat Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, was a key player in the compromise of 1850, and was expected to win the 1852 presidential nomination. But delegates at the convention split between Douglas, former Secretary of State James Buchanan, and two others before nominating Franklin Pierce, who was against slavery but who saw federal action against slavery as an infringement on southern states’ rights. The uneasy 1850 compromise lasted until 1854 when Congress debated the impending territories of Kansas and Nebraska to establish a territorial government in unorganised portions of the Louisiana Purchase. Douglas proposed the idea of “popular sovereignty” to get around the Missouri Compromise ruling of no slavery rule north of latitude 36°30′. Douglas got the support of the south, and of president Pierce’s northern Democrats, by suggesting instead a popular vote to determine whether Kansas and Nebraska would be slave or free. Nebraska to the north was unlikely to hold slaves, but Kansas was in the heart of the trans-Mississippi west and Douglas and Pierce were over-optimistic in believing whichever side lost would accept the results there. The decision caused a storm of protest in the north concerned by what Free Soiler Salmon Chase called “an atrocious plot” to spread slavery through the west. The question was of national importance once Kansas became a state, because its two new senators would affect the balance of power in the Senate. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, and arguably the Civil War started in the mid 1850s in “Bleeding Kansas” which was flooded by pro-slavery “border ruffians” and anti-slavery “free-staters” who fought with each other intermittently for the next five years.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act also redrew the political map. While southern Whigs supported Douglas, in the north the Whigs were replaced by a new party dedicated to halting the expansion of slavery. The electoral sea change began in the 1854 mid-terms when so-called “Fusion movements” uniting Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, prohibitionists and nativists swept to power in nearly all the free states. The balance of power varied enormously from state to state and in many, the nativist Know Nothings dominated, in others antislavery advocates calling themselves the Republican Party dominated. Among the Whigs searching for a new political home was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was no great lover of the Irish but no nativist either. In an 1855 letter he wrote that if the Know Nothings got control the declaration would read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.”

Lincoln had been elected to Congress in 1848 for one term under Democrat president James Polk, before returning to his Illinois law career in the early 1850s. He would eventually gravitate to the new Republican Party by 1856. Though not an abolitionist, Lincoln inherited a belief from his Baptist parents that slavery was immoral and thought slave labour took opportunities away from whites, giving slaveholders an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Yet as historian Eric Foner writes, Lincoln made a sharp distinction between his personal wish that “all men everywhere could be free” and his official duties as a legislator and president in a legal system that recognised the Southern states’ right to property in slaves. No such obligations were due to the territories and he was determined to maintain a distinction between “the existing institution and the extending of it”. Lincoln greeted the Kansas-Nebraska Act of fellow Illinois man Douglas with horror. Nearly every speech he made in the next six years was in response to Douglas and his oratory on the slavery question would make Lincoln a national figure. Watching from the sidelines was the soon-to-be American citizen Thomas Francis Meagher and in 1856 he gradually started to come off the fence and play a bigger role in the controversy that was gripping his adopted nation.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 42. Libby

A portrait of Elizabeth Meagher, later in life. Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society.

Dissatisfied with life in the east, the widower Meagher toyed with the idea of moving to California before fate intervened once more. In late 1854 he met a woman who could not have been more different than Catherine Bennett. Elizabeth Townsend was from a wealthy family with impeccable Protestant Yankee credentials. She was the oldest unmarried daughter of Peter Townsend, whose grandfather had taken the Revolutionary Association oath in 1775. Elizabeth’s father was also the head of the New York-based Sterling Iron Works, the family firm which built a chain over the Hudson during the War of Independence to stop British ships advancing up the river. Elizabeth was educated in the best schools and had turned 24 on September 20, 1854. She had just returned from a European tour where she enjoyed the Irish charm of Belfast. Filled with a social conscience for New York’s downtrodden Irish, she attended several meetings where Meagher spoke before they were formally introduced at a social gathering. According to Cavanagh, Elizabeth was “noble minded as she was beautiful and accomplished.” It was love at first sight, Meagher and Elizabeth equally smitten with each other. However Peter Townsend took a dim view of his beloved daughter’s new dalliance. According to a newspaper gossip column, Townsend’s disapproval was “based on some unpleasant antecedents in the life of the candidate for his daughter’s hand.”

Townsend could not prevent the match. Meagher “opened up” his heart to Elizabeth and in return she told him she could “deeply love” him. By Christmas 1854 he was addressing romantic letters to “My dear, dear Miss Townsend.”  Meagher told her that from the moment they were introduced, he was overcome. “My heart was throbbing, almost breaking,” he told her. On January 2, 1855, he put his cards on the table in a 14-page letter he wrote from his New York Metropolitan Hotel base. While she already knew some details of his past life, he wrote, he had barely told her the secrets of his heart. “You know I was a ‘rebel’ – and you know I am an ‘exile’. You know I was married and you know there has been left to me a little fellow, who knows not what a mother would have been.” Meagher explained why he resisted the British government. “The world knows what Ireland…has been. For years and years, a mere wreck upon the sea, she had nothing but a long list of sorrows, ignominies and martyrdom to contribute to the history of nations.” Every generation, he told her, has tried to “redeem her sinking fortunes” and he was “proudly satisfied” with his own behavior. While that was righteous, he admitted it might not be the wisest course if those efforts failed. “Success covers a multitude of infirmities and errors…Adversity drives the gravest virtue out upon the world.”

Banished to Australia, Meagher said he grew sad and sick of life and Catherine was a “solitary star who shone down” on him. But he could not bear the “odious captivity” which Catherine shared with him and he was determined to bring her to America. “Sometime elapsed. At length she joined me – but to part again and part forever. We were three years married. Of those three years, but eight months we were together.” While Meagher insisted he was sharing the “secrets of the grave of which I keep the key” he glided past the reason why Catherine did not stay in America. Instead he moved on to the present and his “declaration of love” to Elizabeth, whom he called Libby. “Although our intercourse has been limited… I could not be considered as acting with haste or thoughtlessness in pledging myself to you.” He said life would be joyous “with you, as my noble wife and the mother of my little boy.”

Just as there were objections to his marriage with Catherine, he now foresaw objections to this new marriage, though this time he was the relatively low-born one. Meagher told Libby he had “no fortune, at least nothing that I know of.” What of the wealthy Meagher senior? “I never ask my father a single question on the subject. I have fought my own way through the world and will fight it to the end,” he told Libby, omitting the role Thomas Meagher senior had played in helping him survive and escape Australia. In America he was alone, had no recognised standing and was a homeless exile dependent on his “good name and labor for a fortune.” He was determined to become an American citizen and “now that I have the assurance of your love,” he promised to remain in New York where he would practice at the bar. “To win distinction in this profession, shall be my study and ambition,” he told Libby and her will would be his “sole guide in law.” Though Meagher did not explicitly ask for her hand in marriage, it seeped from the pages. She accepted his proposal and a wedding date was set for November 1855. Libby would be his intellectual equal and a stable companion who shared his passions for the rest of his life.

Meagher soon met his new extended family including Samuel Barlow, who married Libby’s younger sister Alice. Barlow was more to the patrician Townsend’s tastes than his prospective Irish Catholic rebel son-in-law. The Massachusetts son of a Yale-educated doctor, Barlow was admitted to the New York bar in 1849 and in 1852 became a member of the firm of Bowdoin, Larocque & Barlow, which he continued until his death in 1889. Thanks to its extensive political and financial contacts, this legal house had deep tentacles into American financial, business, and legal life, securing charters for, managing, and reorganizing corporate enterprises. Barlow acquired a Long Island country estate as part of a fee for a railroad lawsuit. There, he and Alice entertained the great and the good, and Barlow became a hugely influential figure in the Democratic Party.

Meagher met his new extended family including Samuel Barlow, who married Libby’s sister Alice. Barlow was much more to the patrician Townsend’s tastes than his prospective Irish Catholic rebel son-in-law. The Massachusetts son of a Yale-educated doctor, Barlow was admitted to the New York bar in 1849 and in 1852 became a member of the firm of Bowdoin, Larocque & Barlow, which he continued until his death in 1889. Thanks to its extensive political and financial contacts, this legal house became deeply involved in American financial, business, and legal life, securing charters for, managing, and reorganising corporate enterprises. Barlow acquired a Long Island country estate as part of a fee for a railroad lawsuit where he entertained the great and the good, and he became a hugely influential figure in the Democratic Party.

Inspired by Barlow’s example Meagher resumed his study of the law, encouraged by another Townsend family friend, Irish Tammany politician and judge, Charles Daly, Meagher received a crash course in the American legal system from another judge Robert Emmet, nephew of the famous 1803 Irish nationalist martyr. Meagher was admitted to the bar on September 4, 1855 and because he was not yet a citizen he obtained a special order of the Supreme Court of New York through the connections of O’Gorman. He started a partnership with the lawyer Malcolm Campbell though Campbell did the bulk of the work. Meagher supplemented his income with lecture tours. He became, as Rory Cornish put it, “a professional ethnic spokesman” while he tried to find a more suitable position for a gentleman of his education. At an 1855 meeting attended by nearly four thousand people, Meagher joined New York’s other leading Irishmen Robert Emmet, Michael Doheny, John Mitchel and Richard O’Gorman to send William Smith O’Brien a message of congratulations for having finally been released from Van Diemen’s Land and to support “his political principles and honesty.” Meagher was uncharacteristically brief in his speech, telling the meeting “the virtues of the man they had met to honor required no exposition” from him.

With the Know Nothing phenomenon at its highest after successes in the 1854 midterm elections, anti-Irish feeling was rife. At the 1855 St Patrick’s Day banquet in New York, Irish-born District Attorney John McKeon referred to a “storm of anti-Irish protest” while Meagher, the main speaker, toasted “Ireland, our mother, forsaken, not forgotten.” Meagher invoked the memory of the Famine where he called Ireland “the skeleton at this feast.” Some may not see the skeleton, he said, but to him, “the shroud and the sealed lips and the cold hands and the beautiful head bound with the cypress wreath, are visible.” The words were greeted with huge cheers. Meagher summoned the vision of the ancient mother of the nation in a “festival of filial truth, piety and love.” According to historian Stephen Rohs, Meagher’s speech embodied the exile as a “figure of the sacred cause of the nation” and asserted his own authority to exhort the nation to remember its cultural heritage in a new hybrid Irish-American identity which commanded financial and emotional loyalty from his supporters.

Irish nationalists had a new cause to support in 1855. Britain entered the Crimean War with France on the side of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. British military needs had depleted its Irish garrisons and in New York a new revolutionary society called the Emmet Monument Association pledged to fight for Irish freedom. The organization’s name came from 1803 revolutionary Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock which instructed no-one to write his epitaph until Ireland “takes her place among the nations of the earth.” Its leaders included Michael Doheny and John O’Mahony who had escaped to Paris with James Stephens after the 1848 rebellion and then emigrated to America in 1853. It also included Sligo-born emigrant Michael Corcoran who would later play an important role in Meagher’s civil war story and who was a well known figure in Tammany Hall who could deliver the Irish vote. The Emmet Monument Association held confidential discussions with Russian representatives in New York and Washington about the possibility of Russia arming a revolution of 5000 trained volunteers in Ireland. Meagher was not an official member of the Association but he supported its aims. Though the movement fizzled out after Russia sued for peace in March 1856, it became the inspiration for a more lasting Irish revolutionary organization formed two years later.

On November 14, 1855 Meagher commanded emotional loyalty of a different kind when he married Elizabeth Townsend in a small ceremony at the Madison Avenue residence of Archbishop Hughes. Libby was still an Episcopalian so there was no lavish wedding at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Instead Archbishop Hughes wed them in a small ceremony at the archbishop’s home. On a trip to Waterford in 1857-58 Libby would convert to her husband’s religion and become a devout Catholic to the disgust of her father. The New York Times claimed Townsend had disinherited his daughter though it was belied by the fact the newlyweds immediately moved into Townsend’s house at 129 Fifth Avenue. However the Times rumor was not completely wrong. When Townsend eventually died in 1885 aged 84, Libby was left a substantially smaller portion of his will than her two sisters.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 41. Citizens

Detail of Mitchel’s drawing of Meagher’s Lake Sorell property in Tasmania with Speranza on the water. Compare the author’s modern day photo of same location in chapter 35.

In January 1854 John Mitchel launched his own newspaper, with Meagher’s help, called the Citizen. Printed every Saturday the paper was dedicated to the cause of Irish independence. According to the page 1 prospectus in the first edition, “the principal conductors” were Irishmen who had “endured years of penal servitude at the hands of the British Government for endeavouring to overthrow the dominion of that government” and who were now “refugees on American soil.”

Mitchel’s motivation factor was a growing conflict between the Ottoman and Russian Empires that threatened to drag in Britain and France on the side of the Ottomans and his paper’s first edition brought news of a “great battle on the Black Sea.” With Britain preoccupied by a war that eventually took place mainly in the Crimea, Mitchel wanted to “prepare the way for some noble enterprise in Ireland.” It was entirely his handiwork and Meagher’s first contribution was not until the second edition, called “five rough sketches” on Irish orators beginning with 18th century Irish politician Henry Grattan. Grattan, wrote Meagher, had a great cause, “Irish independence,” he had a great opportunity, “the embarrassment of England” and great genius. The first instalment also wrote admiringly of the oratory of another 18th century politician John Philpott Curran and perhaps more surprisingly Daniel O’Connell, given their split in 1846. “Had he willed it,” Meagher wrote, O’Connell “would have been crowned in 1843,” harking back to the failed year of Repeal. Meagher promised to write “within the month” of the final two orators, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his other Clongowes hero Richard Lalor Sheil. However the series was never finished and the fact it was written “on board Star of the West off Kingston, Jamaica” in late 1853 showed Meagher was already on his way to California to concentrate on his own speaking career and he was content to leave the writing conductor’s baton with Mitchel.

It was just as well Meagher was distancing himself from the newspaper because Mitchel quickly made a lot of enemies. It was to be expected Mitchel would take the fight up to the Know Nothings but less advisedly he also went after the Catholic clergy. He poked fun at the idea that Irish nationalism was holier than the “red republicanism” of Europe, making an early enemy of “Dagger” Hughes. Mitchel ridiculed O’Connell’s non-violent methods of “harmless exhibition of numerical force” and said 40 years of peaceful agitation had achieved nothing. With the paper also serialising his Jail Journal, Mitchel’s writings would be seized by leaders of the 1916 Rising that rejected “moral force” movements as ineffective with Patrick Pearse calling Mitchel the “supreme evangelist of nationalism” but Mitchel’s nationalism was tied into his rejection of 19th century progress and liberalism.

The sad news of January 22 was the passing of the original Irish exile journalist-editor, Patrick O’Donohoe. O’Donohoe had taken rooms in Brooklyn and wrote to his wife in Ireland to join him. But he collapsed and died while she and their child were still held up at the Staten Island quarantine station. The official cause of death was dysentery but as Keneally wrote “melancholy, alcoholism, Denison and irregular diet had all had a hand”. The Irish American said O’Donohoe had become estranged from his friends towards the end of his life ‘through nervous irritability and a mind shattered by suffering”. His wife denounced Meagher and Mitchel for not helping him though Mitchel promoted a fund in the Citizen to support her. The appeal was not well subscribed and had to be renewed by the Nation in 1855. Further quarrels among Young Irelanders came after Duffy published Mitchel’s Jail Journal in the Nation. Mitchel said Duffy had tried to evade responsibility at his own trial. Duffy angrily hit back that Mitchel had not escaped with honour and published a letter in April 1854 calling on Meagher to distance himself from Mitchel. However Meagher said he would not communicate with Duffy until he withdrew the slur on Mitchel.

Mitchel also made more American enemies with his growing support for slavery. In late 1853, James Haughton, a Dublin Quaker merchant and anti-slavery activist, wrote a letter addressed to Meagher challenging him and his fellow Irish-Americans Dillon, O’Gorman and Mitchel to join the American abolitionist movement. “Is liberty less the right of the black man than of the white man?” Haughton asked. Meagher refused to take the bait saying no one was entitled “to require from him an expression of opinion respecting the question of African slavery in America”, at least for another three years until he was entitled to become a citizen. Mitchel was less reticent. Responding in the Citizen he said Haughton was hypocritical for concentrating on American slavery while people in his own country were starving during the Famine: “Six or seven years ago while the doomed white slaves of his country were in the very crisis of their agony, we will remember that this worthy gentleman was seized with a paroxysm of violent sympathy with the fat negroes of America.” Mitchel continued with this infamous passage: “We deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even  a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work, by flogging or other needful coercion.. and as far as being a participant in the wrongs, we for our part, wish we had a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.” Abolitionists including Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of best selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin which came out in 1852), attacked Mitchel as “a curse to the soil in which he treads.” Mitchel’s paper suffered a circulation drop though he gleefully reproduced all the headlines other papers printed against him including the Independent which called him a “hideous lag”. Mitchel’s opinions were better received in the south and he travelled to Virginia in June 1854 as a guest of the mayor of Richmond.

As his Jamaica article dateline showed, Meagher had finally taken up an offer for a free passage to San Francisco for a speaking tour at the start of 1854. That meant two long trips by ship and crossing the Panama isthmus, a journey which would have a profound influence on Meagher in the coming years. Meagher landed at San Juan Del Norte, an important port on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast which the British captured in 1841 and renamed Greytown. After the California Gold Rush in 1849 America secured a treaty with Nicaragua for a transit route. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company promised to build a canal and in the meantime carried thousands each month from the Atlantic port to the Pacific side of Central America heading to San Francisco. In 1850 Britain and America signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty under which Britain maintained control of the port while the US owned the vessels, hotels and land transportation along the route. It was here that Meagher became a fierce disciple of American Manifest Destiny. He was convinced one or other of the two great powers would annex Central America to secure the route between the oceans. Meagher had no doubt that power should be America to secure it as the important link between the east and west coast states.

Meagher arrived in California in January 1854 where the local paper told its readers Meagher “finds it necessary to toil for his own support, and has selected the profession of a Lecturer.” He gave three lectures on Irish topics at the San Francisco Musical Hall Audiences paid $2 to hear him talk about fellow Irish orators including Grattan and O’Connell, with the papers describing his manner as “free, off-hand, candid and unostentatious in tone”. He then visited the mining camps in the mountains where he stayed in a hotel without doors or windows and where no one was there to collect his bill when he left. Years later he would tell the story of how he “walked through five feet of snow” to pay respect to a fellow Irishwoman, Eliza Gilbert, the Countess of Landsfelt, who was better known as the stage dancing celebrity Lola Montez. To great laughter in 1865, Meagher recounted how he found Montez with her arm in a bandage, “her pet grizzly bear having given her a slap of his paw the day before, as she was tenderly helping him to a lump of sugar.” On his way home, Meagher spent St Patrick’s Day in Panama where he drowned the shamrock with a fellow Waterford man, John Power. Power was the editor and proprietor of the Panama Star and Herald whom Meagher described as “an accomplished, jovial and gallant gentleman”.

Back in New York he heard his wife had given birth to his second son Thomas Bennett Meagher and Bennie was intending to take him back to America with her. But it was soon followed by tragic news. Weakened by the birth, Catherine died of typhoid fever on May 9, 1854. A sizable crowd attended her funeral from their house on The Mall to Faithlegg cemetery where she was buried in the Meagher family vault. Thomas Meagher senior and Johana Quan arranged to bring up the newborn in Waterford. The Waterford News said Meagher senior had loved his daughter-in-law “with all the devoted fondness of a widowed parent.”

The News did not comment on Catherine’s husband’s reaction but presumably wracked by grief and guilt, Meagher was a vulnerable target. An anonymous New York poet called IERNE condemned Meagher as a coward in 1848. “What did this wond’rous sword-man do in Ballingarry’s fight? He skulked among the cabbages when the Peelers…came in sight.” When the Freeman’s Journal published an article accusing him of dishonourably breaking his parole. McMaster said Meagher and Mitchel were a “vain, blustering set of braggarts that did so much to spoil the work of O’Connell” and were “spouters without industry” and “without shame to make them hang their heads in silence instead of vaporing and blowing.” Meagher went to the office of editor James McMaster to demand a withdrawal but was refused. The New York Daily Times said that on July 18 Meagher then waited for McMaster to appear outside his East Sixth Street home and when he did, he “struck him severely and repeatedly” with a riding whip. McMaster fired his revolver, grazing Meagher’s forehead and burning his face with the powder flash. As he attempted a second shot, Meagher wrestled McMaster to the ground, leaving him “bleeding and panting”. After police were called, both men were bound over and freed on $500 bail. Despite the affray the press continued its campaign and within two days another had called into question Meagher’s honour when escaping.

After surviving McMaster’s gunshot, Meagher had another near fatal moment on October 27, 1854, though this one brought him more credit. He was travelling on an overnight train outside Detroit when his train collided with a gravel train. According to his account to the Detroit Tribune they were travelling slowly because of fog when the accident happened. He had moved from an overcrowded carriage to a quieter carriage and had been asleep for 20 minutes when he was startled by a deep rumbling noise. Coming to, he heard “the crashing and ripping of timbers all around him, mingled with the most fearsome shrieks and groans and the noise of escaping steam.” Parts of the roof crashed down on him and his right foot was caught under the floor. He broke free and found many wounded and dying in the carriage he had vacated. Meagher helped pull survivors from the mangled wreckage and 48 people were killed. According to the Grand Rapids Gazette, Meagher “laboured with a number of others till all the corpses were laid side by side along the margins of the track, and the fifty other suffering and bleeding victims were tenderly lifted into cars.” Perhaps it was a sign that after a terrible year, things were about to take a turn for the positive in Meagher’s life.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 40. The Smith O’Brien Gold Cup

Irish goldminers in Melbourne presented this gold cup to William Smith O’Brien on his release from imprisonment in 1854. The cup is now on display at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin. Photo: Author’s collection

In Van Diemen’s Land, plans to free more prisoners progressed with Mitchel and Martin still keen. Mitchel softened his earlier hard line on Meagher’s escape after seeing that America did not care about his supposed lack of honour. “One may easily guess he will keep most of the favour he has won,” Mitchel wrote. Pat Smyth went to Melbourne to organise a ship and then returned to the island in March 1853, and he rode to Lake Sorell to meet Mitchel and Martin. The plan involved Smyth accompanying them to the police station where they would surrender their parole while Smyth watched on armed and they would then head on to a waiting ship. But Denison found out in advance and sent up constables from Hobart to Bothwell. Mitchel’s plot was “blown to the moon” and the ship sailed without its escapees.

It took another couple of months before Smyth could organise another ship in Hobart. By then Martin had cooled on the idea of escape but Mitchel was still willing. On June 8, Smyth spent a large amount of money to bribe police and magistrates in Bothwell to look the other way. The following morning Smyth and Mitchel went into the Bothwell courtroom and handed the clerk a note saying Mitchel had withdrawn his ticket-of-leave. “You observe, sir, that my parole is at an end from this moment; and I came here to be taken into custody,” Mitchel said. The astonished clerk did not move and Mitchel said “now good morning sir,” while Smyth played with his Colt revolver. The clerk found his valour after they left. He called for the constables next door and shouted “No, no! Stay here!” It was too late. Smyth and Mitchel jumped onto their horses and left town.

They separated and Smyth returned to Nant Cottage to tell Jenny her husband was on the run. With the help of English friend and experienced bushman John Howells, Mitchel rode 130 miles through rough country, camping in a “dismal bivouac” that night. He replicated Meagher’s escape by stopping at Old Job Sims’ hut to shave off his moustache. They arrived at Westbury the following evening and Mitchel stayed in the attic of Irish farmer Burke. Mitchel had to wait for days until Smyth brought the news that the Don Juan was putting into Emu Bay in five days time, 80 miles away. Mitchell rode to Bass Strait but the ship never appeared. The Burkes then dressed up the Presbyterian Mitchel as a Catholic priest for whom they had secured a passage from Launceston.

But with all ships at Launceston being searched, Mitchel was taken onto a boat which rowed all night to the Tamar estuary only to see the ship he was due to board disappear into the open sea. Bitterly disappointed, he rode back to Launceston where he was hidden in a church. Disguised again as a priest, Mitchel boarded a coach to Hobart at Franklin where a fellow passenger was former Attorney-General Edward MacDowell who tried to drag his travelling companion into conversation and found the prelate unusually shy, and reserved. But his suspicion was not raised. The disguise was so effective even Kevin O’Doherty who boarded the coach into Hobart had no idea who he was.

The new plan called for Mitchel to depart aboard the Emma, the regular service to the mainland, as “Mr Wright”. Also on board were Pat Smyth and Jenny Mitchel and her children. Jenny eagerly watched him board but said nothing. In Sydney Mitchel boarded the Orkney Lass bound for Honolulu as “Mr Warren”. Jenny and the children were also aboard. They sailed without further drama on August 2. In Tahiti he was reunited with his overjoyed family and they transferred to a ship bound for America. In Mitchel’s words, it was at this point his Jail Journal ended and his “out-of-jail journal” began. 

Mitchel arrived in San Francisco with his family on October 3, 1853 and spent a week in San Jose at MacManus’s ranch. They then went on to New York via steamer and Nicaragua and Cuba and arrived on the Prometheus in New York at the end of November. An impressed Mitchel called the city “a ganglion of human life”. His arrival was greeted with even more fanfare than Meagher’s with a salvo of artillery fire in Brooklyn where he was reunited with his mother. There was a triumphal procession through the streets and bouquets thrown from balconies. Mitchel asked John Blake Dillon, “To what does it oblige me?” Dillon laughed. “You will be asked for nothing: you are as free as the wind; and so are we all.” But American life came with a caveat. At a reception at City Hall Mitchel said he accepted American honours “as an insult to the British government” but a friendly journalist told him not to criticise Britain in New York. An unabashed Mitchel wrote “I am a professional revolutionist now, an adventurer, a seditious propagandist.”

Mitchel’s escape was another embarrassment for Governor Denison but the worldwide attention meant he could not be severe with those left behind. Martin took on a tutoring role at Ross while O’Doherty served as a surgeon at Cygnet south of Hobart. Smith O’Brien began working on a draft Tasmanian constitution and fought with son Edward who wanted to attend an English university against his wishes. PJ Smyth meanwhile was keen to try another Tasmanian adventure, this time to rescue Smith O’Brien. Smyth had an ulterior motive having fallen in love with a Hobart woman. Meanwhile Charles Gavan Duffy, now a member of parliament, told Smith O’Brien in 1853 he was working hard for his release but home secretary Lord Palmerson was avoiding him.

In the House of Commons Home Secretary Lord Palmerston said Smith O’Brien had behaved “as a gentleman” and should be rewarded with clemency. He was conditionally pardoned in June 1854 and could live anywhere outside Britain. After questioning from Irish MP Isaac Butt who cited possible Irish recruitment for Russia in the Crimean War, Palmerston extended the pardon to Martin and O’Doherty. 

The newly pardoned Smith O’Brien wrote to his wife Lucy he was “in excellent spirits”. After being honoured by supporters in Hobart, he and O’Doherty and Martin took a ship to Melbourne where there were more celebrations among the local Irish. Tipperary-born John O’Shanasy, later to become premier of Victoria, organised ceremonies to welcome them.  At a large public banquet, Irish diggers in the Ballarat gold fields presented Smith O’Brien with a gold nugget and later collected the gold which Irish-born goldsmith William Hackett designed into a spectacular 125 ounce 25 carat gold cup. The top has Hibernia carrying a cap of liberty and crowning O’Brien with a laurel wreath, the bottom is decorated with brooches, shamrocks and wolfhounds while the sides show a kangaroo and an emu. The cup is now in the National Museum of Ireland.

John Martin joined Smith O’Brien on a ship to Ceylon. The latter visited his brother-in-law in Madras before heading to Belgium where he had a joyous reunion with his wife and family. Martin went on to Paris where he had uncertain news for Eva Kelly. Her lover O’Doherty had been lured by the Victorian goldfields accompanied by Pat Smyth. Smyth and O’Doherty did not make their fortune there but were in the mining fields in late 1854 when there was a miners’ riot at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat against the steep mining licence fees. Sixty miners were killed when the police attacked and though it was led by an Irishman Peter Lalor (brother of the late James Fintan Lalor) the two Young Irelanders did not take part, as they were trying their luck in Bendigo without success. Smyth returned to Hobart where he married Jane Anne O’Regan on February 8, 1855. Although the colony was optimistic as it was renamed Tasmania, Smyth saw their future elsewhere. He took his new wife back to America before they settled in Ireland.

O’Doherty returned illegally to England and then onto Eva’s family home in Galway where the revolutionary lovers were reunited. Though police were aware of his movements, he was unmolested. O’Doherty and Eva returned to London where they were secretly married at Moorfields Chapel. They then travelled to Paris, where Martin was based. There they had a second ceremony officiated by the British consul, which with Eva already pregnant would give their children legitimacy. Once O’Doherty completed his medical examinations their growing family eventually returned to Australia where they settled in Brisbane. Like Charles Gavan Duffy who saw the opportunities in goldrush Melbourne in 1855 and later became premier of Victoria, O’Doherty became a colonial parliamentarian in Queensland, though he returned to Ireland briefly to become the Parnellite MP for North Meath. The Brisbane Courier took a dim view saying the “the creeds and aims of the Young Ireland party of 1848 are now as obsolete as the aboriginal Tasmanian.” His fellow former prisoner Meagher was running into his own troubles moving beyond his revolutionary past.

Media person of the year 2022: Volodymyr Zelenskyy

An image of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a building in Warsaw, Poland. Photo: Gleb Albovsky

Happy Christmas and welcome to the annual Woolly Days media person of the year award, which this year is a chance for me to take a brief break from writing the life of Thomas Francis Meagher in 100 objects. This is the 14th year of my awards and often I get to December without recognising any obvious candidate or sometimes it is a hard decision to pick from several deserving candidates. Neither situation applies to this year’s stand-out. The award winner was obvious from February 26 when the Ukraine embassy to the UK tweeted the famous words attributed to the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, when rejecting an American offer of evacuation after the Russian invasion which began two days earlier. “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” Zelenskyy may or may not have said those exact words but it captured the essence of the moment. Even if he did not say it, “all of his actions and his requests mean that,” his press secretary said. It was hard to argue against it and it proved to be an early turning point in a war that most people, this observer included, expected Ukraine to lose quickly and badly.

Dressed in a casual green military T-shirt, Zelenskyy addressed Ukraine that day in a self-shot videos recorded on his phone which he published on social media. “We’re all here,” was the video message. “Our military is here. Citizens in society are here. We’re all here defending our independence, our country, and it will stay this way.” The contrast with the aloof Russian president Putin and his isolation at six-metre long tables could not have been starker. David Patrikarakos, British journalist and author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, said it meant Zelenskyy was showing bravery in the name of all Ukrainians. “He is saying, I am here with the risk of being killed, like everybody else,” Patrikarakos told Al Jazeera.

The 44-year-old Zelenskyy did not seem to have the mettle to become a great wartime president. A former comedian and actor, he was best known in Ukraine for the popular TV series Servant of the People (available on SBS on Demand) where he played the role of a teacher who is elected Ukrainian president after his expletive-laden rant about corruption goes viral on social media. Life imitated art and a political party called Servant of the People was named after the show in 2018 with Zelenskyy a member. He was already doing well in presidential opinion polls despite having no political experience and he announced his candidacy for the 2019 election at year end.

By then the war with Russia had already been going on for five years after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the invasions of Donbas and Luhansk. The western world stood aside and did nothing then and added insult to injury by endorsing Vladimir Putin’s football World Cup in 2018 with barely a whisper of protest. FIFA president Gianni Infantino remains the proud holder of the Russian Order of Friendship medal from Vladimir Putin and while there are serious issues about guest workers and LGBTIQ rights the hypocrisy over the complaints about Qatar’s far less egregious tournament this year stinks of racism.

Zelenskyy avoided serious interviews and discussions about policy during the 2019 Ukrainian election yet he won a landslide victory. Putin believed he could intimidate the inexperienced new president without recriminations and built up a large military presence near the Ukrainian border from 2021. Ukraine had long pushed for NATO membership but that was still an unlikely prospect in early 2022.

In the lead up to the February attack, Russia stepped up a disinformation campaign falsely claiming Russophobia, a Nazi-infected Ukrainian government and denying Ukrainian state legitimacy. By mid January US president Joe Biden feared the worst saying Russia would be held accountable if it invaded. Fighting escalated in Donbas from February 17 then a week later Russia announced a “special military operation” launching missiles and airstrikes on cities including Kyiv, followed by a large ground invasion. Zelenskyy immediately declared martial law and a general mobilisation of all male Ukrainians between 18 and 60.

Russia planned a pincer movement to encircle Kyiv and envelop Ukraine’s forces in the east. Russian airborne troops seized Hostomel Airport near Kyiv on the first morning only for a Ukrainian counteroffensive to recapture the airport later in the day. The Russians also captured Snake Island and the Chernobyl nuclear plant. As Russian troops approached the capital, Zelenskyy asked residents to prepare Molotov cocktails. But Russian units attempting to encircle Kyiv and advance into Kharkiv were bogged down in heavy fighting. They also failed to establish air supremacy. While Zelenskyy admitted he was getting nowhere with Western leaders about admittance to NATO, Ukraine stood strong. “Everyone (in the west) is afraid. They don’t answer,” he said. “But we are not afraid. We aren’t afraid of anything. We aren’t afraid to defend our country. We aren’t afraid of Russia.” By then it was already clear that the worst fears of Ukraine falling quickly were not going to be realised. Two days in, Zelenskyy’s “ammunition not a ride” quote got out. Zelenskyy’s insistence on staying with his family, despite orders for his assassination, was a turning point and he was quickly becoming a western hero.

By February 28 Deutsche Welle could call him “a serious statesman who seems effortlessly able to strike the right tone in a crisis” while there were also comparisons to Winston Churchill and Benjamin Franklin. In March Czech president Miloš Zeman gave Zelenskyy the highest state award, the Order of the White Lion, for “his bravery and courage in the face of Russia’s invasion.” Zelenskyy has taken the propaganda war to the west making numerous addresses to the legislatures across the world including a youtube address to Australia where he evoked the memory of the Russian terrorist operation to down flight MH17 in 2014. His December address to US Congress on his first overseas visit since the start of the war also evoked memories of Churchill doing the same thing in the Second World War. Not even a deepfake version of Zelenskyy calling for Ukrainian surrender could turn the tide the Russians’ way.

As Politico said Zelenskyy has a unique combination of moral authority and uncensored authenticity that has helped rally the West around him. In March Zelenskyy addressed US Congress where he mentioned Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to underscore the dire nature of the threats his country is facing. Though Congress ruled out a no-fly zone, Zelenskyy got most of what he wanted including a Russian oil ban and a massive military aid package. He got bipartisan support in the Senate. Democrat senator Chris Murphy said “He shoots from the hip, and that’s part of his charm” while Republican Senator Rob Portman thought first he’d be meeting a comic. “I thought I was going to be meeting a comic. “Instead I met a statesman,” Portman said.

This statesman wasn’t afraid to point out western hypocrisies either, criticising German ties to Moscow and its reliance on Russian gas, and Turkish promotion of Russian tourists. He was satisfied with the “status quo” of China’s non-involvement and had no time for Henry Kissinger’s misguided peace mission. But he has had less success in the developing world, supported by only a handful of African leaders and denied access to speak to a Mercosur trade summit, by leaders worried about losing access to Russian grain. But bordering Poland was especially supportive. Poland is the second-largest supplier of weapons to Ukraine and has opened its borders to thousands of refugees. In July Polish paleontologists named a 150-million-year-old Jurassic-era feather star Ausichicrinites zelenskyyi for his “courage in defending a free Ukraine.”

After Putin introduced conscription, Zelenskyy called it “criminal mobilisation” and urged Russians to defy their leader. “It is better not to take a conscription letter than to die in a foreign land as a war criminal,” he said. When Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons a couple of weeks later, Zelenskyy said the Russian leader was wasn’t bluffing. “He wants to scare the whole world,” Zelenskyy told America’s CBS. “These are the first steps of his nuclear blackmail.”

The term “charm offensive” is a boring media cliche, but Zelenskyy’s personal magnetism worked with European leaders as on June 23 the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for the immediate granting of candidate status for EU membership to Ukraine and on the same day, the European Council also granted Ukraine (and Moldova) the status of a candidate for accession to the EU.

In April, the Conversation closely examined an extended filmed Zelenskyy interview with The Economist. Being unscripted and more spontaneous than his pre-prepared speeches, it offered a clearer insight into his character. “We found all seven of the key character virtues – humanity, temperance, justice, courage, transcendence, wisdom and prudence – evident in Zelenskyy’s responses to the interviewers’ questions,” the Conversation said. “Zelenskyy possesses strength of character and emotional, intellectual and moral clarity about what is at stake. This explains his effective crisis leadership to date. Despite the clear military mismatch between Russia and Ukraine, Putin has taken on a formidable opponent.”

A sign that Zelenskyy is on the right track is the opposition to him by far-right American commentators. Candace Owens called him “dirtbag actor” and accused him of “trying to start World War 3” by attempting to pin blame on Russia for the missile strike that hit Poland (the evidence remains inconclusive which side was responsible). Meanwhile Fox commentator Tucker Carlson made the ludicrous claim Zelenskyy was closer to Lenin than to George Washington. “He is a dictator. He is a dangerous authoritarian who has used a hundred billion in U.S. tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine.” Zelenskyy tried to answer that criticism of American largesse in his December visit to Washington, his first overseas trip since the start of the war. “The battle is not only for life, freedom, and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer,” he said. “The struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live in. Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”

This year Time and I agree on our person of the year. Time editor Edward Felsenthal said Zelenskyy had “galvanized the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades.” And I could see that from personal experience of the number of Ukrainian flags flying from houses and buildings in my visits this year to Ireland and America. In its interview with Zelenskyy, Time says his vision of victory now extends beyond the liberation of territory. “Later we will be judged,” he said. “I have not finished this great, important action for our country. Not yet.” It’s far from clear how this war will end but Zelenskyy has stamped his authority on it in a truly remarkable way. The fight remains here.

*****

At the end of every year since 2009 I have been awarding my media person of the year. I’ve never fully defined what the award is for but it is framed by my media consumption and generally goes to the person (or persons) I judge to have made the most media impact in the prior 12 months. I gave the first one to the then ABC boss Mark Scott for taking up the fight to Murdoch and a year later I awarded it to Julian Assange for his Wikileaks whistle-blowing exploits. Assange’s global focus encouraged me to look beyond Australia for recipients and since then I’ve mixed and matched between local and international winners and since 2015, male and female winners. The recipients were people I respected with the single exception of 2018 when I gave it to Donald Trump as a warning not an accolade. In 2021 I gave the award to Australian of the Year and advocate to survivors of sexual assault, Grace Tame citing the way she used “her voice to achieve effective change on an international level”. Full list of winners:

2009 Mark Scott

2010 Julian Assange

2011 Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies

2012 Brian Leveson

2013 Edward Snowden

2014 Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed

2015 Clementine Ford

2016 David Bowie

2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia

2018 Donald Trump

2019 Greta Thunberg

2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

2021 Grace Tame

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 39. Thirtysomething

This sketch of Thomas Francis Meagher appeared in the Boston Pilot on July 10, 1852, a couple of months after his arrival in America.

With MacManus, Meagher and now O’Donohoe all in America, plans were afoot to free more prisoners with the help of Pat Smyth. After escaping Ireland in 1848 disguised as a drover, Smyth had worked in America as a journalist, becoming political editor of the Irish Advocate in 1850. According to Mitchel, Smyth acquired the nickname “Nicaragua” after agitating for an American railroad to span Central America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, a proposal Meagher would also enthusiastically support. Smyth inherited a considerable fortune when his father died. Meagher now wanted Nicaragua to go to Van Diemen’s Land with the help of Irish Directory money to rescue whichever of Mitchel, Martin, O’Doherty and O’Brien were up for the adventure. Mitchel and O’Doherty secretly met O’Brien in Bridgewater to discuss the matter. Given that O’Brien’s sentence was for life, Mitchel insisted he go first. But O’Brien had lost enthusiasm for escapology after his Maria Island debacle. O’Doherty, training to be a doctor, wasn’t keen either and that just left Mitchel and Martin. Smyth went off to Melbourne to negotiate a ship while Mitchel told his long suffering wife of his plans. Jenny, who had just given birth to a daughter, approved, and said she would follow him to San Francisco.

In America Meagher continued the lecture circuit while making powerful friends. In February he had a secret meeting in New York with president-elect Pierce and Mitchel’s mother Mary, probably to inform them about the plan to rescue her son. He also met Pierce in Boston on his tour through New England and Pierce invited him to his inauguration in March 1853. Meagher was feted in Fall River, where, according to the Herald, his supposed revolutionary tendencies, berated by clerics and the press, managed to arouse “an extraordinary feeling on his behalf” that would “carry all before it.”

Washington’s famous Willard’s Hotel was where most of the capital’s political intrigue occurred. Gore Vidal called the hotel “the center of the city’s political and social life” while Nathaniel Hawthorne said Willard’s was more important “than the Capitol, the White House or the State Department”. There Meagher met the Irish-born senator and Mexican War hero General James Shields who introduced Meagher to a who’s who of the capital. On March 4 Meagher attended Pierce’s inauguration and a day later was given a tour of the Capitol and the houses of Congress where he was introduced to many senators and congressmen, including New York’s William Seward and Texas’s Sam Houston. Not everyone was flattering. The Pilot was critical of his “radical and anti Catholic tendencies that gave pain and anxiety to his Catholic friends” which compelled “all Catholic papers to disclaim any connection with him.”

Meagher used his growing fame to put together his Irish speeches into a book called “Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland.” Meagher said the intention was “placing upon record, in a permanent form, the opinions that led me, through various changes of fortune and of climate, to this Republic.” However few publishers would touch it, thinking there was no money to be made from its Irish audience. The American-Irish press vendetta against him also hurt. The book sold only 2000 copies and mostly to non-Irish buyers. Meagher would have to look to other ventures to earn a living.

In the meantime he helped found a new Irish military unit – a move that would foreshadow his recruiting efforts in the civil war. Meagher would command a new rifle regiment initially known as the Republican Rifles and later the Irish Rifles. Its nucleus was the Mitchel Light Guard, an independent company of men almost exclusively from Waterford under the command of 1849 Cappoquin rising leader Joseph Brenan.

In February 1853 Catherine Meagher was finally well enough to join her husband. First she sailed to Ireland to visit Thomas Meagher the elder, who was re-elected as MP for Waterford for a second five-year term the year before. She arrived in Waterford on Monday, June 27 but heavy rain meant it was Wednesday before a massive crowd could gather to celebrate the arrival of the wife of the city’s own revolutionary hero. At Ballybricken Hill “the whole population” assembled before a bonfire and fireworks with bands, music and dancing while Bennie appeared at the window of her father-in-law’s house on the Mall along with Thomas Snr, his sister-in-law Johana Quan, and his younger son Henry where they “bowed their acknowledgements” to deafening cheers. Henry spoke on behalf of the family saying “circumstances compelled Mrs Meagher’s stay to be short in this country.”

Waterford mayor Thomas Strange convened a meeting “to pay a tribute of respect” to Thomas Francis Meagher. Mayor Strange gave “an address from the citizens of Waterford” to Catherine and her husband which hoped “the day may not be too far distant when we may share in the glory of his genius and the pleasure of his society.” He also praised Bennie for traveling thousands of miles in search of him. “These, Madam, are no ordinary actions, and they demand our unbounded admiration.” The Nation reported her response that she was content to be Meagher’s companion in exile and she “aspired to join in the happier life which he now enjoys.”

The Waterford Chronicle could see what enchanted Thomas Francis Meagher. It said Catherine was a beautiful girl aged around 22. “Her face is of that splendid Spanish model that has found so many admirers among Poets and Painters.” The Chronicle also praised her native sweetness and simplicity of expression and her “large brilliant eyes.” She was a splendid woman, “tall and commanding and elegantly formed.” The Waterford News also admired “the personal attractions and lady-like deportment of a woman, who looked more like a queen than the wife of a man who has no title.” On July 8 Bennie left for Dublin and then Liverpool with Meagher senior and her brother-in-law Henry to catch a ship to America. Wherever they went, there was a stream of callers and well-wishers giving Catherine an overwhelming sense of her husband’s glowing reputation. They sailed first class on the Arctic and arrived in New York on July 25.

The Irish American hailed the arrival of the elder Meagher saying Ireland had “no more honester, more faithful, or more independent representative in the British House of Commons.” It was the first time father and eldest son had seen each other in four years but there were difficulties. The father turned down an invite from the Meagher Club of United Irishmen in Boston to Thomas Francis’ 30th birthday party in Boston a few days later saying his infirm health was exacerbated by the journey and he preferred to avoid “the excitements of public entertainments.”

Thomas Francis’s reunion with Catherine after 18 months was not successful either and she too declined the Boston birthday party invite. Catherine was overawed with Meagher’s reputation in Ireland, and in America Meagher worship was even more intense. The 30th birthday bash was held at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and although his family was not present, fellow state prisoner Patrick O’Donohoe was there as were members of Charleston’s Meagher Guard. Meagher told them that all Americans were alike. “I have seen no difference between the north and the south, between the east and the west,” Meagher said. “Everywhere I have found freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of discussion, and rights solemnly declared in the instruments under which these various states are molded, admitted by willing sense, guaranteed by the laws, and by the intuitive conservatism of the people, made irrevocable.” Beguiled by his travels, Meagher was glossing over the emerging divisions between north and south. Like many New York Democrats including Archbishop Hughes, Meagher believed slavery would die a natural unlamented death but it was not worth going to war over its abolition. The biggest controversy on the night was not Meagher’s defense of the south, but the drunken behavior of O’Donohoe who was incensed when the master of ceremonies cut him short when he tried to read an account of his own escape.

Meagher and Bennie spent happy times together traveling through Niagara Falls, the Catskill Mountains and Lake George and Catherine fell pregnant. But Meagher was now planning a speaking tour in California, via Panama, a trip his wife looked on with horror. Catherine decided to go back to Waterford with Thomas Meagher senior. Meagher’s biographer Cavanagh said she planned to return to America but her health “necessitated her removal to a milder climate.” It’s not clear why she could not find that climate somewhere in America rather than risk an October crossing over the Atlantic while pregnant. Lucy Smith O’Brien was probably nearer the truth when wrote to her husband, “It is said they do not suit. His fault I am told.” Surrounded by glittering Americans, Meagher was no longer spellbound by Bennie’s simple Tasmanian charms. She and the elder Meagher left Boston on October 11. Meagher never saw either of them again.

Meagher was now planning a speaking tour in California, via Panama, something Bennie looked on with horror. Nevertheless they spent happy times together travelling through Niagara Falls, the Catskill Mountains and Lake George and Catherine fell pregnant. But with Meagher’s heart set on California, Catherine decided to go back to Waterford with Thomas Meagher senior. Meagher’s biographer Cavanagh said she planned to return to America but her health “necessitated her removal to a milder climate.” It’s not clear why she could not find that climate somewhere in America rather than risk an October crossing over the Atlantic. Lucy O’Brien was probably closer to the truth when wrote to her husband, “It is said they do not suit. His fault I am told.” Surrounded by glittering Americans, Meagher was no longer spellbound by Bennie’s simple Tasmanian charms. She and the elder Meagher left Boston on October 11. Meagher never saw either of them again.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 38. Death of an infant

The 1852 grave of Henry Emmet Fitzgerald Meagher, aged four months, outside St John’s Catholic Church, Richmond, Tasmania. Photo: Author’s collection.

Not long after Thomas Francis Meagher arrived in New York, he received a letter from his wife Catherine in Tasmania. Bennie told her husband she had given birth to a son in February, named Henry Emmet Fitzgerald according to Meagher’s wishes. She was building the baby’s strength before travelling to meet him in America and she was getting frequent visits from Smith O’Brien. But by the time Meagher read the letter, his son was already dead. On June 8 Henry Emmet died of influenza aged four months and was buried in the graveyard outside St John’s Catholic Church in Richmond.

Meagher did not mention his son’s death in memoirs or letters at the time but would have received the bad news around August or September. The still unaware Meagher joined his schoolfriend Smyth to review the Irish regiments of New York while the Jesuit Fordham College in the Bronx gave him an honorary doctorate of laws. Meagher established a home at the new and salubrious Metropolitan Hotel, at the corner of Broadway and Prince St, which when it opened its doors that September, the Herald called “one of the most magnificent structures of its kind.” In July the U.S. Democratic Review published a long article from Meagher called “Ireland and the Holy Alliance,” a typically flowery rant where he got four years of hatred of British policies against the Irish off his chest. “Exasperate them into insubordination, that we may scourge them the more severely. If this fails, curb, and tame and subjugate them. Grind them into submissiveness…By blow or stratagem bring them to their knees.” Meagher calls his Vandemonian enemy Denison a “huckster and knight” and even urges America into war against England, “She rivals our commerce, crosses us in our own seas and snubbs (sic) us before Europe. It is necessary to break her back, wither her arm, and tie up at all events, if we cannot seize, the purse with which she hires her associated mercenary despots.”

Amid his bombast, the references to “our” and “us” shows Meagher was firmly on a path to become an American. On August 9, 1852 he went to a New York courtroom and took an oath of Declaration of Intention to become a citizen of the United States. He repeated the second part of the oath with relish: “to renounce forever all allegiances and fidelity to any foreign Prince, Potentate, State or Sovereignty whatever, particularly to the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom now I am a subject”. Meagher was also getting quick lessons on his new country’s politics, which was becoming increasingly fractured. Though they were unrelated to the English Whigs which Meagher disliked so much in the 1840s he was not disposed not to support the American Whigs either. While Meagher was reluctant to initially get involved in politics, like all the New York Irish he aligned with the Democrats. In a letter Meagher published in 1863 he called himself a “Jacksonian Democrat”, though oddly this was around the time he was beginning to lean towards Lincoln. The term originated with 1830s two-term president Andrew Jackson and involved the belief that the people were sovereign and should all have the vote, though in practice the vote was restricted only to white men. It also involved the support of Manifest Destiny, an uniquely American cause Meagher would enthusiastically embrace in the following years.

The Whigs and Democrats were grand coalitions but broadly the merchants, industrialists, professionals and large farmers voted Whigs. There was also a religious element. The Whig outlook was for self-improvement, with Abraham Lincoln an early supporter, and they drew support from evangelical Protestants, Nativists, and slavery abolitionists. The Democrats did well among traditional Protestant sects and Catholics, especially among the growing number of German and Irish immigrants. The thinking shaped the Democratic Party which became a coalition of poor farmers, city labourers and Irish Catholics. New York was governed by Tammany Hall Democrats, long before the Irish arrived in numbers. Tammany (Tamanend) was a Delaware Indian chief who signed the Treaty of Shackamaxon with William Penn. Tammany’s name, as a late 19th century history of native Americans put it, “was an honored one, not only during the time of the warrior and sage who bore it, but long after his decease.” The Society of St Tammany was founded in his honour in the late 18th century by “solid New York greengrocers and upholsterers who pretended to be Indians”, as Gore Vidal put it. In the 1820s the New York Democrats formed an alliance with the growing Irish bloc in the city. The Irish saw Tammany as an ally that did not judge their poverty, religion and culture and rewarded the Democrats with wholesale votes from the Irish community keen to embrace the possibilities of American politics. With 1852 a presidential election year, that meant throwing their support behind Democrat candidate Franklin Pierce, though Meagher did not yet have the vote. It was him the Herald had in mind when they said “all the Irish leaders – all the Irish exiles banished from their home…have come out in favour of Pierce, or remain silent from delicacy, not being as yet, citizens.”

Despite his supposed delicacy, Meagher ran into surprising trouble among Catholic leaders in the church and the press. His issues began when his speeches strayed from his trusted Irish topic in favour of European movements for liberty. His sympathy for the Hungarian Kossuth, who wanted separation between church and state was especially damning. Meagher had said he and Kossuth were of the same vocation, “revolutionists”. Archbishop Hughes had denounced the Hungarian as a “humbug” and enemy of the church and of mankind while the Irish-born bishop of Pittsburgh said Kossuth had made common cause with “Red Republicans and Socialists” who wished to destroy the church. Meagher was caught in the crossfire. In August the Pilot would not believe reports Meagher had praised Kossuth and even if he did, it was an “hallucination of which many have partaken, and of which he will be rid, in time.” By year’s end the Freeman’s Journal was leading the charge against him judging his speeches as a “matter for the censure of Catholics.” Journal editor James McMaster, McMaster had not forgiven Meagher for his perceived role in O’Connell’s death, and their bad blood would lead to actual bloodshed. Even early supporters like the Boston Pilot urged Meagher to watch his language. If Meagher was to be the Irish leader in America, the Pilot said, “his sentiments, if bad, would assuredly do public harm.” 

Meagher complained to Smith O’Brien that after speaking favourably about European liberty movements he was “denounced from the pulpits and through the bigoted Catholic press and in highways and by-ways.” By mid 1853 the Pilot had also turned against him and was boasting that Meagher could only half fill a hall when he appeared in Boston. Meagher’s supposedly dishonourable means of his escape from Tasmania was held against him and even his friends shared their doubts. Martin believed he should have delivered his letter directly to police to “give them a sporting chance” and they even suggested he should return to Tasmania, though Smith O’Brien thought that was absurd. Meagher told the New York Daily Herald the story of his escape, saying he remained near his lakeside cottage until 7pm that evening when his friends advised the police had arrived. “We mounted our horses immediately and rode down to the cottage. 100 yards from it my friends drew up. I rode on until I came close to the stable, which was within pistol-shot of the kitchen door. I drew up there and desired him to go in and tell the police I was waiting for them. He left me at once and entered the cottage. Two or three minutes elapsed-the police appeared. The moment they appeared I rose in my stirrups, called out to them that I was the prisoner they came to arrest, and defied them to do so. The challenge was echoed by my friends with three loud hearty cheers, in the midst of which I struck spurs to my horse and dashed into the woods in the direction of the coast.”

Nevertheless, in a letter to the New York Daily Times Meagher said he would return if his friends were not satisfied and consented to “an independent tribunal of American gentlemen” to decide the matter. On the tribunal were famous editor of the Tribune Horace Greeley, former Congressman John McKeon and businessman Felix Ingoldsby. After examining the case they unsurprisingly decided that he had given the authorities a fair and reasonable chance to capture him and was not honour-bound to return to Australia.

Former Young Ireland spy John Donnellan Balfe added to the mischief. The British government had handsomely rewarded Balfe with a Hobart government position and land grant. Balfe supplemented his income as the editor of the Hobart Town Advertiser. “Had an officer, a prisoner of war, acted as Meagher has done, he would have been at once cashiered for conduct unbecoming an officer or a gentleman, and would have forever forfeited the considerations due to a man of honour,” Balfe, writing as Dion, told his readers. In 1851 Tasmanian newspapers and later the Nation in Dublin exposed Balfe as a spy, but American publications continued to pick up his arguments. The ever-loyal O’Donohoe rebutted Balfe in a letter to the Launceston Examiner saying “The constant coarse bullyism ever on Mr. Balfe’s lips, and which poisons the emanations of his pen, is quite indecorous in a Deputy-Assistant Comptroller of Convicts and Justice of the Peace of Van Diemen’s Land.” This was a courageous letter for a man who had just survived three months of hard labour and was about to be sentenced again for two weeks on the treadmill after he surrendered his ticket-of-leave while drunk. Denison read O’Donohoe’s letter as a violation of his promise not to criticise the administration and withdrew his ticket-of-leave a third time. 

O’Donohoe was sent to Cascades probation station for six months, severely affecting his health and wellbeing. After intervention from Bishop Willson, O’Donohue was released after three months. He went to Launceston to visit businessman George Deas who had helped MacManus and Meagher escape. Deas was shocked to see how aged he was and believed he would not last long if he did not get out of the colony. By December O’Donohoe’s escape was arranged. In Launceston he was concealed in a coal hatch off the engine room of the Yarra Yarra to Melbourne and almost suffocated while stuffed in “like a monster pie in an oven”. He was taken off but eventually travelled to Melbourne a few weeks later and then travelled to Sydney. On February 8, 1853 he boarded the Oberon bound for Tahiti where he had to hide from the British consul. Eventually he secured a passage on the American trading ship the Otranto which took him to San Francisco. The third state prisoner had escaped Van Diemen’s Land. By the time he arrived in America, the last ever convict transport came to Hobart. Thanks to the Victorian gold rush, transportation to the eastern colonies had been shorn of all its terrors. 

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 37. Know Nothings

The flag of the Nativist American Party c1850. The movement would evolve into the Know Nothings which briefly became a major force in American politics in the mid 1850s. Photo: Public domain

May the Guidance that passeth / All Eloquence far / Be thine through the Future / Cead Mille Failthe , O’Meagher – “Amergin”, Boston Pilot 1852

The newly arrived escapee from Van Diemen’s Land was an immediate hero in New York. Thomas Francis Meagher was deluged with invitations to speak at events and meet with powerful people. The summer turned into a “continuous pageant of receptions, balls, testimonials, dinners, and serenades,” as Athearn put it. Thomas Francis Meagher clubs were set up in all the big cities and a Miss Ferguson of 42nd Street even composed the T. F. Meagher polka which was performed on Broadway at Niblo’s Garden music hall. The Herald noted the way to pronounce his name was not as “generally pronounced in this country as if it were written Meagre, but Maher, the ‘a’ having the same sound as in mama” while the Pilot‘s hundred thousand welcome poem for Meagher had a footnote to say the name was pronounced “O’Mar”. More importantly, the same edition of the Boston paper wondered “what he will do, when he again takes up the thread of life, which his enemies coiled up…is a question we hear frequently asked”. The Pilot said Meagher himself possibly did not know.

The answer to that question became obvious as the deluge of speaking requests continued. As the papers printed his old Irish speeches and nearly all the large cities had requested to hear from him, a lecture tour was the potentially lucrative answer. It was announced that Meagher would lecture on the topic of “Australia” in New York on November 25. Entry for his first lecture cost 50c and Metropolitan Hall was packed to overflowing. The New York Herald estimated a crowd of 4500 with the crowd so dense organisers had to open the doors. Catholic Archbishop of New York John Hughes was present in a private box to hear Meagher enthral his audience for two and a half hours about gold-rush Australia and how it might one day become a new republic like America once it escaped the “wrinkled hand of England”. Meagher received $1652 for the night, believed to be “the largest sum ever paid any man for one lecture in this country.” Buoyed by the success he took his speech on the road to upstate New York and then to the south, with crowds lapping it up in Charleston, Augusta and Mobile. In New Orleans the Daily Orleanian noted Meagher concluded his “brilliant series of lectures” with a talk on “Ireland in ‘48”. The newspaper noted Meagher didn’t blame the priesthood for the failure of the revolution. “They never sanctioned the movement – never betrayed it,” quoting from his 1850 letter to Duffy.

The presence of Archbishop Hughes at Meagher’s New York lecture was a huge endorsement. John Hughes was from the same region of Co Fermanagh as Meagher’s fellow Young Irelander escapee Terence Bellew MacManus, but was suspicious of the revolutionary nature of the Young Irelanders. Nevertheless he found Meagher beguiling and charming and after overcoming initial hostility would remain an important supporter for the remainder of his life. Hughes emigrated to America in 1817 where he joined the priesthood and became one of the country’s many Irish-born bishops. He showed his forceful personality getting involved in debates about whether Catholicism was compatible with American republicanism and liberty. He was quickly marked out for high office. When Pope Pius IX made New York an archdiocese in 1850, Hughes became the growing city’s first archbishop and the most important Catholic in America. He became known as “Dagger John,” supposedly for preceding his signature with a cross but also for his abrasive style and willingness to verbally attack enemies. The nickname stoked fears he might lead the Irish to violent action but in reality he was a pragmatist who formed an unlikely but highly successful alliance with leading New York Whig politician William Seward. Seward helped Hughes establish publicly funded schools where they could safely practise their religion.

Just as in England, Americans had not been welcoming to the Irish who were arriving in huge numbers even before the Famine. An estimated 4.7 million Irish arrived in America in the century after 1820, 1.7 million of them between 1841 and 1860. The Nativist political movement saw Irish Catholic immigrants in particular as a threat to native-born Protestant America. In 1850, four million out of 24 million Americans were either Irish-born or American-born Irish. By 1860 they comprised a quarter of New York and Boston’s population, a fifth of Chicago’s population and over a sixth of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In New York they clustered in the notorious ghettos of the Five Points near Paradise Square where five streets converged and where the Irish opened their own speakeasies and formed street gangs.

The rise of the untamed Irish was alarming to the Nativists. Hatred of Catholics and foreigners had been steadily growing in America for more than two centuries and the prejudices brought with the early English Protestant immigrants increased as the Catholic population swelled. According to one 1850s Philadelphia academic, the Irish had “revolting vicious habits” and “being of the lower order of mankind, they were repellent to those who were further advanced in the social scale.” Misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the Catholic position were frequent, and Catholic opposition to Protestant Bible reading in schools was a sore point. Aggressive Protestant papers inflamed their audiences with stories of wicked Catholic plots while books like the The Flight of Popery from Rome to the West spread tales of nuns in sexual misconduct with priests, aborting children and Meagher’s own Jesuits laying plans for a bloody inquisition in America that would sweep away the federal government.

The Nativist movement became known as the Know Nothings, supposedly because when supporters were asked what they stood for, they were told to say they know nothing, though historian Tyler Anbinder says this universally accepted theory is unproven. The term first appeared in the Tribune in 1853 as an unprovenanced label of a “secret organisation” that defeated the Whig candidate for district attorney, and was quickly adopted by the movement. The Know Nothings believed Protestantism defined and embodied American values. They attacked the Irish for their poverty, their religion, their lack of skills, their Democratic politics, their intemperance, their supposed criminality, their devotion to Ireland and their attempts to sow discord with Britain.

Massachusetts’ nativist governor Henry Gardner deported Irish paupers, saying it was cheaper to send them to Liverpool than it was to support them. New York diarist George Templeton Strong wrote, “our Celtic fellow citizens are about as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.” When the nativist James Harper won the 1844 election for New York mayor, there were threats to burn Catholic churches and Hughes responded with a threat of his own. If a single church in the city was burned, he said, New York would “become a second Moscow”. Hughes’s Napoleonic reference was not lost on New Yorkers and Harper backed down. Nevertheless the Know Nothings’ paranoia struck a huge chord among American voters in the 1840s and 1850s, peaking in the 1854 election. As well as Gardner in Boston, nativist mayors were elected in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, and Washington. They dominated state politics in all the New England states, and Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California. In 1856 there were even fears America could have a Know Nothing president though it was eventually subsumed into the new Republican Party.

Newly arrived in New York in 1852, Meagher was an obvious target for the Know Nothings. But the flood of stories about Meagher in the press which painted him as a learned aristocrat and manly hero was a very different image from the typical impoverished Irish immigrant. They would have to find other ways of bringing him down. They would get surprising help from their archenemy – the Catholic Church.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects: 36. New York

The Miss New York ferryboat lies at port in New York harbour with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. Photo: Author’s collection

Just as in Newfoundland, the area around the magnificent New York harbour was owned by Algonkian people who called their mighty Hudson river “the water that flows two ways” because of its strong tidal currents. An English voyager in 1607 named the side of the river Manna-hata while the early Dutch settlers bestowed their own names on the features of “New Amsterdam”: Bronks, Breukelyn, Vlissingen (Flushing) and Haerlem. Their path was laid by an Englishman Henry Hudson, who sailed up the river and gave his name to it while searching for the North West Passage on behalf of his employers, the Dutch East India company. Hudson did not find Asia but found Algonkians willing to trade fur and in 1624 the new Dutch West India Company settled colonists on Manhattan Island.

The Dutch found it convenient to be tolerant of Indian ways and even recognised prior ownership, purchasing land titles from the Algonkians. The English conquest of New York was much more peremptory. In 1664 King Charles II simply gave the territory as a gift to his brother James, without reference to Dutch claims or native titles. Four English warships under Colonel Richard Nicholls arrived to demand the town and ignored Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant’s indignant reaction. Nicholls marched in at the head of his troops and send a letter home “ffrom New Yorke upon the island of the Manhatoes.” The population was slow to grow, with only 4500 New Yorkers by 1700. It had grown to 10,000 by the 1740s and as the British inherited slavery from the Dutch, one in five were slaves. In 1741 a panic swept New York due to rumours that slaves and allies were about to burn the city and murder the white population. Around 170 people were arrested and 34 executed, mostly blacks. It wasn’t until 1799 that New York state freed future generations of slaves with slavery finally abolished by 1824.

By then New York was on the rise in the new United States. In the 1760s an English Currency Act prohibited American colonists from issuing legal tender paper money, an act that infuriated New Yorkers and was one of the drivers of the Revolution. In 1776 John Adams told George Washington that New York was “a key to the whole continent”, a fact the British realised when it shifted its North American base from Boston to New York and ruled the city under martial law from 1776 to 1783. Aided by the Sterling Iron Works owned by the wealthy Townsend family that Thomas Francis Meagher would eventually marry into, the Continental Army built large chains and gun emplacements on the Hudson to prevent British warships from entering the river. 

In 1823 the completion of Erie Canal linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes with New York’s governor DeWitt Clinton correctly predicting it would make the city “the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures (and) the focus of great moneyed operations.” Economic expansion fuelled a demand for labour and between 1840 and 1860 four million immigrants arrived in America. By 1860 the population of New York had grown to 814,000, with 384,000 of them immigrants, mostly German and Irish, the Irish influx mainly accounted for by the Great Famine.

In the early 1850s there was a demand to help more Irish in need, though these were political not economic refugees. Ever since the Irish state prisoners were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity in the United States on their behalf. In 1851 Mississippi Senator Henry Foote moved a Senate motion calling on the United Kingdom to free the prisoners and offer them “sanctuary on American shores”. While Thomas Francis Meagher was still on the high seas, Irish-born Mexican War hero James Shields, then senator for Illinois, proposed a resolution of sympathy for him and influential New York senator William Seward said the only crime the Irish had was “proximity to England”. Whig president Millard Fillmore was no friend of the Irish but was keenly aware that four million of the country’s 24 million people were Irish or had Irish parents. He asked secretary of state Daniel Webster to begin diplomatic manoeuvring and Webster instructed his London ambassador Abbott Lawrence to make discreet representations.

On May 15, 1852 the Boston Pilot published a letter from Hobart which announced Meagher had escaped. “In him the Irish in America will find a chief to unite and guide them,” the Pilot said. “In him America will find a hero to honor without reserve or jealousy.” It wouldn’t take long for the Pilot to change its mind about Meagher. Unaware of the great expectations, the Vandemonian escapee disembarked the Acorn at Castle Depot in New York eleven days later. “Thus began the second half of Meagher’s life; his American life,” as Mitchel later wrote in his Reminiscences of Thomas Francis Meagher. Mitchel said Meagher had always admired and loved “the Great Republic.” The stars and stripes had flown on Speranza in Lake Sorell and “he came to this land with the ardent desire and resolute intention to bear than flag aloft against all enemies, but especially and particularly against our hereditary enemy – England.” Meagher must surely have been exhilarated as he walked incognito through the streets of New York. Here he was finally in the “proud Republic” he hailed in his Sword speech as “prosperous, limitless and invincible.” Given his escapes from the death sentence and now from transportation, did he have similar feelings of invincibility? 

Meagher knew he was also a father by now. Catherine had given birth on February 7. Meagher had yet to receive news but assuming it was a son, and it was, he had insisted he was named for his own brother and two heroes of earlier Irish rebellions, Henry Emmet Fitzgerald O’Meagher. O’Meagher himself had become plain Meagher again. Freedom didn’t need ancestral flaunting.

But a responsible father needed a responsible job and he knew he would need the help of schoolfriends and fellow Young Irelanders who had laid the path before him, Pat Smyth and Richard O’Gorman. It seemed America was full of Irish journalists and lawyers and Meagher would also seek that path. O’Gorman was a lawyer in partnership with John Blake Dillon, co-founder of the Nation and Meagher’s travelling companion as they sought out Smith O’Brien that fateful summer of 1848. Fellow rebel fugitive and lawyer Michael Doheny had also escaped to New York as had Mitchel’s editor accomplice Thomas Devin Reilly.

In an emigrant aid office Meagher found a city directory which listed the law firm of Dillon and O’Gorman in William St, Brooklyn. Perhaps a little nervous he put the meeting off to the next day. Meagher was content to walk the city that first day and spent the night alone in a hotel. The following morning, a bronzed and distinguished stranger “with the bearing of a US naval officer” presented himself at William St. After O’Gorman and Dillon recognised their old friend, there was an eruption of welcomes with old comrades as the news spread quickly round town. By nightfall he had met Doheny and Devin Reilly,. Another Irishman, Michael Phelan offered him all the money in his own pocket book, which Meagher turned down, though it would cement a friendship that would last to the war and the creation of the Irish Brigade. The 69th Regiment of the New York State Militia had also mustered and marched to O’Gorman’s house in Lower Manhattan.

For once Meagher was lost for words and could not account for their enthusiasm as he had fought no battles in Ireland. He said his gratefulness was mixed with sorrow for those left behind in Australia. As an estimated 7000 people cheered him on, the Irish American gleefully reported that an irritated English neighbour named Scriven, belligerently opened a window and played God Save the Queen on the piano with all his might but his playing was drowned out in the uproar. Meagher turned down a public reception while Ireland remained “in sorrow and subjection” which disappointed the convention of Irish Societies however the New York Times said Meagher’s arrival had created “universal satisfaction here”.

The Herald noted he was stoutly built, handsome, and “always a favourite with the ladies” and claimed he was a better orator than Hungarian patriot and lawyer Louis Kossuth who was also in America seeking recognition for his country. Kossuth had led Hungary in its 1848 rebellion against the Austrian Empire and was only brought down by Russian intervention. Kossuth’s Hungarian declaration of independence was based on the American example and he was intensely popular across the Atlantic with Congress even sending a naval frigate to rescue him from Turkey. He had arrived the year before Meagher to a huge reception, making hundreds of speeches all cheered to the rafters, and collecting a large amount of money for his cause.

Now Meagher was making the same inroads. The Nation was overjoyed saying it would open a new era for the Irish in America. “Meagher in America! What triumph, what happiness in the words!…We conceive a great career for him under the flag of WASHINGTON.” Fellow Co. Waterford Young Irelander Michael Cavanagh, who later compiled Meagher’s memoirs, had also escaped to America after the 1849 Cappoquin attack and had come from upstate New York to meet the celebrity arrival. He vividly noted his changed appearance from 1848. “When I knew him in Ireland, he was a handsome well-built young fellow with genuine Celtic features, laughing blue eyes and dark brown, rather curly, hair,” Cavanagh wrote. “Now his form was much more robust in appearance, and his features bronzed by the southern sun…He looked more manly and resolute.”

Meagher visited Mitchel’s mother Mary who moved from Newry to Brooklyn with Mitchel’s sister Matilda and younger brother William. He may have discussed a plan to spring Mitchel which was already in train with P.J. Smyth. Meagher also met fellow Young Irelander D’Arcy McGee down from Boston where he ran the American Celt newspaper. McGee escaped Ireland disguised as a priest and settled in New York but after he accused clerics of not supporting the 1848 rising, he received a belt of the crozier from New York Archbishop John Hughes and moved north. Meagher would soon learn just how powerful Hughes and his church was in the American Irish community. Meagher would also learn he and Hughes had mutual enemies.