Pillars of fire: Irish songs of the American civil war

The Irish Brigade monument at Antietam battlefield. Photo: Author’s collection

In the 1863 song Pat Murphy of Meagher’s Brigade, “honest Pat Murphy” sings ballads at the Irish Brigade campfire the night before battle. The following day, “a hole through his head from rifleman’s shot” ended Murphy’s life. The Brigade lamented that “no more in the camp will his laughter be heard, or his voice singing ditties so gaily”. The fictional Pat’s tragic story was depicted through Murphy’s own medium. His imagined tale captured the spirit of front-line singing culture and reflected the experience of all Irish in the war.

Over 200,000 Irish-born soldiers fought in the American civil war as did thousands more second generation. Their exploits were celebrated in Pat Murphy and 150 other songs written between 1861 and 1865. These ballads are the subject of Catherine Bateson’s 2018 doctoral thesis The Culture and Sentiments of Irish American Civil War Songs which explores what they said about Irish loyalty and devotion to the Union. Bateson found that support for the Irish nationalist cause in 1860s America was complicated, at best. Mainly she found a pervading American identity, “that the Irish fighting and living through the war were stressing to society through song that they were committed to the United States as Americans first and foremost.”

Irish music and songs were popular in America before the civil war, widely circulated by oral tradition, songsheets and broadsides. Tunes carried their own meanings and ballads dedicated to the Irish Brigade used American airs which strengthened the lyrical message of loyalty to America. Dubliner Thomas Moore’s influential 1808 songbook Irish Melodies spread rapidly through America, many songs taking on American identities. Also popular was Thomas Davis‘s Spirit of the Nation (1843). Fellow Young Irelander Thomas Francis Meagher noted the songs sung at bivouac before the 1861 Battle of Bull Run were “mostly those that Davis wrote for us.” Another Irish song The Irish Jaunting Car had a marching-pace tune which became popular especially when Confederates adapted new words to it in The Bonny Blue Flag. Northern soldiers produced their version A Reply to the Bonnie Blue Flag using the same Irish air.

The air inspired Irish Volunteer No. 3 (1862) about General Michael Corcoran. This song about Irish wartime service focusing on American loyalty, set to an old Irish tune that became part of an American musical tradition, showed how blurred Irish American identity was becoming. The tune was used in another important Irish wartime song What Irish Boys Can Do which answered anti-Irish nativist criticisms showing the diaspora’s devotion to the Union cause. The American Fenian ballad What Irishmen Have Done was also based on The Irish Jaunting Car. The most famous civil war song When Johnny Comes Marching Home was not Irish, but Patrick Gilmore, the Galway-born Union Army bandmaster and conductor, took a traditional Irish tune Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye and used it as the foundation of his When Johnny Comes Marching Home lyrics in 1863.

Music and songs were a crucial part of a soldier’s experience during the American Civil War and musical melodies and ballad songs permeated every camp. Corporal John Dougherty of the 63rd New York Regiment told his mother of the general singing atmosphere. “The cheerful spirit of the Irish Brigade made the road seem short, the funny joke and merry laugh of the men at all times whether on the battlefield, on the march or in camp makes the Brigade the envy of the rest of the army – they would go along in silence looking sad while the Irish men would be laughing and singing.” William McCarter of 116th Pennsylvania journeyed to war “accompanied by the voices of the regiment” while military bands mixed the Irish and American airs of Johnny is Gone for a Soldier, The Star Spangled Banner and John Brown’s Body. While a prisoner of war, Michael Corcoran put on concerts with his men for Confederate captors who were “highly delighted with the performance, until, in grand strains, we gave them Hail Columbia.” Mostly, they didn’t mind the musical teasing.

Musicians brought their instruments to the field. Irish Brigade chronicler David Power Conyngham remembered Christmas night 1862. “Seated near the fire was Johnny Flaherty, discoursing sweet music from his violin. Johnny hailed from Boston; was a musical genius, in his way, and though only fourteen years of age, could play on the bagpipes, piano, and Heaven knows how many other instruments; beside him sat his father, fingering the chanters of a bagpipe in elegant style.” Letters home revealed a musical knowledge with one writer wanting to see “Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree” quoting the popular Union air John Brown’s Body while McCarter referenced another song writing of three rousing cheers for Philadelphia and “the girls we left behind us.”

County-Meath born Charles Graham Halpine was the most prolific Irish wartime lyricist and poet in America, known for fictional comic creation Private Miles O’Reilly which appeared in the New York Herald from 1863. His work was collated into The Life and Adventures of Private Miles O’Reilly in 1864. The Irish American newspaper printed ballad verses such as Camp Song of the Sixty-Ninth and War Song of the Irish Brigade, the latter sung to the tune of the Star Bangled Banner.

The gallant bravery of the 69th Regiment and the Irish Brigade was a common theme in songs from First Bull Run onwards and lyrics were dedicated to two Irish-born leaders. Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran embodied the Irish American Civil War experience and were both extolled in verse. The Escape of Meagher, written in 1852 and disseminated as a broadside in both Ireland and America, sang of Meagher’s escape from exile on Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). When he arrived in New York City, Meagher was greeted by diasporic enthusiasm: “it’s plain to see, for Erin go Bragh, the sons they still have a grah”.

Corcoran was even more lauded than Meagher. The song To the Glorious 69th! described the 69th’s chivalry at Bull Run under “brave Commander” Corcoran. “They stood in the hot battle, where balls like hailstones flew, Until the rebel ambush-host with balls did pierce them through.” Another song noted how Corcoran with sword in hand commanded “these sporting boys from Paddies’ land” and as the battle raged they “stood the plain for many an hour, though shot and shell like rain did shower, To prove their valour, tact and power as gallant sons of Erin.” The song Battle of Bull Run was a detailed account of how the Union lost the battle to superior Confederate firepower despite Irish bravery, “we did retreat but were not beat” and ends with Corcoran telling his men “we’ll make them pay some other day”.

Bull Run was the foundation for subsequent productions of Irish wartime history told through song. Long Live the Sixty-Ninth hailed them as they came home to New York “black with battle-smoke, radiant with fame”. The 69th was the founding regiment of the Irish Brigade, commanded by Meagher and many song sheets were penned in its honour. The War Song of the Irish Brigade of November 1861, included reference to the Wild Geese’s flight and how Irish Americans would remember famous battles fought by previous Irish Brigades: “Fontenoy! Fontenoy! We ring out with great joy, And ‘remember Limerick’, will come from each boy.” The first of numerous ballads called The Irish Brigade (1862) claimed no Irish soldier was afraid of battle. “There ne’er was traitor or coward, In the ranks of the Irish Brigade.” Irish Brigade songs sang of the mid 1862 Battle of Fair Oaks and the Seven Days Battles. America’s Irish Brigade! had a verse saying “In the seven days’ fight, sure I stood at my post, And each pop of my gun made some Rebel a ghost.”

Other songs focused on darker times. The Irish Brigade in America was about the fatal charge at Fredericksburg’s Marye Heights on December 13, 1862, where nearly half the Brigade was lost. “With bayonets fixed they charged the heights, and death soon scattered round. And thousands of the Southerners lay dead upon the ground.” The Union did not gain the victory the ballad implied and defeat was compounded in Irish eyes by the Emancipation Declaration which came into effect in 1863. As a Halpine songs went “To the flag we are pledged – all its foes we abhor; And we ain’t for the nigger, but are for the war!” The Irish community was blamed for the subsequent New York draft riots of 1863 though Irish war songs ignored this topic. Their focus remained on loyalty to America, and suggests most Irish Americans detested the unfairness of the draft rather than abolitionism itself.

While Irish support for the war dropped after Fredericksburg, Bateson says that lyricists penned verses that continued to extol Irish service and pride in the war effort. Hugh F. McDermott’s January 1863 ballad ode The Irish Brigade drew inspiration from Marye’s Heights and Meagher’s inspiring leadership before the fight. “With shout and yell, and stunning peal, Their vengeance leapt upon their steel.” Its refrain was that sacrifice with honour and noble battlefield endeavours should be remembered and commemorated. It was hugely popular even outside the Irish communities in New York and Boston.

Though stuck in Confederate prisons for the early part of the war, Michael Corcoran remained the most frequent figure lauded in Irish wartime ballads. Corcoran had served with the militia since 1849 when he moved to the United States, and steadily rose through the ranks before becoming colonel. The first ballad in his honour predates the war. Corcoran refused to participate in a parade for Prince Edward of Wales who visited America in October 1860. Corcoran was imprisoned and awaiting a court martial trial when southern states seceded from the Union. Corcoran was released after pledging loyalty to the Union and offering his militia to defend Washington. The 69th New York State Militia mustered into service in May 1861. Col. Corcoran and the Prince of Wales retold Corcoran’s version of events. “Through the street and the parks the Militia did start, For to take a part in the Royal parade: There was one stood alone…. [Corcoran] would not comply for to honor the King. Court-martial was ordered the jury was panelled, To try this brave Hero for no other offence.” The song detailed the 69th’s journey to their compound at Arlington Heights, renamed Fort Corcoran.

At Bull Run, Corcoran was taken prisoner of war. Battle of Bull Run depicted him as a brave commander rallying Irish soldiers. At the end, the “gallant Colonel Corcoran”’ was on the ground, “weary and fatigued and exhausted from his wound… Cried unto his gallant men brave boys I’m not undone.” Several songs made reference to his subsequent year-long imprisonment, even non-Irish songs, such as We Will Have the Union Still which expressed how the whole Union Army would avenge the insult of Corcoran’s battlefield capture. After his release in August 1862 the ballad Corcoran! The Prisoner of War said he had “tendered his sword and his life” to America, implying that other Irish should follow suit. The freed Corcoran would “capture ould Jefferson Davis; And will wallop the rebels like blazes” as another ballad put it.

Corcoran’s lauding confused matters while he was in prison and the 69th Regiment was rolled into the Irish Brigade, under Meagher. Corcoran supporters were frustrated the Brigade did not wait for his release, especially as rumours surfaced of Meagher’s supposed drunkenness at Bull Run. Despite Meagher’s erratic behaviour, the songs about him were positive. “That gallant MEAGHER fleets swiftly past; Through teeming groans, and clash and jar, His trumpet voice thus sounds afar: ‘Again to the charge, old Erin’s sons!” War Song of the Irish Brigade is also glowing. “Our leader is youthful, and manly and brave, The pride of our race: and a lover of glory… Then Meagher lead the way. We’re eager for the fray, With thy spirit to cheer us we’ll soon win the day.” Halpine’s Miles O’Reilly, heaped praise on Meagher’s leadership in a fictional meeting with President Lincoln in 1863. O’Reilly informed Lincoln that because “the poor boys of the Irish Brigade’ had experienced ‘days of its hardest fights under General Meagher”, their leader “ought to have two stars on each shoulder, or there could be no such thing as justice to Ireland”. What Irish Boys Can Do (1863) used Meagher to push back against Know Nothingism, reminding Americans that in the present war “Let no dirty slur on Irish ever escape your mouth”.

Yet even a year into Meagher’s tenure, songs about the Brigade continue to refer to “Bould Corcoran leading us”. Meagher would not have been too upset and accuracy came a distant second to telling a good story. For those listening to ballads about Irish American Civil War service, it was the battlefield stories and war sentiments that mattered, not nuanced details about accurate units and command. The song Return of Gen. Corcoran of the Glorious 69th (1862) sang about how Meagher drew on the spirit of the original Irish Brigade to spur on the 69th New York at Bull Run and Fair Oaks: “As at the charge of ‘Fontenoy’, our brave men of to-day, With gallant Meagher, drove the foe, in terror and dismay – For at the battle of ‘Fair Oaks, as at the ‘Seven Pines’, The Irish charge, with one wild yell, broke through the rebel lines.”

After his release Corcoran established his own command and recruited some of his old 69th New Yorkers, for his “new brigade of Irishmen who would preserve America”. Corcoran’s Legion mostly remained in New York and experienced little action compared to the Brigade’s bloody involvement on major battlefields. That did not stop songs in the Legion and Corcoran’s honour though one 1863 ballad complained about lack of action. “So here we’re doomed to swear and sweat, On Bull Run’s bloody borders.”

It was not a good year for the Irish leaders. Meagher resigned in May 1863 protesting against the slaughter of his Brigade at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Corcoran died ingloriously in December, falling off his horse after a drinking session with Meagher. Corcoran was mourned in song, but the number of ballads dropped off. The Irish Brigade, minus Meagher, was much diminished, which was recognised in song “Our Brigade exists no longer – they have gone – the good the true; Pulseless now, the gallant hearts that a craven feat ne’er knew.”

Older antipathies emerged with the prospect of battle-hardened Irish troops going home to fight for independence from Britain. The 1862 song The Irish Volunteers looked forward to this under Meagher’s leadership: “Long life to Colonel Meagher, he is a man of birth and fame And while our Union does exists applauded be his name.” This was what Fenians wanted, though Meagher was a lukewarm member at best. Pat Murphy of Meagher’s Brigade also sang he would rather fight the British than the Confederates. “Now, if it was only John Bull to the fore, I’d rush into battle quite gaily; For the spalpeen I’d rap with a heart an’ a half, With my elegant Sprig of Shillaly.” The reality was different as Lamentation on the American War showed after 1864’s bloody battles. “Heaps of Irish heroes brave on the plains there lay, That was both killed and wounded there all in America.” Instead of fighting the Saxon, most of the Irish Brigade were dead as another song lamented: “Themselves, with the mournful past, have fled… Many a tear and tender thought will be given the lonely graves.”

The post war “Fenians Ever More” gave the lyrical impression that America would come to Ireland’s aid: “with Yankee ships and Irish hearts”, Irish and American soldiers would “cross the mighty Main”. Instead the United States discouraged the Fenian invasions of Canada while the Irish uprising of 1867 was a miserable failure. Meagher, too, was wary of Irish rebel activity after the war. When he became acting governor of Montana, which bordered Canada, he told Secretary of State William Seward that he had met local Fenians and though he was sympathetic, he said that “as an officer of the United States, I felt bound in honour, as well as by a conscientious regard to my official obligations, not to say or do anything which might be at variance with the policy and duty of the Government.” Like the wartime ballads about him, Meagher put his loyalty to America first. So did countless other Irish Americans. America, with its dreams of liberty and democracy, was everything they wanted Ireland to be. As one song put it “now Erin’s Green flag is blended Among with the Red, White and Blue.” The Irish especially needed to show that loyalty to other Americans: “To the Banner of Freedom, to the red, white and blue, The brave Irish soldier must ever prove.” The Irish took up arms as American citizens and defended its unity. America had become their home nation, and the Irish were citizens twice over, as Halpine wrote, “by adoption and by service”.

Meagher’s death in 1867 and the deaths of other prominent figures including Corcoran, Halpine and Archbishop John Hughes was a huge blow to Irish American identity after the war. Yet its ethos lived on in ballads. The 1868 song America to Ireland suggested survivors carried on the legacy of Irish American Civil War heroes: “The leaves of the Shamrock are spreading a-far, And we honor the heroes who bare them, Where Sheridan, Corcoran, Mulligan, Meagher, Like pillars of fire went before them.”

Patrick O’Donohoe: Irish Exile

Young Irelanders Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew McManus, and Patrick O’Donohue receiving their death sentence in their 1848 trial at Clonmel.

In 1837 Patrick Donahoe started a newspaper for Irish Americans in Boston, which he called the Pilot in honour of a Dublin O’Connellite paper. Thirteen years later his near namesake Patrick O’Donohoe started his own newspaper for the Irish in Hobart. According to Richard Davis, O’Donohoe was an anomaly among the seven Young Ireland state prisoners transported to Australia after the failed Ballingarry rebellion. Unlike the others he was not wealthy, attracted no biographer and he drank to excess. Yet from O’Donohoe’s writings, said Davis, we learn much about the 1848 rebellion and the class tensions in Van Diemen’s Land before the abolition of transportation.

O’Donohoe was born in Clonegall, County Carlow in 1808 which put him in the same age bracket as William Smith O’Brien and older than most Young Ireland colleagues. Possibly educated at Trinity College, he was a law clerk at the Dublin office of his uncle, a solicitor named Dillon, and later at W. McGrath of Gardiner St. He contributed anonymously to the Nation and after the Young Irelanders split from the Repeal Association in 1846, “P.O’Donohoe of Sandymount” signed a law clerks’ remonstrance against their disqualification. He supported Young Ireland’s Irish Confederation in 1847 and was elected to its 36-man council. According to Michael Doheny, O’Donohoe was “much relied on” by Confederation friends and proposed radical ideas such O’Brien’s abstention from parliament, a daily national newspaper, and a Irish national assembly elected by all adult men. However he became disillusioned and temporarily disappeared from public view.

After the French revolution of 1848, O’Donohoe joined the Grattan Club, a new Dublin Confederate club, eventually becoming its vice president. As the talk of revolution in Ireland reached fever pitch in July 1848 and Britain suspended habeas corpus, jailed Nation publisher Charles Gavan Duffy asked O’Donohoe to take a message to William Smith O’Brien, then on the run in the south. O’Donohoe went to Kilkenny where suspicious local leader James Stephens arrested him and took him to O’Brien at Cashel. “These damned rascals take me for a spy,” O’Donohoe complained. O’Donohoe and Stephens joined O’Brien’s ragtag army which criss-crossed Tipperary over the following days fomenting rebellion. They found support in mining communities but priests dampened enthusiasm and one refused to take O’Donohoe’s confession. O’Donohoe was also unimpressed with the patrician O’Brien’s insistence on property rights. They met Thomas Francis Meagher returning from a failed mission to get support from north Tipperary radical priest John Kenyon. Meagher recognised O’Donohoe who “peered through the front rank of the guerrillas, his sharp black eyes darting in sparks of fire from him the wild delight excited by the scene and the prospect of a fight.”

Meagher and O’Donohoe attended the council of war in The Commons on July 28. The following morning they headed south together and missed the failed rebellion in Ballingarry. Now wanted men, they travelled in atrocious weather, sleeping in haylofts and bogs, “the people being all afraid to shelter us,” O’Donohoe said. They were arrested on August 12 near Holycross, Co Tipperary. Both men were tried for high treason in Clonmel with O’Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus. While the prosecution could not prove O’Donohoe was in the rebellion, they had ample evidence he was involved in the lead-up. All four were found guilty and sentenced to death.

O’Donohoe spent eight months in Richmond prison before their sentences were commuted to life transportation in Van Diemen’s Land. On July 9, 1849 O’Donohoe farewelled his wife for the last time and boarded the Swift with the others, bound for Hobart. Though he complained they were “cruelly treated,” they had far better treatment than working class convicts. They arrived in Hobart on October 27 and were offered tickets-of-leave, all but O’Brien accepting. As a law clerk O’Donohoe was allowed to reside in Hobart, the others went to rural districts.

O’Donohoe turned to journalism rather than the law. On January 26, 1850 he produced the first issue of the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate. Fellow state prisoners disagreed with the venture, believing they should not get involved with local politics. When John Mitchel arrived in April he complained the paper “piped its notes under the censorship of a Comptroller-General.” Nevertheless John Martin contributed articles and Meagher obtained subscriptions. The paper supported local demands for a representative assembly but mainly promoted Irish issues and 500 of its 800 subscribers were on the mainland.

Van Diemen’s Land governor William Denison initially believed it was better to allow the paper under his supervision rather than ban it but warned O’Donohoe not to criticise his administration. When O’Donohoe blamed authorities for O’Brien’s ill health, Denison threatened to shut the paper. O’Donohue told readers, “I am fettered but there are free men in this land, who can, if they be earnest and true, find befitting channels through which to complain.” Denison sent a copy to London and Colonial Secretary Earl Grey told him to close it down. These messages took many months to relay and were overtaken by events.

Denison and O’Donohoe were uneasy temporary allies. Other Hobart newspapers were anti-transportation but Denison believed, and was borne out by events, that an abrupt end to convict labour would damage the colony economically. O’Donohoe supported Irish convicts who suffered discrimination and he criticised anti-transportation leaders for “convict hating, white nigger driving principles.” He mainly favoured the government and condemned the intransigence of Tasmania’s gentry, believing convicts were the backbone of the economy not “a mob of sheep farmers.” Davis said O’Donohoe anticipated the development of Irish Catholic-led Labor politics.

Denison enjoyed O’Donohoe’s evisceration of wealthy anti-transportationists and did not punish O’Donohoe for his role in the aborted O’Brien freedom attempt from Maria Island. Towards the end of 1850 O’Brien accepted a ticket-of-leave and moved to New Norfolk. The state prisoners celebrated by visiting him, which was illegal under their ticket terms. On December 17, O’Donohoe visited New Norfolk with fellow newspaper editor John Moore and brawled with him in the pub. O’Donohoe was charged with drunkenness and breach of parole. He was fined on December 19 for drunkenness and rebuked four days later for the breach. Unhappy with the leniency of the magistrates, Denison ordered O’Donohoe’s re-arrest and sent him to Saltwater River prison, a decision widely condemned in Hobart.

Patrick O’Donohoe.

Denison no longer needed O’Donohoe, who had become unreliable in his support and a less erratic Irishman was a better bet as a propagandist. This was Young Ireland traitor John Donellan Balfe, recently arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with glowing recommendations from Dublin Castle. Balfe was appointed Assistant Comptroller-General of Convicts and wrote pro-transportation articles for local newspapers signed as “Dion”.

Before going to prison, O’Donohoe signed a deed of trust temporarily ceding control of the Exile to Patrick McSorley. He was too weak to work at Saltwater and was transferred to Port Arthur hospital where he did light duties, “making brooms and other menial work”. He was transferred to the Cascades probation station on February 24 while Catholic priest John Therry organised a petition to remit the rest of his sentence. O’Donohoe was released on March 31 and ordered to live in Oatlands in the midlands. He attempted to regain control of the Exile but McSorley refused saying he now had full ownership. McSorley then closed the paper on April 19. With no work in Oatlands, O’Donohoe was permitted to move to Launceston where he survived on donations and charity. He lost his ticket-of-leave in October, possibly for a failed escape attempt. After a brief stint in Hobart jail he was freed again though by February 1852 was re-arrested after pleading guilty to drunkeness and served 14 days on the Launceston treadmill.

Anonymous correspondents outed Balfe as a British spy though Balfe (as “Dion”) rebutted the allegations. In August O’Donohoe wrote to the Examiner calling Balfe a traitor and said the state prisoners were barred from saying more. Denison regarded this as a breach of bail conditions and sent him back to Cascades. When he was released in November, O’Donohoe believed he was free of ticket-of-leave requirements and hid in Launceston. He was smuggled onto the Yarra Yarra ship to Melbourne and nearly suffocated in the coal hatch. He travelled on to Sydney and caught a ship to Tahiti. The American ambassador secured him a berth on a ship to San Francisco where he arrived on June 22, 1853, 185 days after leaving Hobart.

O’Donohoe travelled to New York where his uncompromising lectures were well received. But he struggled to keep his drinking under control. In August 1853 he attended fellow escapee Meagher’s 30th birthday party in Boston and was shouted down by the event’s chairman when he tried to tell his own story, almost leading to a duel. When Mitchel made his own spectacular escape to New York, O’Donohoe was pushed further into the shadow.

O’Donohoe expected his wife and daughter to arrive in New York in January 1854 but they never met. While the women were delayed in quarantine by rough weather, O’Donohoe contracted diarrhoea caused by alcohol consumption. He died on January 22, aged 44. As Thomas Keneally wrote “melancholy, alcoholism, Denison and irregular diet had all had a hand” in his death. The Irish American said O’Donohoe was estranged from friends through “nervous irritability and a mind shattered by suffering”. His wife attacked Mitchel and Meagher for not helping her husband. Neither attended his funeral at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery and his grave went missing, though Mitchel’s newspaper advertised a poorly subscribed fund to help her. Donahoe’s Boston Pilot said O’Donohoe was gifted with strong mental powers, and almost herculean physical strength but “the sufferings and systematic tortures inflicted by English officials in Australia, almost, ruined a once vigorous mind, and so impaired his great constitution, that his death is the natural consequence of five years’ hardship.” Richard Davis said O’Donohoe was a wasted talent who alienated friends. His lasting legacy was the Exile which stressed Tasmania’s independence though overestimated its potential for growth. “He deserves to be remembered as one of the founders of the Irish-Australian radical tradition and one of the most interesting Young Irelanders,” Davis said.

O’Donohoe’s grave was rediscovered in 2010. Green-Wood cemetery historian Jeff Richman found a record of the interment and after workers inserted a metal rod into the ground they recovered a large ledger stone engraved with a cross, about six feet long, stamped with the words “Patrick O’Donohue” and “Irish Rebel”. Green-Wood restored the gravestone which is close to the memorial marker for Thomas Francis Meagher, fellow Irish nationalist and Tasmanian escapee who went on to become a Civil War hero.

In and around Waterford

I was back in Waterford in July and August, usually the nicest months though this year it was even wetter than Ireland’s usual. A rare ray of sunshine greeted me as I arrived on Waterford’s Quay looking to the northside where work has started on a pedestrian bridge to link a proposed new train and bus station with the city.

On my first day back in town I tried to get to Mount Misery to take a photo overlooking the city but could not find the entry gap behind Waterford Golf Club. I contented myself with a close-up of Pope’s Tower off Rockshire Road behind the derelict Ard Rí hotel. The tower was owned by the merchant Pope family of Henrietta Street and was likely a folly tower. Andrew Doherty at Tides and Tales speculates it may have been part of a semaphore system to communicate the arrival of ships.

I was keen to visit the newest addition to Waterford’s vibrant museum quarter, the Irish Wake Museum. Situated in a 15th century Cathedral Square almshouse, the museum explores Irish death rituals, traditions and superstitions with the entertaining help of a tour guide in character. “Have you heard the news?” the guide exclaims. “There is a rupture in Christendom”.

That rupture was in mind when I went up John’s Lane to see the Wyse Park Quaker cemetery. Wyse Park was a childhood playground but Quaker link was unknown to me until recent times. The memorial was created in 2014 and includes a landscaped area and wall bearing the names of those buried here. Quakers came to Waterford in the 1650s and the first cemetery at John’s Lane opened in 1689 with 250 people buried there before a second burial site opened in Parliament Street in 1764. Quakers played a major role in the economic and business life of the city. The Jacobs made their first biscuits in Waterford in 1851, the Strangmans began a brewery in 1722, and the Penroses founded Waterford’s glassworks in 1783. Quakers donated the park and graveyard to the city in the 1950s. The park was named for the Wyse family of the Manor of St John.

I went to see older burial grounds the following day. The first stop was Knockeen Dolmen, near Henry de Bromhead’s racing stables in east county Waterford. A dolmen (from Cornish tolmen “hole of a stone”) is a stone table with a wide stone supported by other stones. Knockeen is the largest portal tomb in County Waterford with a double capstone, and is one of the finest examples of Irish dolmens. Erected 5500 years ago, it was likely the tomb of a local chieftain. It contains a small keyhole entrance that may have been used to offer food to the spirits of the dead or for access to rituals. It is not easy to reach as visitors must climb over an unsignposted farm gate, duck under an electric fence, cross a field, then duck under a second electric fence before getting to the tomb. But it is worth the effort.

A few kilometres away is another portal tomb. Like Knockeen, Gaulstown Dolmen is 5500 years old but situated in a small wooden glade, is easier to access from the road. The six tonne capstone rests on two portal stones and a backstone. In Irish Gaulstown is Cnoc an Challaig, hill of the hag or witch. Knockeen and Gaulstown are among 200 surviving portal tombs in Ireland.

Of more recent vintage is the remains of St Martin’s Gate off Spring Garden Alley. The gate was one of three entry points to the medieval city along with Reginald’s Tower and Turgesius Tower. St Martin’s Gate had a portcullis and two flanking towers. In the 12th century the Normans rebuilt the gate and extended the city west. Here, officials collected customs and taxes called murage (from the French word for wall) on goods coming into the city. Outside the gate lay the Benedictine priory of St John’s and Waterford’s oldest bridge, John’s bridge over the St John’s River. The gate fell into disuse in the 15th century as Arundel Gate and Lady Gate were closer to Waterford’s centre. The Sisters of Charity demolished St Martin’s Castle in the 19th century before their orphanage was also removed in the 20th century.

The impressive Beach Tower in Jenkins Lane is one of Waterford’s six surviving walled towers. Built on a rocky mound in a natural defensive position, this 15th century crenelated building allowed a clear view of the river with a view from the battlements upstream to Grannagh Castle in Co. Kilkenny. It was heavily rebuilt in the 17th century. After restoration it was officially reopened in 1996.

There is another Waterford building associated with the Quakers and the Wyses. The three storey over basement Newtown House was erected to designs by great local architect John Roberts (1712-96) and represents an important component of late 18th century heritage. John Wyse, son of Thomas “Bullocks” Wyse, built and lavishly decorated the house, squandering much of his inheritance in the process. A plaque notes that Thomas Wyse was born here in 1791. That Thomas would become an important lieutenant of Daniel O’Connell and marry a niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. Encumbered by debts, John Wyse sold Newtown House to the Religious Society of Friends in 1797 who adapted it as a school based on the Quaker discipline of moderation. They removed the decorative plasterwork “so that all the expense that went into creating a magnificent house came to nothing”. British General Gerard Lake commandeered the property as temporary barracks during the 1798 Rebellion and the opening of the school was postponed to August 1, 1798. Newtown school remains active to this day.

Passage East is 11km east of Waterford on a strategic bend of Waterford Harbour where ferries connect to Ballyhack in Co. Wexford. The Earl of Pembroke Richard de Clare, better known as Strongbow, landed here in 1170 and marched to Waterford. To quash any ideas of Strongbow starting an independent kingdom, King Henry II landed here a year later, beginning the Norman invasion of Ireland in earnest. Cromwell needed to secure Passage in his attempt to take Waterford in 1650 while both William of Orange and James II left Ireland from here after the Battle of the Boyne. There was a failed plan to put Swiss settlers at nearby New Geneva which became the infamous Geneva Barracks after the 1798 rebellion.

A few kilometres down the harbour is Woodstown Beach (not to be confused with Viking Woodstown, 3km upstream of Waterford). I spent many summer Sundays of my childhood here, rain or shine. Swimming was limited to when the tide was fully in and when it was fully out, the water disappeared a good mile into the estuary. Woodstown’s most famous visitor was Jackie Kennedy who stayed six weeks with her children in Woodstown House in 1967 (four years after the assassination of her husband and a year before she married Aristotle Onassis). Amid huge media interest there were boat trips to Dunmore and ferries to Ballyhack to visit the Kennedy homeland in Wexford. Duncannon in Co. Wexford, visible in this photo (far right), was another strategically vital spot for Cromwell in his conquest of the region.

At the end of Waterford harbour is Dunmore East. The beach has the opposite tidal problem to Woodstown. At high tide the beach disappears completely and water laps the breakwall. Visible across the harbour past the yachts is the massive lighthouse at Hook Head (one of the oldest lighthouses in the world). Dunmore’s own impressive though smaller lighthouse is out of sight at the fishing harbour to the right of the picture.

One reason for my visit was to attend celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Francis Meagher on August 3. Meagher was an Irish revolutionary, founder of the Irish Brigade which suffered greatly in the American civil war, and an early Montana governor. He also popularised the Irish flag in 1848, though I disagree with the official version how he did that. Earlier in the day we joined historian Donnchadh O Ceallachain on a guided tour of the artifacts in the Meagher room of the Bishop’s Palace and that evening we attended a reception at the Granville Hotel where Meagher was born in 1823. In this photo Granville owner Ann Cusack (a driving force in remembering Meagher in New York, Montana and Waterford) welcomes guests. There were other speeches on aspects of his life and musical entertainment from the Thomas F. Meagher fife and drum band. A big crowd enjoyed a great night in honour of one of Waterford’s finest.

James Francis Xavier O’Brien: Fenian filibuster

JFX O’Brien in later years as a Westminster MP.

James Francis Xavier O’Brien was an adventurer and revolutionary in the mould of fellow County Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher. Born in Dungarvan in 1828, O’Brien was five years younger than Meagher. Like Meagher, O’Brien survived a death sentence for his role in an Irish revolution, ended up in America where he fought in the civil war (though for the Rebels, not the Union like Meagher), and supported American manifest destiny ambitions in Central America. Unlike Meagher, he returned to Ireland and became a Westminster MP before dying in 1905.

O’Brien came from a prosperous mercantile family and was educated at a Dungarvan private school and St John’s College, Waterford. His grandfather was a big farmer near Dungarvan and his father kept two shops in town, a draper’s shop and a general merchant store selling corn, butter, timber and coal. In New Orleans in 1859, O’Brien his 1848 rebellion leader namesake William Smith O’Brien, himself related to Brian Boru, who told him James’s family was descended from Thomond O’Briens who settled in the Comeragh mountains in county Waterford.

In his journal, James said that as a young man, he lost faith in O’Connell’s movement and turned to the Young Irelanders like Smith O’Brien, Davis, and Duffy though makes no mention of fellow Waterford man Thomas Francis Meagher. As a clerk in his father’s business, O’Brien remembered the impact of the potato blight and resulting famine. “I remember distinctly walking in the country near Dungarvan in the early part of July (1845) having noticed an extraordinary stench as from rotting vegetable matter.” Before long, “starving men, women and children were seen on the footways of the town unable to move, lying, I might say, in the agonies of death. It was a terrible time.” O’Brien said there was an abundance of food in Ireland and a native government would have seen to the lives of the people first. “The foreign government concerned itself about the landlords’ rent. Few more hideous crimes stain the pages of history,” he wrote.

In July 1848 Smith O’Brien launched the failed Ballingarry rebellion. A month later, John O’Mahony was reported to be attacking Portlaw barracks with 1000 followers and was heading towards Dungarvan. The raid was quickly put down and O’Mahony eventually escaped to America. At St John’s College, O’Brien fell under the influence of Fintan Lalor, who was plotting another uprising. O’Brien organised a rebel group in Dungarvan and met Thomas Luby in Carrick-on-Suir where he purchased pikeheads for the revolution. However he missed out on the 1849 attack on Cappoquin police barracks. “I suppose notice was not given me because of my youth,” he wrote. He enrolled 100 people in Dungarvan, and when police found out, they issued a warrant for his arrest. “This I easily evaded by crossing to England in a vessel belonging to my father,” he said.

After hiding in Wales for several months, O’Brien returned to Clonmel where he worked for the family business until his father died in 1853. In 1855 he moved to Paris to undertake medical studies. There he attended lectures and met revolutionary John O’Leary. Returning to Ireland in the summer of 1856 due to ill health, a doctor advised him to take a holiday and he moved to New Orleans in late 1856. In 1857 a new adventure called with American conquistador William Walker. Walker was a former journalist and medical student (like O’Brien) who led a failed raid on Baja California before leading an expedition to Nicaragua in 1855. Walker exploited local divisions to become president of Nicaragua, where he re-introduced slavery, but was deposed by a coalition of Central American armies. Locals called Walker and supporters “freebooters” or “filibusters” from “filibustero” the Spanish word for pirate.

Walker avoided arrest when he returned to America in 1857, thanks partly to the legal work of Thomas Francis Meagher and tried to regain the presidency of Nicaragua. In New Orleans, Walker met Joseph Brenan, who led the Cappoquin attack in 1849. Brenan advised Walker to employ O’Brien as a staff officer and in the spring of 1857, O’Brien sailed with Walker’s new expedition. It was a fiasco. By the time it reached Nicaragua, Walker surrendered to the United States Navy and the entire crew was jailed. In prison, O’Brien quarrelled with superiors including Walker’s brother and managed to flee the camp, seeking humiliating refuge with the British consul. O’Brien got back to New Orleans where he was employed in a wholesale business. He proved his worth and progressed from a clerkship at $20 a month to a partnership worth $3000 a year, with a wife and two children. Then the civil war intervened.

O’Brien ignored the advice of fellow Irish revolutionary and Confederate sympathiser John Mitchel that he should return to Ireland. He enlisted in a Rebel regiment of mostly Irish married men. When they found out he was a medical student he was appointed assistant surgeon, though he never used his skills in battle. While most Louisiana infantry regiments were ordered north to Virginia, O’Brien was still in New Orleans when the city fell to union troops. Possessing only worthless Confederate money, he became bankrupt. In October 1862 he decided to return to Ireland, securing a pass from New Orlean’s infamous Union commander Ben “Beast” Butler. In New York O’Brien met John O’Mahony and took a steamer to Queenstown (Cobh) before settling in Cork.

He got a job as a general manager and bookkeeper for Cork tea and wine merchants and again proved his worth in business, tripling his wages in three months. He contacted local Fenians and within 12 months knew most of the local leadership. James Stephens, who served with William Smith O’Brien at Ballingarry, had turned the Fenians into a significant underground movement and in 1864, founded the Irish People newspaper, with John O’Leary as editor. O’Brien was a notable contributor writing as “De L’Abbaye”. Despite his Catholicism, he often took issue with the Catholic clergy when they condemned Fenianism. He helped O’Donovan Rossa expand the movement in Dungarvan. When police swooped on the Irish People in 1865, O’Brien went to Dublin and avoided arrest.

Like most Fenian leaders, O’Brien argued for an immediately uprising with the help of 3000 civil war veterans but Stephens vetoed the idea. The transatlantic movement split on the idea of a revolution in Ireland or attacking Canada. O’Brien condemned Stephens’s “inaction and procrastination.” Many leaders were arrested including Stephens, though he later escaped to Paris. When the Irish rising finally occurred in 1867, O’Brien opposed it saying they were unarmed and not ready. But a vote of members went against him. He was among 1500 Fenians assembled outside Cork on the night of March 5. Between them they had two shotguns, one rifle, five revolvers and eight pikes. Despite his reservations, O’Brien’s natural leadership skills emerged and he became the de facto commander in the capture of Ballyknockane police barracks. He ordered the men to disperse when faced with a strong military column near Mallow. He was captured near Kilmallock and charged with high treason.

Because of O’Brien’s low profile before the Rising there was little police evidence against him. The prosecution relied on witness testimony of his participation in the police barracks attack. He was found guilty and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered – the last person to be so condemned in the United Kingdom. However, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After a month in Dublin’s Mountjoy prison, he was among 30 Fenian prisoners chained together and transferred to London’s Millbank prison. He declined the offer to transfer to Western Australia in 1867 and moved to Portland prison where he renewed acquaintance with O’Leary and Luby.

In 1869, O’Brien benefited from Gladstone’s Amnesty Act and was released from prison. He returned to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, becoming president of its Supreme Council in an anti-Stephens faction, using his job as a commercial traveller to rouse the organisation across Ireland. In the 1870s, he became disillusioned with the use of physical force and with separatism. “We were paying too high a price in money and energy for such work,” he wrote. In 1882, he moved to Dublin where he became a partner in the tea and wine business of W. H. O’Sullivan.

He was drawn into parliamentary politics. His wife was related to Fr John O’Malley who was prominent in the Land League. Aware of O’Brien’s belief in the possibility of Home Rule, Charles Stewart Parnell nominated him to stand for the seat of South Mayo in the general election of 1885. Despite concerns he was a “blow in”, his Fenian past counted in his favour. O’Brien was elected Nationalist MP and he represented South Mayo until 1895. when he became MP for Cork City. He retained that seat until his death in 1905. In the Parnellite split, he followed the majority, unlike most Fenians, and opposed Parnell, despite Parnell’s earlier help.

O’Brien did not make a major impact as a parliamentarian and he never felt at home in the House of Commons. According to Pat McCarthy, O’Brien’s most valuable work was behind the scenes. From 1888 until his death, he was treasurer of the Irish National League of Great Britain, and from 1890, he was also its secretary and treasurer of the Parliamentary Party. “It is perhaps typical of the man that he engrossed himself in the minutiae of organisation and left platform rhetoric to others,” McCarthy wrote. “With his help, the League became an important factor in English politics; helping to decide marginal constituencies.” In 1888, his wife and three young daughters joined him and he lived the remainder of his life in London.

O’Brien announced his intention to retire in early 1905. While preparing to hand over his duties he contracted pleurisy and died of heart failure on May 28. Dungarvan councillor Thomas O’Connor led the tributes. “O’Brien stood in the dock in 1867 for one of the noblest acts that an Irishman could be guilty of; he offered to open arms against Her Majesty the Queen,” O’Connor said. “The only thing he said he regretted in the transaction was that it was not on the battlefield and that place he was giving his life for Ireland.” James F. X. O’Brien was buried in Glasnevin on June 1, 1905.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 97. The demon drink

The statue of Father Theobald Mathew in Dublin, “the apostle of temperance”. Photo: author’s collection

When Waterford mayor Thomas Meagher held a dinner for Capuchin friar Father Theobald Mathew in 1843 he invited his son Thomas Francis to speak at the event. This was a high honor. Father Mathew, a Tipperary man like Meagher’s forebears, had established a massive Irish temperance movement which O’Connell used as both the template and the membership base for his 1843 Repeal organization. The first Irish temperance movements started in the 1820s, inspired by American models, but they encouraged moderation not abstention and were not popular among Catholics. A few lay Catholics in the movement approached Mathew to act as president of the Cork Total Abstinence Society. His activity was deliberately non-political and he won considerable support among non-Catholics. Mathew administered a teetotal pledge to large crowds and the movement spread quickly from Cork to Limerick and Waterford, then across the country. At its peak the movement attracted three million members, almost half the Irish population, while Mathew was the second most popular figure in the country after O’Connell.

There was a need for Mathew’s crusade. Alcohol abuse was rampant in early 19th-century Ireland. Henry David Inglis, a visitor to Waterford in the 1830s, noted between “two and three hundred licensed houses” in a city of 30,000 people and said that “whisky drinking prevails to a dreadful extent.” In September 1838, every three in five of those tried before the mayor’s court were charged with drunkenness while the Chief Constable needed to recruit 15 extra policemen to enforce the act. The Waterford Chronicle asked if there was another town “where drunkenness has made such a havoc as Waterford?” 

Mathew’s visits to the city had immediate effect with 100,000 taking the pledge. Meagher senior was a committed teetotaler who felt that a successful abstinence campaign would dramatically reduce crime in his city. He aligned himself closely with Mathew and offered the mayor’s carriage in his visits in January and May 1843 and was present as Mathew administered the pledge. Mathew’s second visit that year to Waterford coincided with the return of Thomas Francis from school and the young man was present with his father at a dinner that evening for Mathew. The Chronicle reported that a speech the mayor presented “was from the pen of Mr Thomas Francis Jr” and did him great honor. According to Cavanagh, young Meagher’s “eulogy on the great Apostle of Temperance was listened to in wonder and admiration, and enthusiastically applauded.”

But Thomas Francis enjoyed the good life too much to practice what he preached. At the house of the parish priest of St Patrick’s the young man dined with Richard Sheil sharing jokes, anecdotes, quotations and epigrams over the best Blackwater salmon, and the choicest Epernay wine. Meagher was a regular member of the Waterford Club where, as he recalled they cordially “used to drink my health and cheer my stammering speeches at their dinners.” 

Meagher also enjoyed the conviviality of Irish Confederation and 82′ Club meetings in Dublin and even arrest in 1848 did not stop his ability to hold parties or to bring friends to soirees at Richmond jail. “The Governor has most kindly given us the use of his apartments, and desires me to intimate to all our friends his wish they should ask at the hatch for the Governor,” he wrote in one invite.

In exile in Van Diemen’s Land, Meagher organized parties for his friends where alcohol flowed and his arrival in New York was a succession of banquets, grand balls and other boozy events, in a city where the saloon was the center of political life. Nativists used Meagher’s fondness for alcohol to perpetuate the myth of the “drunken Paddy” even though severe alcohol problems were known to be greater in English and Slavic communities than Irish communities. 

There is a reference to Meagher’s drinking in an 1857 meeting with Nicaraguan filibuster Walker when a newspaper reported that “Mr. Thomas Francis Meagher, with others, received him in their arms, and the noble company drove across Broadway to the Saint Nicholas Hotel, where they got drunk.” Fenian leader James Stephens also noted the extent of Meagher’s drinking problem in his 1858 New York diary. Stephens said Meagher had a generous heart and could do great service for Ireland, “but for his proverbial weakness.” The comment was off-hand and unexplained but the fact that the weakness was “proverbial” and in italics suggests that it was well known to his contemporaries. 

The civil war accentuated Meagher’s reputation for drinking and the Irish Brigade was renowned for its party and copious measures of alcohol. The 69th New York’s “Regimental Cocktail” emerged when Meagher’s staff were unable to find Vichy water to mix with whiskey and instead found champagne which Meagher mixed “into a satisfying punch.” While his friend and supporter Methodist minister George Pepper praised Meagher as “a genial, instructive and delightful companion” he admitted that “his strongest weakness was a devoted love of the social pleasures.” Fellow supporter and man of the cloth William Corby said Meagher’s convivial spirit would sometimes lead him too far, but he was no drunkard. “It was not for the love of liquor, but for the love of sport and joviality that he thus gave way, and these occasions were few.” 

Others were less charitable. Though Maria Lydig Daly had earlier praised Meagher’s courage in the battle of Bull Run she revised her opinion a few months later. “It would seem from all we can learn that Meagher was intoxicated and had just sense and elation enough to make one rush forward and afterwards fell from his horse drunk,” she wrote. Rumors of drunkenness also dogged Meagher at Fair Oaks, Savages Station and Antietam while Private William McCarter was witness when Meagher almost fell into a fire after a boozy officers’ meeting in November 1862. Though McCarter claimed he never saw Meagher drunk again after the incident, that achievement is not as impressive as it sounds, as they never saw each other again after the battle of Fredericksburg, barely a month later. 

Meagher drank often to excess and probably sampled from the bottle to summon courage prior to battle. David Work said Meagher’s alcoholism impaired his ability to command troops in combat and provided evidence he should have been relieved. But fellow civil war historian Stephen Sears said reports of drunken officers in action were not uncommon. He quoted a Yankee soldier who said generals with whiskey courage were in every battle and “the officers who did not drink more or less were too scarce in the service.” Generals Ulysses Grant and Joe Hooker were also notoriously heavy drinkers but neither were Irish and therefore unlikely to be targets of residual Know Nothingism.

However Meagher’s problems with alcohol worsened after he left the Brigade. In August 1864 he was thrown out of General Gates’s quarters for continued drunkenness. Army provost marshal Marsena Patrick reported in his diary on August 18 that “Genl. Meagher is lying in the tent of the chaplain for the 20th as drunk as a beast, and has been so since Monday, sending out his servant for liquor and keeping his bed wet and filthy! I have directed Col. Gates to ship him tomorrow if he does not clear out.” In February 1865 Major Scott reported finding Meagher drunk and unable to issue orders or follow directions. “I saw him on board the steamer Ariel (and) I became convinced from his appearance, manner and conversation that he was too much under the influence of liquor to attend to duty,” Scott said. This damning evidence convinced Grant to sack Meagher.

Alcohol problems followed him to Montana. While William Chumasero’s comments in a letter that Meagher’s habits were “beastly and filthy in the extreme” were exaggerated to impress his brother-in-law Sanders, sheriff Neil Howie had no reason to life in his diary that the governor was “very drunk” with a party in his office where the brandy and wine flew and “the boys (were) nearly all drunk” during the Second Montana Territorial Legislature on March 5, 1866. Alcohol was part of Montana’s gold rush culture. Meagher famously ran up a $274 bar bill which included “seventy-four meals, nineteen bottles of wine, seven tumblers of cocktails, a dozen pitchers of beer, forty-four individual drinks, forty-three cigars, a bottle of whiskey, and a bowl of punch.” Elliott West argues Meagher used this liquor “to lubricate the machinery of government” in a territory where politicians gravitated to the bar-room and there was one saloon for every 80 people.

Libby helped in keeping her husband on the straight and narrow when she arrived in mid 1866 but she was not there for his final fateful journey. Storekeeper Baker testified Meagher had “got on a bender” on the way to Fort Benton and there was evidence that Meagher drank heavily on the day. When the news of Meagher’s death reached Helena two days later, James Fisk’s brother Andrew wrote in his diary about Meagher that he had been on a steamer to visit friends. “Got on a spree – went to bed – was heard to get up and go out – a splash was heard” and Meagher was seen no more. Fisk’s pithy conclusion was “Another victim of whiskey.”

Meagher’s grieving teetotal father had seen enough Irish victims of whiskey in his time. “I ask you,” Meagher senior said in 1847, “what greater crime can there be than drunkenness?” This was a rhetorical question. Meagher knew well there were greater crimes and his son narrowly avoided a death sentence for one barely a year later. But he also knew temperance was not in his son’s gregarious nature. The demon drink destroyed him in a way the British never could.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 96. The written word

This portrait of Meagher, taken after his arrival in America, appeared in Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland (1853). Photo: public domain

To those citizens of the Republic who are bound by no ties of birth to Ireland, yet are moved by a generous spirit of inquiry to explore the mystery of her misfortune, the following pages may to some extent explain the circumstances which preceded and provoked the attempt last made to free her, and the frustration of which has been thrown upon the shores and scattered through the cities of this great commonwealth, so many of her children – Thomas Francis Meagher, introduction to Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland, (1853)

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life is well documented in hundreds of speeches, pamphlets, letters, official reports and newspaper articles he wrote from the mid 1840s through to his death. His first publication was in 1847 when he edited Thomas Davis’s Letters of a Protestant on Repeal for the Irish Confederation. Meagher said his objective was to “cherish the memory” of the Young Ireland founder. Meagher showed the impact of his privileged upbringing on his political philosophy in his brief introduction, saying he wanted Ireland to achieve independence as a confederation of the aristocracy and democracy where “the social arrangement of the country would be less disturbed.” Meagher’s next publication Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland (1853) was a collection of his Irish speeches compiled for an American audience, “chiefly influenced by the desire of placing upon record, in a permanent form, the opinions that led me, through various changes of fortune and of climate, to this Republic.” From 1856 to 1860 Meagher wrote for the Irish News before showing a talent for descriptive travel writing with his Costa Rican adventures (1859 and 1861) and his later Rides Through Montana (1875). His newspaper articles from the Bull Run campaign were published as Last Days of the 69th in Virginia (1861) and his civil war letters to Dublin papers were published as Letters on our national struggle (1863). Many of his speeches through the 1850s and 1860s were captured for posterity by American and Irish newspapers. Yet Meagher never found the time to write his memoir and the task of biography was left to his friends after his death.

Two books about Meagher emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the year of his death. In Dublin, Meagher’s old school friend Patrick Smyth published The Life and Times of Thomas Francis Meagher. Despite the title, Smyth’s volume concentrated on Meagher’s time in Ireland as the book’s editor J.C. Waters acknowledged and mostly consists of long passages from Meagher’s speeches. Meagher’s long years out of Ireland are dealt with summarily by the statement that he was “no querulous craven” but was a “poet rebel” who took his fate “with all the heroism of an Irish patriot.” Smyth provides a rare glimpse of Meagher’s personality in the story of an incident after the Young Irelanders broke away from the Repeal movement in 1846. When a Repealer named Captain Broderick described Meagher in “offensive language” and then refused to meet Meagher or explain his behavior, Smyth accompanied Meagher to Westmoreland St in Dublin where they came face to face with Broderick. “Meagher instantly lifted his cane and struck Broderick across the shoulder,” Smyth wrote. Broderick called for the police and a magistrate bound the pair over to keep the peace for seven years. The incident hints at Meagher’s temper and his sensitivity to criticism, which re-emerged in his fights with newspaper editors in New York and Montana.

While Smyth was writing about Meagher’s life in Ireland, Tipperary man David Power Conyngham featured part of his American story in The Irish Brigade and its Campaigns, also published in 1867. Conyngham was a former Young Irelander and journalist who arrived in America at the start of the civil war armed with introductions from Smyth and Smith O’Brien. After writing up early battles for the Daily Herald, Meagher appointed Conyngham captain in the Brigade after the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Conyngham’s goal in the book was to rehabilitate the reputation of the Irish Brigade after the disaster of Fredericksburg and he brings a journalist’s eye to colorful accounts of the campaign. A modern historian said Conyngham and his later fellow Irish Brigade memoirists Father William Corby (1893) and the Pennsylvanian St Clair Mulholland (1903) emphasized the patriotism and courage of the Irish Brigade creating “a body of literature important to any consideration of how Americans remember the civil war.” They also contributed greatly to the memory of Meagher and all three men were big admirers. Conyngham called Meagher a war hero and he was “one of the old Irish princes of medieval times.” Corby also saw Meagher’s princely bearing and praised Meagher’s “high-toned sentiments and manners” while Mulholland saw him as “a handsome man, stately and courteous, with a wonderful flow of language and poetic ideas.”

The first attempt to synthetize Meagher’s Irish and American lives came in Captain W.F. Lyons’s Brigadier Thomas Francis Meagher: His Political and Military Career (1870). Lyons had known Meagher since his Young Ireland days and he wanted to carry out Meagher’s wish that his speeches be recorded in permanent form. The book is a valuable collection of Meagher’s views on Republican government and the American Union and also contained the first account of Meagher’s death. The book raised the ire of Catholic newspapers for publishing a Meagher speech where he stood “prepared to resist the temporal power of the pope.” The Catholic World said the speech contained, “doctrines mostly clearly condemned by the Catholic church” and they could not “recommend this book to the Catholic public, or consider it a worthy monument of Thomas Francis Meagher.” The World’s view was not shared by American publisher and politician John Weiss Forney who called the speech “exquisite” when he included it in his 1881 collection Anecdotes of Public Men. Forney believed Meagher’s mind was mirrored in his speeches. “In these you see the man better than in a biography,” Forney wrote. “You read the story of his boyhood and his manhood; his patriotism, his religion, his politics, and his prejudices.”

In 1892, Meagher’s Fenian friend from County Waterford, Michael Cavanagh, published Memoirs of Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher, Comprising the Leading Events of his Career. Cavanagh’s book played up the Fenian affiliations, recasting Meagher as a fervent nationalist dedicated to “national liberty” and a “soldier orator (who) always prided in being thoroughly Irish.” Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith also saw resemblances between the Young Irelanders and his own revolutionary organization in the lead-up to the Easter Rising. In 1913 Griffith published a preface to Mitchel’s Jail Journal where he wrote that “the haughty spirit of a great Irishman though baffled in its own generation may set the feet of our country in the way of triumph in the next.” Two years later he put Meagher to similar use in Meagher of the Sword: Speeches of Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland 1846-48. Griffith’s introduction presented Meagher as the national orator of the 19th century and his speeches were “the authentic eloquent voice” of Irish nationalism. “The Young Ireland movement had its philosophers, its poets, its statesmen, but without Meagher it would have been incomplete,” Griffith wrote. “In him it gave to Ireland the National Tribune.” Like the books of Smyth, Lyons and Cavanagh, it was mostly a collection of Meagher speeches, along with several of Meagher’s “personal recollections” from his Irish News days. 

The first critical biography of Meagher did not emerge not until a century after the Young Ireland revolution. Colorado academic Robert Athearn’s biography Thomas Francis Meagher: An Irish Revolutionary in America (1949) meticulously used unpublished documents, official archives and American newspapers to paint a picture of Meagher as “mercurial, ambitious and self seeking” whose career met disappointment at every turn. Athearn was unsympathetic but perceptively identified Meagher as like America itself, “young, enthusiastic, filled with optimism and willing to struggle for ends that seemed barely possible.

Athearn glossed over Meagher’s Irish past which he dismissed as a “youthful indiscretion” and his biography showed the difficulty of writing about someone who had lived in two radically different worlds – or four, if Tasmania and Montana are included. Young Ireland academic and Smith O’Brien’s great grandson Denis Gwynn returned to the Irish and Australian pieces of the puzzle in his 1961 O’Donnell lecture on Meagher noting newer work on Young Ireland such as his own history and T.J. Kiernan’s The Irish Exiles in Australia based on the unpublished letters of Kevin and Eva O’Doherty. Gwynn said Meagher’s claim to immortality lay not in his achievements but in his Irish speeches and in the “intense personal affection and devotion which his gay courage inspired in his contemporaries.” Gwynn quoted from O’Gorman’s eulogy that Meagher “gave all, lost all” for Ireland before doing the same in America as her “true and loyal soldier” who in the end, “died in her service.”

Australian author Thomas Keneally brought Meagher to life on three continents in his The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English Speaking World (1998). Keneally’s scope was vast covering Irish immigration to Australia and America throughout the nineteenth century scope but Meagher emerges as one of the two heroes of the book along with Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly, who would later laud Meagher in verse to anoint his own revolution.  

Interest in Meagher blossomed in the 21st century. In 2003 Montana college administrator Gary Forney wrote Thomas Francis Meagher: Irish Rebel, American Yankee, Montana Pioneer which attempted to do justice to the main phases of Meagher’s life. A longtime student of the civil war, Forney knew of Meagher’s involvement in the Irish Brigade but was not attracted to his story until he first saw Meagher’s statue in Helena. Forney called Meagher “a significant personality upon the stage of world events.” Forney helped provide a more comprehensive view on Meagher’s Montana life and half the book is dedicated to those last two years of his life.

Two years later an excellent Irish academic compilation came out covering all aspects of his life. Thomas Francis Meagher: The making of an Irish American (2005) was edited by Waterford-born John M. Hearne and English-born American-based Rory Cornish. Stimulated by Hearne’s visit to Montana to deliver a lecture on Meagher in 2003, it has solid academic contributions on his Newfoundland background, his father, his friendship with Mitchel and his days in Young Ireland, Australia, New York, the civil war and Montana. There is also a short but powerful foreword from another Waterford academic Roy Foster which painted Meagher as a hero of a Berlioz opera, whose “headlong life, combined the themes of youth, idealism, conflict with a powerful father, failed revolution, transportation to and escape from an exotic location, impulsive marriage, exile and war, and the climax comes with a sudden and mysterious death.” In the key chapter on his “Meagher of the Sword” days, John Hearne painted Meagher as a “reluctant revolutionary” who was fully aware of the privileges of his status but was propelled forward by “the obligations of leadership and honor.”

In 2007 another biography emerged from Montana, Paul Wylie’s The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher. Lawyer Wylie’s painstaking use of official documents, letters and telegrams sheds a great deal of light on Meagher’s American life, especially during his civil war days and his time in Montana. Wylie noted his problems with alcohol and his mysterious death but said it was “Meagher’s great courage, brilliant oratory, widespread influence and world renown that should dominate the memory of the man.”

The dramatic aspects of Meagher’s story are accentuated in the most recent biography, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by New York Times (2016) columnist Timothy Egan. Egan does not add much original research but he brings his Pulitzer Prize winning skills to bring the lively story of the “dashing young orator” to a wider audience, claiming “his life is the story of Ireland.” While Roy Foster thought Meagher’s story was operatic, Egan’s tale was more cinematic. Within a year Hollywood actor and producer John Cusack announced he was “shooting a major film on the life of Thomas Francis Meagher” based on Egan’s book. The project has yet to see the light of day. Perhaps in these post-COVID times, Meagher’s life would work well as an HBO or Netflix mini-series.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 95. Irish graves

The grave of Thomas Meagher at Glasnevin cemetery. Almost directly behind is O’Connell Tower which houses the body of Meagher senior’s hero Daniel O’Connell. Photo: Author’s collection

Heaven’s thronged with gay and careless faces,

New-waked from dreams of dreadful things,

Katharine Tynan “Flower of Youth” (1915)

Unlike his old comrade Meagher, John Mitchel lived long enough to see his native Ireland again. After he was arrested in June 1865, Mitchel spent four months in jail at Fort Monroe with Jefferson Davis. Conditions were harsh and Mitchel aged noticeably, becoming stooped and looking haggard beyond his 50 years. After Irish-Americans including O’Gorman and O’Mahony complained to authorities, Mitchel was released and moved to France where the Fenians appointed him financial agent. However he quarreled with leader James Stephens who regarded Mitchel as a “disgruntled egoist and man of the past.” Mitchel’s final loss of faith in the Fenians came after their failed raid into Canada in 1866 and he resigned as financial officer of the Irish Republican Brotherhood on June 12 and returned to America. “One cannot live forever astride upon the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, though his transatlantic wandering was not finished.

Based in Richmond, Mitchel wrote his influential History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick. He then moved to New York in 1867 where he founded another newspaper the Irish Citizen which printed the sentimental reminiscences of Thomas Francis Meagher after his death. Mitchel wrote that no-one knew or loved Meagher better than he did. “Alas! For seven years before his death we had not met, nor held any communication,” Mitchel wrote. “Wide oceans flowed between us – sometimes a sea of water, sometimes a sea of blood. Yet now that he is gone, the blank he left in the existence of everyone who intimately knew him and shared his wonderful life, is deep and wide, and his friends and enemies (and both were ardent) miss him alike.” Mitchel continued to defend the South calling emancipation “a monstrous crime” and he dismissed accounts of Ku Klux Klan violence as fabrications. He told Martin he had supported Fenian principles for 20 years, however the current organization was “established upon a wrong and false basis by that wretched Stephens.” Mitchel was no happier with the new Irish Home Rule movement established in 1870 calling its founder Isaac Butt a “humbug.” As Keneally wrote, Mitchel had not lost the old gift to offend both sides of the argument.

Mitchel’s health declined in 1873 and, unable to write, he fell into poverty. John and William Dillon, sons of Nation founder John Blake Dillon who died a year before Meagher, raised a testimonial in his honor. Mitchel drew closer to the young Dillons and back to Irish politics. Under their influence he ran for the seat of Cork in 1874 but finished bottom of the poll. Undeterred he decided to return to Ireland, accompanied by daughter Isabel, to run again in person. Authorities decided against arresting the undischarged felon, since his term had expired and transportation was abolished, but they kept a close watch on him. Though Martin had married Mitchel’s sister, Mitchel refused to stay with his old friend over his hatred of Home Rule. However he did accept a dinner invite from Lady Wilde, erstwhile Young Irelander “Speranza.” With his health worsening, Mitchel went back to America in October, but returned to Ireland three months later, this time with son James, when he heard a parliamentary vacancy had arisen in Tipperary.

Martin endorsed his candidacy saying “national dignity” would not suffer if Mitchel got in. When Mitchel arrived in Queenstown in February, he found he was already elected. Nominations closed a day earlier and Mitchel was the only candidate. When parliament declared him ineligible, Mitchel said he would run again. He spoke to great cheers in Clonmel, but by now was dying, with only his “indomitable will” keeping him going. On March 11, 1875, he was re-elected, defeating a Tory candidate. Mitchel put his victory down to the fact he “had made no peace with England.” Mitchel died nine days later at his childhood home at Newry. John Martin, also seriously ill, attended the funeral before following his lifelong friend to the grave a week later.

Mitchel’s influence on Ireland was muted in life but his works took on new meaning in death. His contention that the Famine was deliberate genocide helped revive Irish military nationalism in the 20th century. Easter Rising leader Patrick Pearse hailed Mitchel as a nationalist hero with almost religious fervor, as someone who had delivered “God’s word to man.” Fellow nationalist Arthur Griffith named his newspaper the United Irishman in Mitchel’s honor, saying he was a “proud, fiery-hearted, electric-brained, giant-souled Irishman” who stood up to the might of the British Empire. Griffith was particularly important in reassessing the reputations of Mitchel, Meagher and Doheny writing prefaces for the Jail Journal, Meagher of the Sword and The Felon’s Track.

But the reputation of Mitchel and Meagher and the other Young Irelanders suffered after the Irish war of independence. Writing in 1968, Young Ireland historian Richard Davis said the movement was little more than a link in the chain of nationalist ideology and its “legacy of chauvinist verse, bombastic rhetoric and intellectual soul-searching” held little appeal. As one modern scholar notes, Mitchel in particular, “with his overblown romantic nationalism, his bitter hatred of Britain, his support for the institution of slavery, his antisemitism and hostility to parliamentary democracy” is an embarrassment for modern Ireland. Mitchel’s 2008 biographer acknowledges there is much to deplore in Mitchel’s views but he “cannot be ignored.”

Meagher’s ideas on slavery were less deplorable than Mitchel but were still rooted in his 19th century mindset. His reputation in Ireland remains based on his contribution to the Irish flag, an idea inspired by Mitchel. In his Sword preface, Griffith admitted Meagher was not on the same plane as Mitchel “in strength of intellect and character.” Meagher, however, “was the most picturesque and gallant figure of Young Ireland.”

In America Meagher’s name was kept alive through his association with the Irish Brigade as president Kennedy noted when he came to Ireland in 1963, but for many years there was a marked reluctance to celebrate Meagher’s legacy in his homeland. The Glasnevin grave of his father is neglected and overgrown but at least Thomas Meagher senior was buried within view of his beloved O’Connell. His son’s ghost had no such solace. There was talk of a Meagher monument in Waterford as early as 1868 but nothing came of it. Although he was honored in Helena in 1905, it took almost a century for his home town to reciprocate.

In 2004, Waterford City Council announced it would install a new equestrian statue of Meagher to form “a stunning centerpiece” to the entrance of the Mall opposite Reginald’s Tower in a site then occupied by a statue of 17th century Waterford-born Franciscan friar Luke Wadding for nearly 50 years. As ever, there was controversy with Meagher, with a Waterford radio station finding 96 percent support for the Wadding statue to remain in place while a petition to keep him there attracted 1500 signatures. But the Jesuits won this battle over the Franciscans by 12 council votes to three and Wadding moved to an appropriate new home near Waterford’s 12th century Franciscan church.

On May 12, 2004, sculptor Catherine Green’s statue of Meagher, funded by the Irish Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, was lifted into place on the Mall to mark a meeting of European environment ministers in Waterford. Like the Helena original, Greene’s monument shows a mounted Meagher holding a sword aloft. Meagher was finally riding high in his home town, just across the road from the building where his Confederate club saluted the French revolution in 1848.  

Making up for lost time, Waterford granted Meagher a second honour a few years later. A new cable-stayed bridge opened over the Suir in 2009, the largest in Ireland until overtaken by a 2020 bridge in nearby New Ross named appropriately for Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. In 2015 Irish president Michael D. Higgins officially named the Waterford bridge in Meagher’s honour, saying few Irish patriots have appealed so warmly to the popular imagination in their own time as has Thomas Francis Meagher in the mid-19th century. “Eloquent, generous, passionate, courageous and handsome; in turn orator, journalist, lawyer, revolutionary, convict, soldier in the American civil war and Acting Governor of Montana,” Higgins said. “There is a picturesque, almost literary, quality to Meagher’s personality and life, which continues to capture our imagination.” It still captures American imagination too. In 2017, the 150th anniversary of Meagher’s death, the Montana Order of Hibernians put up a plaque to him in front of Baker’s store at Fort Benton, Montana. “A few yards from here, Meagher met his mysterious Fate on July 1, 1867,” the plaque says. The curious spelling may be accidental but if ever a mysterious “Fate” deserved to be capitalized it was Meagher’s.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 94. Manifest Destiny

American flags flutter outside the Washington Memorial, Washington DC. Photo: Author’s collection

Sail On! Sail On! O Ship of State
Sail on O UNION strong and great
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Building of the Ship” (1849)

Visiting America from France in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the restless energy of Americans and their apparent lack of attachment to place. “No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult,” de Tocqueville wrote. “All around you, everything is on the move.” From the Louisiana Purchase onward, much of that 19th century movement was westward and American freedom was linked with availability of land in the west. In 1843 Jacksonian politician George Bancroft began his history of the United States not with the revolution of 1776 but with Columbus’s voyage of 1492, a longer timeframe with which he hoped “to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable.” The spread of evangelical Christianity, new technology and American-style democracy convinced Bancroft that the United States was bound by God to carry these improvements across the continent.

Irish-born New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan argued that democracy was “Christianity in its earthly aspect” and he first used the phrase “manifest destiny” to mean the United States had a divinely appointed mission to occupy all of North America. Americans, said O’Sullivan in 1845, had a far better title to western lands than any international treaty, right of discovery, or long-term settlement could provide and the people of the United States were fated to “possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the great experiment of liberty.” Native Americans in the West were either irrelevant, or needed to be civilized.

In the decades leading up to the civil war, 300,000 settlers headed west to Oregon and California. Inspired by expansionist fever most Americans supported the war against Mexico in 1846 (Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau among the few notable voices of objection) after which one million square miles of California, New Mexico and Texas joined the Union. The discovery of gold in California took the clash of Free Soilers and Slavery across the continent and laid the foundation for the civil war. As future Secretary of State William Seward put it, America was destined to “roll its resistless waves to the icy barrier of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”

As America came to grips with the sectional crisis in the 1850s caused by its vast new territories, expansionist fever waned. Thomas Francis Meagher was a willing and eager recruit for the cause of manifest destiny from the time he was first invited to California in 1854. With no safe overland way across the continent, Meagher took a ship to Central America and crossed the narrow isthmus before taking another ship up to California. Meagher went from New York to San Juan Del Norte 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 carried thousands each month from Greytown to the Pacific coast. 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. Meagher was concerned Britain would annex Central America and believed America needed to get in first to secure the route between east and west coast states.

Meagher’s Irish News quoted with approval an 1856 piece in the Nation which described manifest destiny as “legitimate annexation” and meant “England must yield every inch of territory she has unjustly gained and every pretense of authority she has presumed to put forward in Central America.” Meagher supported Walker’s filibustering regime in Nicaragua, and defended Walker and his lieutenants in American courts in 1857. When Meagher made his first trip to Costa Rica in 1858, he promoted Costa Rica’s climate and landscape which he thought potential immigrants would find comfortingly similar. “English wheat and clover, the Irish potato, the American pumpkin, peaches, apples, plums, quinces and strawberries” all found “the most encouraging nurture” in Costa Rica, he wrote. His visit amounted to little except for rowdy sessions in the mountains where they “ate, drank, talked preposterous politics, shouted the Marseillaise, spread ourselves on Manifest Destiny and ox hides, smoked, drank again, and finally fell off to sleep.” His two later visits were more openly political, first delivering state papers to the US minister and then acting as an agent for Andrew Thompson’s planned railway through Chiraqui, which again was a failure.

After the civil war Meagher once again promoted Manifest Destiny, this time looking westward. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act which allowed citizens to acquire parcels of undeveloped land of up to 160 acres free of charge after improving and living on the land for five years, and in the decades that followed the war, millions of predominantly white homesteaders claimed land across western America. Arriving in Saint Paul, Meagher told locals he was there to “improve his condition” and set an example to returning soldiers for whom “the untapped resources across the Mississippi” would give them a more satisfactory life.

Meagher and other settlers failed to take into account those who had already tapped those resources. Steeped in notions of racial superiority and the John Locke philosophy that property in land derived from agricultural improvement, American authorities did little to prevent the mass displacement of Native peoples that followed. Indian tribes had been forcibly ejected from the eastern states and now the discovery of gold was making life difficult in the west. Nineteenth century American politicians, Lincoln included, had no idea how to stop the extermination. According to Dee Brown, Manifest Destiny was invented to justify breaches of the Indian frontier, “a term which lifted land hunger to a lofty plane.” America’s Irish population were also unable to imagine the parallels with their own country. The Boston Pilot saw the Indian wars as a “struggle between civilization and barbarism that has agitated the world forever” while Meagher told an Irish-American audience America’s colonial history was a time “when it was a prey to the Indians.”

Meagher had misgivings about the fairness of the 1865 Fort Benton Treaty but he believed it was the Indians who reneged on the treaty not the whites. In his message to the first 1866 Montana legislature he referred to Indian “rascalities and crimes—the robberies and murders” which showed a “costly and wasteful policy with which it was believed in Washington the Indians could be tamed and subsidized,” while the whites at Fort Benton were “harassed and hemmed by these savages.” After the Fetterman Massacre later that year, settler paranoia about Indian “depredations” increased. Sherman told Grant “both races cannot use this country in common and one or the other must withdraw.” While Sherman was annoyed by frontier whites outrunning his efforts to force Native peoples onto reservations, his conclusion was the process of dispossession needed to be hastened. Sherman was no fan of Meagher but he reluctantly agreed to provide the rifles to him to help him force that withdrawal. But the delivery of these guns led to Meagher’s own death, the Irishman becoming a victim of his own stampede.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 93. Seven Generals

This civil war era portrait of Meagher accompanied his Rides Through Montana article in Harper’s Monthly published after his death in 1867.

In mid 1863 a small column started appearing in one of America’s leading Irish newspapers, the Boston Pilot, which nowadays would be called “in-house advertising.” In the column, editor Patrick Donahoe offered the paper’s 100,000 subscribers the chance to buy card photographs for 15c each at the Pilot bookshop or mailed out for 20c each. The cards would have been placed on walls or mantlepieces and featured Catholic iconography such as the crucifixion, the Mater Dolorosa, Madonna Guido and St Cecilia. and religious figures of the day such as Pope Pius IX, Bordeaux’s Cardinal Cheverus, New York’s Archbishop Hughes, and Boston’s Bishop Fitzpatrick. Those who wanted “any number of religious subjects” could, the ad stated, address the editor who would then “make a judicious selection for them”.

Also available to buy on a card was Daniel O’Connell, and though hardly a “religious subject” his was a name no one would object to as the holiest of Irish Catholic heroes. Also on the list was Thomas Francis Meagher, sandwiched between a Rev. Fr. Wiget and the Infant Redeemer. Readers could also buy card photographs for fellow Catholic generals Rosecrans, Shields and Corcoran and two Irish-American colonels James Mulligan and Thomas Cass. No one seemed to bat an eyelid at the appearance of the man of the sword and the other martial figures on the list of religious subjects and the list says much about how they were revered in Irish America, despite the first list appearing barely a month after the New York draft riots.

The ads must have been profitable for the Pilot as continued regularly until after the end of the war, the final ads appearing November 17, 1866. By then the selection was broken up into categories. Religion was still well represented with the pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, saints and religious iconography and churches in Boston. Daniel O’Connell was still there, alongside Napoleon III as “prominent men” while a military contingent also survived, in a list now whittled down to seven generals: McClellan, Meade, Rosecrans, Corcoran, Lee, Shields and Meagher.

The list is illuminating as much as for whom it excludes as includes. None of the three northern heroes of the war feature in it: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and William Sherman. The three men were among the few who best understood the south could only be defeated by total war and their cold-hearted and competent commitment to it would pave the way for even bloodier 20th century war. None had any political sympathies towards the Irish, as seen in their attitudes to Meagher. Lincoln treated Meagher with importance and respect as a leading Irishman but failed to action his requests to get his beloved Brigade back to New York. Sherman’s antipathy to Meagher dates back to Bull Run and continued in Tennessee and Montana. Grant sacked Meagher from the army and along with Sherman refused calls for help in Montana. Lincoln, Grant and Sherman were cold-blooded in pursuit of their goals and not even the assassinated president, would be likely to end up as heroic card photographs in Irish American homes.

In contrast George B. McClellan continued to be a drawcard, though a military and political failure and a Calvinist in religion. Appointed as chief of the Army of the Potomac after the disaster of First Bull Run in 1861, McClellan created an army “out of a mass of disorganised elements” for which his men, the Irish Brigade included, gave him undying affection. After his first sacking at the end of the Seven Days Battle his men believed he was “sacrificed at the shrine of politics” and when Lincoln sacked him again after Antietam, Meagher called it a “notorious and criminal” action “which the army of the Union will never forgive.” Yet Meagher did not support his old Democrat friend in the 1864 presidential election, despite his brother-in-law Barlow acting as McClellan’s campaign manager. Neither did the army, which voted three to one in favour of Lincoln. Yet McClellan continued to inspire reverence in the Irish community and in late 1864 Meagher got great cheers as he described McClellan as “highly cultivated, refined in manner as in mind, deeply imbued with a reverence for all that is virtuous, wise and heroic in the history of the republic, proud of his nationality and sensitively jealous of the honor of his country.”

The second man in the list, George Meade, was an Irish-American Catholic who suffered discrimination at the hands of Know Nothings. Old Snapping Turtle had fought with Meagher at Antietam and other battles and he was the hero of Gettysburg, the battle that turned the tide of the war in the north’s favour. After that battle the Pilot hailed the “superb generalship” of “the grandson of a naturalized Catholic emigrant from Ireland.” The next man on the list, William Rosecrans, had won battles in the west before a disastrous defeat at Chickamauga, which had the second worst Civil War casualty list behind Gettysburg. Rosecrans was born a Dutch Protestant, but earned his place in the Pilot’s affection by converting to Catholicism in 1847 while in the engineer corps at West Point.

Michael Corcoran was a personal friend and rival to Meagher having led the New York 69th Regiment which led to the Irish Brigade and then led his own Corcoran Legion until his death in 1863, unwittingly caused by Meagher’s horse. General James Shields was another Irish-born Catholic general and American politician who provided the template for Meagher’s career and was in many ways his American mentor. Finally there was Robert E. Lee, neither Catholic, Irish, nor Union nor was he known personally by Meagher. However his heroic war exploits were admired by both sides and as he revealed to George Pepper after the war, he admired the fighting spirit of the Irish Brigade.

What of the “gallant Meagher” himself and his own chequered war record? Pro-southern Kelly O’Grady is damning in his assessment calling Meagher’s war record undistinguished. Acknowledging that Meagher was charismatic O’Grady says his army career was as tragic as his brigade’s destruction at Fredericksburg and his conduct was whitewashed by contemporaries. “Meagher was allowed to avoid the hottest fire of battle,” he wrote. “Meagher’s continuance as senior field commander, however, unnecessarily endangered the lives of his men.” Meagher lacked military training and his impetuous decision-making was occasionally suspect, however his mistakes were nothing compared to the monumental blunders of his West Point superiors McClellan, Burnside and Hooker. His immediate superiors such as Sumner, Hancock and Steedman all respected Meagher. His men respected him as the founder of the Brigade, and he inspired great loyalty in its members. He led by example, “sharing with the humblest soldier freely and heartily all the hardships and dangers of the battle-field (and) never having ordered an advance that I did not take the lead myself.” Brigade Captain David Power Conyngham found him caustic and cutting against enemies but genial and flowing to friends, “full of buoyant vivacity, wit, humour and historical lore.” These were Irish qualities guaranteed to appeal to Donahoe’s Irish American subscribers who reverentially placed his card photograph next to O’Connell and the pope.

Thomas Francis Meagher’s life in 100 objects 92. The Helena monument

The statue of Thomas Francis Meagher outside the Helena capitol building. Photo: Author’s collection

The people of Montana appreciated that there was somebody in government looking out for them – Mike O’Connor (Helena Ancient Order of Hibernians), interview about Thomas Francis Meagher (2022)

After the excitement of the Meagher era, Green Clay Smith tried to forge a quieter path between Montana’s feuding Republicans and Democrats. On July 14, 1867 he issued an order which disbanded most of the militia raised to fight the Indians. In November he called the fourth legislature which promptly restored all the laws that Congress voided in the second and third legislatures. That Democrat-dominated legislature also passed motions declaring Judges Munson and Hosmer incompetent and demanded their resignations. Smith went back east in 1869 and ran for president in 1876 as a candidate for the Prohibition party. The party’s time had not yet come and Smith attracted just 6945 votes.

Meagher’s old enemy Wilbur Fisk Sanders stayed on as Montana leading Republican. He was consistently defeated in elections for territorial delegate. After Montana was finally admitted as the 41st state in 1889, Sanders was elected one of the new state’s first two senators in a controversial election and served only three years.

Thomas Francis Meagher did not live to see the long-awaited Irish influx to Montana. The town of Butte began 70 miles north-west of Virginia City in the late 1800s as a gold and silver mining camp. At the turn of the century, the development of electricity and the industrialization of America resulted in a massive copper boom, and Butte flourished. As copper mining ramped up and the city grew, it attracted workers from all over the globe, including from Waterford’s own closed-down copper mines.

One of Butte’s “three copper kings” was Irishman Marcus Daly who worked his way up from the mines of Virginia City to establish the Anaconda copper mine in Butte. Thousands of Irish flocked to the city to work for him and by 1900 a quarter of its population was Irish. They took Daly’s side in a two year “wild capital fight” as he fought to site the new state capital at Anaconda near Butte. The other choice was Helena, which had become Montana’s largest town since its goldrush at Last Chance Gulch in 1864. Fellow copper king and Protestant mason William Clark supported Helena. Daly lost that battle after a close vote in 1894, but the Irish got revenge a decade later.

Montana Irish-descendent Congressman Martin Maginnis had first called for a statue of Meagher in 1869. Now in 1898, Irish miners founded a Meagher Monument Committee with Daly serving as honorary chair. They accepted donations from everyone with the pointed exception of Wilbur Fisk Sanders. Andrew O’Connell donated $25 for which he received a certificate of membership to the “Thomas Francis Meagher Memorial Association.” After seven years the committee had raised $20,000, enough to put up a monument outside the state capitol, for which there was no objection.

On July 4, 1905, huge crowds packed the lawns outside the handsome state house in Helena for the unveiling of the monument. Elizabeth Meagher was invited to the opening but she was too frail to travel. Her husband was mounted, sword raised and facing north, as if to ward off British Canada. Irish-born Chicago sculptor Charles J. Mulligan designed the monument as a tribute to Montana’s Irish. Plaques around the base of the monument tell the story of this Meagher of the Sword as an Irish rebel, a civil war hero, a governor, a Catholic and Democrat, erected in his memory “by his friends and admirers in America.”

One plaque outlines his early years as an “Irish patriot and orator” born in Waterford in 1823; sent to Paris in 1848 by the Irish Confederation to congratulate the French on their revolution, indicted and tried at Clonmel for his “participation in the Irish insurrectionary movement” before being sentenced to death and commuted to life in Van Diemen’s Land. 

A second plaque remembers Meagher as an American soldier and statesman, and as a Brigadier General in the United States Army who “raised and organized the Irish Brigade in the Battles of Fair Oak, Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, White Oak Swamp, Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Antietam and Chancellorsville” then was appointed “to the command of the Etowah district as acting major general in November 1864” before becoming “Acting governor of Montana from September 1865 to July 1, 1867 when he was drowned in the Missouri River at Fort Benton, Montana.” 

A third plaque has two Meagher quotes from the 1860s. The first quote is from his 1861 civil war recruitment speech at Jones Wood in New York. “My heart, my arm, my life are pledged to the national cause and to the last it shall be my highest pride as I conceive it to be my holiest duty and obligation to share its fortunes.” The second is from his St Patrick’s Day 1866 address in Virginia City, Montana. “The true American knows, feels and with enthusiasm declares that of all the human emotions, of all the human passions, there is not one more pure, more noble, more conducive to good and great and glorious deeds than that which bears us back to the spot that was the cradle of our childhood, the playground of our boyhood, the theater of our manhood.” The first quotes show Meagher as a passionate advocate of his adopted country while the second shows that advocacy was based on his love of Ireland.

The fourth plaque quotes his speech after Mitchel’s transportation in 1848: “To the end I see the path I have been ordained to walk, and upon the grave which closes in that path, I can read no coward’s epitaph.” The plaque has a second unattributed quote from O’Gorman’s eulogy when he declared that both in Ireland and America, Meagher invited no man to danger he was not ready to share. “Never forget this,” O’Gorman continued. “He gave all, he lost all for the land of his birth. He risked all for the land of his adoption, was her true and loyal soldier and in the end died in her service.”

Together the plaques read as an antidote to Meagher’s failures, especially in Montana. Mike O’Connor, the head of the Helena Chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, said in 2022 that Meagher was fighting for freedom for all his fellow territorians. “Not just a political party, but all of Montana,” O’Connor said. “Meagher had a lot of enemies, but he was willing to talk to them.”

Those enemies seemed willing enough to allow the acting governor his moment of immortality. Like Libby, Wilbur Sanders was too ill to attend and he died three days later. Though he was never elected again after his brief Senate stint he remained an active force in Republican politics and the legal profession. Sanders was the founder of the Montana Historical Society and one of the most important early histories of Montana was the 1913 three volume A History of Montana, written by Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, Wilbur’s daughter-in-law. Helen Sanders supported her father-in-law’s efforts to overturn Meagher’s second and third legislatures and uncritically repeated his account of the day of Meagher’s death while dismissing rumors of foul play as “purely hearsay.” She also quotes the elder Sanders who said there was no ill-feeling among the vigilantes after Meagher’s “so-called” pardon of Daniels. “I would naturally have heard of it had there been (a quarrel), for I was close to those men at that time, although not a member of the organization.” 

Those judging Meagher’s legacy in Montana negatively point out his impetuous decision-making and his tendency to “stampede” to deal with the Native American threat, though he was far from alone in thinking the Indians stood in the way of the march of white civilisation. Twentieth century Montana historians Malone, Roeder and Lang say Meagher’s role in Montana’s history was “less than constructive,” his Indian campaign was “bogus” and he was “overwhelmed and destroyed by Montana territorial politics.” Hamilton calls him “the most remarkable character connected with the territorial history of Montana” while Burlingame said Meagher “reaped the whirlwind.” He oversaw one of Montana’s most chaotic periods but his predecessor Edgerton left a mess that would have been impossible for almost anyone to resolve. Early Montana historian Michael Leeson acknowledges that Meagher was “in reality” Montana’s first governor. Meagher had, as his mourners said in 1867, tried to make the territory a better place to live. The Irishman had earned his statue.

On the 150th anniversary of Meagher’s death in 2017, the Montana Order of Hibernians put up a new plaque in his honor in front of Baker’s store at Fort Benton. “A few yards from here, Meagher met his mysterious Fate on July 1, 1867,” the plaque says. The curious spelling may be accidental but if ever a mysterious “Fate” deserved to be capitalized it was Meagher’s.