Irish Week

“The Immortal Irishman – The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero,” by Timothy Egan, 2016

There is a whole pantheon of Irish revolutionaries, given the long occupation of southern Ireland by the British, which only ended less than a 100 years ago.  Connolly, Pearse, de Valera, Parnell, O’Brien, Larkin, Casement, Clarke, Emmet, Collins and O’Connell are some of the most prominent.  Let’s add one. 

Thomas Meagher, who is of particular interest to people in the U.S.  He was part of the “Young Ireland” movement that challenged Daniel O’Connell for leadership of the Irish national struggle.  O’Connell had helped win the right to practice Catholicism in Ireland in the early 1800s from the British colonialists.  Prior to that Irish Catholicism had been against British colonial law.  O’Connell, the “Liberator,” had then been elected as a member of the English parliament and had become partly integrated into English rule in Ireland and elsewhere.  While attempting to repeal the bond between the two countries, O’Connell’s supporters had become corrupt and close to their English overseers.  The men and women of the Young Irelanders advocated a continuing independence struggle, up to and including revolutionary action, and so clashed with O’Connell. 

Buying off the top strata of an oppressed country or group is standard practice among colonial, imperial or capitalist rulers.  It was at work here as well, in the taming of a wing of the independence movement.

Meagher was from an upper-crust Irish family, sent to school in England, but had become an excellent orator at a young age.  He was like others in the Young Ireland movement – poets, writers, journalists and intellectuals.  They represented a wing of the upper class that still wanted to kick out the British completely, and were supported by thousands of peasants and some workers as well.  Thousands had signed up to rise against the British. 

In 1847 (“Black ‘47”) the Irish famine hit and conditions in Ireland became intolerable. The potato crop was the basis of most Irish families’ food, 2/3^rd of the population.  The potato blight followed for 5 years and 1 million Irish people starved to death, while another 2 million began to emigrate.  This was out of a total population of 8 million.  In 1925 at the time of national independence, 4 million were left.  Since Irish farmers had no money, evictions became commonplace and ‘lucky’ people ended up in work or poor houses.  The British during this whole period rejected providing free food because it would threaten the sacred free market system which commodifies food.  It can only be bought ‘for a price.’  Remember, the Irish were supposedly ‘citizens’ of the United Kingdom at this time. Instead the English gentry and businessmen continued to export massive quantities of Irish agricultural products like corn, wheat, rye, meat, fish, butter, milk and vegetables from Ireland to England.  By doing this, the English ruling class actually helped starve the Irish people in a holocaust that has not been forgotten. 

Meagher gave speeches in Dublin and all over the country against this tyranny.  In 1848 Meagher designed the present tricolor flag of Ireland.  Ultimately he and others were forced to call for a rising against these conditions.  Yet these were intellectuals - and warfare was not in their skill-set. While many thousands of farmers were ready, they had no adequate weapons or organization of any consequence.  After a somewhat pathetic military attack on some police in Ballingarry, the leaders were arrested for sedition and condemned to die, but then their sentences were commuted.  Most were transported to Tasmania, an island prison colony south of Australia.  Meagher became an exile there, similar to the exile faced by Russian revolutionaries. 

At first Meagher tried to adapt to Tasmania – marrying a young frail woman, trying to start a family, farming and riding.  But after another exile escaped, he too decided to plan an escape with help from supporters in Ireland and the U.S.  He could not waste away on this lonely bit of land.  He could not return to Ireland, so he planned on heading to the U.S.  He escaped on a tiny boat, was marooned on a small island, and barely caught the ship that was to take him to the U.S.  In 1852, he landed in California and made his way to New York, where he was greeted as a hero.  Meagher gave speeches all over the country and even had an audience with the U.S. president. 
 

Meagher In Montana

At this time the U.S. was in the midst of the early crisis over slavery that led up to the U.S. Civil War.  Unlike the image of the ‘radical’ Irishman, most Irish people were not revolutionaries or abolitionist.  While many later joined the Union Army, many in New York later protested the draft for class reasons, but also attacked and killed freedmen.  One of Meagher’s best friends from the Young Irelanders, John Mitchel, became a virulent slaver.  Meagher himself did not call for an end to slavery, and stayed silent as it was legal in the U.S. at the time.   

When the Confederacy seceded and then fired on Fort Sumter, Meagher came out for the Union and began raising troops for the legendary Irish Brigade, the ‘fighting ‘69th.’  Later he supported Lincoln and came out against slavery, for which he was much reviled by the Irish right.  He became the Brigade’s leader, a brigadier general appointed by Lincoln, and heroically led his troops into battle on horseback – no longer only a man of words.  Because the Brigade was made up of long-reviled Irishmen, it was looked down on as a bunch of lazy uncontrollable farm boys by the press and the Army.  But at the battles of First Bull Run, the 7 Days, Chancellorsville and the bloody hell of Fredericksburg, they proved to be one of the best, if not the best unit in the Federal Army. 

Meagher hoped that these Irish men trained in military tactics could take the skills and use them back in Ireland in a military confrontation with the English occupiers when the war was over.  But after General Burnsides’ incredible incompetence at Fredericksburg, Meagher could no longer stomach Union generals and resigned from the Army.  He took his second wife, a former scion of East Coast money, and moved to Montana.  He had given up trying to launch a military revolt in Ireland as a Fenian, especially after a failed Fenian attack from the U.S. on British Canada in 1866. 

In Montana he had been appointed the acting governor by President Johnson, residing in Virginia City in a crude cabin.  He recruited Irish settlers to leave the big cities and start to farm and ranch in Montana, or become miners.  He fought corruption, attempted to incorporate Montana as a state and opposed the bloody reign of terror of a group of Protestant and Republican businessmen and ranchers.  For this he was assassinated, pushed into the Missouri river off of a steamboat by a hired thug in 1867.  Meagher’s statue now stands in front of the Montana State Capital, along with a memorial in Fort Benton, as reminders of the Irish revolutionary who also became one of the best opponents of slavery in the U.S.

The book is a well-written novelistic history and shows the connection between the national liberation struggle in Ireland and the fight against chattel slavery in the U.S.  It also shows that some people can’t connect different kinds of oppression for the life of them.  In all, lessons for the present.

Other reviews on this topic – use these search terms:  James Connolly, Abortion Referendum, Jimmy’s Hall, The Dream of the Celt.  Also many book and film reviews on the U.S. Civil War.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I got it in the Library!

Red Frog

June 3, 2018