Member Review The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2016) 389 pages $28.00 Hardcover, $9.99 Kindle.

Timothy Egan, the New York Times columnist, is one of the most accomplished nonfiction writers alive. He has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines and he is the author of seven books. His three year old book, The Immortal Irishman, may be his finest work yet. I see it has popped up to the top of Amazon's chart for Best Selling Civil War book and I am guessing that will happen every March for a while.

Egan uses the life of Thomas Francis Meagher to tell the story of Irish immigration to the United States during the Civil War Era. Meagher was a revolutionist, a romantic liberal dreamer and poet, a heroic fugitive from the world’s most powerful empire, and a Union general in the Civil War. His life spanned three continents and his travels, compelled and compelling, covered thousands of miles in an age of slow moving sailing ships.

Note: This review will be posted in several installments.
 
Part 2:

Thomas Francis Meagher was born into this most distressful country, but he had unique advantages. His father had emigrated to Canada, made a fortune there, and reimmigrated to Ireland. The elder Meagher was among the richest of the Catholics in Ireland. At the time of Meagher’s father’s return to Ireland, the British were under intense pressure to end the disenfranchisement of the Irish and to allow for their education. Meagher was part of the first generation to be able to take advantage of these changes.

Thomas Francis Meagher studied abroad and returned to Ireland with a fine hand for writing. He joined a circle of young Irish men and women who advocated for liberal changes in their land, decolonization of Ireland, and greater equality. Meagher also fell into an intellectual romance with the poet who would later give birth to Oscar Wilde.
 
Part 3:


The potato blight of the mid-1840s turned the reformers into revolutionists. Because most of what the Irish produced went to their English overlords, the Irish relied on growing calorie rich potatoes for their own food. Successive years of blight left blacked potatoes rotting in the fields. The blight killed the potato, said the Irish, but the British caused the Famine. Egan describes the chilling economy of the Famine:

here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported…Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.2

The British lord that Queen Victoria appointed to oversee the Irish during the Famine wrote that “It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food,” a policy that threatened the extinction of the Irish. He believed in free trade, even if it meant shipping food out of a starving country. He described the mass deaths of Irish, who were starving a rate of 5,000 per week, as “an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” An English Quaker reported on how effectively the British program was working. He described the Irish peasantry as “walking skeletons, the men stamped with the livid mark of hunger, the children crying with pain, the women too weak to stand.” Ireland would see a quarter of its population die of starvation or be driven into immigration in half a decade.

In 1848, with revolutions rocking the kingdoms of Europe, Meagher advocated a turn from civil discourse to revolutionary violence before the Irish were too weak from starvation to make a stand. His rebellion of poets and dreamers was crushed before it ever got off the ground. He was hunted down, tried by an English-controlled court, and sentenced to hang and have his body cut into four quarters. At the last minute, the English decided to send him and a half-dozen other prominent Irish radicals to their prison colony of Australia.
 
Part 4:

The Australian phase of Meagher’s life is one of the best parts of Egan’s book. Meagher is surprisingly given relatively liberal treatment by the British there, and he is applauded as a hero by other Irish condemned to live in Tasmania with him. The prisoner occupies a house by a lake where he builds a boat to sail its waters. He marries the daughter of an Irish convict. Forbidden from travelling outside his county, he arranges to have dinner with another Irish rebel at a point where the two men’s counties meet. Neither violates his parole, while both thumb their noses at the British.

In spite of his relatively favorable situation, Meagher plots his escape. This is one of the most slow- motion escapes of all time. Meagher sends a letter to Ireland to arrange for a ship to be sent to rescue him. It takes three months to arrive. Every other step in the escape is similarly done at the speed of a sailing ship.

When Meagher finalizes his arrangements to escape, he feels honor bound to notify his jailers that he will revoke his promise not to escape that he gave when he accepted his parole. He informs them that if they try to capture him before the date of revocation, he will consider the British to have violated the terms of the agreement. He then awaits the British until he hears they are at his house seeking to arrest him. He finally flees, freed from his parole pledge, but only after stopping to repay a debt to a shepherd who had assisted him.

It took Meagher a year to get from Australia to New York, but when he arrived he was the hero of the city. Immigrant and native alike wanted to see one of the world’s most famous fugitives. Parades and parties were given in his honor. But the celebration of the young Irishman began to take a backseat as the Know Nothing party rose in power and Civil War threatened.

For all his radicalism, by 1860 Meagher was a fairly conventional Irish American Democrat. He disapproved of the abuses of slavery, but he opposed the Abolitionists as divisive Puritans likely to plunge the United States into civil war. His Protestant Irish comrade in the Young Ireland movement John Mitchell went even further and, after a move to Richmond, endorsed slavery and urged new immigrants to come South and buy slaves.
 
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When war came, Meagher joined the Fighting 69th New York regiment and fought at the first major battle of the war at Bull Run. After the Union defeat, he organized the famous Irish Brigade and became a national hero in the North. His experiences during the war both convinced him that slavery must end and left him depressed over the great loss of life among immigrant soldiers. The eruption of riots against the draft by thousands of Irish in New York City left him a pariah among a sizable segment of the disaffected in his own community. Meagher wrote sadly that if he had been set upon by the rioters he would have been “torn limb from limb if they caught hold of me.”

Meagher courageously took on those Irish Americans who demanded that the war be ended by allowing slavery to continue in the South. He wrote in an Irish newspaper that the war was started by the “Slave Lords, the kings and princes of the cotton fields and rice swamps.” Meagher insisted that slavery was “the cancerous disease, the glaring disgrace of this great nation and a violent contradiction of the principles on which it was established.”
 
Part 6:

Meagher continued to serve the Union cause in various roles until the end of the war. He was then given a position in the government of the Montana territory. When he travelled there with his native-born wife, he found that the governor of the territory was on his way out and that he was to be the acting governor. He also found that real power in the territory was held by a group of wealthy Republicans who headed a secretive organization of vigilantes. The vigilantes, under the guise of maintaining order, executed dozens of men, many of whom were immigrants.

In 1867, while Meagher was travelling on a steamboat at night, he disappeared into a Montana river. His body was never found. The vigilantes claimed that he committed suicide, or that he was the victim of his own drinking and had stumbled overboard. Egan presents interesting evidence that he may have been murdered.

Meagher had tried to impose law and order in Montana and end the reign of vigilante terror. For that he had been threatened with death and Egan introduces evidence that a vigilante leader had discussed silencing Meagher permanently. That leader was one of the last men Meagher ever saw on the day of his death. A career criminal later confessed to assassinating the acting governor at the behest of the vigilantes. The confessed hitman later renounced his confession.

Timothy Egan has written a compelling book about a uniquely American immigrant character. There are some quibbles with minor factual inaccuracies that Harold Holzer pointed out in his review of the book. I also think that Egan should have discussed Meagher’s controversial exit from the battlefield at Fredericksburg which led to whispers of cowardice by his enemies. But apart from these issues, this book is an excellent introduction not only to Thomas Francis Meagher, the most famous Irish immigrant of his day, but to immigrant life at the time of the Civil War.
 
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