Hidden Irish American history uncovered at Notre Dame

Irish legacy includes patriot's sword and Irish Brigade battle flag

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General Thomas Francis Meagher, known as "Meagher of the Sword"

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Debt for freedom

In many ways, as he was touring the country to raise funds and the visibility of the Irish cause for independence, he came looking for America to repay a debt for freedom that the United States owed to Ireland. Americans were happy to pay, none more so than the jubilant students at Notre Dame.

So moved was he by his time at Notre Dame that De Valera considered it the high point of his American tour. Although no one knows the exact origins of the nickname “the Fighting Irish” – perhaps newspapermen coined the term, maybe anti-Catholic bigots, or students themselves in reference to Meagher’s men and the Fighting 69th of World War I – it is no mere coincidence that the term gained general currency in the 1919 football season in the wake of De Valera’s visit.

He was, after all, the most celebrated fighting Irishman in America at the time.

I was astonished to learn that Notre Dame owned the sword of “Meagher of the Sword.” But I could not find it. Eventually I did. It lay stored in a gray box on the sixth floor of the library’s archives. Archivists were not to be blamed; rather, it seemed the significance of the sword had somehow gone missing. Notre Dame, after all, was more Irish-American – with an emphasis on American – than Irish by the turn of the twenty-first century.

I found more. Notre Dame also owned a flag of the famed Irish Brigade. 

The New York 63rd

Like the sword, the flag was nowhere to be found. I later discovered that it had been exhibited from time to time but was held for the moment in an off-campus storage facility.

The flag, referred to as the Second Irish Colors, was made by Tiffany and Co. in 1862 and presented to Meagher by a group of merchants from New York. On it is emblazoned the name of one of the regiments of the Irish Brigade: the New York 63rd.

Along with the famed 69th, which would gain further renown in the First World War as “the Fighting Irish,” the brigade comprised New York’s 88th, as well as regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. By the time the Second Colors were commissioned, the first flag had been shredded but never surrendered in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War.

The Irish Brigade had distinguished itself in the Peninsula Campaign, and the green flag came to be feared by rebels. In fact, after only a few months, Meagher’s men earned the reputation as the shock troops of the Army of the Potomac, leading Abraham Lincoln to visit Meagher’s camp and kiss the Second Colors.

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