Born in Waterford in 1823, Meagher rejected moderate politics to join the Young Irelanders and was shipped to Tasmania after the failed 1848 uprising. His escape to America produced a second life as a lawyer, journalist, and commander of the 69th New York Regiment, yet his fall from a Missouri steamboat in 1867 left a legacy of heroism, controversy, and unanswered questions.
The Irish, wrote the 9th-century German theologian Walafrid Strabo, are a people "for whom the custom of travelling has almost become natural”. This custom has been both voluntary, as in the case of Irish Christian missionaries in the early Middle Ages, or mandatory, when Irish indentured servants were transported to the Caribbean in the 17th century. Many of those who were forced to leave the island went on to lead eventful lives, and in this essay, I wish to discuss one such person.
I will tell you about Thomas Francis Meagher, a Waterford-born Irish nationalist who was expelled from his homeland after the 1848 Irish rebellion. He went on to live in Tasmania and the United States, leading an Irish regiment during the American Civil War, and becoming the territorial governor of Montana. For Meagher, the custom of travelling became a necessity, as it was for so many who both preceded and came after him. Let’s tell his story.
Born in Waterford City in 1823, Thomas Francis Meagher had a comfortable childhood. Both of his parents came from prosperous Catholic merchant families. His father, one of the wealthiest people in the city, had fled to Newfoundland after his involvement in the 1798 Irish Rebellion and returned to Ireland after making his fortune as a shipowner and merchant.
Influence of O’Connell and a growing rift
Like many Catholics in the city, Meagher’s parents were supporters of Daniel O’Connell. The son of Catholic gentry, O’Connell was an accomplished lawyer and activist who lobbied Westminster to permit Catholics to hold parliamentary seats. After taking his seat in Parliament in 1829, O’Connell gave speeches around the country, mobilising support for an independent Irish Parliament.
Meagher met O’Connell numerous times – indeed, in 1844, an aging O’Connell helped him to register as a law student at King’s Inns after he had finished school, but he disagreed with his mentor’s attitude towards the British. His disagreements with O’Connell would also lead to a permanent rift with his family.
O’Connell preached non-violence and conciliation with Westminster, insisting that independence would come only through dialogue. At the same time, Meagher believed that non-cooperation and armed conflict were necessary to expel British troops. In 1846, while still a student, Meagher blasted the British, telling a crowd in Conciliation Hall 1846 “Abhor the sword? … No, my lord, for at its blow, and in the quivering of its crimson light, a giant nation sprang up from the waters of the Atlantic, and by redeeming magic the fettered colony became a daring free Republic”.
Meagher joined the Repeal Association, chaired by O’Connell, but quickly broke away from it, denouncing the “corrupt gang of politicians who fawned on O’Connell” for patronage and Parliament jobs. He and some of his colleagues founded the Irish Confederation, a development that angered Meagher’s father. An elected MP for Waterford City, Meagher senior refused to endorse his son’s February 1848 bid to win a by-election as a Confederation candidate, contributing to the latter’s electoral defeat.
Inspiration from Europe and the Tricolour
The Confederation, also known as the Young Irelanders, was a committed band of revolutionaries and was radicalised by the failure of the potato crop and the catastrophic response from the British Government. They were also inspired by continental upheaval. In 1848, following the failure of the potato crop in continental Europe and the resulting rise in food prices, absolutist regimes briefly fell across continental Europe, including France, where, in February of that year, republicans forced the King to abdicate.
Delighted by this new development, Meagher and his colleague, William Smith O’ Brien, visited Paris and sent a congratulatory message to the new government. After returning to Ireland, they presented a new green, white, and orange tricolour flag, modelled on the French tricolore, to their fellow Confederates. In July of that year, the group launched a day-long insurrection in Ballingarry in County Tipperary, exchanging fire with police, before being defeated. Sadly for Meagher, neither the rebels nor the nearby population had few arms and little military experience, with future Fenian John Devoy condemning the revolt as “insanity”.
After the failure of the rebellion, Meagher and his fellow soldiers were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for sedition, but their sentences were later commuted to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. The British authorities backed down under pressure from sympathetic locals – Waterford natives erected a barricade on a bridge over the River Suir in a desperate attempt to prevent Meagher from being arrested.
In July 1849, Meagher began the three-month voyage from Richmond Jail in Dublin to Hobart. While there, he met other convicts with whom he would fight wars and campaign for Irish freedom, like John Mitchel and Kevin Izod O’Doherty. Once he arrived in Tasmania, he was posted to a small township, away from his comrades, but he still managed to evade the local authorities and meet them clandestinely. His life in Tasmania was dull but comfortable, but he would not stay for long – in January 1852, he escaped aboard a ship destined for New York.
Arrival in New York and Irish America
Four months later, Meagher arrived in the United States, where he was welcomed warmly by Irish Catholics, most of whom had just arrived following the famine. Between 1847 and 1860, 1.1 million Irish people landed in the port of New York, and they faced discrimination – organisations like the American Party, also known as the “Know-Nothings”, declared their commitment to exclude all Irish Catholics from elected office. As well as this, the new arrivals led a life of squalor and criminality – through the 1850s, over half of the New York prison population was Irish-born.
Meagher was a unifying figure for displaced people and quickly ingratiated himself into Irish American society. He studied law and journalism and was admitted to the New York bar. He also became a well-known public intellectual, giving lectures at East Coast universities and writing newspaper columns. He was reunited with John Mitchel, with whom he set up Citizen, a radical newspaper that called for Irish independence. In 1858, he even travelled to Costa Rica, receiving a commission from Harper’s Magazine to assess its suitability for Irish settlement.
By 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, Meagher had become an American citizen. Like most Irish Americans at the time, he supported the Democratic Party, which was more tolerant of Catholic immigration to the United States than the Republican Party, which was Protestant-dominated. In spite of the assistance that they provided to white Catholics, however, Democratic politicians in the southern states supported the enslavement of black people, while the Republicans, who held the view that the practice hurt small farmers in the north, were against the practice.
In 1860, following the election of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the southern states seceded from the Union, fearing that the Lincoln administration would abolish the practice nationwide. The North invaded these southern states the following year, igniting a bloody civil war.
Meagher was initially ambivalent about the war and even expressed sympathy for the “patriotic and kind-hearted” Southerners. However, after the Catholic Church asked him to rally soldiers to the Union cause, he changed his mind. He formed Company K of the 69th New York Regiment, serving as its captain.
Meagher’s regiment, which recruited soldiers from both Ireland and Irish American communities, was fierce in battle, distinguishing itself at Seven Pines, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. The “Sons of Erin”, as they were known, impressed their Confederate counterparts, with General Robert E. Lee writing of them, “Never were men so brave”. However, the 69th incurred heavy losses, and he resigned from his post in 1863, before serving a short stint as commander of a garrison brigade in Tennessee.
Noted for his bravery on the battlefield, Meagher was trusted by Washington and was posted to the Montana Territory to serve as its territorial governor after the war. The territory, which would become a state in 1889, was growing rapidly. Gold was discovered by white settlers at Gold Creek in 1858, sparking the westward migration of Euro-Americans and the establishment of towns. Montana was a violent place during this period - its two major towns, Bannack and Virginia City, were lawless and dangerous. Indeed, the sheriff of Bannack secretly led a notorious gang that robbed miners of their gold as they travelled through the town.
Brought into Montana to restore order and to reconcile Democratic and Republican operatives in the territory, Meagher’s governorship was short and tumultuous. He pardoned James Daniels, an Irishman convicted of manslaughter, infuriating local vigilantes. He also angered local whites when he gave voting rights to black war veterans and attempted to create a militia to protect Native Americans.
He was not helped by the fact that the new militia was poorly organised - one observer described it as “a motley collection of businessmen … and frontier ne’er do wells” who spent “most of their time fighting themselves over rank, deserting or drinking”. It would not be long before its lack of professionalism was exploited.
In June 1867, Meagher and eleven of his officers travelled to Fort Benton on the Missouri River to collect a shipment of guns from the central government. On the night of July 1st, Meagher and his men boarded the steamboat, the G.A. Thompson, which was transporting their weapons.
It is unclear what happened next – it is known that Meagher fell from the deck of the steamboat carrying the guns and into the river, never to resurface. It could be that he was pushed into the river by an officer who secretly hated him, or that he was drunk, though records suggest that it is unlikely that he had been drinking that night. We will probably never know for sure.
Meagher’s legacy has endured in the United States – since 1905, a statue of him on horseback has stood on the front lawn of the Montana State Capitol in Helena, and the state’s chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians is named after him.
A Vision of Reconciliation
In Ireland, meanwhile, he became an admired independence activist. The 1848 Rebellion was invoked in the 1916 Proclamation of Independence - it was one of the “six times during the past three hundred years” that the people of Ireland had “asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty”.
Meagher’s vision of a united Ireland, in which both Catholics and Protestants could live in harmony, was made clear when he said of the flag that he and his fellow Confederates designed “The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green, and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood”.
In this essay, I have described the life of Thomas Francis Meagher. Exiled from Ireland for most of his adult life, Meagher led a life of cunning and bravado in Tasmania and the United States. He was a charming man, and he was not devoid of wit – in 1848, after he was initially sentenced to death, he pledged to his judge that he would not abandon the Irish freedom struggle, stating “My Lord, this is our first offence, but not our last…. And next time – sure we won’t be fools to get caught”.
His 20th-century descendants would achieve this aspiration, creating a society that would become one of the wealthiest and most tolerant in the world. Today, the custom of travelling out of Ireland that was so common in Meagher’s day is mostly voluntary, and not mandatory, characterised more by Ryanair flights to continental Europe than by economic necessity or religious persecution.
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