The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  The Melbourne committee, led by Repealer Mr O’Shanassy, who had helped ill-starred Patrick O’Donohoe escape, resolved unanimously that for Mr O’Brien’s visit, a gold vase of not less than 100 ounces of £7-per-ounce fine gold, should be manufactured and displayed at the Paris Exhibition before being sent off to Ireland to honour O’Brien’s freedom. O’Doherty and Martin would each receive a purse of 200 gold sovereigns.

  The three freed prisoners left on the Ariel for Port Phillip. ‘My progress has throughout been a complete ovation,’ O’Brien told Lucy while visiting Geelong near Melbourne. He was living up to the duty of the released prisoner to be exultant. On the eve of his departure, at the Criterion Hotel in Collins Street in the golden city of Melbourne, the most formal of the Australian mainland dinners was held. The Criterion was a hotel favoured by American and Irish miners whose republican politics had generally been reinforced by experience on the Californian and Nevada goldfields. These men ensured that as O’Brien, O’Doherty and Martin were led into the concert room where the banquet was laid, ‘They were received with several salvos of vocal and manual artillery, and had great difficulty in even reaching the platform.’ O’Brien declared to the guests that he regretted that the pardon did not permit him to return to Ireland—he would live in Brussels. However, he argued, he was not pleading for a full pardon. Since his role in the 1848 uprising was that of a patriot, not of a criminal, he had no reason to plead.

  O’Doherty summoned up for the diners the ghosts of the Famine fever: ‘Piled together in the fever sheds, happily unconscious, in their wild delirium, of the horrors of their condition.’ At first sight strangely, given the yearning which had characterised his sentiments towards Eva, O’Doherty intended to go for a time to the goldfields in the newly proclaimed state of Victoria, referred to in the days of Hugh Larkin’s overlanding as the Port Phillip area. Perhaps Saint Kevin saw a chance to acquire quick capital preparatory to marriage, and was urged along by Irish and American miners at the Criterion. Perhaps he feared meeting as a woman the ardent child he had known in Richmond prison. His travelling companion to the fields was Nicaragua Smyth, who had spent so much of the Directory’s money on Australian events that he was nervous and wanted to supplement the funds.

  Smith O’Brien and John Martin left Melbourne on 26 July 1854, travelling together as far as Ceylon. O’Brien wrote to Lucy from Point de Gable, as many Europeans called Galle in Sri Lanka, to tell her he intended to visit Madras and see her brother William, a Light Cavalry officer. This would delay him one month, he explained, but he was not likely to have a chance to make such a visit again. Was Ireland’s greatest hero procrastinating too? He was certainly anxious about leading an exiled life in Brussels, and about how he would support himself. He sent on gifts to Dromoland with a fellow passenger, a colonial-made man who was returning to Ireland from Australia. The good companion John Martin said goodbye in Colombo too and took a ship for Aden, Suez and Cairo. He travelled by open cart across the desert and sailed from Alexandria to Marseilles. From a hotel-pension at rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré 38 in Paris, just before Christmas, he wrote to Eva Kelly wondering ‘if propitious winds and waves shall have brought to you in real bodily presence a certain tall brown-faced friend of ours—the happy dog!’ In fact, Eva must have known by now that O’Doherty was not to be in Europe by Christmas. For his own part, Martin intended to spend Christmas at the house of an ageing Irish expatriate, and then to move to a less fashionable pension across the river in the Latin Quarter at 26 rue Lacépède. Both the address in rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the one in not-so-fashionable rue Lacépède would become the two favorite residences of released and escaped Young Irelanders in Paris.

  The visit to Lucy’s soldier brother over, O’Brien set out nervously for the reunion in Brussels. By 21 November, when he was visiting Martin in Paris, every hour revived his fever about income, and he hectored Lucy. ‘I wish you most decidedly not to bring a governess with you.’ Brussels was now only a train ride removed, and he was there by 25 November, at the Hôtel de la Regence in the Boulevarde Waterloo, an establishment recommended to him by Lucy.

  He had now received with ill-humour the news that under the family trust arrangement drawn up in 1848, their income from Cahirmoyle would be £500. The Hôtel de la Regence could not keep him, her, their four children and a maid for less than £2 per diem, that is, over £700 per year. At last he found a hotel that would take them for £170. He told Lucy he would not go to meet her at Antwerp in case he missed her and incurred the additional expense for nothing!

  The reunion took place joyously, and the eldest son Edward, now approaching twenty years of age, showed an exemplary affection and manly respect for his father. Lucy and Grace applied themselves with pragmatic energy to making a home for William. Christmas was celebrated in that wilfully joyous spirit. His daughter Charlotte, nine years old at the time of this reunion with a father she had last seen at three, would write of him that ‘those very qualities which raised his public life were a difficulty in his private.’

  In November 1854, as O’Brien moved towards reunion with his family, the discredit of bereaved Meagher’s street battle with McMaster would be partially redeemed. He was travelling in the first-class section of the Great Western Railroad outside Detroit when his train collided with an eastbound express. In the splintered carriages forty-seven people were killed, and Meagher was reported to have hauled dead and wounded out of the tangle of steel and shredded panelling. Some of his valour may have derived from the fact that he had by now met and fallen in love with a New York woman of a much more exalted family than Catherine Bennett’s. Elizabeth Townsend was a sweet-tempered young woman in her mid- to late twenties. In an age of early marriages, she was considered a late developer, and had established that sort of warm and mutually reliant relationship with her parents, people of wide connections and pleasant disposition, which was often then seen as a prelude to old-maidhood. Her father, Peter Townsend, had a Fifth Avenue residence and was chief of his family company, the New York-based Sterling Ironworks. Elizabeth herself was a frank, jolly, not unambitious young woman, and her features even in old age would radiate a handsome optimism. Meagher described her as ‘in the bloom, and pride, and the genial glorious dawn of womanhood—stationed in the highest social rank, in a community the wealthiest in the world—the oldest unmarried daughter of a family, affluent in its circumstances, and by long descendent residence in this country …’

  Her sister Alice had already married the sort of man Peter Townsend would have expected as a son-in-law: Samuel Mitchell Barlow, Democrat, partner in the powerful New York law firm of Bowdoin, Larocque & Barlow, specialising in railroad work. Barlow had strong connections with the New York Democratic Party machine of Tammany Hall, and could walk into the Congress in Washington like a man entering his own club. His interests in and directorships of a number of railroads gave him great influence either side of the Mason-Dixon line, and great usefulness to his father-in-law. Barlow could be asked to call in on New York Congressman Dan Sickles and discuss progress on a new bill in Congress ‘for repeal of law posted last session,’ which threw the Navy’s steel contracts open to foreign tenderers.

  By comparison with Samuel Barlow, Meagher was a bolt from the blue. We do not know where and when Elizabeth and he first met, but by Christmas 1854, he was writing, at that time from the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, to ‘My Dear, Dear, Miss Townsend.’ In this same letter he gave a proper place in his history to poor Catherine. ‘Banished to an island in the South Pacific—16,000 miles from home … I grew sad and sick of life. In the darkest hour of that sick life, a solitary star shone down upon me, making bright and beautiful the desolate waters of the mournful wild lake on the shore of which I lived. In that wilderness I met her who has left me the poor child, for whom, as yet, I have no home.’ But now, he told Elizabeth Townsend, her own ‘great goodness, and nobler nature’ forced him to retire, ‘as from a Sacrament, with a steadier, wiser, purer purpose.
Thus instructed, and thus improved, do I feel myself to be ever since I made known to you my love … I was fully sensible that in claiming the honor to be your husband, I should have to meet no slight contradictions and rebuke. For, I have no fortune—at least, nothing that I know of. I never ask my father a single question on the subject.’

  He had found in Elizabeth a great companion from beyond the Irish world. So impeccable were her Yankee bloodlines that her ancestor, Peter Townsend, founder of the Sterling Ironworks in Sterling Pond, New York, had undertaken in 1777 the biggest contract ever to that time given to colonial ironworks—to forge for the Continental Congress a massive 750-link chain to be stretched across the Hudson at West Point to prevent the British navy from controlling the river.

  In the Irish world, St Patrick’s Day of 1855 demonstrated to Libby Townsend that Tom Meagher was still the American favourite Mitchel had so quickly ceased to be. Fifth Avenue was choked with snow for the procession, and there were fears of Orange counter-demonstrations. But at the St Patrick’s Night banquet Meagher’s splendid response to the toast was greeted with awe and cheers. ‘There is a skeleton at this feast,’ he declared of ravaged Ireland. Some did not perceive the corpse, he said. But he saw clearly ‘the shroud and the sealed lips and the cold hands.’

  On the goldfields in Victoria, where O’Doherty and Smyth had gone to find their fortunes, a series of events was unfolding that would become a pivotal episode in Australian history. At Ballarat, one of the great fields, Peter Lalor, healthy emigrant brother of the late, spinally crippled James Fintan Lalor, inflammatory journalist, was heavily engaged in miners’ politics. James had died in 1849, a few days after his attempt to capture a police barracks in Tipperary. Two of his siblings, Peter and Richard, were by then already settled in Melbourne. Peter mined first at Bendigo in 1853, and then at Ballarat. Each digger on the fields, including of course O’Doherty and Smyth, was required to pay a licence fee of £3 a month for a surface stake scarcely bigger than a man could lie in. Miners were therefore paying massively more than other landholders, yet had no vote. The Ballarat Reform League, founded in November 1854, demanded that property qualifications for voters and members of Victoria’s Legislative Assembly be abolished, along with miners’ licence fees. A new flag of a white Southern Cross on a blue ground was flown at a Reform League meeting at Bakery Hill near Ballarat where the 27-year-old Peter Lalor addressed a crowd of 10,000, calling for volunteers to resist ‘digger hunts,’ police brutality against miners who did not happen to have their licences on them. Hundreds of volunteers came forward. Kevin O’Doherty and Pat Smyth were certainly involved in these questions but were not closely engaged in this Australian rebellion. They were busy in Bendigo, the other great field, where Smyth was losing money in a ‘diggin’ speculation.’

  Lalor inducted his men with United Irishman solemnity. The volunteers knelt down, ‘and with heads uncovered, and hands raised to heaven, they solemnly swore at all hazards to defend their rights and liberties.’ On the night before British troops from Melbourne and a police detachment attacked, the password at the stockade the miners built—the Eureka Stockade—was ‘Vinegar Hill’ (the name of the famous battlefield where Irish rebels fought British troops in 1798). ‘We were betrayed and taken by surprise,’ wrote Peter Lalor later, in summary of the fight-cum-massacre at Eureka, in which many soldiers and, according to some modern research, perhaps as many as sixty miners were killed. But though Lalor lost an arm there, the institutions of the new country after the Eureka Stockade fight proved more flexible than did those of Ireland after Ballingarry. Juries would not convict the thirteen leaders arrested. Universal male suffrage was promptly introduced and amongst those elected to the Legislature of Victoria less than a year after the uprising was Peter Lalor, ultimately to serve as Cabinet minister and three times Speaker of the House.

  Without profit to boast of, Nicaragua Smyth returned to Hobart and married Jane Anne O’Regan on 8 February 1855. Smyth and his bride would set out for America later in the year.

  Not having profited much on the gold fields himself, O’Doherty made arrangements to travel discreetly and illegally to Britain with Captain McDonnell of the James Baines, an American wool clipper which had just arrived in Melbourne after a record run from Liverpool of 63 days. When the Baines departed in March 1855, Kevin assumed a false name but was spotted by a Dr Alfred Carr, who was believed to have given false evidence regarding the deaths of two miners. Carr resolved to inform the Home Office that O’Doherty was entering England. But he was able to slip back into Ireland to try to collect his modest inheritance, have his reunion with Eva, and plan the marriage to which they were committed by love, published verse, their meeting in prison and the fame of their being parted by exile. The Sub-Inspector of Police at Galway advised Dublin Castle in early July 1855 that ‘it was whispered abroad that a strange gentleman was staying with the Kelly family.’ With Eva’s parents’ support, Kevin was able to travel to Dublin with them and their daughter, and then by steamer to Liverpool. On 23 August 1855—without wedding guests—they were married by a sympathetic Englishman, Cardinal Wiseman, at Moorfields Chapel in the presence of Eva’s father and Kevin’s jovial Uncle George from Paris. The new couple travelled on to Paris then. Charles Gavan Duffy wrote to Kevin, ‘A man going to marry his first love and to live in Paris has nothing to desire in the world.’ But for Saint Kevin and Eva, Paris was shared exile, enriched by the friendship and good humour of John Martin and of Uncle George. Before long they were living in the Latin Quarter in the same pension as Martin. A second ceremony was eventually conducted at the British Consul’s office, to give their children civil legitimacy. Young Eva was already pregnant with their first child. Kevin studied for seven months in Paris at the L’Hôpital la Pitié and the Paris School of Anatomy, while in the pension in the rue Lacépède, the middle-aged bachelor John Martin was Eva’s companion in the dreary winter days. ‘Of all the friends I have known,’ she would write to him later, ‘none has been more genuinely or delicately kind than yourself.’ But Kevin decided it would be too severe on his wife to have her give birth in Paris, and so together they caught a packet to England, then a train to Liverpool, and sneaked on to the steamer to Dublin.

  A week later at O’Doherty’s mother’s house at Monkstown, a son, William, was born. They had been in hiding there about two weeks in all when an unconditional pardon of O’Brien, O’Doherty and Martin was announced, allowing them to live openly in Ireland. Mother and baby returned to Eva’s country, Killeen in East Galway, and O’Doherty took rooms in Dublin near the Royal College of Surgeons to prepare for his final examination.

  Meanwhile, his old Vandemonian friend Mitchel had become a devoted Southerner! There had been a number of reasons for throwing over the Citizen and leaving New York. Jenny had complained of Mitchel’s eye problems in letters to Ireland and blamed it on New York’s guttering gaslight supply. His uncertain vision was itself, however, a metaphor for the difficulties he had brought on himself after a year in New York. If it was a journalist’s job to offend the powerful, he had been a success. He had now determined, he said, ‘to seek retirement somewhere far away in the wooded mountains of the interior; give up the Citizen bodily to John M’Clenahan.’ At the end of that last ‘polar winter,’ in the spring of 1855, he found himself and his household on board the steamer Nashville, bound for Charleston, ‘from whence we were to penetrate the interior as far as the shady valleys of East Tennessee.’ For reasons of education Johnny, the eldest boy, stayed with his uncle William in New York, and attended engineering lectures at Columbia. Having been no further south than Virginia, Mitchel was dementedly committing the rest of his family to a deeper South still. ‘I have never seen Knoxville, and did not know one human being in Knoxville’: still, Jenny took a considerable delight in escaping Brooklyn’s comfortless winters, and harboured a hope that this might be the shift to make her husband finally content.

  From Charleston the Mitchels made their way by railway
to Loudon on the banks of the Tennessee River. They completed the journey to Knoxville on rutted country roads in a conveyance called a carry-all. Knoxville, with two or three ‘decent streets, but not paved or lighted by gas,’ was on a steep hill rising from the surging Holston River. ‘Like every other town in the US, it has a mighty future, and occupies itself much in contemplation of that good time.’ On the morning of his arrival in Knoxville, in the rooms he had taken at the Coleman House, Mitchel was called upon by William G. Swan, the mayor of the town, and a number of other gentlemen. Swan was six years younger than Mitchel when he greeted the Irish hero to town. Investments in the coming railroad and proposed gaslight supply had made him already wealthy; a conservative on the institution of slavery, who yet possessed no slaves himself and harboured no prejudices against the Irish, he was the beau ideal of a Southern gentleman as far as Mitchel could see. Together they would grow old in their grievous cause.

  Mitchel was disgusted to find that anti-Papist Know-Nothingism had reached even East Tennessee, where one citizen told him that the vaults of Knoxville’s first Catholic church were obviously to store gunpowder for use by the Jesuits when they came to abolish liberties and set up the Inquisition. The Knoxville Whig was ‘a furious Know-Nothing organ,’ edited by a Methodist preacher named Brownlow ‘who once preached with pistols and a Bowie-knife on the Bible before him.’