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

by Thomas Keneally

  From the port the party, including the captain and the colonel of militia, travelled in a bungo through wonderful forests up the river to the city of David. Ahead still lay the omnipresent volcano and its forested ranges, but to the south, in the direction of Panama City, were great cattle pastures.

  The journey across to Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic side was taken no more than four or five times a year. It required competent guides, and three such Indian guides led the way now on foot, bearing large javas or wicker-work baskets. Ransacked Indian graves lay on either side of their road.

  As they marched higher, the winds from the ice-clad slopes of Chiriqui volcano froze them. Half way across, at the final ascent to the cordillera, the party halved—the Indiana colonel and the French captain making tearful goodbyes to Meagher and the Indian guides. Emerging from forests, Meagher and the Indians entered the piercing cold of Chiriqui’s lava beds and were grateful to begin a descent down rugged slopes towards the Atlantic side. Meagher praised Chiriqui for its volcanic fertility, ‘its inter-tropical grains, fruits, vegetables and esculent roots in marvellous abundance. The sugar is the best on the coast.’

  Meagher’s article on Chiriqui in Harper’s sometimes has a boosting character. ‘Perfectly free from swamps—the writer having crossed from sea to sea without once wetting the sole of his shoe except, indeed, when he had to ford the rivers—not a dollar would have to be sunk, at any point, in the construction of an artificial foundation.’ He considered Bocas del Toro splendid. ‘The railroad once built, ships of the largest size can ride broadside on to the wharves.’

  But was there too much of the literary man in Meagher? He saw the Central American scene romantically, in too humane and textured a way to be able to look at it as the true Yankee entrepreneur should—as raw asset.

  As Meagher reconnoitred for Thompson’s and his own glory, Mitchel’s paper was out of business. After two years of publication, the Southern Citizen ceased publication in the summer of 1859. Closing his office, Mitchel had come to one of his lightning decisions. He would leave Washington and go to France. ‘There is an Anglo-French war in the air,’ said Mitchel. ‘When will it come down in bodily form to the earth?’ He intended to support himself and his family by supplying material to American and Irish journals, including the Irish American. Jenny was relieved to hear that she should not pack up and move yet. He would test things out first.

  He was in Paris by the end of August 1859. But the Anglo-French war he hoped for never took ‘bodily form.’ A couple of months’ residence, and discussions with the Foreign Ministry, proved that, and all at once he desired to be back in Washington with his wife and family. Even John Martin was gone from Paris, having returned to Ireland in 1858 as guardian of his seven nieces and nephews—his sister-in-law and brother having died of fever. Martin was courting Mitchel’s sister Henty, a further bond between the two old friends, but an eventuality which would keep him permanently in Ireland. It was drear January of a new year, 1860, when Mitchel wrote to John Blake Dillon, who had returned to Ireland under amnesty, in disgust at the peace accord the French and English had made: ‘The entente cordiale, though it is false and treacherous on both sides, is for the present in full credit.’

  Jenny was pleased to see him back in Washington. But American events conspired against her. The coming split in the Democrat vote between Stephen A. Douglas and Breckinridge of Kentucky delighted Mitchel, and was the mechanism he had urged in the Southern Citizen as a means to ensure radical Republican success, the election of Lincoln, and the separation of the long-suffering South from the undeserving Union. Mitchel and the family distracted themselves from the question of what this all might mean to young men such as their sons James and John by meeting up in New York and going on a trip to New Rochelle. Not liking it, the family removed to David’s Island in Long Island Sound. Even when it came to a summer bathe Mitchel could not simply settle, and in the spirit of his restlessness was discussing with Jenny a more concerted return to Paris, en famille, there to make a living as a foreign correspondent. He had established a range of press contacts—the family of a friend, Senator Rhett of South Carolina, were involved in the newspaper business in Charleston and would publish whatever he sent. Thinking that Mitchel was sick of acrid American politics and was proposing a long-term residence in Paris, Jenny became enthusiastic. She could visit Ireland easily from there. And though she would have to leave her two eldest sons behind in the United States, her daughters and her youngest son, Willy, would get a good French education. ‘What hurried me at the last, if you must know,’ Mitchel wrote to his sister Mary, ‘was that I found my particular ship, the Mercury, was in port and to sail for Havre on a certain day. They brought over all our packages, just as they had been made up in Washington, piano and all, in their packing cases.’

  They settled in rue de l’Est in Paris. But life was monotonous, with the same small circle who had entertained John Martin now emerging to greet Jenny. Willy attended a day school, and a governess came three times a week to teach two of the girls. His beloved eldest daughter, Henrietta, attended the convent of Sacré Coeur, and soon he would have to vouchsafe the information to Miss Thompson and his disapproving mother that she had been for some time ‘a devout Catholic. She has become extremely intimate with the ladies of the Sacré Coeur—a splendid convent here.’

  In Costa Rica, Elizabeth Meagher still remained in the temperate capital, but Meagher came briefly back to New York to report, 13 pounds lighter and tanned. He became involved in correspondence with Buchanan’s Secretary of State, his old friend General Cass, over expenses incurred on the journey. But the prospects of massive rewards remained. ‘He has shown that Irishmen can succeed as well as other people,’ said the Irish News. The US Navy, which would benefit by acquiring ports, intended to expend a then prodigious $300,000 as a down payment to the Costa Ricans on Thompson’s grant, and to put in another $700,000 when Thompson got utterly undisputed title to the grant. But now the Senate refused to ratify the deal, and in a few late summer days Thompson and—more significantly—Meagher were stripped of their Chiriqui prospects. ‘I’ll return to Costa Rica,’ Meagher wrote desolately, ‘without the $300,000 which was to be deposited as a guarantee of the fulfilment of the contract.’ By mid-October, after further discussions with Thompson and government officials, he was back in Costa Rica to report the sad news to Libby, and to try but fail to extract from the local federal representative of the New Granadan government any recommendation he and Mora could have taken to Bogota.

  Meagher, desperate for Yankee-style success, applied now to the Costa Rican government for an exclusive right of extracting Indian rubber. But since the Senate had prevented the planned payment of $300,000 from the Navy, his standing was not as pristine as before. The Meaghers and Dmitri, US minister in San José, were savagely disappointed that all their negotiations had produced so little. Late in the year, Tom Meagher and Libby said goodbye to Mora, left San José, went to Nicaragua and home. Rugged souls, they must have dreaded facing relatives and friends with news of their failed enterprise. To add to their disappointments and concern, the Republican Lincoln had just been elected President. Uneasy at heart, they sailed in the North Star through bright seas towards New York.

  18

  IRELAND AND THE BLOODY ARENA

  I saw a Private of a Wisconsin regiment stumbling along with a feather bed across his shoulders … a counterpane wrapped about him—a curious piece of needlework, gaudy enough to please a Carib prince and sufficiently heavy for a winter’s night in Nova Scotia.

  The Last Days of the Sixty-Ninth in Virginia,

  Thomas Francis Meagher, Captain,

  Company K (‘Irish Zouaves’), New York, 1861

  On 25 January 1861, Meagher and Libby landed with their tropical complexions in a snowy New York, in a United States already beginning to disintegrate, and heard under freezing skies the news of the death in San Francisco of Meagher’s fellow Vandemonian exile, Terence Bellew MacManus
. His passing was of particular resonance for Meagher: MacManus had died the death of a disappointed rebel who had failed to find a place for himself in America.

  For Meagher, back in his father-in-law’s house at 129 Fifth Avenue, the death of gentle MacManus added to the wistfulness and lack of triumph of his own season. But this personal loss was augmented by the civic fear of Meagher and all his New York friends that the abolitionists’ tool, Abraham Lincoln, might destroy the United States. Libby and Meagher had missed the frenetic presidential elections, but the Irish News, Meagher’s old paper, had been solidly Democrat behind Senator Douglas, whose vote the rival Southern Democrat candidate Breckinridge split. And now, even as, in reaction to Lincoln’s election, Southern states began to secede, Meagher saw his brother-in-law Barlow exercising all his powers to resolve the crisis. Barlow’s solution was earnest but improbable: the Federal government should take a suit in the Supreme Court against all states, slave and free, to show cause for their behaviour. Barlow had both civic and material reasons to keep the peace. Serving on the boards of such north-south-running railroads as the Ohio & Mississippi, of which his amusing friend George B. McClellan was president, he saw any possible conflict as an unspeakable catastrophe.

  The mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, a Southern sympathiser, who had broken with Tammany and founded an alternative Democrat faction named Mozart Hall, argued that rather than go to war, the city should now declare itself a city republic, independent of the United States. New York was the great cotton-handling port of America, and its merchants had a unique affection for and tolerance of the South. Congressman Dan Sickles, though he would in the end strive to be a Union general, doubted any New Yorker would cross the city line to wage war against the Southern states.

  But Meagher could see that traditional New York affection for the South was being tried. By the close of January six states had seceded, and Southern clients began to refuse to pay their bills to the Sterling Iron Works and New York-based railroads until payment could be made in Confederate currency. Some—including, it seemed, Peter Townsend—began to think that a brief show of military strength could settle that issue.

  In late February, Lincoln visited New York and held a successful levee four blocks from the Townsend residence at Moses Grinnell’s Fifth Avenue house. Meagher saw the avenue fill up with hostile working men, notably but not totally the Irish, fearful for their prospects of employment if millions of freed slaves were turned out on to the labour market. Meagher, perhaps worn out by travel and disappointment, might at another time have appeared on the steps and addressed them. But he did not yet know what to suggest to himself, let alone to them. He remained watchful.

  At last in March, to the contempt of old Yankee Democrats, Lincoln was inaugurated. That month a planned long-distance Fenian transfer of the body of MacManus from San Francisco to Ireland generated a series of invitations to Meagher to deliver lectures eulogising MacManus throughout New England. The term ‘Fenian’ was coined by lean, intense John O’Mahony. After being with O’Brien at Ballingarry, O’Mahony had lived for the greater part of a decade in Paris, making his way in the world as French translator of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and as teacher of Irish at the Irish College. Moved to America, he attached to the membership of the new Irish republican movement founded in New York in 1858 the name ‘Fenian Brotherhood,’ from the ancient Fianna, Finn MacCool’s warriors, seven score and ten samurai-like leaders. The Fenian Brotherhood spread rapidly throughout the United States.

  On St Patrick’s Day 1858, another Ballingarry fugitive, James Stephens, once O’Mahony’s fellow Parisian exile but now returned home on amnesty, established the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin. The title ‘Fenian’ would be extended to Stephens’s men and women as well, even though the Fenian movements in Ireland and the United States were separate structures. Though the Fianna had been defenders of Ireland’s boundaries, their nineteenth-century incarnations intended to free Ireland by physical force, and now the new movement sought to enlist the ghost of Terence MacManus. San Francisco Fenians intended to exhume his remains, seal them in lead and take them on pilgrimage.

  Back in New York after his speaking tour, Meagher apologised to Judge Daly for some small unrecorded lapse of manners. ‘Return good for evil—Drop down to Irving Hall, Wednesday evening next, April 3rd, if you’ve nothing pleasanter or more profitable to do … I want you to know who MacManus was.’ On the night, to massive applause, he introduced the audience to his late fellow prisoner: ‘there he is, dashing through the multifarious business of his, at the rate of one million and a half pounds sterling a year—radiant, hearty, full of pluck, teeming with brain, and having a proud, dutiful, chivalrous thought for Ireland all the while.’

  The eve of the great American conflict found little D’Arcy McGee in a condition he would, earlier in the decade, have felt contempt for. In the mid-1850s, he had begun to fancy Canada and praise that huge British dominion for the capacity of its massive spaces to accommodate Irish immigrants. The Canadian provinces were ‘not necessarily miserable and uninhabitable because the British flag flies at Quebec … That flag, without futile landlordism, without a national debt, without a state church, is shorn of its worst terrors.’ Whereas the squalor of American slums and the seductions of Tammany Hall politics weakened the faith and moral fibre of the Irish. And exiled Irishmen like Doheny, said McGee, who schemed to use the American government as a weapon against Britain, served only to fuel Know-Nothing hate. The last time lawyer Michael Doheny had met D’Arcy in the streets of New York, punches had been thrown.

  By 1856, McGee had taken to depression and drink and was a near-bankrupt. He was married to an Irish-American, Ann McCaffrey, and had two small girls about whose future security he was worried. He wrote to the Bishop of Canada, Bishop Charbonnel in Toronto, to ask his patronage, and Charbonnel was probably behind the invitation extended in 1857 by the Irish Catholic community of Montreal for McGee to found there a level-headed, non-sectarian Irish paper, the New Era. Of Montreal’s 70,000 persons, somewhere between a quarter and a third were Irish, and to that community McGee brought his restless energy. Supporters provided him with a good house in St Antoine Street. One who knew him at that time, approaching thirty years of age, said of him, ‘He was short and stubby. His face was homely and not much marked by shaggy hair and whiskers: it was redeemed from ugliness only by its remarkable expressiveness.’

  Almost immediately he accepted the invitation of the St Patrick’s Society to stand as the Irish Catholic candidate from Montreal in the general election of 1857, and was elected an independent to the Parliament which met sometimes in Toronto, sometimes in Ottawa. He had a definite Montreal Irish mandate: to achieve the right of Catholics to establish their own nonstate schools, and to defend from reform the system by which less populated French Lower Canada, where the Montreal Irish lived, returned the same number of representatives as the more populated and British Upper Canada.

  But once in Parliament, he began voting for electoral reform with a new friend, the progressive Orangeman George Brown, editor of the Toronto Globe. The equal number of seats from each province, he argued, ultimately produced nothing but deadlock. Montreal Irish accused him of treachery, but to prevent the swamping of the Irish in Anglo-Protestant Canada West, McGee organised efficient Irish political committees, based on the St Patrick’s Society of each region, to direct votes of the entire Irish community to sympathetic candidates.

  In Toronto, McGee became, fleetingly, a Catholic hero when on St Patrick’s Day 1858, O’Donoghue’s National Hotel, where he was speaking, was attacked by an Orange crowd. The ground floor of the hotel was wrecked and the subsequent parade disrupted. But after the incident, he argued that St Patrick’s Day parades should be suspended by law for a 3-year period. This made him a pluralist champion, but he lost popularity with Catholics, particularly since he did not ask for legislation to be passed suspending the Orange processions of 12 July.

  And in 1860, Bis
hop Charbonnel, who had been so friendly to McGee, was replaced by an Irishman, Bishop Lynch, an ardent Irish nationalist. It aggrieved Lynch that in Parliament McGee stuck with a diffuse liberal alliance of politicians, the Reformers led by John Sandfield Macdonald, against the Tories led by John Alexander Macdonald. But what bound the Orangeman Brown and the Catholic McGee was a vision of immigration, with settlement of the plains and the remoter west, and a belief in the wisdom of confederation of all the Canadian provinces. In some splendid speeches to the Canadian Parliament and amongst the public, McGee was holding out to Canadians the poetic and political necessity of a federal Canada and, in Lynch’s eye, ignoring the Irish question.

  ‘I see in the not remote distance one great nationality,’ said McGee, ‘bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean. I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions, free intercourse, free commerce.’ And now confederation for Canada seemed to become a more urgent matter of self-protection as the prospect grew of large armies taking the field in the United States.

  Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, was fired upon on 14 April 1861. Lieutenant John Mitchel of the 1st South Carolina Artillery commanded one of the heavy batteries at Secessionist-held Fort Johnson, and so Mitchel’s blood was represented in that first exchange of fire so fatal to America’s young. Lincoln’s refusal to withdraw Federal troops from the forts in Charleston harbour had almost guaranteed that they would be fired on, but Meagher and other shocked New Yorkers for once did not blame him. Any opportunism of his was overshadowed by this assault on the Union flag by Americans. In conciliators such as Meagher, there were now unexpected feelings of outrage. Digesting the news, most New York Democrats were in fact transformed over days into Union Democrats. Archbishop Hughes had, before studying for the priesthood, worked as a slave overseer in Maryland, but was now vocal for preserving the Union, and so were Mayor Wood, Dan Sickles and the Irishman Bennett’s New York Herald.