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

by Thomas Keneally

  Grant was extending his trenches towards the capital. Lee made an attempt to split the line in two by attacking Union Fort Steedman in front of Petersburg, but the Union forts either side of Steedman ferociously held. Twenty-four hours later, U. S. Grant got his men around the southern end of the Confederate trench line. It became obvious not only that Petersburg would fall but that Richmond would need to be evacuated. In Richmond in the last days of March and in early April, men and women seemed in a trance, but not Mitchel. The Examiner continued to come out with a determined and almost manic air of normality. As the Confederate garrison prepared to burn the warehouses and depots on 2 April, Mitchel attended the hasty burial of his friend Daniel, who had perished of pneumonia. The eccentric newspaperman’s death coincided with Richmond’s last full day as a capital; he would have liked that. Mitchel faithfully produced the last wartime edition of the Examiner, for which he wrote the obituary of its proprietor, as in Cary Street Jenny yet again packed up. The Mitchels, carrying a few bags, evacuated Richmond on 3 April 1865, travelling with Kemper’s command, including Colonel James Mitchel, south-west across the James River. Richmond was no longer serviced by the Richmond & Danville Railroad, and John and Jenny had 14 miles to walk before they reached the Confederate railhead.

  A fire from the destruction of military equipment would spread throughout the city. The Examiner building was destroyed. On the evening of 4 April, the blazing city was occupied by Federals, and Abe Lincoln, in the last ten days of his life, came down from City Point, where he had been waiting, inspected the ruins, and sat at Jeff Davis’s desk in the Confederate White House. Grant’s great army headed off Lee’s retreat on 8 April, at the hamlet named Appomattox near the Richmond to Danville Railroad. The surrender would occur the next day. Having come to Danville on one of the last trains from the Confederate railhead, John and Jenny were living in a room in the crowded town. Here they heard of Lincoln’s assassination and feared it would key up the extreme party in the North. Travelling with a ‘deeply distressed and humiliated’ Colonel James Mitchel and a few other Confederate officers, John and Jenny peaceably made their way back through Halifax County to Richmond. Mitchel’s rose-tinted Confederate money was useless. ‘The green is far above the red now,’ he wrote in reference to Davis’s ballad. But the Mitchel house remarkably still stood amidst ruins, and having settled his family there, Mitchel got straight on the train to New York, an apparently daring advance. But he had a plan: to persuade the North to resume normal relations with the South. It was as if he had expected to return to the Southern-leaning city of pre-war. But thousands of New Yorkers were dead at Rebel hands, and Meagher thought his old friend crazy to return to this city and to pursue a virulent line on all the North’s plans. The display of Lincoln’s body, brought across to New York from Jersey City by ferry and thence in a hearse to City Hall, where it lay in state, had not enlivened affection for the South. ‘I fear,’ Mitchel told a friend, ‘if they once erect a gallows, it will have many victims.’

  On 3 June, he was offered and took on the editorship of the Daily News, ‘a staunch Southern newspaper which has opposed the war from the beginning.’ His mother had returned in bad health from Brooklyn to her Irish home, Dromalane House, and now, to be close to work, Mitchel moved to a boarding house in Manhattan. Mitchel had none of the humility of the vanquished. ‘Of course I set myself at once to tell the truth concerning the Southern cause, to explode and expose the villainy of affecting to consider Jefferson Davis as a criminal and our Confederacy as a penitentiary offence.’ He was soon in familiar strife. The New York Times and the Evening Post were ‘continually raging and warring against me.’

  In early June an order was made out and signed by General Grant for Mitchel’s arrest. General Dix, garrison commander of New York, did his best to avoid enforcing it and even sent Mitchel futile warnings. In the end he activated the warrant, designating the place of imprisonment as Fortress Monroe, on the humid, miasmic tip of the Peninsula. Mitchel was in the Daily News office on 14 June, about to write a letter to his wife and children to join him in New York, when an artillery officer appeared, backed by a number of army and peace officers. Mitchel was loaded into a carriage, inside which the officer and a detective travelled with him as the wagon galloped off to the Battery. It took three days for Mitchel’s steamer to make the journey. He had time to reflect, ‘I suppose that I am the only person who has ever been a prisoner-of-state to the British and the American government one after the other. It is true the English Government took care to have a special Act of Parliament passed for my incarceration; but our Yankees disdain in these days to make any pretence of law at all.’

  While he was in Fortress Monroe, Mrs Mary Mitchel died at Dromalane, the house they had all occupied when John was a boy.

  Meagher’s friend Major O’Beirne was now Special Aide to the new President, Andrew Johnson. Meagher had spoken with O’Beirne at the White House before meeting with the new President the very morning after Lincoln’s assassination. With a Union Democrat for President now, Meagher was hopeful of something developing. But in conformity with General Orders number 79, on 12 May 1865 he wrote tendering the resignation of his commission, as all generals of volunteers were required to do. A card from the White House said the resignation was accepted by the President, but then a document in the National Archives reads, ‘It is ordered by the President that the Communication from the War Department accepting the resignation of Brigadier General Meagher be forthwith cancelled, and that his commission as Brevet Major General be forthwith made out.’ The question of whether Meagher could or could not consider himself a brevet major-general was one which would confuse friends and enemies alike.

  On 20 June, he wrote an insouciant and fateful letter to his friend Major O’Beirne. First he asked ‘to have my Brevet as Major General.’ He could not ‘help writing to you and beg you will see the President, and request him, in my name, to have it made out as soon as possible—indeed without another day’s delay.’ He referred to the imprisonment of Mitchel. ‘If in one striking case, an Irishman is being punished for his bad conduct towards his country—in another equally striking at least, let an appropriate recognition be made of good conduct and devotion … Let me have the delightful satisfaction of wearing my two stars on 4th July and showing that the Government is true to Irishmen who are true to it.’ He then mentioned that he had just seen in that morning’s Tribune that the governorship of Idaho Territory was vacant. ‘Entreat the President to let me have it, and all will be forthwith right and glorious with me. Urge this at once.’

  ‘Let me have Idaho,’ he finally wrote boldly across the folded letter. As energetically as he sought a post, his enthusiasm for the West was not artificial. With Libby he had attended a lecture at the Cooper Institute by James Fiske, frontiersman. Fiske, evoking improbable mountains and illimitable high plains, was to lead an expedition to Montana in the coming summer. In those wholesome spaces, Meagher began to argue, the Irish could remake themselves! It is worth wondering what the widows and bereaved families of the Irish Brigade made of his new passion for the West. No officer of the brigade ever complained about it. The war had been so much longer and bloodier than anyone’s imagining that any further deployment of the remnants of the old brigade was preposterous.

  These remnants he led down Fifth Avenue on 4 July, wearing not his uniform but civilian clothing. At last, at the summer residence of Daniel Devlin, the ready-to-wear king, in Manhattanville, Long Island, he received the telegraph he and Libby both wanted. The President wondered whether he might accept the Military Secretaryship of Montana, a post equivalent to territorial minister of defence. Though one historian of the region would claim that two other men had already refused the offer, Meagher telegraphed Colonel William A. Browning, the presidential aide. ‘Thanks to the President for the complimentary and friendly remembrance. I accept the Secretaryship of Montana. Shall proceed at once to Bannack City and Virginia City.’

  He heard from O’Be
irne that a young territorial governor named Edgerton was waiting in Montana for an excuse to leave the year-old territory, and Meagher’s arrival would be the pretext. Meagher would therefore become not only Military Secretary of Montana but its acting governor. Late in the season, Captain Lyons saw Meagher with Libby at the Townsend house in East 23rd Street. The general sat at his desk, holding a letter he had just received, enclosing a photograph, from his son Thomas Francis in Waterford. Lyons thought the 10-year-old lad in it looked splendid, and he later remarked matter-of-factly, ‘Of course, Meagher had never looked upon his face.’

  A mystery lies in that ‘Of course.’ One wonders why a man who during the war could have been killed in one of a dozen battles, did not seek to have his son brought over to the United States. Perhaps he did not wish to interrupt the boy’s education. Perhaps he had an unspoken fear of confronting this new face of his guilty relationship with Catherine. About the same time Lyons said goodbye, Meagher wrote to his father an undated letter which reads dutifully, like an adult version of what a child might write from school, saying that he hoped that Montana would be a splendid enterprise and that it might enable him ‘to pay you a visit in France next summer.’

  Fortress Monroe, where Jeff Davis and John Mitchel were now located, was an item of American Gothic; moat-encircled, its walls, though only 30 feet high, 95 feet thick. Within this sinister solidity, Mitchel was kept in a small, grim, whitewashed and vaulted room lit by a casemate. Low in the wall was a barred opening, and the prisoner could by bending talk through it. He had an iron bedstead and a little deal table. He was warned that he could not meet with his fellow prisoners, Mr Davis, captured in Georgia after the end of the war, and Mr Clement C. Clay, Davis’s adviser. He could not have books, and was served, directly on to an unscrubbed table, with a lump of bread and a piece of cold pork.

  Visited by the commandant, General Miles, the prisoner Mitchel complained that he was not informed ahead of time that he would be allowed no exercise and no books. Miles explained that these conditions were regulated by the War Department. In seeping damp, Mitchel sat up at night heaving with asthma, and the prison surgeon, Dr Craven, reported to the War Department that the Confederate newspaperman could not live long unless he was supplied with better food. From mid-August, he was allowed exercise and books and newspapers. The meals improved, and were served on a plate. Once he was permitted to face Mr Davis silently in the yard, and shake hands with him.

  Mitchel spent four and a half months in prison before the combined pressure of Irish-American Democrats, Peace and Union both, and of the potent post-war Fenian movement, brought his release. On his last morning at Monroe, 30 October, before leaving, he was allowed to visit Mr Davis for a few moments, and speak to him, bent over, ‘through the bars.’ Mitchel wrote to Mrs Varina Davis, who was not permitted to visit her husband, that Davis was ‘in morning deshabille … But I assure you, when he dresses to go out he looks well, steps as firmly and holds his head as high as he ever did on Capitol Square.’

  On release, he was four days short of his fiftieth birthday, but in no way finished with his career as an Irish lightning rod. He returned home to Richmond briefly to see Jenny and his children in their unmarred house, and then took train yet again to New York. Jenny noticed that he was heroically unchastened, and in New York he discussed with Richard O’Gorman and other New York attorneys the option of suing the government for permitting a violation of Habeas Corpus at his arrest. The lawyers wisely advised him to leave this matter alone.

  Fiske the explorer abandoned the idea of travelling with a group of veterans to Montana—a military escort was not provided. But Meagher was determined to get there before winter, escort or not. Libby would come in the following spring. His twentieth-century biographer reliably states that General Meagher’s route was by rail to Atchison, Kansas, and after he declined a departing serenade offered by the local Fenians, from there on the overland coach. He chose the irksome, bruising coach because though the Missouri was full, it could take a river steamer forty days or more to reach Fort Benton, which was still nearly 200 miles’ ride from the seat of government, Virginia City. Apparently, on 6 September, he reached Denver and was given a reception; and a similar reception awaited him amongst the Irish mining community of Salt Lake City. He suffered from atrophy of the muscles, though the splendid mountains and vast openness of the country diverted him. From Salt Lake he turned due north, through little Mormon settlements like Ogden, to raw Pocatello in Idaho and so into Montana. In a telegram to Seward, he indicated that travel was slow and uncertain, due to Indian troubles. It took seventeen days from Salt Lake to reach Bannack City, Montana, and cost $600.

  Arriving in Bannack City’s clapboard main street, he was met by Montana’s young Ivy League governor, Sidney Edgerton, all packed to depart. Edgerton shook hands, passed over a valise of territorial papers and left by the same coach Meagher had arrived in. Meagher rode with some of the territorial staff on over difficult Badger Pass and the Ruby Range to reach Virginia City, a township held in a bowl of mountains on which the snow did not fully melt in summer.

  Since all this seems accurately to describe the route Meagher took to Montana, we are left wondering about an article he would write under the nom de plume of Colonel Cornelius O’Keefe, a circumstantial account of a journey from Oregon into Montana. This would be published posthumously in Harper’s and was certainly specific. Meagher/O’Keefe described reaching Portland by steamer, taking a coach to Walla Walla, and travelling up the Columbia into what is now southern Manitoba in Canada. Then down the Pend d’Oreille River and the north fork of the Clark, through northern Idaho, and so into the valleys of Montana on the western side of the Rockies!

  The article described Pend d’Oreille City, Idaho Territory, in intense detail—‘standing on a picturesque slope,’ with ‘its store, billiards saloon, hotel and half a dozen private residences.’ So that if Meagher did not visit it on the way into Montana, he must have spent time there on his territorial rides. From Cabinet Landing, Meagher had O’Keefe travelling with a Flathead half-breed and a former army quartermaster down the Clark Fork towards the Flathead Reservation at St Ignatius, founded by Father de Smet and run by the Jesuits. On the trail, O’Keefe claimed to have met Kootenais, Pend d’Oreilles and Flatheads, who ‘boasted joyously that they’d never stained their hand with the blood of the Pale Faces.’ Meagher/O’Keefe and his quartermaster and Flathead guide encountered in the town of Plains the first sight of a phenomenon which would be a plague to Governor Meagher. Vigilantes had strung up a man.

  O’Keefe, crossing the Jocko, came to the Jesuit-run Flathead Indian Reservation. Ahead, suddenly, the enormous wall of the Rockies rose. The narrator claimed that the priests ‘have done more to reconcile the Indians to our government and progress than all the agents, superintendents, traders and interpreters that ever drew pay from Pennsylvania Avenue.’ Significantly, he saw the plush Flathead Reservation with its 12,000 souls as ‘an extravagant franchise’ which should be made available to white settlers. The Indians ‘virtually do not hold, and most certainly do not turn to advantage, one-sixteenth of it.’ The former defender of the rights of Irish peasants and tenants felt little sympathy for the idea that the Flathead might have uses for their remaining land.

  The narrative of Colonel O’Keefe, which was intended to be continued in further issues of Harper’s, came to a close here. But whichever way Meagher got to Virginia City, he was commendably seated at the modest gubernatorial desk in his upstairs office in Virginia City in October 1865, as the glacial winter began to penetrate the canyons, and he wrote with something close to accuracy to his former officer and now newspaperman Lyons, of ‘my being Acting Governor of the richest territory of the Union. I want you, like a good fellow, to have this announced in the Herald.’

  23

  GLORIO, GLORIO, TO THE BOLD FENIAN MEN

  It is worthy of observation with what regular gradations sedition and treason have been declining in re
spectability and prestige ever since 1798—then noblemen were the traitors—O’Connell had many men of some position associated with him … Phoenixism and Ribbonism were lower still. But Fenianism is even lower than Phoenixism.

  S. L. Anderson’s report to Lord Naas

  By the time Fort Sumter was fired on in the spring of 1861, the population of Ireland had dropped by death and emigration to perhaps less than six million, on the way down to the figure of 5,200,000 that would be counted in the census of 1881. In the altered landscape, there were only a third as many 1–5-acre farms as there had been in 1841. Throughout the 1850s, Munster’s population, already lowered by the Famine, dropped by a further one in five, and much of that loss was through the great harbour of migration at Cobh, Queenstown, renamed in 1849 for some seventy years. Ulster’s population fell by a further one in twenty too, and this was again on top of a 16 per cent decline during the Famine.

  Throughout the early 1860s there were enough young Irishmen who believed the inequities which created these losses must be addressed in Ireland itself, not through some oblique struggle under heroic Meagher and Corcoran in Virginia. Typical was a Fenian named John Kenealy, who had grown up in dairy-cattle country near Newmarket in north-west Cork. As Kenealy admitted later in life, the Irish Fenian movement ‘knew the disruption of the Union would strengthen England, make her hold on Ireland stronger, and check liberty in the world over.’ But the most direct duty was the forcible creation of a just republic in Ireland, not the saving of a threatened one in the Americas.

  Kenealy’s background was similar to that of much of the Fenian leadership, who often came from the class that typically generated members of the Catholic clergy. He was the second son of a dairy farmer, James Kenealy. A Kenealy clan of six families were thickly settled in cabins and farmhouses on a townland called Glenlara, 950 acres in extent, 460 acres of which they rented conjointly from the Earl of Cork, as their forebears had been doing since 1603. Apart from potato gardens, everyone kept dairy cattle, which they could graze on the slopes of nearby Mullaghareirk Mountains.