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

by Thomas Keneally

  The Republican officials of the territory correctly feared that the legislature would repeal the Extra-Compensational Law which gave federal judges $2,500 per annum each from the territorial funds, and rewarded other officials to scale. When they did so, many officials, including Judge Munson, became deadly enemies of Meagher. By St Patrick’s Day 1866, with the legislature in session, Meagher was thoroughly back in line with his Irish Democrat constituency, denouncing the radical Republicans and the Vigilance Committee, and attacking the proposition that Irish American loyalty to the United States was vitiated by an attachment to Ireland. He told a crowd in Virginia City, ‘It’s out upon the bastard Americanism [great cheering] that spews this imputation in the face of the gallant race whose blood, shed in torrents for its inviolability and its glory, has imparted a brighter crimson to the Stripes, and made the Stars of that triumphant flag irradiate with a keener reverence.’ His position would be one of ‘knowing no Republican, no Democrat, no Rebel, no Missourian, in the discharge of his duties.’ In calling the statehood convention later that month, he was recognising that ‘the war was over, and he, for one, would not plant thorns in the graves where the olive had taken root.’

  The first sitting of the legislature held, Meagher was left with a clearer budgetary base and a set of administrative acts. In the next Congressional election that year, Sanders was again heavily defeated by McLean, and the defeat was seen by the populace as a vote of confidence in the work of Meagher’s legislature. But before the legislature had even finished sitting, Judge Munson, the territory’s senior federal judge, made ominous remarks about his right to decide on the validity of the legislature’s acts. As early as 8 March, Meagher had written a blast at Munson, and perhaps unwisely let it be published in the Montana Democrat: ‘I do not and shall not, hold myself in the least accountable to you for my official acts.’

  In a decision published in June, Munson declared Meagher’s legislature and all its legislation illegal. Meagher wrote to Seward asking that Judge Munson and his colleague Judge Hosmer be removed from the territory, or at least that he be empowered to assign them to areas in Montana still inhabited only by buffalo and Indians. ‘Let the judges read Blackstone to the Aborigines!’ he urged.

  Meagher certainly had a taste for this huge territory, and wanted a Montanan future. If Edgerton resigned, he told the President, he himself would be anxious to be appointed chief executive of Montana. ‘Nothing delights me so much as being on horseback,’ he told Johnson, expressing a taste which would sometimes become jaded by Montana’s massive distances, ‘and taking long, rough and adventurous journeys.’

  A picture of Meagher in his hopeful Montanan phase emerges from a Belgian Jesuit, Francis Xavier Kuppens, twenty-seven years old at the time of his first meeting with the acting governor. In the early winter of 1865, when Meagher was making north for his first visit to Fort Benton, the general’s small party found Kuppens’s tented camp along the Missouri north of Helena. Kuppens was attached to St Peter’s, a new mission to the Blackfoot tribe, and was manning one of St Peter’s tented outstations. He found the Blackfoot on the east of the Rockies less biddable than the Flathead on the west, and was pleased to see Meagher and his party.

  As a Montana blizzard set in outside, the general chatted about his Jesuit education in Clongowes and Stonyhurst. The mercury went down to minus forty degrees that night, and Meagher’s party of five slept on a tent floor rendered comfortable by a number of pine boughs. They were all stuck there for two days, during which Kuppens got an eloquent summary of the history of the Young Ireland movement, and tales of Tasmanian imprisonment and of the Army of the Potomac both. When the blizzard stopped, Meagher rode on towards Great Falls and over the central plateau, coming for the first time to the red bluffs of Fort Benton on the Missouri, one of the great depots of American migration west.

  Ultimately, in the spring of 1866, the Jesuits decided to abandon St Peter’s. But Kuppens was pursued by a special messenger from General Meagher. If the US military authorities could be shown the well-established buildings of St Peter’s, they might be encouraged to place a garrison there, to guard the road from Virginia City to Fort Benton. Meagher asked Kuppens to come with him and meet up with the officers of a small detachment, which was presently being towed up the Missouri to Fort Benton in flat-bottomed barges. In an environment where even Jesuits were cowboys, Kuppens set to work breaking in a bronco, and then on this newly tamed horse chased after Meagher, catching up with him on the high plains some 40 miles south of Benton. The near-waterless stretch from Sun River to Fort Benton, Kuppens found, was made very pleasant ‘by the inexhaustible supply of anecdotes of the General.’ Meagher was disappointed on arrival at Benton, however, to find no soldiers had arrived. Their barges, too large for the pre-thaw river, had got them only as far as the mouth of the Judith, some 70 miles east.

  Meagher and his party rushed aboard a steamer which was attempting to make a fast turn-around for St Louis. Kuppens remembered that some of the black deckhands considered him bad luck and referred to him as ‘Sky Pilot Jonas,’ a view which became fulfilled when, under the high red bluffs of the Missouri, the steamer stuck on a sandbar. Crew and passengers worked all night carrying cargo ashore to lighten ship. But the tide did not lift it—in fact, they saw with frustration that the spring melt from the mountains was actually cutting a new channel to their right. The general and the four remaining members of his party gave their commiserations to the captain, waded their horses ashore, and headed overland to the Judith River, guiding themselves by the lines of the Bears Paw Mountains and the Judith Range.

  Meagher and his four companions suffered from thirst in the wide-open plains of eastern Montana, depending on murky water from the centre of a buffalo wallow. Meagher himself was thrown from his horse in a ravine full of alkaline mud and rode on covered with a ‘yellowish-whitish’ substance which permeated every fibre of clothing, every pore of skin. At last they saw the tents of the new fort on the Judith River. An Irish sentry looked up into Meagher’s alkali-covered face and said in whimsical prophecy, ‘Begorrah, sir, you look two governors!’—the living one, and the coming ghost. Lieutenant Hogan, a Fenian officer of the garrison, knew Meagher from the Army of the Potomac, and a prime frontier banquet was planned for that evening.

  Ultimately, the army was persuaded to rent the buildings of St Peter’s Mission from the Jesuits. Thus Meagher achieved both an army garrison for the territory, and the continuing presence of priests to serve a growing Irish community. Meagher desired the Irish not so much as souls, however, but rather as Democrat voters and citizens of the potential state.

  Later, with institutions of civil power in place, the Montana Vigilantes, a semi-secret, law-enforcing fraternity, which had strong connections with the Republican gentry of Montana, were happy to use such historians as ‘Professor’ Dimsdale, a Montanan newspaperman, to produce a graphic account of the rough equity but ultimate probity of their actions. They would apply themselves in particular to proving their case against one James Daniels, the defendant in a murder trial in which the acting governor was involved.

  Daniels had been charged with having knifed a man named Andrew Gaitley—according to many accounts, an honest citizen—during a game of whiskey poker in the winter of 1865–6 in a saloon in Helena. According to the Vigilante side of the tale, repeated not only in Professor Dimsdale’s book but in a number of territorial histories, at the time of the killing the Vigilance Committee was aware that Daniels had a bad record and had already killed a man in Colusa, California. But though its members knew the victim Gaitley—goes the tale—the Vigilance Committee forbore to mete out justice to Daniels: it agreed to let Judge Munson try the case. Despite Munson’s associations with the Vigilance Committee, the trial did not find Daniels guilty of murder. As a result of Munson’s advice to the jury, a verdict of manslaughter was found, and Daniels was given a 3-year sentence.

  Then, after a petition from a number of Daniels’s business and ot
her associates, Meagher pardoned the man. The proclamation pardoning James B. Daniels does not read like an act of drunken recklessness, as it was later depicted, but rather as a reasonable exercise of executive power. Basic to the matter, said Meagher’s proclamation, was ‘the petition of numerous good citizens of the County of Edgerton, where said conviction occurred, including several jurymen, who, by their verdict, contributed to the aforesaid conviction.’ The petition was signed by thirty leading Montana businessmen of the new kind, who resented the old Vigilante-Republican axis. It argued ‘that the circumstances under which the aforesaid offence was committed were most provoking on the part of the deceased or the parties in conflict, and, to a great extent justifiable on the part of the said Daniels.’ On this basis Meagher charged the sheriff of Madison County immediately to release Daniels.

  Judge Munson insisted that the pardon be rescinded. Meagher refused. According to the Vigilante version, Daniels returned to Helena to attack those who had given evidence against him. A decent populace was so angered that they hanged him at the Dry Gulch on the outskirts of Helena appointed for these purposes, and pinned to the dead man’s coat a notice: ‘The governor is next.’

  On 31 March 1866, to justify the hanging, the Post, edited by Dimsdale, gave James Daniels a fictional background. He had lately been pardoned out of the California state prison by Governor Lowe, after conviction of manslaughter, as—said the Post—all the readers of the Sacramento Union knew! For good measure the Post claimed that the wife of Gaitley had died of a broken heart. Munson and the Post could not, however, explain why, if Daniels was such a desperate man, his funeral was well attended by a large and respectful crowd, ‘the largest audience ever gathered in this territory,’ and why at the grave an eloquent citizen delivered a speech against the ‘secret midnight conclave.’ Afterwards, the crowd expressed their outrage against Vigilantism further in what the Democrat described as a large protest meeting.

  In the previous autumn of 1865, John Mitchel had been released from Fortress Monroe, and on arrival in New York was at once aware not only that the Fenian organisation had become extensive, but that President Andrew Johnson, in conversation with a Fenian deputation, had used language that led them to think ‘that the United States government may really contemplate [the policy of permitting, or at least conniving, at any enterprise] the Irish-Americans may undertake.’ In that enthusiastic season, before the split between William Roberts and John O’Mahony, Mitchel joined the American Fenians. ‘In short,’ he wrote, ‘if this gallant game is to be set afoot, I must have a share in it.’ O’Mahony, knowing that Mitchel needed activity, devised a safe and effective role for him: he could go to Paris where he could act as Fenian agent ‘for the safe transmission of funds to Ireland—a thing which had been attended with much loss through the intervention of the enemy’s Government.’ But Mitchel was empowered to be a legate too, to pursue ‘diplomatic relations with the French government, or any other public or private parties on the European continent, that may be found useful to the Fenian movement.’

  Less than two weeks after his release from prison, therefore, he had told Jenny with that heightened excitement she might by now have learned to dread, that he was to be stationed in France, where she and their daughters could soon join him. He was not long in a comfortable pension in rue du Rocher before he began to doubt the exaggerated claims of Irish readiness for an uprising. Brave, honest but credulous men, sent from Dublin or Liverpool, entered Mitchel’s lodgings and told ‘wonderful stories of the masses of men that were coming from America, and how General Sheridan was coming to lead them.’

  When the escapee Stephens arrived in Paris in March 1866, hope revived a little for Mitchel, though he suspected the roseate view Stephens gave him of Irish military possibilities: ‘Our strength exceeds 200,000 sworn men in Ireland alone … Of these 200,000, at least 50,000 are thoroughly trained men, a fair proportion being veterans … Rely on these figures, and then say if we can do nothing till France or America goes to war with England.’ Mitchel confessed to Jenny’s old friend Miss Thompson, ‘I begin to have some misgivings re: the Chief Executive of the Republic.’ On 17 February he had received by express from New York a large package of ‘Bonds of the Irish Republic,’ the ones that had caused the Fenian schism, and a letter asking him to sell them in France. In the light of the American split, Mitchel saw this suggestion as fatuous. The French authorities, at peace with Whitehall, were likely to arrest him for so much as advertising bonds whose purpose was hostile to a friendly nation.

  When his money ran short, and he left his lodgings at rue Rocher to go to the cranky and familiar old pension in the rue Lacépède, three British spies moved with him, settling into a wine shop across the road. But these mouchards were themselves watched by the outraged younger inhabitants of the pension. A number of young men wanted to go over the street and beat up the agents on Mitchel’s behalf, but Mitchel crossed to the wine shop, introduced himself to the three gentlemen, and told them he had needed to restrain a husky youth named Bonnerie from attacking them. This caused the three, or so he claimed, to abandon their post. Mitchel believed the men to be agents of Lord Lowley, the British ambassador, and he took his complaint against them to an admirer, the private secretary of the Emperor Napoleon III, Monsieur Piétri. Piétri made it pleasantly clear that the French appreciated his ‘reserve,’ and that their tolerance of him and his movements was based on a continuation of that reserve. In fact all his contacts with Piétri and other figures in the administration convinced him that ‘it is quite out of the question to open any kind of negotiation with the Emperor or his Ministers. While France is at peace with England, they would not even listen.’

  In America, the Civil War survivor Colonel James Mitchel was about to be married to a young woman of a powerful Bronx political family named the Purroys. Having fought the North for so many bitter years, James was going to re-enter it by marriage—although the Purroys were characteristic Tammany Democrats who had retained a peculiarly New York sympathy for Southerners, Mitchel did not leave Paris for the wedding, but the event caused him to consider what America signified for him. ‘How happens it, that though I have lived so long in America, and have met many good people there, I can never think of any Americans as touching me very closely.’ And yet he had left two dead sons there, and sought the company of Southern families in Paris, the Bayers and the Connollys.

  Though Montana abutted remoter Canada, Meagher found himself fortunately and distantly placed when it came to standing aside from any of Fenianism’s proposed adventures against the Canadian border, which, in the wake of the Civil War, were generating serious enthusiasm. There in fact existed a tradition of American forays into Canada. Apart from American attempts in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the republican ideal of delivering Canada from the British was pursued throughout the 1830s and 1840s by officially unendorsed bodies such as the Hunters, organisations made up of Americans who lived along the Canadian border and who considered Canada as the ‘Texas of the North,’ ripe for liberation. The Hunters’ 80,000 sympathisers were generally temperance, abolitionist and anti-Catholic, but some immigrant Irish Ribbonmen joined them. During the Canadian uprisings which began in 1837, Americans from the Hunters’ Lodges in upstate New York and Vermont infiltrated Canada. These American ‘brigands’ were tried—generally by the same courts martial as the Anglo-Canadian rebels of Upper Canada and the patriotes of Lower. Some were shipped to Australia with the Canadian rebels, whose ultimate presence in New South Wales is marked by Canada Bay on the broad Parramatta River.

  In 1842, angered by perceived damage to American commerce from the actions of British banks, the Hunters planned raids along the Canadian frontier as acts of disobedience against the Neutrality Act, and against the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which recognised the eastern border between Canada and the United States. America’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny, however, was in the 1840s–1850s directed more to the south, against Mexico, than towards
the north.

  Popular enthusiasm for invading Canada revived with the onset of the Civil War. American grievances against the British were increased by the number of Southerners, including paid agents of the Confederacy, who were harboured on Canadian soil; Clement C. Clay, Mitchel’s friend, for example, and the wealthy former Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson. In Canadian cities, especially in St Catherine’s near Niagara, they met with Peace Democrats from the States, subsidised Peace Democrat journalists, financed the seizure of a Union gunboat on Lake Erie, rescued Confederate prisoners from Johnson Island off the Ohio coast and from a camp in Lake Michigan, and sent volunteer arson squads into the North. On the afternoon of 19 October 1864, a group of twenty-one Confederate raiders crossed the unguarded border into the United States and robbed three banks in St Albans, Vermont of over $200,000. The Chicago Tribune, like other papers, called upon the American government ‘to march a sufficient body of troops to Montreal, Quebec, or any other place where the St Albans pillagers may have taken refuge.’