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Thomas Francis Meagher

1823–1867

 

To his contemporaries, Thomas Francis Meagher was simply known as Meagher of the Sword.  It was a tribute to his dramatic rhetoric, but though he had lived as a soldier for much of his life, he left his country several important inheritances, including the national flag of present-day Ireland.

      Thomas Francis Meagher was born on 3rd August 1823 in Waterford, where his father was a prosperous merchant.  The family fortune had been made a generation before in the Newfoundland trade, which was an important part of the economy of the thriving seaport.  His father, Thomas Meagher, had been an MP and mayor of Waterford.

      Thomas Francis was educated at Clongowes Wood College, a select college run by the Jesuits.  From there he was sent to a sister school, Stoneyhurst, in England, which provided elements of a university education.  At these schools Meagher was noted for his rhetorical and literary skills, both from reading the speeches of DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and debating with other students.

      At first he became involved in Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, having been dismayed at the incompetence of the authorities in the face of the famine.  But this was a constitutional movement which did not appeal to his more ardent nature.  In 1845 he joined the more revolutionary Young Ireland movement, and in 1847 was one of the founders of the Irish Confederation.

      In February 1848 revolution broke out in France.  Meagher went with William Smith O'Brien to Paris to support the revolutionaries as part of an Irish delegation to Lamartine to congratulate the people of France on the establishment of a republic.  He returned to Dublin with a French gift to the Irish nation - a new tricolour in imitation of the French flag.  It was green, white, and orange, as he explained that it was to represent the union of the two traditions in Ireland in peace.  This became the accepted flag of the republican movement, and is now the official flag of the Irish state.

      His highly dramatic and inflammatory speeches led to his arrest and prosecution, but the jury disagreed.  In July 1848, the Irish Confederation established a 'War Directory', of which Meagher was a member.  He and Smith O'Brien travelled throughout southern Ireland urging revolution among the people.  But the Young Ireland uprising in July 1848, Ireland's response to the European year of insurrection, was a comic failure and again led to his arrest.  He was tried for high treason and in October was sentenced to hang.

      His death sentence was commuted.  Instead, in July 1849 he was deported to Van Diemen's Land (now the Australian state of Tasmania) with Smith O'Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus.  In 1852 he made a dramatic escape from the penal colony, and when he reached New York in May he received a tremendous welcome from his countrymen.

      Meagher then took up the law and was admitted to the New York bar in 1855.  His talents soon brought him into prominence the leaders of the Irish community.  He founded and edited the Irish News, first issued on 1st June 1856, and was much in demand as an author and lecturer.  For Harper's Magazine he made two exploring trips through Central America, which provided new material for his lectures.

      When the Civil War broke out, Meagher raised, in New York, a company of Zouaves, of which he was the captain.  (The Zouaves had a distinctive uniform with baggy trousers, derived from those worn by native troops of the French army in Algeria after 1840, which had been suggested by Lincoln's friend, Elmer E. Ellsworth, for wear by the company of volunteer firemen from New York City who fought in the Civil War.)  They went to the front line with the 69th New York Volunteers and took part in the first battle of Bull Run, in July 1861.  Returning to New York, he organized an Irish Brigade for the Army of the Potomac.  On 3rd February 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general and appointed its commander.  He led his brigade through the Peninsular Campaign to the Battle of Chancellorsville, and it proved itself at the battle of Fair Oak in June 1862, and at Richmond, Antietam, and Chancellorsville.  At Fredericksburg, on 13th December 1862, the brigade was cut to pieces and Meagher was wounded in the field.  In December 1863 he resigned, complaining that he had not been allowed to withdraw his soldiers to recover their morale.

      However, he was recommissioned in December 1863, and was given command of the military district of Etowah, with his headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Here he saw incidents of brutality by the Union Army against the Southern civilian population that reminded him of the worst excesses of British rule in Ireland.  After a very short time he resigned, and was then assigned to Sherman's army in Savannah, Georgia, from which he was discharged when the war ended.

      Meagher supported President Andrew Johnson's reconstruction policies.  The president then appointed him territorial secretary of Montana, in July 1865, and he was named acting governor in September 1866.  He had many problems in the gold-mining camps and plains settlements.  His support of Johnson and the Catholic religion did not make him a welcome figure to the powerful local vigilantes who actually ruled the territory.  His efforts to root them out were a failure.

      While on a scouting trip against hostile Indians near Fort Benton, on the night of 1st July 1867, he fell from the steamer on which he was travelling and drowned in the Missouri River.  His body was never recovered.  Unfriendly critics said he was drunk.

      It was the English novelist William Thackeray who gave Meagher his nom de guerre, Meagher of the Sword, as a consequence of a typically fiery speech the young man gave extolling the virtues of the sword at a meeting of the Repeal Association in Dublin, in July 1848:

 

      The soldier is proof against an argument - but he is not proof against a bullet.  The man that will listen to reason - let him be reasoned with, but it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that alone can prevail against the battalioned despotism.

      Then, my Lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it to be profane to say that the King of Heaven bestows His benediction upon those who unsheath the sword in the hour of a nation's peril.

      Abhor the sword?  No, my Lord, for in the passes of the Tyrol, it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian.

      Abhor the sword?  No, my Lord, for at its blow a great nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud republic - prosperous, limitless, and invincible.

 

      Daniel O'Connell prevented him from saying more, so Meagher and the Young Irelanders turned their backs to him.  This appeal to the sword, to physical force, thrilled his audience and countless later admirers.  Meagher stands squarely in the centre of the Irish revolutionary tradition to this day, but as O'Connell realized, and as Meagher himself came to see in Tennessee and Montana, the sword may do in wartime, but the affairs of any community cannot be ruled by it on all occasions.  To prosper, the republic he was so proud to serve needed peace.  As a rhetorician Meagher was outstanding, but as the old Irish saying has it, 'Fine words butter no parsnips'.