Timothy Egan's 'Immortal Irishman': A truly Irish, wildly American life

The Immortal Irishman

The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

By Timothy Egan

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 448 pp. $30

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

nolead ends From his earliest years in Ireland to the battlefields of the Civil War to his mysterious death in an icy Montana river, Thomas Francis Meagher was driven by visions of freeing his native Ireland from the yoke of Britain. It was a mirage constantly fading into the horizon.

Born to family wealth he easily tossed aside, Meagher had been sentenced in 1848 to hang for revolutionary activities. His life was spared only by an international outcry that led Queen Victoria to commute his sentence to permanent exile in Tasmania.

Four years later, leaving his new wife behind, he was lying, terrified, in the bottom of a small boat piloted through a howling rainstorm by two hired fishermen, the first leg of an escape painstakingly planned with the aid of other Irish patriots.

Eventually reaching New York - to the wild acclaim of the city's burgeoning Irish colony - he immediately plunged into the political life of his adopted country.

As Timothy Egan points out in this well-crafted biography, it was not the simplest of times, either in the city or in the nation.

More than a fourth of the city's population of 600,000 was composed of Irish immigrants, some fighting one another in gangs, others slowly starting the climb to positions of power in politics and the law.

But the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party was also gaining strength, often with rhetoric making the 2016 presidential primary campaigns sound almost genteel.

Four years before Meagher's arrival, at a rally in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, one speaker referred to the Irish immigrants as "scum unloaded on American wharves." Some of the crowd then stormed through Irish neighborhoods, burning churches and St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and forcing the mayor to declare martial law.

In the nation, of course, tensions over slavery were slowly building toward the Civil War, and the impending struggle was a source of conflict in the immigrant community. Some feared freed blacks would compete with Irish immigrants for entry-level jobs.

Meagher straddled the issue, saying that although he didn't favor slavery, "I am devoted to the Union. The Union accepts slavery," which at the time it did in the Southern states. He was aware of British sympathy with the Confederacy, and he harbored the dream that a Union victory would somehow lead to American help in freeing Ireland.

His restlessness was also at play. He was drinking - an intermittent problem throughout his life - and despite his well-received public appearances, he feared becoming, in Egan's words, "a minstrel act with a brogue."

His personal life was already steeped in tragedy. He met his first wife, Katherine, in Tasmania. The first child died there in infancy. Katherine died in Ireland in childbirth, leaving an older son he would never see, as he could not return home without facing arrest. His second wife, Elizabeth, was virtually ostracized by her aristocratic Protestant family for marrying a Catholic. She eventually converted to marry Meagher. The marriage was happy but childless.

Meagher joined the Union Army, bringing with him a unit of fellow immigrants who formed the highly decorated Irish Brigade. He eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general, fighting at Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, twice shot from his horse and once left for dead in the Virginia mud.

After the war, he served as acting governor of the Montana Territory, fighting a losing battle against vigilante frontier "justice."

This was where he met a mysterious and still-unsolved end when he fell, jumped (least likely), or was pushed by political enemies from the deck of a steamboat and drowned. Egan makes a convincing case for the third alternative.

The author of six other books, a multiple Pulitzer-winner, and perhaps best known as a columnist for the New York Times, Egan is a masterly storyteller. He dedicates the book to his ancestors, "cast out of Ireland," who "never forgot where they came from," and he is perhaps at his best in the early pages, where sorrow and anger show through his portrayal of British domination. The most glaring outrage came during the Great Famine, when the crown, in the midst of the horrendous potato blight, demanded that Irish grains and other produce be exported from Ireland while thousands starved.

The writing gets a bit purple at times, as in this description of Dublin in 1844: "Black rain on black cobbled streets, carriages splashing through puddles, the bruised-looking Liffey lumbering to sea." Or his description of Lincoln as "the praying mantis-limbed lawyer."

But in the end, it's a wee price to pay for a book like this. Meagher's wild life was both quintessentially Irish and memorably American.

Paul Jablow is a former Inquirer editor and writer.