On guided tours of the official and unofficial city, Meagher saw that the locale of Irish political power under Tammany was the saloon. It served both as bank and political meeting-place. The saloon was also where favours, contracts, city and state jobs were dispensed by emergent Irish political bosses. The august court system was also exploited by the Irish: local Democrat bosses illegally naturalised the newly arrived Irish with the help of Democrat judges. The way politics was played here and in other cities was everything the Irish enjoyed: intimate, them-against-us tribal, and based on getting one’s own people—brothers-in-law, nephews, the children of friends—into some, any, public post. The law attracted many of the clever, since it required what many self-taught Irish could provide: the gifts of oratory, a passion for reading, an artful mind, and a furious but not always uncritical belief in the righteousness of any claims their fellows might bring. Taught by the Liberator O’Connell in the villages and townlands of Ireland to expect political results, the Irish were wringing slowly from America what they had historically craved, a place in the landscape.
On the morning of 29 May, a levee was held for Meagher which was attended by the most prominent local Whig and Democratic politicians. Mindful of his recent allegiance to the Australian League, the anti-transportation forces in the Australian colonies, he told the audience that the common convicts of Australia were a very low lot, but that the free colonists deserved a much better comment. That evening he visited Mrs Mary Mitchel, John Mitchel’s mother, who had moved from Newry to Brooklyn with Mitchel’s sister Matilda, and his ten years younger brother, William, who was attending classes at Columbia and devoting himself to a characteristic American vocation, that of inventor.
Subject to no police magistrate, Meagher also went out to Glen Cove, to a summer house provided to him by an Irish merchant friend of O’Gorman’s, Dillon’s and Doheny’s. Here he rested and was advised to wait to be offered ‘public entrée’ by several authorities. While he vacationed, little D’Arcy McGee came down from Boston to invite him to make an appearance in that city.
Meagher might indeed have taken a lesson from McGee, who had arrived in New York a young hero after escaping from Ireland following Ballingary. A natural newspaperman, McGee had initiated the New York Nation. He quickly made an enemy of the Catholic Bishop Hughes of New York by attributing the failure of 1848 to the strength of British garrisons in the towns and to the malign influence of the clergy in the countryside. He had also shown sympathy for the Garibaldian rebels who had forced the Pope to flee Rome. After his New York Nation was denounced from altars, McGee had gone to Boston at the invitation of a remote relative, the Bishop of Boston, to edit the American Celt.
But drinking coffee by the shore of Long Island Sound, the boyish McGee, scarcely twenty-five years old, was undergoing a total reversal of the opinions which had recently got him in so much trouble. The national movements in Europe were godless and secular, he would soon be writing, and a danger to Catholic faith and morals. Many Boston Irish found his new politics too pious and sales of the American Celt declined for exactly the opposite reason those of the New York Nation had. In his four years in America, McGee had offended nearly every constituency on which his living depended.
For the moment, Meagher was in no danger on that score. A fury of approbation raged round him. Governor Lowe of Maryland, an old schoolmate from Clongowes Wood, urged a visit to Baltimore. Governor Wright of Indiana sent an invitation, as did the corporations of Detroit and Macon, Georgia. In Charleston a sympathy meeting was held to applaud him on his escape.
In a letter received by Meagher, Catherine said Smith O’Brien had been to see her frequently at her parents’ home—a remarkable example of O’Brien’s loyalty. Now she devoted herself to building up the baby’s strength for the sea journey ahead. But on 8 June, Meagher’s 4-month-old Tasmanian infant died in the hamlet of Richmond, where Catherine was visiting friends to say farewell and to show off the hero’s son. ‘Poor Mrs Meagher lost her baby,’ Jenny Mitchel wrote to Miss Thompson from Bothwell. ‘… She has had a very pleasant letter from her father-in-law lately, the first time since her marriage. Also very handsome presents from Mr Harry O’Meagher.’ There was a tacit proposition here: the Meagher family growing closer to Catherine as Meagher himself grew more remote.
Since he did not yet know of the death, no cloud hung over the honour given him at the city’s premier hotel, the Astor House, where he was waited on by a committee of the Common Council of New York. Meagher pleaded, ‘Gentlemen—had the effort in which I lost my freedom been successful, the honours now tendered me would not surprise me. But it was otherwise.’ He made it clear that he did not seek any planned public receptions in New York or throughout the East, and the New York Times declared that this would ‘confirm and strengthen the favorable impression that he has already made upon the public mind.’
Nonetheless the newly founded Meagher Club of New York presented him, at the law offices of O’Gorman & Dillon, with exquisitely bound American classics—Sparks’s Life of Washington and Bancroft’s History of the United States. In July he accepted in absentia an honorary doctorate of Laws from Jesuit Fordham College in the Bronx. And a gala martial event was planned at the end of July. On the appointed morning, Meagher emerged from O’Gorman’s house with his refound schoolmate Pat Smyth, and walked down to the Battery to review the Irish regiments of New York—the 9th, 69th, Emmet Guard, Shields Guard, Irish American Guard, New York Irish Dragoons and Mitchel Light Guard. This event was attended by an immense number of the Irish population. Michael Doheny, now a New York militia colonel as well as an attorney, stepped forward to call on Meagher to communicate to his friends still in bondage, ‘that day and night their honourable deliverance is the first thought of their armed countrymen in these Free States.’ Facing continuous and frantic applause, Meagher invoked the light from the bayonets of the Irish militias the way he had invoked the light from the sword. ‘They penetrate and disturb the clouds which overcharge the present hour—revealing to us, in the light which quivers from them, many a fragment and monument of glory.’
The hero had by now made his home in the extremely comfortable Metropolitan Hotel at Broadway and Prince Street. He enjoyed its utter modernity. It was serviced by 12 miles of gas and water piping, and featured upper-floor sky parlours from which ladies and their escorts could look down amazed on the activities in the street below. There, large shuttles carried shoppers across the slippery Belgian-block pavement of Broadway, and respectable people walked on the west—not the disreputable east—side of the thoroughfare. Looking down in the company of splendid young American visitors, he felt the shadow of his Vandemonian marriage, adequate for a Lake Sorell solitude, but perhaps not for complex New York.
The letter which marred the year was placed in his hands in late summer or early autumn. Meagher was not particularly explicit on his grief for his lost son. But there was now flesh of his flesh which would never escape Van Diemen’s Land.
The New York Herald’s editor, Irishman James G. Bennett, boasted that election season that ‘All the Irish leaders—all the Irish exiles banished from their home by a persecuting government—have either come out in favor of Pierce, or remain silent from delicacy.’ Millard Fillmore was no choice—he was trying to curry votes by attaching himself to the widespread, nativist, anti-Irish Know-Nothing movement, so named because its early members, questioned about their anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic policies, structure and membership, always claimed to know nothing about such things. Tom Meagher himself certainly took an instant and avid interest in the coming presidential elections and in the Democratic candidacy of General Franklin Pierce. But Meagher’s chief work as the elections came on was to prepare for the lecture season which began in the fall in New York, and for which his opening lecture—‘Australia’—was to be at Metropolitan Hall. The organising committee pitched the entry price at 50 cents in hope of a mass audience. They were not disappointed. Though the doors would not open unt
il seven, by five o’clock in the afternoon of 25 November the hall was surrounded by people, and by six the pressure of the crowd was so great that the management opened the doors in any case. From backstage Meagher could hear that exciting anticipatory murmur of a mass of people bigger than most VDL townships. ‘The number present could not have fallen far short of six thousand,’ reported the New York Times, unlikely to exaggerate numbers for Democrat darlings like Thomas Meagher. Meagher had appeared on stage with two significant aids, a map of Australia and Robert Emmet, nephew of immortal Emmet, and for two and a half hours recounted to an enthralled audience the tale of his escape, going on ‘to consider the position Australia would yet assume as a Republic.’ Knowing his audience, he concluded with a coruscating passage in praise of America. In a field by the Hudson, he said, he had been struck by the bounteous harvest. ‘ “That seed,” said one who stood by, “came from Egypt.” It had been buried in the tombs of the kings—and lain with the dead for two thousand years. But, though wrapped in the shroud and locked within the pyramid, it died not … And thus it is that the energies, the instincts, the faith, all the vitalities which have been crushed elsewhere, have been entombed elsewhere, in these virgin soils revive, and that which seemed mortal becomes imperishable.’
The Irish American recorded that the T. F. Meagher Lecture committee presented the lecturer with a cheque for $1,650. Given that he had a wife and future family to provide for, Meagher went afield lecturing. It suited his desire to see the sprawling United States. His first series of hinterland speeches was made at Albany, Schenectady, Auburn, Utica and Rome. The Utica Evening Telegraph believed the Schenectady crowd ‘showed about as much admiration as would be exhibited in the tail of a defunct rat.’ But it admitted that in Utica itself the reception was better.
Meagher spent his first Christmas at liberty speaking in St Louis, where one member of the audience gave a toast: ‘The Five Stars in the new constellation in the Hemisphere.’ Meagher declared that he could not let the occasion pass without saying, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! And Amen! to that sentiment … the worst thing the British officers in Australia had to say against the flag is, that it “looks devilishly Yankee.” ’ But after a lecture he gave in the last days of 1852 in Cincinnati, he was urged by Catholic papers to clarify his attitude towards the clergy, and to explain his admiration for anti-clericals like the Italian Mazzini, who wanted to unify Italy and sweep away the Papal States, and for Kossuth, former radical governor of Hungary and political prisoner, now agitating in the United States on his country’s behalf. The Freeman’s Journal, the American Celt, the Shepherd of the Valley and the Boston Pilot printed tales of Meagher’s red anti-clericalism. ‘I spoke favorably of Kossuth and the European movements for liberty,’ he later wrote to O’Brien, ‘and that was the whole of it. For this I was denounced from the pulpits and through the bigoted Catholic press, and in highways and by-ways.’
After Meagher’s getaway, O’Brien fretted and felt entrapped. If he accepted a pardon on Britain’s terms, he told Lucy, he would ‘probably feel myself morally bound to abstain during my life from seeking to overthrow British Rule.’ His gentle brother Henry ran into the problem of his impenitence when seeking signatures to a petition for a pardon. ‘You will observe,’ wrote Henry depressingly, ‘the absence of many names which I had hoped would have been attached to it.’ But at least, said the Reverend Henry O’Brien, at prayer times in St Columba’s, when the boys were called on in the Litany to pray for all captives, ‘I know your son Edward and your nephews are in the habit of connecting your name with this petition.’
One anxiety bred another. He told Lucy he had received some money from Robert and had discharged some but not enough of his escape-attempt debt. And as frankly as an innocent, he raised his anxiety over Lapham and ‘his amiable family.’ He was dependent for any joy in life upon small favours. He felt poignantly relieved when an honest maid at Elwin’s found a lost locket Lucy had given him. But that was offset by doubts about how his family would treat his raw colonial friends. ‘I hope you will ask Mrs Meagher to visit you at Cahirmoyle.’
And though O’Brien considered Lucy a paragon, he scolded her for not being a model of the Irish rebel’s spouse. On his forty-ninth birthday, 17 October 1852, he remarked that Mrs Dillon, ‘a six months bride,’ joyously committed her husband to the rebellion, ‘bidding him die for his country rather than live for her. But you breathed no word of encouragement in the crisis of Ireland’s fate.’ When he thought of what she and his children had had to suffer for a cause they either did not feel, or were too young to feel, sympathy for, ‘I am tempted to exclaim—Maidens, beware of patriots!’
There was a maiden who had not bewared. Mrs Kate Meagher was about to sail off to join her husband by way of Ireland, where she would visit Thomas Meagher the elder. This was as good a route to New York as any through the Americas, but the prospect awed her. A father like Brian Bennett was familiar, hearty, possessed of a warm colonial vulgarity. From her husband she would have got a very different picture of Thomas Meagher senior—sage, authoritative, disapproving of his son’s excesses, one of which he might consider to be this colonial girl.
Since leaving his penal station on the Tasman Peninsula to live in Oatlands, Patrick O’Donohoe had had a vexing time, but had now been permitted to go to Launceston. Here he was greeted at the coach and looked after by Dean Butler. He tried to achieve redemption, financial and spiritual, by writing a manuscript on Port Arthur, but the printers to whom he entrusted it decamped to the Victorian goldfields. This was but one of many disasters and follies to afflict the increasingly alcoholic O’Donohoe. In January 1852, he staggered tipsy into the watch-house in Launceston and gave up his ticket-of-leave. Though he took it back the next day, he was sentenced to fourteen days on the exhausting treadmill in Launceston gaol. Convicts called this mechanical corn-grinder, designed for the dissipation of criminal energies, the ‘everlasting staircase’ or the ‘cockchafer.’
Then in August that same year, John Donnellan Balfe, the Young Ireland informer, was explicitly accused of treachery by the Nation in Dublin and by papers in Van Diemen’s Land. While defending his behaviour, Balfe took time to describe Meagher’s escape from Van Diemen’s Land as dishonourable. Loyal O’Donohoe rebutted Balfe in a letter to the Launceston Examiner, and said that Hampton should beware lest ‘the Macquarie-street convict hulk may be wrecked by the imprudence of his subaltern.’ The Macquarie Street convict hulk was the Convict Department, where Balfe had been until recently a deputy assistant comptroller.
Denison believed O’Donohoe had now violated the instruction not to criticise the administration, and by edict withdrew his ticket-of-leave yet again. Well-armed by now with Irish transportation statutes and certificates, the authorities sent O’Donohoe to hard labor at the Cascades probation station for six months. The Cascades regimen of heavy work in chain gangs aged and unsettled him to an extent noticed by all his friends. A month after his arrest, at a meeting of the Legislative Council, all the anti-transportation members passed a motion calling on the queen to rescind the Order in Council that designated Van Diemen’s Land as a penal colony. This helped Bishop Willson’s intercessions to Denison on O’Donohoe’s behalf, and O’Donohoe was released on 2 November after serving three months. But, not wanting him to make use of the gap between paroles which had allowed MacManus to escape with honour, the superintendent at the Cascades told him that he would be released only if he gave the normal guarantee. With no spiritual resources left, O’Donohoe signed his name to the parole. Reaching Launceston four days later, he went to see a friend whom he designated as GD—surely the businessman George Deas who had helped MacManus and Meagher escape. GD was shocked to see how shrunken O’Donohoe was and how lined his face. He argued that O’Donohoe could not last long under a regime of gratuitous imprisonments. He was after all the Young Irelander whom Denison could most punish with least local and international comment. He was thus, said his friend, ‘absolved from the moral an
d honourable responsibility’ of the parole. GD travelled to Melbourne to arrange a passage from there.
It was not until December that another friend of O’Donohoe’s, Mr O’N of Sydney, arrived and told him that the escape had been arranged. In his room in Launceston, O’Donohoe changed into a sailor’s jacket and walked with Mr O’N ‘at a quick pace to the Y Y Steamer’ (the Yarra Yarra). O’N concealed O’Donohoe in a succession of hiding places, including a stove. O’Donohoe ‘just fitted in to it like a monster pie in an oven,’ but it was decided that O’Donohoe would suffocate. As Mr O’N and the officer attempted to find another hiding place for O’Donohoe, news came that the police were already searching the ship, and O’Donohoe crept down the gangplank and back to Deas’s house.
The Yarra Yarra returned to Launceston on 17 December, and O’Donohoe boarded two days later, was concealed, and travelled without any drama the next day to Melbourne. Here he was greeted and helped by a Tipperary man named John O’Shanassy, an admirer of O’Connell, whose portrait hung on the wall of his house. O’Shanassy and two others had organised a place for him on a vessel going from Port Phillip to a ‘Spanish Colony’—perhaps the Philippines. But the cowardly captain reneged, and trembling and weeping, O’Donohoe travelled 90 miles back through the bush towards Melbourne, living on brackish coastal water.
Now, for lack of a ship in Melbourne, O’Donohoe had to be sent to Sydney. In that port, also gold-frenzied, he remained in hiding for several weeks in the splendid Macquarie Street house of a shipowner named McNamara. The vessel O’Donohoe ultimately travelled on from Sydney on 8 February 1853, Oberon, was cleared by Sydney customs for the South Seas. The most hapless of the Young Irelanders was, in a sense, free.