The Immortal Irishman

Timothy Egan’s The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016) is the riveting tale of a maverick Irish exile that championed the causes of his people on three continents throughout his lifetime.

The biography begins with Meagher’s death, caused when he fell off a steamboat on the Missouri River, having been named the acting governor of Montana.

Egan then turns to the history of Ireland, suggesting that Meagher and Ireland are one and the same. The beginning of Ireland’s oppression began, according to Egan, with Pope Adrian IV in 1155. The Pope disavowed the Irish Catholic Church and acknowledged Ireland’s submission to King Henry II of England. Thereafter, Ireland would be a nation whose people were invariably oppressed. First, the Vikings intermarried with the Irish, then the English invaders of 1169 also stayed on the conquered land, marrying Irish women. Henry VIII’s conversion to Anglicanism forced the Irish to do the same, giving England another opportunity to ostracize the Irish. Oliver Cromwell exacted horrific casualties in Ireland, sparing not even women and children. The Irish survivors from Cromwell’s nine-month raid in Ireland with a force of 12,000 were sold as slaves in Barbados. Thereafter Penal Law (much like the Jim Crow Laws in America) was used to keep Irish from holding high office, owning valuable property, or inheriting large parcels of land.



The book is divided into three parts: the first recounts the portion of Meagher’s life spent in Ireland, the next sees Meagher as an exile in Tasmania, and the final part describes Meagher’s final years in the United States.

Despite Ireland’s history of oppression and endurance of Penal Law, the Meagher family amassed a small fortune, and Thomas Meagher’s grandfather, Thomas Sr., sailed to Newfoundland in 1780. He conducted a lucrative trading business in such goods as timber, sealskins, salmon, and cod, and returned to Ireland with his family. The titular Meagher is raised in an aristocratic home on land once belonging to English descendants of Cromwell’s army.

This background sets up Meagher as a member of the aristocracy. He attends boarding school and is trained in oratory. After studying at England’s Stonyhurst College, Meagher devotes himself to the cause of repealing the Act of the Union, which keeps Ireland under the oppressive “bootheel” of England. Meagher is back in Ireland and comes of age during the potato famine. He urges the hungry masses of Ireland to blockade the Irish ports so that their crops cannot leave for England, but rather feed the starving Irish at home. Meagher and other members of the so-called “Young Irishmen” are sentenced to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” but Queen Victoria commutes the sentence to exile to the other side of the world: Australia.



This marks the next stage in Meagher’s life as an exile in the English penal colony called “Van Diemen’s Land” (in modern Tasmania). Confined to a seven-square-mile area in Campbell Town, he is granted relative freedom in exchange for his word that he will never try to escape. In Van Diemen’s Land, Meagher meets a young governess, Catherine Bennett, who becomes the mother of his child. Feeling stifled by his inability to effect change as an exile on a remote island, Meagher escapes from this penal colony on a ship, leaving his pregnant wife. Catherine planned to meet him in America (as a free citizen, she could leave whenever she wished). Her daughter died in infancy, though Bennett would have a son, Meagher’s only surviving child, after joining her husband in America. Because Meagher escaped, he was forbidden from ever returning to his home country of Ireland.

While in America, Meagher distinguishes himself by taking the Fenian oath, whereby an individual claims to return from America to Ireland to liberate their people from the British. In America, Meagher faces extreme anti-Irish prejudice, especially from the nativist “Know-Nothing” Party. While many Irish are divided between the Union and the Confederacy, Meagher is promoted to general by President Lincoln. Meagher distinguishes himself as a general at the helm of the 69th Infantry Regiment later known as the “Irish Brigade.” His regiment performs heroically in the Battle of Bull Run, in which the Confederacy is victorious, but the Irish fight fearlessly. Egan remarks that the Irish suffer disproportionate casualties during the Civil War, because they cannot afford to avoid the draft. Meagher, however, remained loyal to the Union cause even during the draft riots, the most famous and disastrous of which took place in New York City.

After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson names Meagher Secretary of Montana. This is, in part, inspired by a proposal by the Irish ambassador to the United States, that the Montana Territory (for its wealthy copper mines in Butte) be named “New Ireland,” after the fashion of New England and New Jersey. Soon after Meagher arrives, the current governor, Thomas Dimsdale, furnishes a letter abdicating his current position as governor. Thus, Meagher, having just completed the six-month journey from Manhattan to Virginia City becomes governor of the Montana Territory



Egan’s tome, despite its scholarly rigor and thorough narration, leaves Meagher’s ultimate fate an unresolved mystery; he fell off a steamship in Fort Benton and his body was never recovered. Though acting governor, Meagher died a fugitive. An equestrian statue of the former governor remains in St. Helena as a tribute to the fugitive Irishman who championed his country’s cause from three continents. Meagher never met his only surviving son, Thomas, who was raised in Ireland—a country to which his banished father never returned.