Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish Patriot, in Charleston

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–1867) was a famous Irish patriot of the mid-nineteenth century whose agitation for independence from Britain led to his exile from the Emerald Isle. After settling in New York in 1852, Meagher visited Charleston several times to deliver public lectures on history and politics. South Carolina’s Irish immigrants embraced him as a national hero during the 1850s, but denounced him in 1861 when he fought against the rebellious Confederate States. Today we’ll explore the context and legacy of Meagher’s connection to the Palmetto City.

Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced like “Mahr”) was born in 1823 in the port City of Waterford (Port Láirge), in the southeast of Ireland, to a Catholic family that gained affluence and influence through commerce. Under English and then British rule, Ireland’s Catholic majority had suffered centuries of cultural, religious and political repression that began to soften during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Roman Catholic Relief Act, ratified by British Parliament in 1829, annulled most of the old penal laws that had greatly abridged the civil rights of Irish folk who did not practice the Protestant faith or speak English. That thawing of religious and cultural restrictions allowed Meagher’s father, also named Thomas, to serve as Mayor of Waterford in the early 1840s and then as a Member of British Parliament. In short, young Thomas matured during an era of expanding freedom for the common people of Ireland living under the yoke of British colonial rule.

Meagher received his primary schooling in the city of his birth, then traveled to England for secondary education at a Jesuit boarding school. He returned to Ireland in 1843, the same year that Daniel O’Connell, an older Irish patriot, predicted great change for the Emerald Isle. O’Connell was the head of the Repeal Association, launched in 1830, shortly after Catholic emancipation, to advocate for the repeal of the Acts of Union (1800) that bound Ireland to the so-called United Kingdom. Despite widespread support for repeal among the common folk, British officials quashed the movement in late 1843 and briefly jailed O’Connell. Agitation for Irish independence was renewed in 1845, when the rapid spread of a potato blight destroyed the principal crop of poor tenant farmers who had little economic freedom under British rule. The persistence of the famine, or an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), fueled intense resentment of the British government that continued to export beef, pork, wheat, and barley from Ireland to England while tens of thousands of poor families either starved to death or emigrated to North America.

In the midst of famine and political repression in the spring of 1846, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Francis Meagher began to cultivate a reputation as a gifted orator. His talent for public speaking, polished within the context of a rather genteel family life, inspired Meagher to join other voices imploring Britain to stop exporting precious food resources out of starving Ireland. Daniel O’Connell and other Irish patriots of the early nineteenth century lacked the creative vigor and drive of Meagher and “Young Ireland,” as O’Connell famously described them in the summer of 1846. While British leaders were reluctant to acknowledge the island’s expanding humanitarian crisis, Meagher and other men and women of his generation began to contemplate more radical political action. The advent of Catholic emancipation in 1829 softened the theme of religious discrimination in political discourse and created new space for cross-community collaboration. Thomas found fellowship among a group of young nationalists advocating for Irish people of all religions to unite to achieve a common goal. In a famous Dublin speech disowning O’Connell’s old Repeal Association and advocating the use of force if necessary to gain Ireland’s independence, he earned the moniker “Meagher of the Sword.”

While friends in Dublin prepared to launch a radical new journal called United Irishman in the early weeks of 1848, Thomas Francis Meagher traveled to France to learn more about the young idealists behind the revolution unfolding in that country. He returned with a tricolor flag made to his specifications. One end of the banner was green, traditionally associated with Irish Catholic nationalism, while the opposite end was orange, associated with Protestant England since the late seventeenth century. The central block of white represented peace between two old rivals. On 7 March 1848, Meagher displayed the subversive flag above Waterford’s most fashionable street, angering British officials in the city. He then went to Dublin to deliver a series of fiery political speeches, joined by dozens of Young Irelanders advocating Irish independence.

The British government, incensed by the revolutionary rhetoric, began arresting Irish agitators in the spring and early summer of 1848. Meagher was at his family’s home in Waterford in mid-July when he was detained on a charge of uttering “seditious language.” After posting bail in Dublin, he returned home and continued to meet with political allies. He bid a final farewell to his family in late July and fled into the countryside. Members of the Young Ireland movement then launched a brief rebellion that began and ended on July 29th. Meagher was arrested in County Tipperary in mid-August and transported to Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, where he was incarcerated with other political prisoners.

The trial of Thomas Francis Meagher and other Young Irelanders in September 1848 was widely reported in newspapers across Europe and North America. Members of the global Irish diaspora learned that he and several others were sentenced to death for “treason felony,” a newly-invented British judicial tool, and that Queen Victoria commuted the death sentence of Meagher and other Young Irelanders in the spring of 1849, ordering them instead to be exiled to the remote territory then known as Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), on the south coast of Australia. Meagher and others boarded a ship in Dublin in July 1849 and sailed to their destination in the South Pacific. The ship arrived in November and Meagher remained on the island for more than two years. He escaped in January 1852, however, and in late May received a triumphant welcome to New York City. The twenty-eight-year-old exile, destined never again to see the land of his birth, immediately declared his intention to establish residency in New York and become a citizen of the United States.

Charleston’s daily newspapers of the 1840s and 1850s included streams of telegraphic information about the political convulsions in famished Ireland. The city hosted a significant population of Irish nationals and Irish-Americans at that time, though not in such large numbers as found in the Northern States. Charleston’s prosperous Hibernian Society, formed in 1801 by immigrants Catholic and Protestant, opened their own stately Hibernian Hall on Meeting Street in January 1841.  In the spring of 1848, during the optimistic zenith of the Young Ireland movement, a group of immigrants in Charleston formed a short-lived “Association of the Friends of Irish Independence.” Their enthusiasm evaporated in the autumn of 1848, after the failed rebellion, but it might have simply evolved into another organization that resurfaced in early March 1853 as the “Society of United Irishmen.” Those in Charleston who had read about the speeches, arrest, trial, and deportation of Thomas Francis Meagher embraced the opportunity to invite the famous patriot to the Palmetto City.

In the early weeks of 1853, Meagher embarked from New York on a lecture tour stretching from Boston to New Orleans. On the first of March, the members of Charleston’s Hibernian Society resolved to send a telegram inviting Meagher to join their annual celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, and perhaps to deliver a lecture as well. Meagher accepted, and arrived by steamboat from Wilmington, North Carolina, on the morning of Monday, March 14th. After resting at the luxurious Charleston Hotel on Meeting Street, he walked a few blocks southward to Hibernian Hall to deliver an evening lecture on the history of Australia. Meagher described the island’s geography and contrasting landscapes, and provided and overview of its settlement under British authority during the preceding century. He included no personal anecdotes, however, relative to the chain of events that led to his exile and temporary residence on the island of Tasmania. Instead of dwelling on the past, Meagher spoke at length about Australia’s prospects as an independent nation, soon to be liberated from the yoke of British colonization. “The future of Australia,” reported the Charleston Courier, “was depicted indeed with oriental exuberance of prophetic imagination, and the appeals for sympathy and hope for a nation struggling into freedom, were received with rapturous applause.”[1] Meagher’s second lecture on the evening of March 16th focused on the achievements of Henry Grattan and the “Irish Volunteers” of 1782, who succeeded in gaining legislative independence for Ireland within the British commonwealth, and whose achievements were erased by the Acts of Union in December 1800.[2]

On Thursday, March 17th, Meagher celebrated the feast of Ireland’s patron saint with several groups of Irishmen in Charleston. In the early afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day, Meagher strolled to what was then identified as No. 90 Meeting Street, the hall of the Society of United Irishmen. There he received an address expressing “unfeigned delight” at his arrival and hearty thanks from his fellow countrymen, some of whom had also fled during the upheavals of 1848. Meagher responded with a brief speech congratulating the efforts of Charleston’s United Irishmen to propagate the principals of civic and religious unity that he and other Irish patriots had espoused since the 1780s. “Ireland cannot be elevated into a new and nobler condition of existence,” said Meagher, and “cannot enjoy a permanent fortune as a free state, should such a fortune, despite her present dissensions and infirmities, be acquired—unless the principles you profess be the principles of her entire people. Nor can this Republic [that is, the United States]—beautiful as it is in capacity, opulence and territory—endure to the end of all mortal creation, unless the same principles pervade and govern the great elements [i.e., immigrants], flowing in upon these shores from other lands, which constitute the mighty aggregate.”[3]

In the late afternoon, Meagher joined members of Charleston’s Hibernian Society for their anniversary dinner at Hibernian Hall. The large repast was accompanied by songs performed by several local sons of Erin and a band of music playing patriotic airs from both Ireland and the United States. There followed a long series of toasts, including one made by the society’s president, Henry Connor, in honor of their distinguished guest: “Thomas Francis Meagher—the exiled patriot, who shall resume, in this the land of his adoption, the torch of freedom that will guide the land of his birth in its progress to civil and religious freedom.” Meagher then stood and made an impromptu speech, thanking his hosts for their hospitality and attention. While he appreciated the many compliments paid to him, he expressed reluctance to speak about his own efforts to promote Irish independence while many of his patriotic colleagues were still suffering the repercussions of British oppression elsewhere. Nevertheless, Meagher held aloft a printed copy of the 1791 “Declaration and Resolutions of the United Irishmen of Belfast,” supplied by local Irishman James Adger, and encouraged the audience to advocate “for the promotion of constitutional knowledge, the abolition of bigotry in religion and politics, and the equal distribution of the rights of man through all sects and denominations of Irishmen.”

Although Meagher’s fame stemmed from his participation in the failed Irish rebellion of 1848, he told the audience that he preferred not to dwell on the recent past. He had not abandoned that cause, he said, “but he was now here, and had declared his intention of becoming a citizen of this happy and flourishing country. He acknowledged now no other government than that of the United States of America, and whatever efforts in behalf of his native land he might deem it incumbent on him to make hereafter, they should be made as became a citizen of the United States. Nothing should be done illicitly or illegally. His conduct should be governed strictly and rigidly by the obligations he had assumed[;] to obey the constitution and laws of the country he had adopted as his own.” In response, the cheering audience spontaneously nominated and elected Meagher to membership in Charleston’s Hibernian Society, which the distinguished guest graciously accepted.[4]

Later in the festive evening of St. Patrick’s Day, Meagher strolled to nearby Military Hall to join the celebration of the Irish Volunteers, a local militia company established in 1794. He entered the room after their own sumptuous dinner and in the midst of the seventh after-dinner toast, inspiring “loud and prolonged cheering” in the crowded room. The captain of the Irish Volunteers, future South Carolina governor Andrew Gordon Magrath, proposed a toast to Meagher, concluding with the phrase “may every Irishman be as true to him, as he has been to them.” Meagher responded with a brief but eloquent speech that emphasized his intention to avoid the public sphere of politics while working towards his personal goal of becoming a citizen of the United States.[5]

Thomas Francis Meagher left Charleston on March 18th for Augusta, Georgia, but left lasting reminders of his visit to the Palmetto City. Before his departure, he posed for a photograph in the King-Street studio of James Osborn, who later advertised to sell reproductions of his daguerreotype portrait of the famous patriot.[6] In the days immediately following Meagher’s brief visit, members of Charleston’s Society of United Irishmen organized a new volunteer militia company in honor of their fellow countryman. They adopted the name Meagher Rifle Guard in April 1853 and in subsequent years celebrated their anniversary on January 13th, the date of Meagher’s 1852 escape from Van Diemen’s Land. Due to internal divisions, however, some members of the nascent militia unit left to form other Irish-themed companies, while the original name was shortened to the Meagher Guard(s). In this transition, the Meagher Guard abandoned the green-white-and-orange color scheme of their patron’s signature flag in favor of the ancient Irish nationalist symbol of a golden sunburst on a field of green.[7]

Meagher’s second visit to Charleston followed an extended trip to California during the winter of 1853–54. After landing at New Orleans in late March, he steamed from port to port and arrived at Savannah, Georgia, in late April. There Meagher received telegraphic invitations to visit friends in Charleston on his way to New York. In early May, local newspapers announced that the Irish patriot had agreed to present a series of lectures while sojourning in the Palmetto City. Meagher reached Charleston on the morning of May 11th and was conducted by friends to the Mills House Hotel, at the southwest corner of Meeting and Queen Streets. Heavy rains that evening forced the postponement of his first lecture, giving the weary traveler a day of welcome rest.[8]

At the hall of the South Carolina Society in Meeting Street on the evening of Friday, 12 May 1854, Meagher delivered a lecture titled “The value of intellectual wealth to nations, as illustrated in the case of Ireland by the fame and lessons of her orators.” Following a “glowing introductory passage in praise of the glories of the American Republic,” Meagher focused on the intellectual contributions of several noted Irish patriots of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including John Philpot Curran, Henry Grattan, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Richard Lalor Sheil, and Daniel O'Connell. The speaker did not count himself among Ireland’s most valuable exports, however. A review of the lecture in the local press noted that “Mr. Meagher commenced with an allusion to the circumstances which had first induced his appearance as a public lecturer. Personal allusions were repugnant to him, and his friends would bear witness that he had rarely if ever referred to the causes which led to his presence here amid the citizens of this proudly glorious republic.” Meagher also announced that his visit to Charleston “would close his career as a lecturer.” Public speaking tours had provided income and allowed him to become acquainted with various parts of North America, but he intended to settle into a more stationary career as a lawyer and ordinary citizen of the United States.[9]

The second lecture of Meagher’s 1854 visit to Charleston, devoted entirely to “The Life and Times of John Philpot Curran, the Irish Patriot, Orator, and Wit,” took place at Hibernian Hall on the evening of Monday, May 15th. That topic formed a sort of prelude for Meagher’s third lecture on May 16th, titled “The Life and times of Daniel O’Connell.” For reasons not articulated in the local press, however, these last two programs at Hibernian Hall received far less publicity than his earlier presentations. Details of Meagher movements in Charleston during the latter part of May 1854 are now obscure, but he evidently bid farewell to his Carolina friends and sailed to New York before the end of the month.[10]

Despite his stated intention to end his career as a public lecturer, Thomas Francis Meagher returned to Charleston for a third time in January 1855 to speak at a fund-raising event. He accepted an invitation from the city’s Meagher Guard, extended in November 1854, to visit and help raise money for the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association. Meagher had in the past spoken positively about the political career of John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina statesman of Irish descent, and the ladies determined to raise a monument in his honor sought to capitalize on Meagher’s popularity within the state’s Irish-American community. In early January 1855, the Charleston Courier predicted that the upcoming visit of the famous Irish patriot would attract “one of the largest audiences ever assembled in this city.”[11]

Meagher traveled by steamship fifty-five hours from New York to Charleston, then enjoyed a restful weekend at the Mills House Hotel.[12] On the evening of Monday the 15th, he spoke to an audience of more than two thousand white citizens crowding into the recently-completed hall of the South Carolina Institute, standing on the opposite side Meeting Street from the Mills House in the adjacent block. His talk was titled “American Progress; Evidences and Developments of American Genius; South Carolina in the Camp and Senate; the Heroines and Heroes.” The long discourse, which was abstracted in the local newspaper and later published in pamphlet form, focused on the character and intellect of John C. Calhoun, the political and military history of South Carolina, and the virtuous patriotism demonstrated by the efforts of the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association.[13]

After his lecture, Meagher lingered in town for a few days. On the evening of January 17th, he attended a special meeting of the Meagher Guard at Military Hall, which assembled to celebrate the anniversary of the American victory over British forces at Cowpens, South Carolina, in 1781. The participants raised a toast to the heath of Thomas Francis Meagher, which he reciprocated with generous compliments to his hosts. He again expressed his firm determination to end his career as a public lecturer and to focus on the practice of the law. “His career thus far,” observed the Charleston Courier, “is a noble and cheering guaranty [sic] of what we may expect, when the status of full citizenship, shall give such a mind the power of full and free utterance on all great topics of public interest.”[14] Meagher departed Charleston on the afternoon of the 19th by steamship for Savannah. Later in the year 1855, Meagher passed the bar in New York and married a wealthy Protestant socialite. In 1857, after five years’ residency, he officially became a citizen of the United States and was enrolled as an officer in the New York militia.

Meagher planned another lecture circuit through the Southern states during the winter of 1857–58, but he postponed the entire tour to embark on a study of Costa Rica.[15] The Irish exile was curious to know if that Central American nation, which was predominantly Catholic and amenable to the use of enslaved labor, might serve as a suitable refuge for future generations of Irish emigrants. Planning for Meagher’s Southern speaking tour resumed at the end of the year, however, when he proposed a series of new lectures on the land and people of Central America.[16]

Meagher traveled by steamer from New York to Charleston, arriving on Monday, 10 January 1859.[17] On Thursday the 13th, he joined his namesake militia company for their anniversary celebration. Members of the Meagher Guard escorted their guest from the Charleston Hotel to a ferry landing near the east end of Market Street, then across the Cooper River to the village of Mount Pleasant. There they shot rifles at targets and distributed prizes before enjoying a lavish meal at the village hotel. After dinner, Captain Edward Daly raised a toast to their distinguished guest and patron, whom he described as “a true republican and patriot.” Meagher stood and replied with his typical genteel wit. “It gratifies me, beyond expression,” he told the crowd, “to meet once more, in the hospitable shade of the fragrant old Palmetto, so many of my Southern friends, and the gratification which this circumstance excites, is heightened by the reflection that since I saw them last—those Southern friends—four years ago—I never forgot them once.” After a winding impromptu speech praising the Meagher Guard, the City of Charleston, and the State of South Carolina, he concluded by alluding to a higher political ambition. Meagher said he was “supremely proud” to be an American citizen, but, he added half-jokingly, a citizen “who deeply regrets that, having been born out of the United States, he cannot be presented as a presidential candidate at the Charleston [Democratic Party] convention in 1860.”[18]

More than a week after his arrival, Meagher delivered his first lecture at Hibernian Hall on Tuesday, January 18th, titled “Observations in Central America.” Some in the audience might have expected his talk to contain “something of the filibustero stamp about it,” remarked a local newspaper, but Meagher’s address proved “eminently and soundly conservative,” focusing on “the history and condition of the brave and prosperous Republic of Costa Rica, the Switzerland of Central America.” To illustrate the florid, romantic word painting of his lecture, Meagher brought a series of large-scale paintings, created especially for the series, that hung from the ceiling like theatrical backdrops. With these props, the press observed, “Mr. Meagher conducted his audience up from the Pacific, through forests, across rivers, over plains and mountains, through storm and sunshine, &c., to San Jose, the beautiful and modest little capital of Costa Rica.”[19]

Meagher’s second evening lecture, a continuation of his “observations in Central America,” took place at Hibernian Hall on January 19th, followed by a third program on the 20th titled “St. Patrick’s Day, and the Influence and Significance of National Anniversaries and Commemorations.” The local newspapers provided no coverage of these events however, nor any further details of his movements in Charleston beyond the fact that he departed on Saturday, January 22nd, aboard a New York steamer.[20]

One year after Thomas Francis Meagher’s fourth visit to Charleston, the vitriolic presidential campaign of 1860 threated to tear the United States in two. The principal cause was the political battle between those seeking to arrest the growth of slavery in the expanding nation and those seeking to preserve the legal traffic in unfree labor. Meagher owned no slaves and lived in a state that had abolished slavery decades earlier, but he had friends in Southern states like South Carolina where enslaved people of African descent formed the majority of the population. As early as 1856, in fact, he had supported the Democratic Party party’s pro-slavery candidate, James Buchanan, who became the fifteenth President of the United States.[21]

The election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 induced Democratic South Carolina to secede from the union in December, followed soon after by ten more Southern states that all sought to protect the legal right to own slaves and engage in human trafficking. In the wake of this national crisis, a New Yorker asked Meagher in early April 1861 to articulate his political sympathies in case of war between North and South. Meagher reportedly replied enthusiastically, “my sympathies are entirely with the South!” After rebellious South Carolina forces triggered a civil war on April 13th by attacking Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, however, he reconsidered the complex web of his American allegiances.[22]

Telegraphic news in late April 1861 informed Charlestonians that Thomas Francis Meagher was raising troops for a new Irish company in the New York state militia. In response, the Irish and Irish-American members of Meagher Guard called a special meeting to consider their future. A committee assigned to determine the veracity of the rumor reported that “it appears to be true that Mr. Meagher has been carried away by the fanaticism of the North, and has enrolled himself in the ranks of our enemies, taking arms against us in this most unholy war in support of usurpation and oppression, thus proving himself recreant to the sacred principles of liberty, of which he was hitherto so uncompromising an advocate.” The rebellious Carolinians lamented what they saw as Meagher’s betrayal of their constitutional rights, and resolved to repudiate his name. On May 6th, the citizen-soldiers agreed “that the name of Thomas Francis Meagher be erased from the roll of honorary member of this Company,” and assigned another committee “to suggest some suitable name by which this company shall hereafter be known.” Three days later, on May 9th, the members of the Meagher Guard officially changed the company’s name to the Emerald Light Infantry.[23]

Meagher went on to become a general in the Union Army during the long Civil War that finally ended in the spring of 1865. He was then appointed secretary of the new Territory of Montana, where he briefly served as acting governor until his mysterious disappearance in July 1867. The tricolor flag that he had first flown in Waterford in the dramatic spring of 1848 disappeared from public view under continued British rule, but it persisted in the hearts and memories of Irish citizens and exiles who dreamed of independence. Banners of green, white, and orange reappeared in 1916 as a powerful symbol of Irish unity, became the national flag during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and Free State (1922–1937), and attained constitutional recognition as the official flag of the Irish Republic in 1937.

Thomas Francis Meagher made many friends in Charleston during four visits within a span of six years, then lost them all in a bloody conflict that convulsed the republican ideals of his adopted home. He did not survive the war long enough to consider a fifth visit to South Carolina, where he might have made peace with his fellow countrymen and written a new chapter in Irish-American history. If Meagher were to visit Charleston today, I think he’d swell with pride to see the tricolor banner of Young Ireland flying in the ocean breeze over a city that embraces its Irish past, present, and future.

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