Irish rebel, Australian convict, US general

Thomas Francis Meagher

1823 It has well been said that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. This is the story of an Irishman, Thomas Meagher, who was almost hanged and his body chopped into four pieces by the British government, for his terrorist leanings, and who went on to become Governor of Montana, USA. His fellow terrorists also had remarkable careers – but more of them in just a minute.

This day saw the birth of Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish nationalist, and later transported convict, escapee, American Civil War general, and Governor of Montana.

In the 1840s, at the time of the great Irish famine, a party of radical Irish nationalists called the ‘Young Irelanders’ wrote articles in The Nation and The United Irishman newspapers arguing that the Irish people, if they had an Irish Parliament, could better deal with An Gorta Mor (‘the great hunger’), than could British parliamentarians sitting in London so removed from the Irish peasants dying by the hundreds of thousands.

One of the Young Irelanders who came to prominence, at a young age, was Thomas Meagher. Educated in Jesuit colleges, allowing him to receive a better education than most Catholics at the time, Meagher left college in 1843 with a reputation as a great patriot and orator. He took his fervour and oratorical ability to the Loyal National Repeal Association, the nationalist party of ‘the Great Liberator’, the elderly Daniel O’Connell. However, Meagher was of an impetuous nature and O’Connell’s devotion to non-violence could not keep Meagher in O’Connell’s ranks. The Young Irelanders had no such reservations about the use of force, and in 1848 Meagher, aged only 23, gave a firebrand speech that earned him the nickname ‘Meagher of the Sword’ ...

On April 15, 1848, Meagher presented the tricolor national flag of Ireland to the public for the first time at a meeting of the Young Irelander Party. Earlier that year – the year of revolutions in Europe, he had travelled to Paris with a YI delegation. Inspired by the tricolor French flag, he came up with similar design for the Irish flag, with orange, white and green stripes ...

A fearsome sentence
In May, 1849, he was tried for “exciting the people to rise in rebellion”, but the trial was aborted. In July, the Young Irelanders attempted a rising among a people then suffering through some of the worst ravages of An Gorta Mor, which the British called the Potato Famine. The rising had no real prospects of success, and was soon crushed. Meagher was among those arrested, tried for high treason, and sentenced on October 23 to be hanged, drawn, and quartered – the British punishment for high treason ...

Read on in the Book of Days (click book image above): Meagher escaped from an Aussie prison and became a US General and Governor ...