The Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848: How Dreams of Freedom Ended in an Old Widow's Cabbage Patch in Tipperary

It is July 18, 1854 and young Irish revolutionary Thomas Meagher has been drinking--a lot.

In only the last six years Meagher has become a convict, a fugitive from justice and a world renowned celebrity of the Irish diaspora that grew out of the millions who fled from his homeland during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840’s.  He has become an American citizen, and now, at the young age of thirty-one, Meagher has also become a widower and father to a small child that he’s never even seen.

If anyone, at that moment in 1854 had reason to drink it was Thomas Meagher. And things were about to get even worse.

After spending years as a convict, castaway by the English Crown to the remote British penal colony of Tasmania, Meagher, thanks in large part to his well-connected, wealthy and loyal to the British Crown father, made a harrowing escape from the remote prison colony.  He, like many of his Irish revolutionary friends in the early 1850’s washed up on the shores of Manhattan to a hero’s welcome from the tens of thousands of recent Irish immigrants living in New York City’s slums at that time.

But in a letter from his father upon arriving in America Meagher soon found out that his young wife, who was in ill health to begin with had passed away before she could join him in the United States, and that he had a child he could never see in his native Ireland--a homeland he could never return to.

Ostensibly, while residing in New York City Thomas Meagher was a fugitive from the law on the run from British authorities.  Not only was Meagher an escapee from the penal colony of Tasmania, but he was also a traitor to Great Britain, a young Irish revolutionary leader in fact, who had been part of a failed uprising against British rule that had taken place in Ireland almost exactly six years before to that very day.

That uprising which took place in July of 1848 was called the Young Ireland Rebellion.  It had been planned, organized and carried out by a group of young idealistic starry-eyed poets, artists, lovers and dreamers, none of whom was past the age of twenty-five at the time.  It had failed, failed miserably in fact, having been sold out from within by turncoats who had been co-opted by promises of wealth backed by British pounds Sterling.  Thomas Meagher had been the international face and leading orator behind the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848.

Leaders of the Rebellion after their Capture

By 1854, though in their hearts the dream of Irish independence still lived on, outwardly all the once innocent and idealistic  young men (and women) of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 had since paid dearly for daring to transgress Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s rule.

Thomas Meagher in the summer of 1854 was barely over thirty years old.  His God given gift of oratory and his leading role in the Young Ireland Rebellion had already made him famous, for a time, but that fame was beginning to slowly slip away as his public speaking appearances dwindled and his alcohol consumption steadily increased.

He found himself an unexpected widower; an exile living in a foreign country and unemployed.  That summer he lived in rented rooms in hotels in Manhattan’s notorious crime and vice ridden Five Points neighborhood and he subsisted off the charity of friends and even off of a loan from his loyalist turncoat father who was well respected and one of the few Catholic  members of the British Parliament.

Five Points in 1850

Thomas Meagher, by July 18, 1854 had sunk quite low since the heady and intoxicating days of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848. And to top it all off, to add insult to injury, Thomas Meagher had recently been attacked in the New York City press for his role in the Young Ireland Rebellion by no less an authority, no less a friend of the Irish, than the Roman Catholic Church!

That summer Meagher came under attack from fellow Irishman James McMaster, a newspaper editor who ran a New York City rag sheet called The Freeman’s Journal.  McMaster’s paper was the most widely read and well-respected Catholic run periodical in the United States at the time and was, for all intents and purposes, the voice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York City.

In July of 1854, after Meagher had been openly critical of the lack of Catholic clerical support for the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 in one his speaking engagements, McMaster referred to Meagher, fellow rebel John Mitchel and all the rebels of Young Ireland as, “these silly, bad and contemptible boys.”  He went on to call their abortive uprising, “a laughingstock to the world.”  (Egan 150-151)

Meagher was enraged.  After drinking all day he challenged McMaster outside his editorial office.  He stood staring up at the second story window and demanded that McMaster, “Come out you dirty rat!”

McMaster simply told Meagher to, “Go home!” And slammed the windows to his editorial office shut.  A drunken and enraged Thomas Meagher stood in the street on that hot July afternoon until the sun started going down, simmering with anger, because McMaster wouldn’t respond like an honorable gentleman to his challenge.

He went home dispirited, disappointed and still enraged.  He continued to drink and went back out into the street.  He waited for McMaster near his home and confronted him in the street.

Meagher, who was always armed, threw a punch which the other man dodged.  McMaster tackled him and the two men fought on the muddy ground of the city street.  Somehow, the gun Meagher carried discharged and the bullet grazed McMaster.

The police came and arrested Meagher and McMaster.  Both were hauled off to jail and Thomas Meagher, famed leader of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, faced a charge of attempted murder…

Back in 1848 it had seemed as if all of Europe was a powder keg ready to be lit by the spark of Revolution and go up in a blaze of idealistic young democratic flaming glory.  

There had been popular uprisings against monarchies and national governments in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg and a score of other European cities.  Some of these uprisings had very nearly succeeded and many of  these so-called “Revolutions” had led to more progressive and democratic forms of government in countries throughout Europe.

The Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 was a part of this greater continent wide upheaval of what would come to be called the “Year of Revolutions” in Europe--a time in history when democratic, nationalist and even anarchist groups rose up against the traditional monarchical seats of power in Europe.  However, there was one key, fundamental, difference between the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 and all other popular uprisings in the mid 19th century--the Irish in 1848 were literally starving to death.

Ireland in the 1840’s suffered through the Great Famine, sometimes called “The Great Potato Famine” because of the blight suffered by the crop that sustained life for the majority of the Irish poor--the potato.

Starving of the Great Famine

And though in theory, at least, it was the blight, or mysterious disease that affected the potato crop which was the proximate cause of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840’s, Ireland throughout that decade was, in fact, producing enough food in the form of wheat, meat and dairy to feed its entire population.  However, the British aristocracy was exploiting Ireland and exporting their other foodstuffs abroad for lucrative profits in the form of a cut-throat laissez-faire capitalist system akin to medieval feudalism that caused the deaths by starvation of a generation of Irish.

Though it began in 1845, the year 1847 is considered by historians to be the worst year of the Great Famine in Ireland.  The Irish themselves called it “Black ‘47”.

In that year alone it is estimated that over 1 million Irish died of starvation, while a further 1 million Irish men, women and children fled the country--mostly settling in the United States and Canada forming an international diaspora of Irish of which Thomas Meagher himself would become a leading figure in the 1850’s.

But Meagher’s flight to America still lay some years in the future.  As it was, by 1848, with millions of his countrymen having literally starved to death and been evicted from their homes while their wealthy British overlords reaped the profits generated by the foodstuffs that the peasant Irish grew and exported, of which they were not allowed to eat while their children starved, many young Irish like Meagher had had enough.

Leaving Ireland for America 1847

Young Irish, Meagher among them, fresh out of school and fired by patriotic song and poetry sought to throw off the yoke of British oppression.  They formed an organization known as the Irish Confederation and they created the flag of Ireland as we know it today.  The Irish Confederation sought help and aid from Catholics throughout Europe to feed the starving of Ireland and to help them rid themselves of British feudalistic rule.

In 1847, inspired by the democratic tenets and spirit of the French Revolution of 1789, leaders of the Irish Confederation, Thomas Meagher, William Smith O’Brien and Richard O’Gorman went to Paris to try and enlist French support for a possible rebellion.  Though the leaders of the French Republic were sympathetic they turned a cold shoulder to the pleas of the young Irishmen for help.

As the Irish Confederation gained in popularity throughout the country, and as the depths of the famine worsened, the British government became alarmed.  The Irish Confederation of Young Ireland even unveiled a national flag with a green line representing Ireland’s Gaelic roots, a white line representing Irish Catholicism and an Orange like in honor of Ireland’s Protestants that the Young Irish hoped would rally to their cause.

The British became so alarmed at the prospect of Irish Rebellion that in July of 1848 the British government suspended the writ of habeas corpus for all Irish citizens.  This act, meant in effect, that the British government could now arrest and imprison any of the young Irish leaders without trial and for any reason.

For one week at the end of July, from the 23rd to the 29th of 1848, Thomas Meagher, William Smith O’Brian, John Mitchel and other Young radicals in Ireland called for open rebellion against oppressive British rule and attempted to arm and rally the Emerald Isle’s starving masses to their cause.

The British responded with increased military and police presence.  On July 28, 1848 a great gathering of Young Irish rebels took place in Tipperary.  Barricades were erected in the streets as it was declared that police officers and military personnel would soon be arriving on the scene to arrest Young Irish leader William Smith O’Brien for seditious activity.

Hundreds of local laborers armed with pistols, rusty old smooth-bore muskets, fowling pieces and even pitchforks and sharpened sticks rallied around O’Brien and came to his defense.

        Forty-six police officers approached a crossroads outside the town of Ballingarry, and seeing the crowds and barricades that had been erected against them, decided to head back down the road and retreat across some open farmers fields away from the crowds of rebellious Irish arrayed against them.

The angry crowds pledged to the defense of the Young Irish rebels followed the British police.  The forty-six police officers took refuge in a large two storey farmhouse that belonged to a widow named Mrs. Margaret McCormack.

She was not at home when the police barricaded themselves in her farmhouse, she was gathered outside with the crowd of rebels that had pursued the British officers down the road and across the farmland.  Her children were inside the farmhouse.  She demanded to be let into her home.

The farmhouse was surrounded by Irish rebels, the police barricaded the windows and doors, and refused to either let Mrs. McCormack in or her children out.

Mrs. McCormack's Farmhouse 1848

Mrs. McCormack found William Smith O’Brien amongst the crowd of Irish rebels that had surrounded her home and demanded that he do something or, “What would become of my children?!”

O’Brien bravely walked up to the front window of the farmhouse and demanded that the police, “Give up their guns!”

An official report after the incident at Mrs. McCormack’s farmhouse stated that after O’Brien attempted to open up negotiations with the police, a shot rang out fired by one of the police constables inside.  After that initial shot, general gunfire ensued, with the both rebels on the outside and the police officers barricaded inside firing at one another.

The rebels, young, inexperienced, out-gunned, untrained and with many women and children among them, were unable to gain access to the farmhouse and were soon forced to run for their lives in the midst of the withering fire from the police, with more law enforcement and military personnel on the way.

The Battle of Mrs. McCormack’s Cabbage Patch was over and the rebels had lost.

Within hours O’Brien, Meagher, Mitchel and all of the leaders of the Young Ireland Rebellion found themselves fugitives from the law and on the run.  A starving population of Irish peasants, though largely sympathetic, was unable to hide and help the rebels to escape.

Eventually, all the leaders were rounded up by British authorities and though sentenced to death for the felonious crime of High Treason against Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the Crown not seeking to turn these somewhat amateurish young Irish rebels into martyrs,  had their sentences commuted to “Transportation” a Victorian-Era euphemism for being sent to one of the British Empire’s far-flung prison colonies such as Tasmania.

After all of that, seven years later, Thomas Meagher found himself in an American jail cell, charged with attempted murder and still on the run from the British.

But Meagher, though ridiculed and down and out, just like most of the Young Irish Rebels of 1848, and like the nation of Ireland itself, would go on not only to survive, but also to flourish.  His rich, well-connected father, would go on to bail him out of jail once again and the Irish diaspora in America would rally once more around him.

During the American Civil War Thomas Meagher would become a war hero as the men who formed and led the famed “Irish Brigade” the fighting 69th Regiment from New York City.

And though it would take nearly eight more decades of struggle, Ireland too, ignited in no small part by the spirit of the Young Irish Rebels of 1848 would cast off the burdensome yoke of British rule and gain its hard won independence.  An independence that had been paid for so dearly by the millions who starved and died during the Great Hunger of the 1840’s..

All quotes in this article are from:

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American 

Hero by, Timothy Egan published 2017