Creative History

  Sometime in the 1780’s, just after America had won its hard fought independence from Great Britain, a young Irishman returned home after several years abroad fighting with George Washington’s Continental Army. He had gone to the rebellious colonies several years before as little more than a boy, seeking to escape grinding poverty and an overbearing and mentally unstable mother back home in County Roscommon, Ireland.  While in America he had fought bravely; saved all of his money and grown into a man. Elizabeth Sugrue, the returning soldier’s estranged mother, was destitute and desperate.  Her husband, a hard-scrabble, abusive alcoholic and subsistence farmer had died unexpectedly several years before; her son had left home as a runaway for parts unknown and she had taken to drinking, petty theft and prostitution to survive.  She ran a boarding house in Roscommon city, which as all local residents knew, was in actuality little more than a thinly disguised brothel....

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 Manhatta...