Swordplay

This book is a biography of Irish American adventurer Thomas Francis Meagher (1823-67).

Meagher was an Irish revolutionary, a Tasmanian convict, an escapee to America, a leader of Irish-Americans, a public speaker, a newspaper publisher, an editor, a lawyer, an American Civil War union general before becoming acting governor of Montana. His death, aged 43, mirrored his operatic life, mysteriously drowning off a steamboat into the Missouri River. He is revered in Waterford and among Irish Catholic Americans while remaining a highly controversial figure to this day in Montana. Meagher played a big role in helping to introduce the tricolour flag to Ireland, though he had allegiance also to Stars and Stripes and the Irish Brigade "green flag" while he promoted the Southern Cross flag while in Australia.

Meagher came from a wealthy Catholic family that mixed Irish and North American money (in this case Newfoundland) and he could afford a good education at Jesuit schools in Ireland and England. He studied to be a lawyer but became obsessed with Irish politics and served in committees that worked with Irish politicians in London. He gravitated from the great Daniel O'Connell to younger generational leaders of the Young Ireland movement and he became one of the leaders himself. He stood for election but failed to join his father in parliament as the crisis of the Irish Famine reached into a third year, which the United Kingdom government seemed helpless to stop. Meagher and the intellectual Young Irelanders were unlikely revolutionaries who were become desperate for change, and peacefully if possible, just as France did in its third revolution. France's revolution would fail as would Ireland's. But its botched 1848 revolution against British rule has been unfairly written off as pointless. Britain didn't think so and having found him guilty of high treason sentenced Meagher to be "hanged, drawn and quartered". After 12 months of gentle jail time, it was commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania was known until 1856). There he lived in semi freedom as a ticket of leaver. He married Catherine Bennett the daughter of an Irish convict, by which he had two sons, neither of which he saw. The first son died as he escaped to New York and Catherine herself died in Waterford after she gave birth to his second son, conceived in America. Catherine could not handle the city where he was feted by a population, one quarter Irish. He married again to WASP Elizabeth Townsend and though they never had children. She would support him as became a public speaker, newspaper publisher, lawyer, and Central American adventurer. Meagher was best known as a Union general in the America civil war where he raised the famed Irish Brigade including the regiment known as Mrs Meagher's Own. Meagher and his fellow Irish Americans fought valiently, many to the death in some of the bloody battles of the war such as Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.

For his war service Meagher was appointed secretary of the new territory of Montana in 1865 and went out to the wild west. Arriving in Bannock City by coach, he found the governor leaving his position by the next stagecoach. Meagher became "acting" governor and in this role he fought with politicians, vigilantes and Indians. One day in July 1967 he boarded a steamboat to collect rifles at Fort Benton on the uppermost navigable reach of the mighty Missouri river. That night he fell off the boat and disappeared into the murky waters below. His body was never found.