Meagher’s saga, in which he rose from America’s immigrant ranks to become a celebrated Civil War brigadier general in Lincoln’s Army of the Potomac, is brilliantly captured in Timothy Egan’s book, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 362 pages, $28). International outrage followed, including from the United States, and the British were shamed into reducing the sentences to life in Van Dieman’s Land, some 14,000 miles away. He was convicted of treason and sentenced with five other intellectuals to death.

Educated by Jesuits and a gifted orator, Meagher was 25 when he led Ireland’s failed rebellion of 1848, one of five in Ireland’s long fight for freedom from the Crown (the Free Irish State was created in 1922). An intellectual condemned initially to death, he was a fugitive of the British Crown who had escaped a penal colony in what is now Tasmania. Meagher, at 29 years old, made it to America via a most circuitous and dangerous route. Ireland’s population would decline precipitously over the decades, and to this day (5.6 million people) it has never recovered from its pre-famine high. Those who survived the crisis did so just barely they were forced off the blighted lands by absentee landlords and left to live in dire poverty. In a country of slightly more than 8.1 million people, the famine impacted one in four Irish. More than one million Irish died during the famine (1845-1852) and another 1.5 million emigrated to the New World, mostly American cities in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Some, like Irish intellectual Thomas Francis Meagher, were even banished for life for rebelling against the British Crown’s onerous rule that nearly starved the Ireland nation to death.

Through the years, I’ve read tidbits of The Great Hunger (the Irish potato famine), but I never fully comprehended the depth and breadth of human sacrifice, ruin and the millions of Irish forced to leave their native land in order to survive.

The immortal irishman review