One of the standard tropes of Civil War history is the complaining about “political generals.” This is something that we simply don’t have in our modern-day professional military, and good riddance to it. But in the pre-Civil War era, the United States didn’t have a large standing army, and in the early stages, both sides were dependent on state militias, which were run by politicians. And the politicians went into battle, many of them spectacularly ill-trained for the job. Sometimes the political generals did poorly --- the archetypal example being Benjamin “Beast” Butler, a Massachusetts politician who flubbed in a variety of roles. Sometimes the political generals died --- Edward Baker, a United States Senator, was cut down during a skirmish in Northern Virginia. But most of them ended up as footnotes in history.

In THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN, Timothy Egan rescues General Thomas Meagher from footnote status. Meagher lived an astonishingly colorful life even before the start of the Civil War. Born to a rich Irish family, Meagher studied at an English boarding school. He returned to Ireland as a junior politician and became radicalized during the infamous potato famine. He argued, unsuccessfully, that food should be given to the poor and starving rather than exported to England. This radicalization led to his conviction by an English court and transportation to the Antipodes --- specifically Tasmania, the most remote part of the British Empire.

"Egan rescues this flawed but magnetic hero from obscurity and tells his story in crackling prose, untinted by blather or blarney. THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN is a real achievement in biography, history and storytelling."

In Tasmania, Meagher was given an unusual amount of latitude. He homesteaded at a remote cabin, and fell in love and married. But his imprisonment grated on him, and he made a desperate escape that almost ended in tragedy. He found himself in New York, lionized by the waves of Irish immigrants that escaped the famine, and became a political leader and Democratic stalwart. As the slavery issue tore America apart in the late 1850s, Meagher initially opposed abolition, as did many poor Irish laborers who did not want the competition from freed slaves. But when the Southern states seceded, Meagher came down on the side of the Union and raised a Zouave company of New York Irishmen, which became integrated into what soon would be known as the Irish Brigade. Meagher became a brigadier general and fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Eastern Theater.

Meagher’s up-and-down adventures were tailor-made for Egan’s muscular prose. He communicates to the reader Meagher’s outrage for the myriad ways that England expressed its cultural and economic dominion over Ireland, setting the stage for his rebellion. His description of the devastation caused by the potato famine and the immiseration of the Irish tenant farmer class is vivid and powerful.

What makes THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN work, though, is not so much Egan’s forthright prose or Meagher’s remarkable life. It’s that Egan is immune to the infectious sentimentality and nostalgia that pervades both Irish and Civil War narrative history. He does nothing to romanticize the grinding poverty of the famine years, the bleakness of the Australian penal colony, or the blood-soaked battlefields of Northern Virginia. And he is equally unsparing to Meagher, who he appreciates but never hero-worships. Meagher’s drinking is treated as a cause for concern, not as a charming character defect. Egan also gives a fair amount of airtime to Meagher’s detractors and enemies, including criticism from his friends, although this is mostly confined to his romantic life.

Meagher lived a tumultuous, kinetic life, which was cut short by his tragic disappearance while serving as territorial governor of Montana. Egan rescues this flawed but magnetic hero from obscurity and tells his story in crackling prose, untinted by blather or blarney. THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN is a real achievement in biography, history and storytelling.