MEAGHER, THOMAS FRANCIS Irish revolutionary leader, orator and American soldier, was born in Waterford, Ireland, on Aug. 3, 1823. He graduated at Stonyhurst college, Dublin. He became a member of the Young Ireland Party in 1845, and in 1847 was one of the founders of the Irish Confederation. In July 1848, the confederation created a "war directory" of five, of which Meagher was a member, and he and William Smith O'Brien travelled through Ireland arousing the countryside for a revolution against English rule. The attempt of 1848 proved abortive; Meagher was arrested in August, and in October was tried for high treason before a special commission at Clonmel. He was found guilty and was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in Van Diemen's Land, whither he was transported in the summer of 1849. Early in 1852 he escaped, and in May reached New York city. He made a tour of the cities of the United States as a popular lecturer, and then studied law and was admitted to the New York bar in 1855. He found himself a leader of the Irish element in New York city and edited several influential Irish journals. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was made captain of a company (which he had raised) in the 69th Regiment of New York volunteers and fought at the first battle of Bull Run; he then organized an Irish brigade, of whose first regiment he was colonel until Feb. 3, 1862,
when he was appointed to the command of this organization with the rank of brigadier-general. He took part in the siege of York town, the battle of Fair Oaks, the seven days' battle before Rich mond and the battles of Antietam Fredericksburg, where he was wounded, and Chancellorsville, where his brigade was reduced in numbers to less than a regiment, and Gen. Meagher resigned his commission. On Dec. 23, 1863 his resignation was cancelled, and he was assigned to the command of the military district of Etowah, with headquarters at Chattanooga. At the close of the war he was appointed by President Johnson secretary of Montana Terri tory, and there, in the absence of the territorial governor, he acted as governor from Sept. 1866 until his accidental death in the Missouri river near Fort Benton, Mont., on July 1, 1867. Meagher's championship of President Johnson's principles. of re construction and his religion made him unacceptable to the power ful vigilante organization which then ruled Montana, and in his efforts to dislodge the vigilantes from control he was unsuccessful.
See M. Cavanaugh, Memoirs of General Thomas Francis Meagher (1892) ; Meagher of the Sword (ed., A. Griffith, 1916) ; C. J. Bowers, The Irish Orators (1916).