Page:Brigadier-General Thomas Francis Meagher- his political and military career; (IA brigadiergeneral00lyon 0).pdf/49

Rh miserablo debris of her puby agitators, which are fast making the name of Irishman a word of reproach all over the world."

And so Meagher passed his lifo in the Tasmanian wilderness until, by the help of Providence, and P. J. Smyth, and the New York Irish Directory, and, more than all perhaps, by his own daring courage, after he resigned his parole, dified the British jail authorities to arrest him, intrusted himself to the buffetings of a stormy sea in an open boat, braved the desolation of an uninhabited island for some hours, and, after much weary travail, reached Pernambuco, and from theuce finally landed in New York, as we have already stated in a previous chapter.

THE first orert act of civil war in the United States—a war which endured from April, 1861, to April, 1863, occurred on the 12th day of April, 1861, when a formal demand was made by General Beauregard, then commanding the Confederate forces at Charleston, upon Major Anderson, of the U. S. army, to surrender the federal stronghold, Fort Sumter, and the property of the general government which it contained, into the hands of the government recently established at Montgomery, Ala., and claiming recognition as the government of the "Confederate States of America." How the demand of the insurgeat general was met by Maj. Anderson, and the result which followed in the terrific bombardment of Sunter, from the forts at Moultric, Sullivan's Island, and Cummings' Point, and its surrender on the 13th, are known. It is not within the province of this volume to dilato upon the political causes which led to the civil war, the preliminary acts of which called into existeace Meagher's Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac, an organization which, by its valour in the field, in its patient endurance on the march, its invalnable labours in the fortificatious, and its promptness to participate heartily and uoſlinchingly in every battle fought wbilo it continued disiutegrated by the fearful