the paper supported Mayor Fernando Wood, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall. There were consequences to McMaster's invective through the years. One man skewered in his pages in 1854, Irish political activist Thomas Francis Meagher, assaulted him with a whip on the street when the editor refused to retract his published attack on Meagher's character and intelligence. McMaster fired his revolver at Meagher but missed. Both men were arrested in a public scandal, later freed on bail, and agreed not to press charges against the other. McMaster was jailed at Fort Lafayette and his newspaper shut down during President Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus at the start of the American Civil War. When released from prison, he continued to write against the war effort, always believing that the South had a right to secede from the Union. Death He died in Brooklyn in 1886, age 66. He had suffered a fall and spent two weeks at St. Mary's General Hospital before his death. References 1820 births 1886 deaths People from Duanesburg, New York American people of Scottish descent 19th-century American journalists 19th-century American male writers American male journalists American newspaper editors Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism Catholics from New York (state)