1770–1866
Mary Ann McCracken’s diverse interests included political reform, workers’ welfare, philanthropy, women’s rights, education and Irish music
Born in Belfast of Scottish stock, Mary Ann’s family was Presbyterian and, under the Penal Laws, suffered nearly as much discrimination as Catholics. In contrast to most Catholics, however, they were well-to-do: her father was a prosperous sea captain and her mother’s family were textile merchants. Mary Ann was the second youngest of seven children born to the McCrackens. She was a sickly child but grew into a young woman with an iron constitution. She was a lifelong believer in hard work, but she also believed in the therapeutic qualities of recreation; she herself was renowned for her playfulness until the end of her days. She was also extremely musical.
All the children in the McCracken family were well-educated in a pioneering co-educational school. Her unusually modern education, plus her background of religious dissent, helped mould Mary Ann into an independent-minded non-conformist who believed passionately in human rights. Mary Ann felt that parliamentary representation for all Irishmen was a basic human right. She and at least three of her siblings – the most famous being her older brother, Henry Joy McCracken – supported universal male suffrage, and to this end young Harry, as Henry Joy was known, was a founding member of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791.
The United Irishmen started out as a constitutional group looking for parliamentary reform in certain areas, such as the eligibility of all men (though not, of course, women) to vote, regardless of their religion. The society’s small voice for reform increased in volume until eventually it was silenced by the government. Driven underground, the now secret society evolved into a truly republican group, espousing complete separation from England.
As the United Irish cause became more radical, Mary Ann became more radical along with it. She herself had broken out of the usual female mould by starting a successful muslin business with her sister, Margaret. She saw this as a way of combating Belfast’s unemployment as well as a means to make a living. By the mid-1790s, she had developed a particular interest in social reform and was influencing her brother’s opinions on the subject.
In 1796 the authorities rounded up many United Irishmen, including Henry Joy McCracken and his colleague, Thomas Russell, and threw them into Kilmainham Jail. Harry was released after a year. As was usually the case in these circumstances, women involved in the movement then had a chance to become active, and it was around this time that the Society of United Irishwomen was formed. Mary Ann may or may not have been a member, although we do know that she assisted the cause by concealing arms from the authorities on at least one occasion.
Nonetheless, Mary Ann was basically a pacifist. She was opposed to the violent insurrection of 1798 in which her brother played such a prominent role. ‘What is morally wrong,’ she wrote, ‘can never be politically right.’ In other words, the end did not justify the means. Mediation was more in her line, and she was close enough to the leadership of the United Irishmen to make her presence felt in disputes. However powerful and influential she was on a personal level, she criticised an all-male society’s tendency to ‘keep the women in the dark and…make tools of them without confiding in them’ – something that would be echoed by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington some 140 years later. In 1798, the men forged ahead with their plans for a rising, and nothing Mary Ann could say would sway them from their course.
In June 1798 Harry found himself unexpectedly taking command of the Antrim brigade in the rising. The Battle of Antrim was a rout, the rising was a failure and Harry took to the hills. Afterwards, it was Mary Ann who went out, on foot, looking for her brother. She made arrangements for Harry to be hidden, got him a forged passport and organised an escape attempt to the USA. It was all in vain: Harry was captured trying to board the ship to America. He was imprisoned again in Kilmainham and quickly tried and found guilty of armed insurrection, the penalty for which was execution.
During Harry’s trial and subsequent imprisonment, as she came to terms with the fact that she was going to lose her favourite brother, stoical Mary Ann wrote and visited often to keep his spirits up while continually lobbying the authorities on his behalf. Her pleas fell on deaf ears; Harry was sentenced to a traitor’s death. He was to be taken to a public place of execution and there hanged by the neck until he was dead.
During the last day of Harry’s life, Mary Ann personally begged the governor for mercy. When this failed she spent his final hours with him in his cell, and walked with him to the scaffold. After he was hanged, she held him in her arms and attempted to resuscitate him. When it was obvious that all hope was lost, she made the necessary arrangements for his burial, which took place later the same day.
After Harry’s death, Mary Ann discovered he had fathered a four-year-old daughter, Maria. Despite massive familial and societal disapproval, Mary Ann took the illegitimate child in, reared her as her own, gave her a home and provided for her education. She treated Maria as her own daughter for the rest of her life.
Mary Ann remained involved in the United Irishmen’s cause after the rising. She had been close to Thomas Russell, Harry’s comrade. Jailed in 1796 but never charged, Thomas was only released from prison in 1802 and immediately started organising support for Robert Emmet’s abortive rising of 1803. After that rising failed and Emmet was arrested, Thomas went to Dublin to try and arrange his rescue, but instead he himself was arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to death. In a sad echo of the events of five years previously, Mary Ann visited her friend in Kilmainham Jail, lobbied on his behalf and paid for his defence. Again, her campaign was in vain; in October 1803, Thomas Russell was taken to Downpatrick, County Down, and executed.
After Thomas’s death, Mary Ann withdrew from radical politics. She became more involved in the cultural life of Belfast, particularly the musical side. (Mary Ann was a lifelong friend and foster-sister of the famous traditional-music collector, Edward Bunting, who, as a child, had been taken in and brought up by her parents.) She had always been involved in the Belfast Charitable Society in an unofficial capacity, but now, after her textile business collapsed in 1815, she became more active.
The Charitable Society was run by an all-male Board of Governors, but Mary Ann saw the need for a counterpart ladies’ committee. The committee, with Mary Ann at its head, took special interest in the girls who were cared for by the Charitable Society, teaching them useful skills, such as needlework and housework. The committee also found employment for them and mediated in disputes between them and their employers.
Always interested in the education of children, Mary Ann then employed what she called ‘active and enlightened’ people to look after and teach the children and, very much against the wishes of the governors, incorporated time for play, reading and rewards into the new régime. From the 1820s till the 1850s she successfully took on the all-male board in matters of money, equipment, hygiene and food for the children, berating them for feasting themselves while the children in their care had scarcely enough food to survive.
In the meantime, Mary Ann added abolitionism, temperance, the plight of child chimney sweeps and the Ladies’ Industrial School to her list of causes. The industrial school had been set up in 1847 in an attempt to help women stricken by the Great Famine. One of Mary Ann’s duties, at the age of seventy-seven, was to go door-to-door asking for financial support for the industrial school, a job she hated but never shirked.
As for the abolition movement, Mary Ann had supported the great abolitionist William Wilberforce from the early days. Although slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833, she continued to campaign for its abolition in the USA. As late as 1859, when she was in her eighties, she was at Belfast’s quayside, leafleting returning Americans and claiming that America was not so much ‘the land of the brave’ as ‘the land of the slave’. The author and expert on the United Irishmen, Dr RR Madden, with whom Mary Ann enjoyed a twenty-year correspondence, shared her interest in abolitionism. He acknowledged her invaluable help in compiling his seminal work, The Lives and Times of the United Irishmen (1842–46; 1857–60).
Despite a deep and increasing attachment to her own Presbyterianism in old age, Mary Ann remained as free of bigotry as in the early days of the United Irish cause. She visited the first Catholic convent in Belfast as a very old lady and found the nuns delightful, though she privately thought they could be more useful if they had more ‘liberty’.
Mary Ann died peacefully in the home of her adopted daughter, Maria, at ninety-six years of age. She was buried in Belfast.