What is often described as the rising of 1848 in Ireland was not in any practical sense a rising at all, nor until the very last minute was it ever intended to be one. There was no previously drawn up military plan of campaign, no secret organization, and such conspiracy as there was had previously been overtaken by events and made irrelevant. Though a confrontation of sorts between the Young Irelanders and the government had been planned in theory for the autumn of 1848, the confused series of events which actually took place in July and August was no more than a desperate last-minute attempt by would-be Irish leaders to avoid arrest and thus force the government into a negotiating position. It failed hopelessly, for the same reason as the more positive effort vaguely proposed for the autumn would have failed. The gap between words and deeds, but above all between leaders and people, was too great. In such a situation the initiative remained throughout with the government.
Immediately after Mitchel’s transportation one of the few priests who had come out not only in favour of the Irish Confederation but also of the extreme viewpoint expressed by Mitchel had arrived in Dublin to see Duffy. He was a Father Kenyon of Templederry in County Tipperary. Even before Mitchel’s sentence he had expressed some impatience with mere histrionic gestures and talk. Addressing a crowd at Kilkenny in April 1848 he had said:
‘You have often met before in crowds like this; you have been hitherto accustomed to shout and cheer and take off your hats, until shouting and cheering and taking off your hats has come to be worth a pinch of snuff …. I ask you again, are you ready to die for Ireland?’ And the crowd had replied: ‘Yes, yes, all ready to die this minute’, whereupon he had expressed himself content.1
Now he put it to Duffy that some positive preparations should be made for armed action if necessary. Duffy, all too aware how little had been done, agreed.2
But activity was largely restricted to sending agents to France and America to enlist general support, one of whom dramatically carried his commission to America smeared with gunpowder in a loaded pistol so that it could be blown to pieces in the event of arrest.**3
O’Brien himself, only kept vaguely informed of the moves, remained brooding at home. He was still unable to ‘stoop or stretch without pain’ after his Limerick injuries, but he was also as late as June on his own admission still ‘not one of those who wish to plunge recklessly’ and this must have played its part in delaying his recovery.4 However, he kept quite closely in touch by letter with developments, and one of the most important of these was a reunion at least between the Confederation and the old O’Connellite Repeal Association.
For the Confederation the benefit of this reunion was more psychological than organizational, for under the combined influence of the famine and John O’Connell’s leadership the old Repeal organization had become moribund and inactive. The Repeal Rent, which had once run into thousands of pounds per week, had for a long time barely reached double figures. But the reunion did bring theoretically to the Confederation the potential sympathy of those masses for whom the name O’Connell was still the only one which held any political magic at all. The reunion also seemed to promise some tentative approval from the bulk of the Roman Catholic clergy, who had so far largely held aloof from the Confederation and were the key to all popular support in Ireland. Out of the reunion a new political body was formed to replace the Irish Confederation. It was named the Irish League.
O’Brien, still at home, wrote on 1 June a letter to The Nation approving the Irish League’s formation, in some of his most committed language to date.
‘Our controversy,’ he wrote, ‘will soon narrow itself into the single question how often uttered with impatience – When will the Irish Nation strike?’,5 though typically he also quoted the Young Ireland poet who had written:
… Your worst transgressions
Were to strike, and strike in vain.
And it is clear that by ‘striking’ he still meant more the striking of a defiant attitude, backed by an armed organization, rather than literally taking the field.
The effectiveness of the new united front was soon reduced by two events. The first was a decision taken by John O’Connell to retire from public life. In making his decision known he also let it be known that the new note of militancy in O’Brien’s letter had contributed to it. The second event was another revolution in Paris at the end of June. This, unlike that in February, was extremely bloody, and openly socialistic and anti-clerical. It alarmed many wavering middle-class supporters of the Irish League and put a sharp brake on the clergy’s approbation of radical methods.
Nevertheless, the spirit of optimism among the faithful of the Confederate clubs was running high. Meagher and O’Gorman in particular were busy travelling about the country working up enthusiasm. The press, in the shape not only of The Nation but of a new paper, the Irish Felon, which had replaced Mitchel’s suppressed United Irishman and was edited by a close personal friend of his, John Martin, with help from Fintan Lalor, was striking a more and more openly revolutionary note.
Letters were appearing in The Nation on how to look after steel weapons, whether pikes, sword blades or daggers, and how to cast bullets.6 Duffy was promising that one of the first duties of the Irish League would be to plant the country with clubs from end to end.7 O’Brien himself, in his more militant mood, actually wrote that he was bound to tell the people of Ireland that injustices and wrongs were ‘rapidly bringing us to that period when armed resistance to the oppressors of our country will become a sacred obligation, enforced by the highest sanctions of public duty.’8 Meagher, fully extravagant again, declaimed: ‘Generation transmits to generation the holy passion. From the blood which drenched the scaffolds of 1798 the felons of this year have sprung.’9
Duffy had been subtly encouraging the more militant side of O’Brien’s nature and trying to goad him at least into committing himself to leadership. ‘There is no half-way house for you,’ he wrote to him probably on 17 June. ‘You will be head of the movement, loyally obeyed, and the revolution will be conducted with order and clemency; or the mere anarchists will prevail with the people and our revolution will be bloody chaos …. If I were Smith O’Brien I would shape out in my own mind … a definite course for the revolution and labour incessantly to develop it that way.’
He blamed O’Brien for allowing the projects for a National Guard and the calling of a Council of Three Hundred to lapse, but thought it was now too late to try and revive them. The Confederate clubs were now the one real hope. ‘Forgive me for urging this so anxiously upon you, but I verily believe the hopes of the country depend upon the manner in which the next two months are used.’10
And at the beginning of July O’Brien came out from his home at last and went on a tour of the country. In spite of the ‘abject looks’ rather than ‘glad faces’ he met among the peasantry,11 he began, under the combined influence of the beauty of the Irish countryside and the enthusiasm he found in the Confederate clubs, to drift more and more positively towards a guarded revolutionary fervour. In Cork he held a sort of review by moonlight in a city park of some seven to ten thousand members of the clubs, many of whom marched past him in military order.12 The next day he wrote to his wife that ‘we shall be able to make the whole of this force available for good purposes …’.13
But how exactly these good purposes were to be worked out was still left vague. There was no practical plan of rebellion such as Lord Edward Fitzgerald and even Robert Emmet had developed. It was clear that both O’Brien and Duffy too were still thinking primarily in terms of a display of armed organized clubs which, when the time came in the autumn, would stand as a challenge to the government behind the demand for Repeal and succeed in getting it to back down, much as the Volunteers had achieved their objectives in ’82.
However, some awkward voices were beginning to be raised.
Another new radical paper had appeared, the Irish Tribune, edited by two students, Dalton Williams and Kevin O’Doherty. ‘Why?’ asked a letter in this on 1 July, echoing Duffy’s private letter of a fortnight earlier, ‘Why is not the Council of Three Hundred, which alone is required to save the country, proceeded with? … We call upon Smith O’Brien – we call upon T. F. Meagher to rouse from his apathy.’ The harvest, the letter continued, would be ready in two months and it must be prevented from leaving Dublin and other ports by the clubs. ‘… No faltering, no hesitating, no suspense. Ever keep before your minds the GREAT CAUSE …. Think of those great victims whose names, still unappeased, cry out for vengeance – FITZGERALD, and EMMET and TONE. Think of MITCHEL …. Think, think and BE COURAGEOUS.’14
A letter in the Irish Felon, also at the beginning of July, came even closer to the point when it stated that though the clubs were numerous they were not well-armed. There was too much braggartry, the writer complained. He discerned only the desire for freedom – not the energy to win it. Each club that was aware of its own deficiencies imagined that the others were better equipped. ‘Cork looks to Dublin and Dublin looks to Cork.’ Defeatism was spreading with ‘each new postponement of the revolutionary drama which seems necessary to our cautious managers …. The words you speak are meaningless, for you have spoken them so frequently already; and the attitudes you adopt are lifeless and unimpressive, because custom has exhausted passion …. Our alternative now is … the hillside or the court. I for one would rather die with the green flag for my shroud than pine into the grave with the insignia of felony on my limbs …’15
Duffy himself had expressed similar reservations about the clubs only a short time before. Certainly the number of members in Dublin had doubled in three weeks after Mitchel’s sentence, but there were still large blanks on the map of Ireland where there were no clubs at all.16 This knowledge, however, did not prevent the issue of The Nation which revealed this from carrying an article entitled ‘Night Thoughts on The Bayonet’.17
Then, while O’Brien was still down in Cork intending to continue his leisurely tour of inspection through Youghal and Dungarvan and up to Dublin, the government struck. It arrested Gavan Duffy for sedition. He was joined in prison the same night by John Martin, Mitchel’s friend and editor of the Irish Felon, for whom a warrant had been out for some time. Next day the two young students who had started the Irish Tribune were there too, having only been allowed to bring out three issues of their paper. Early the following week Doheny and Meagher, whose oratory had been becoming increasingly violent, were also arrested, as was D’Arcy Magee, Duffy’s assistant editor on The Nation.
Doheny, Meagher and Magee were all allowed bail. Duffy and the others were not, though, as had been the case with O’Connell, the prison regime under the control of Dublin Corporation was lax. Both Duffy and Martin were able to keep in contact with their papers and, being allowed any visitors they liked, could continue to confer on general ‘revolutionary’ policy.
This remained as imprecise as ever, except for the principle that nothing rash or premature should be attempted. As Duffy himself was being taken to prison in a police van on the night of his arrest, a vast crowd had collected round it in the streets of Dublin, forcing it to walking pace in spite of a large police escort. Shouts of ‘Take him out! Take him out!’ had arisen, and the president of one of the Confederate clubs climbed up on the steps of the van and asked Duffy if he wanted to be rescued.
‘Certainly not,’ replied Duffy, and then at the request of the police officer appealed to the crowd to let him be taken to prison.18
Similar scenes had occurred the next week when Doheny was arrested in Cashel and Meagher in Waterford. Meagher had had to appeal to the clubs from the top of the vehicle on which he was being taken to gaol to remove a barricade blocking the bridge and to abandon their determination to occupy the town.
They agreed reluctantly, saying: ‘We fear you will be sorry for it, sir.’19
But clearly not all initiative could be left to the government. Smith O’Brien cut short his tour and returned to Dublin by sea on 14 July to discuss what should be done. On the 15th a meeting of the council of the Confederation took place together with representatives of the clubs. It was a private meeting, but there was nothing secret or illegal about it, though the government had taken the precaution of infiltrating an informer.**
O’Brien, after going through the strength of the organization of the Dublin clubs with their representatives, gave an encouraging report on his experiences in Cork. But, as he truly said, they were not yet well-enough informed of the state of the clubs’ organization in Ireland as a whole. When discussion arose as to the desirability of a rescue attempt on behalf of the new prisoners should they be convicted, he said that he personally would rather ascend the gallows himself than let anyone lose his life by a premature step on his account. But the consensus of the meeting seems to have been that a rescue should be attempted in the event of the prisoners’ conviction. Since the next law term in which convictions might be expected was not until October no thought of an immediate insurrection seems to have been contemplated by anyone.
A quite different situation had, however, arisen when the council met again four days later, with O’Brien again in the chair. For the government had again taken the initiative. On 18 July the lord lieutenant issued a proclamation declaring the holding of arms in Dublin and a number of other counties as illegal. At the Irish League council’s meeting a resolution was immediately put forward that the clubs should no longer wait for the harvest in the autumn but should start an insurrection at once. This was proposed by the young man from Cork, Joseph Brenan, who had written the fiery letter to the Irish Felon earlier in the month.**
An amendment to Brenan’s motion was moved by John Blake Dillon, to the effect that the clubs should merely conceal their arms and offer only passive resistance to the proclamation, refusing to open any door or lock voluntarily.20 This was eventually carried by a small majority.21 Brenan, arguing that the clubs were at the peak of their morale now, declared in exasperation that they were always waiting – till American or French aid came, ‘till rifles are forged in heaven and angels draw the trigger’.22
During these days since his return to Dublin, O’Brien had been touring Confederate clubs in towns in the capital’s vicinity. At Drogheda, Navan and Trim he had received great welcomes and told his audiences that the day might not be far distant when they would be called on ‘to afford sterner indications of patriotism than mere cheers’.23 But at a meeting of the League itself on the evening of 19 July (the day of the council’s decision to offer passive resistance to the arms proclamation) he insisted that the organization would continue constitutional efforts ‘until we find all constitutional efforts exhausted’.24
On 21 July a further meeting of the council took place which O’Brien purposely did not attend. The object of this was to elect a small inner executive to manage the clubs, a directory whose deliberations would be less unwieldy than those of the thirty-strong council, and both swifter to take any necessary emergency action and more secret. O’Brien refused even to let his name go up for election, objecting to the whole idea on the grounds that such a directory would be a source of jealousy and weakness,††25 Those elected were Duffy, Meagher, Dillon, D’Arcy, Magee and Devin Reilly; three were to form a quorum. Pressed by the rest of the meeting to give a pledge that a rising would take place before 8 August Meagher refused, though he said he would do everything he could to expedite one even before that date. But the general feeling seems to have been that nothing would occur to precipitate a rising for three or four weeks, and the feeling was shared by O’Brien.
On the next day, 22 July, Smith O’Brien went down by invitation to stay near Enniscorthy in Wexford with an old friend, John Maher, Deputy Lieutenant for that county and formerly its Member of Parliament. There was a plan for them to go the following day to visit some midlands then in process of reclamation in Wexford Harbour, a subject in which O’Brien, with his admirable civic sense, had expressed considerable interest.26
The same day, after O’Brien had left, the news reached Dublin that the government was rushing a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act through the House of Commons.
O’Brien never visited the midlands. Soon after six o’clock on the morning of 23 July he was woken to be told that Meagher and Dillon, whom he thought were in Dublin, were in the house and wanted to speak to him urgently. They were shown to his bedside where they told him that Habeas Corpus was being suspended and that a warrant was said to be out for his arrest. After consulting with them for over an hour he asked his host to come to his room and, while dressing, told him the news.27
‘My dear Maher,’ said O’Brien, ‘I did not come to your house to disturb its peace; get us some breakfast, and send us on our way. I do not wish that any arrest should take place in your house. Send for a car, that we may go towards Kilkenny, where we have some friends with whom I wish to consult in this crisis.’28
With these unambitious words began the ‘rising’ of 1848.
O’Brien had rejected both the idea of submitting to arrest and that of flight. As he wrote soon afterwards:
‘So much had been said by the Party with which I was associated and by myself, about the necessary preparation for conflict, that we should have been exposed to ridicule and reproach if we had fled at the moment when all the contingencies which we had contemplated as justifying the use of force were realized …’29 But he continued, ‘… In order to leave as little as possible to conjecture I resolved before I summoned the country to arms, still further to test the disposition of the people.’30
In other words, having come South without any idea of an immediate insurrection in mind, and having been forced by circumstances to recognize that the moment for some sort of decisive action had at last arrived, he decided to prolong that moment as long as possible.
The town of Kilkenny, with its historical associations from 1642, and its dominating position over much of southern Ireland, had for some time been commanding the Confederates’ attention. Only three days earlier, when positive action was still far from O’Brien’s mind, he had been publicly looking forward to holding the next meeting of the Irish League there.31 A prominent citizen of Kilkenny, Dr Cane, was an enthusiastic supporter of the League and there had been a newspaper report to the effect that the Confederate clubs there were organized to a strength of seventeen thousand men.32 In the adjacent county of Tipperary, at Templederry, lived Father Kenyon, the fiery priest who had tried to jolt Duffy into some sort of action two months earlier. On the other side lay Waterford, where in the county town Meagher had his own personal Confederate stronghold. In deep support to the south-west lay the city of Cork, where O’Brien himself had witnessed the militant dash of the Confederate club members.
To Meagher, already thinking more single-mindedly of insurrection than O’Brien, certain tactical military considerations reinforced the advantages of Kilkenny as a base. The railway from Dublin still stopped fourteen miles short of the town, and the undulating landscape and twisting roads flanked by high walls and hedges made it suitable territory in which to confront regular troops with spirited irregulars. An additional coincidental factor thought to be of advantage was that the Annual Show of the Royal Agricultural Society was being held in Kilkenny that week in the presence of the Duke of Leinster, the Marquis of Ormond, the Earl of Clancarty and other gentry who might prove useful as hostages while the cattle themselves could also be put to good purpose.33
Such thoughts had run through the minds of Meagher and Dillon the day before, when they had taken a number of hurried decisions with D’Arcy Magee, the only other member of the inner directory available in Dublin. (In tune with the general feeling that nothing unexpected was likely to happen for a few weeks, O’Gorman had left Dublin to continue the organization of the clubs in Limerick, and Doheny was in Cashel on a similar errand.) Now, given the recent resolution of the clubs to offer only passive resistance to the arms ban and the known effectiveness of the government’s Dublin garrison, it seemed mad to take responsibility for blood-letting in the streets of the capital and call out the clubs.34 The three looked naturally to the areas of the South which were less heavily garrisoned, and in which in any case the most respected figure of the movement was known to be staying. Agreeing that D’Arcy Magee should go off to Glasgow where he had connections and, with the help of the very large Irish population of the city, try to organize a supply of arms by sea for the moment of insurrection, Meagher and Dillon then themselves travelled all night down to O’Brien in Wexford.
Soon after ten o’clock the next morning, Sunday the 23rd, after collecting O’Brien, all three were on their way by coach to Kilkenny.
They stopped at a number of points en route to try to rally feeling. At Enniscorthy, since it was Sunday, Meagher and Dillon went to Mass. Afterwards they were joined by O’Brien, and all three were soon surrounded by a large crowd who assured them that, though not prepared or organized for an insurrection, they would protect them if any attempt were made by the police to arrest them. O’Brien expressed some disappointment that a town of the size of Enniscorthy did not have more than one Confederate club. He did not call them out to insurrection, but told them that they had to prepare for an emergency. The townspeople were asked to pledge themselves to take the field should the people of a neighbouring county rise, and a ringing shout came back that they would ‘and with God’s blessing too’.35 But in this they were over-stepping the mark. In the peasantry’s eyes, at any rate, it was the priests who were the final arbiters of God’s blessing.
It was raining heavily that Sunday and, stopping occasionally by the roadside for shelter, O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon were left in no doubt by the famished and dispirited peasantry they met that they had no enthusiasm for any rising. A longer stop at the small town of Graigue-na-mana was also discouraging, for the priest there would not commit himself to approval of an insurrection, remarking merely that ‘the whole affair was a very difficult subject to decide upon’.36 Spirits recovered a little, however, when it was remembered that Thomas Cloney, the old rebel of ’98,** now a venerated citizen, lived in the town, and O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon went to see him.37 Cloney, long popularly known as ‘General’ Cloney, threw his arms round O’Brien and wept with emotion. Speaking to a crowd of between three and four hundred from Cloney’s house, Meagher told them the news of the suspension of Habeas Corpus and urged them to form a club, but also told them to beware of ‘the claws of the law’ and to commit no breach of it.38 It may well have seemed unclear to the crowds whether they were actually being called to insurrection or not. The position roughly was that O’Brien and the others were saying they would take up arms if the people supported them while the people were saying they would support them if they took up arms.
The three arrived in Kilkenny at about eight o’clock that Sunday evening and went straight to the house of Dr Cane. There they received their first serious shock. There were not 17,000 members of the clubs in the town as reported, but 1,700. It had been a misprint in the newspapers. Only about one in four of the members had arms.39
Abandoning the idea of an immediate insurrection in the town, O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon proceeded next day on a tour of the surrounding countryside. They hoped to mobilize support for those ardent spirits in Kilkenny who, in spite of all, had encouraged Meagher and Dillon to think that within a week the green flag would be flying from Ormond Castle.
The travels of O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon now continued in the same pattern as the day before, only with the difference that the longer such travels continued the more desultory and inconclusive they seemed. At Callan a party of the 8th Irish Hussars was in the town when they arrived, but they left O’Brien unmolested as he again asked a crowd, this time about nine hundred strong, if they would let him be arrested and the crowd replied emphatically: no. One Englishman among the Hussars, alarmed by the prevailing mood, prepared to leave the Market House where the troops were quartered. But Meagher reassured the men that there was no need to leave the building and that they and their arms were quite safe.40
‘We know that, Sir,’ replied a corporal of the Hussars. ‘We know well you wouldn’t take an unfair advantage of the poor soldiers; at any rate, you wouldn’t do it to the Irish Hussars.’41
Again the gist of the message to the people was two-fold. They should help O’Brien resist arrest if arrest were attempted. They should also organize and be ready, for the time was at hand. It was still not made clear what the time was at hand for, other than being ready.
That evening on the road between Callan and Carrick-on-Suir, O’Brien, Meagher and Dillon stopped at a halt to change horses and chatted with the country people. They learned that though many were disposed to rise against the government even if they only had bill-hooks and pitchforks rather than guns, the priests were overwhelmingly against it. However, some of the more enthusiastic people they spoke to said that if only one priest could be found in favour of action that would do ‘for the people were tired of keeping so quiet and dying from day to day’.42
Just short of Carrick itself they pulled up at some cross-roads to talk to some men digging in a field. On hearing that a young Catholic land-owner named John O’Mahony, who had done much to organize the local clubs, lived in the neighbourhood they asked to see him. Twenty minutes later O’Mahony himself came galloping up on a black horse to vouch personally for the local enthusiasm.43
In Carrick town itself therefore O’Brien, on being brought into the presence of the club leaders, asked for six hundred men with guns and ammunition to guard him and his companions while they raised the countryside. Since Tipperary was a proclaimed county, this was to propose an open act of war. But though O’Brien was beginning to commit himself his request met with dismay. One man asked pointedly why it was that the leaders should have come to Carrick of all places to start the rising. Was it because they had been rejected everywhere else?44
The most influential priest in the neighbourhood, a Father Byrne, who had in his day made inflammatory enough speeches, would have nothing to do with the project, saying that O’Brien ‘must be mad’, and that he should at least wait until the harvest had been brought in in a fortnight’s time.45 That other well-known Tipperary priest, Father Kenyon at Templederry, was also backing out of any positive action on the grounds that an attempt now would be suicidal.
O’Mahony, ashamed for Tipperary, pledged himself to go out and raise the neighbourhood. He actually succeeded in collecting four hundred men from his own club with about eighty guns and a large number of pikes. But there was apparently no immediate work for them to do. For by next morning O’Brien had moved off in the direction of Cashel, hoping to get some encouragement from Michael Doheny, whose home town it was. Before leaving Carrick he addressed a crowd of some five thousand in the streets, telling them positively this time that he was calling them to the field. Meagher also spoke and was quite carried away by his own oratory, for after first appearing to contradict his leader and telling the crowd that they must all deliberate a little longer he also cried:
‘What care I for all their force? They may threaten us with death; they may tear from us our lives; more they cannot do for they have already deprived us of all else besides. Death is the worst they can inflict. Death is the utmost bounds of their threats. They are again renewing the bloody deeds of ’98 …’46
It was half a century since ’98, but memories of the appalling government brutalities that had followed its failure were still vivid. Any reminder of them was a doubtful rhetorical gambit, for apprehension of failure was growing daily.
The whole of the rest of the week was spent in similar dilatory and cumulatively demoralizing fashion. Day followed day without any very positive action being taken by anyone. O’Brien and his companions simply moved from place to place within a relatively small area of Tipperary, often visiting the same town or village more than once. Those who at first had had a certain amount of heart for a fight became understandably cautious, while those who were already pessimistic became even more determined not to involve themselves in the consequences of disaster. The priests did all they could to discourage premature audacity, coming out increasingly into the open to argue against O’Brien.47
Meagher went off to his own city of Waterford, hoping to raise the clubs there and return with a thousand men. He returned alone, having been unable to get the leaders to move against the advice of their own radical priest, Father Tracy. Meagher seems, however, to have accepted their reply a little too readily, for later in the week another young Confederate, Michael Cavanagh, found the boatmen of Waterford disappointed and feeling let down by Meagher who had sent them no word when ‘thousands’ of them were still waiting for a summons to the fight. They felt, they told Cavanagh, ‘something was wrong somewhere’.48
Almost nothing was right.
O’Mahony, by force of his own local appeal and vigorous personality, continued to rally the countryside effectively for a time. He reckoned afterwards, probably with some exaggeration, that he had some twelve to fifteen thousand men ready to march by the night of Tuesday, 25 July, and Michael Doheny, who had by then joined him, substantiates at least the enthusiasm with which pikes were being forged in the area round the Slievenamon hills.49 But O’Mahony, waiting for a signal from his leaders that never came, was unable himself to give his followers any very clear indication of the purpose for which they were being summoned.
A number of other enthusiastic middle-class young Irishmen had by now made their way south to swell the group round O’Brien. Among them were P. J. Smyth, son of a prosperous Dublin merchant, and a successful young shipping agent, named T. B. McManus, who had crossed over from Liverpool specially for the purpose. Also in this group was a twenty-five-year-old employee of the Limerick and Waterford Railway Company who, though he had never been a member of the Irish Confederation, had come to join O’Brien from Kilkenny. His name was James Stephens.
It was in the company of Stephens, armed with a double-barrelled gun, that on the morning of Wednesday, 26 July, O’Brien made his first overt move against the forces of the Crown. Wearing the gold and green cap of the ’82 club, and with a number of pistols tucked into his coat, O’Brien, with Stephens and one other companion, marched into the police station at Mullinahone, in County Tipperary. It was garrisoned by a head constable and five others.50
An enthusiastic crowd had gathered in the village the night before, but in the morning, under the influence of their priests, they had begun to have second thoughts. The presence of the police was given as an excuse for their new-found timidity. O’Brien decided to tackle the problem head on. He had been maintaining throughout the last three days that the police were as good Irishmen as any, and when the time came would know how to act. He proceeded to the police station to prove his point, and asked the police to surrender.
The head constable said afterwards in court that he replied: ‘I would be unworthy of the name of Irishman if I gave up my arms.’51 And though O’Brien, who is probably more reliable, stated that the constable had by no means been so firm as he later pretended, the fact that this was at least thought to be the right answer to give is significant. O’Brien, like other Irish nationalists before and after, was up against the awkward fact that Irish nationalism was not the clear-cut cause he made it out to be.
Another eye-witness maintained, many years later, that while O’Brien and Stephens were inside the police station, a big policeman put his head out of an upper window and exclaimed to the crowd: ‘Yerrah! sure the time isn’t come yet to surrender our arms. D’ye wait till the right time comes!’52 Whatever the truth of this, while O’Brien gave them further time in which to deliberate, they worked out their own compromise and made off with their arms to a stronger police post.
This new appearance of resolution on O’Brien’s part had first taken shape the night before, when he had sent P. J. Smyth off to Dublin with orders to ‘start an insurrection there’.53 Nevertheless, a man who saw O’Brien that same night later described him as having been ‘like a man in a dream’.54 And it was a fact that the secretary of the Dublin clubs, James Halpin, was actually already in the South looking for O’Brien in order to get instructions for his clubmen. These had been left ‘disheartened and bewildered’,55 without any indications of what was going on or how to communicate with their leaders. Some isolated manoeuvres were carried out in a few parts of Ireland on the initiative of a few individuals who hoped for news from the South to give coherence to their movements. Richard O’Gorman, for instance, began to raise the peasantry in Limerick, and D’Arcy Magee, after he had had to fly from Glasgow to escape arrest, had landed in Sligo and organized some qualified support from the agrarian secret societies there.56 But by then total fiasco had overtaken O’Brien’s perambulations in Tipperary.
Without any proper organization, or even effective communications, with the priests against him, and beset by failures such as that of Meagher’s in Waterford and his own before the police station in Mullinahone, O’Brien must by mid-week already have begun to grasp that his chances were forlorn in the extreme. Nevertheless, the same eye-witness who described him as having been like a man in a dream at Mullinahone, also saw him not many hours after looking dreamy still, but happy and smoking a cigar as he left on a jaunty car.57 He stubbornly refused to requisition private property for supplies, as his companions urged him to, maintaining incongruously that the last thing he wanted to start was a jacquerie58
A certain amount of shambling drill seems to have taken place in Mullinahone itself and other villages where he appeared. But always the parties of peasants, armed mainly with agricultural implements and a few muskets, melted away after entreaties from their priests not to risk their lives without hope of success, or on realizing that supplies of free food were not unlimited. (O’Brien paid for more than 160 loaves of bread on one occasion out of his own pocket, but another day solemnly issued an order that each man among the starving peasantry should appear with at least four days’ rations.)59
However, on Friday, 28 July, at the small town of Killenaule, O’Brien had the nearest thing to a victory that came his way during the whole week. A party of dragoons was seen approaching the town and, it being assumed that they had come to arrest O’Brien, barricades were thrown up in their path. When the captain of dragoons, a Captain Longmore, halted before the first barricade a rifle was presented at him by James Stephens, and he was asked by Dillon if he had a warrant for O’Brien’s arrest. On giving an assurance that he had not and that he had no intention of trying to arrest O’Brien, the barricades were lifted and he and his men were allowed through and out of the town.60 It was a transaction from which on reflection neither party considered it had emerged with credit. O’Brien, after all, was a proclaimed outlaw, and it would have seemed Captain Longmore’s duty to proceed against him whether he had a warrant or not. To this extent it was a victory for O’Brien. On the other hand, if O’Brien had really been wanting to start an insurrection and put heart into those thousands in the area who were understandably wavering, this had been an opportunity for forcing a body of government troops to surrender which had not been taken.
But it was still perhaps not wholly O’Brien’s policy to commit himself to a fighting insurrection. Future policy was indeed the subject of a conference held that night in the small town of Ballingarry, the centre of a colliery district from which O’Brien hoped for support from the miners. Earlier that evening Meagher had told the miners that they were to be ready in three weeks ‘when the wisp would be lit over the hills’.61 Another, unnamed, companion had stated more directly that they would ‘hunt every English bugger to his own side, and let him live there’.62
The conference at Ballingarry was the nearest thing to a council of war the Confederates ever held. Doheny and O’Mahony, as well as Meagher, had managed to join O’Brien for it, along with Stephens, Dillon, McManus and the others already there. The conference lasted only an hour and a quarter. Everyone declared himself dissatisfied with the course which events had taken during the week. In the circumstances most people were in favour of going into hiding and waiting for the harvest. But O’Brien, whose strong personal sense of honour prevented him from becoming a fugitive at this stage, determined to try and continue to raise sufficient force to be effective. It was decided that Dillon, Meagher and Doheny should once more go off to rally the neighbouring districts while he stood firm where he was.63
Prospects had been doubtful enough before. Now nothing seemed in their favour. After so much delay already the only hope of rallying the countryside lay in the news of an outstanding success. As Father Kenyon, the former militant priest of Templederry in Tipperary, told Dillon and Meagher when they arrived: it was not becoming in a priest to start a hopeless struggle; they were perfectly at liberty as far as he was concerned to raise a green flag on a pole anywhere in his district and see just how many men would rally round it.64
And soon there came to Templederry and elsewhere news not of a success but of a particularly lamentable failure.
On Saturday, 29 July, the government forces slowly began to move towards O’Brien, penned up in his Tipperary box. He had spent the night writing a letter to the mining company, saying that if they withheld wages from the miners who joined him, then the colliery would be confiscated as national property in the event of the Irish Revolution succeeding.65 It was the one truly revolutionary step he took in the whole week. Next morning McManus reviewed the local forces. Two days before few people in Ballingarry had even heard of O’Brien, let alone had any clear idea of his cause.66 Now McManus counted twenty men armed with guns and pistols, and eighteen with crude pikes.67 The decision was taken to try and join up with another more powerful force optimistically thought to be in the neighbourhood and attack the nearest police barracks.
Before they could move, a member of one of the Dublin clubs, named John Kavanagh, who had come South to join O’Brien, galloped up to say that on his way he had spotted a large body of police approaching Ballingarry.68 He had come via Kilkenny, where incidentally the rumour was that the town of Callan was in rebel hands and O’Brien himself at the head of twenty thousand men. All the approaches to Kilkenny were now guarded by the military, but he thought the government were in a panic and urged O’Brien, who seemed elated by this news, to strike rapidly. At that moment another messenger came up to say that an even larger body of police was now approaching from Thurles. O’Brien and McManus decided to defend Ballingarry.
A barricade, manned by O’Brien himself, was thrown up. Stephens and some of those armed with guns occupied the houses immediately overlooking it. McManus and another party lay flat on their faces in a hollow about 250 yards ahead of the barricade, waiting to catch the police in the rear as they approached it.69
The police whom Kavanagh had spotted had now arrived within a mile or so of Ballingarry. But seeing the barricade and the large crowds assembled – the majority of whom can only have been sightseers – the police veered prudently away and made for cover in a solid one-storey stone house with a slate roof about a mile northwards at Farrinrory.70 This house belonged to a widow, a Mrs McCormack. She was out at the time, but her five children, all under ten, were inside when Sub-Inspector Trant and forty-six men entered, and chorusing ‘The British Grenadiers’ started breaking up the furniture to put the house in a state of defence.71
Without waiting for orders the mob rushed towards the house, sweeping Smith O’Brien before them. McManus decided the best policy would be to try and smoke the police out by setting fire to some straw in the stables at the back, and was in the process of doing this when he was stopped by O’Brien who said that the widow herself had now arrived and was appealing to him to save her house and her children from destruction.72
She, O’Brien, McManus and a few others then went through a gate into the small cabbage garden that surrounded the house, and O’Brien boldly went up to one of the windows. Climbing up onto the sill he asked to speak to Sub-Inspector Trant, the police commander. Trant had taken up his post at an upstairs window and there was a delay while someone went to fetch him. Meanwhile, O’Brien talked to the policemen at his window telling them that he was an Irishman and a soldier too, and asking them to give up their arms. To this they replied: ‘We would forfeit our lives rather than give up our arms.’73
Whereupon O’Brien said he would allow them five minutes in which to make up their minds, and got down from the window sill.
The next thing that happened was that, as O’Brien turned away, someone – clearly not O’Brien – shouted:
‘Slash away, boys, and slaughter the whole of them!’ or words to that effect.74
Some stones were thrown. Possibly a shot was fired from the crowd.
The police were in an unpleasant situation and very nervous. They fired a volley. They continued to fire intermittently for the next hour or so, expending some 230 rounds in all.75 Two of the would-be besiegers were killed and a number wounded. None of the police were wounded.76 There was a general retreat of the besiegers, including eventually even O’Brien, who had at first refused to leave the scene declaring formally that an O’Brien never turned his back on an enemy.77
The local priest, a Father Fitzgerald, now came on the scene. O’Brien enlisted his help in making one more attempt to persuade the police to lay down their arms. But the priest received only a harangue from the agitated Sub-Inspector, who conjured up visions of ’98 and threatened martial law, the burning of houses and summary executions for this resistance to lawful authority. On his return to O’Brien Father Fitzgerald advised him to give up all notion of attacking the house and O’Brien seemed disposed to take the advice.78
Another policeman had arrived during the fighting with a message for Sub-Inspector Trant about reinforcements on the way but had been made prisoner by the mob and had his horse taken from him before being released. Some time later this policeman ran into O’Brien wandering about on this horse of his in a state of some distraction. O’Brien, thinking that the man had come to arrest him, produced a pistol and prepared to sell his life dearly. The policeman hurriedly reassured him, and when the misunderstanding had been cleared up they had something of a heart-to-heart conversation.
The policeman told O’Brien he had no hope of success with the clergy against him, and asked him how, in any case, he hoped to be able to take on regular troops. O’Brien’s reply was that he had been working for his country for twenty years and his country could redeem itself if it liked. The policeman said the only way it could be redeemed was with blood. O’Brien said he wanted no blood and gave him his horse back.79
Two hours later another force of police arrived, and after a brief engagement with the mob, which James Stephens attempted to rally, they relieved the widow McCormack’s house and its loyal defenders.** Further bodies of police followed. O’Brien, McManus and Stephens went off into hiding. They had little alternative since McManus’s attempt to raise a force from the citizens of Ballingarry to avenge their fallen comrades produced only three volunteers.80 The ‘rising’ was over.
As an eye-witness of Ballingarry declared a few days later: the idea that it had been a rebellion was ridiculous.81 O’Brien himself called it an ‘escapade’ and added, echoing Emmet, ‘it does not deserve the name of insurrection’.82
Large bodies of troops and police soon poured into the area round Ballingarry. There was no repetition of the horrors of ’98. Many arrests were made and according to the local parish priest ‘whole families were left mourning and desolate, for many died in captivity and exile, others perished from long concealment in bogs and mountains’.83 But there were no executions.
None of the leaders were betrayed in hiding. O’Brien himself remained at large for over a week and was eventually captured on the platform at Thurles railway station, trying to make his way back to his home near Limerick.84 He was wearing a black hat, a blue coat and light plaid trousers at the time, and had just bought himself a second-class ticket and forgotten to collect his sixpence change. An English railway guard named Hulme made the initial arrest and received the £500 reward.85
Others arrested while more conventionally on the run included McManus, taken on board a ship bound for America in Cork harbour, and Meagher, caught on the open road near Cashel after nights spent in ditches, haylofts and peasant cabins. James Stephens’s death from a bullet at Ballingarry was reported in the Kilkenny Moderator. The paper, while regretting the loss of this ‘most inoffensive young man, possessed of a great deal of talent’, and lamenting ‘his untimely and melancholy fate’, nevertheless trusted it might prove a ‘wholesome warning to the hot young blood of Kilkenny’.86 However, the Moderator’s rival, the Kilkenny Journal, scooped it a couple of months later when it was able to announce that Stephens had written to a friend in Tipperary from Paris, where he had found sanctuary and where refugees were, he revealed, being received in the highest circles.87 Stephens had made his escape to France via Bristol and London, after spending adventurous weeks in hiding together with Doheny who also got to France. O’Mahony, thanks to the local loyalties he commanded, kept something of a force in being in Tipperary for a few weeks. In September he unsuccessfully attacked a police barracks at Glenbar with the loss of two men, and another at Portlaw in County Waterford with the loss of one. He then escaped to join Stephens and Doheny in Paris.88
O’Brien’s trial for high treason was by then over. He was found guilty and sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, there hanged by the neck until dead and then decapitated and cut into four quarters to be disposed of as Her Majesty thought fit – the routine formula of the day**.89 The same sentence awaited Meagher, McManus and others involved in the misfortunes of that last chaotic week in July. From the dock, McManus, who had been earning the large sum of £2,000 a year as a shipping agent in Liverpool only a few months before, stressed that he had been activated not by animosity towards Englishmen, among whom he had spent some of the happiest and most prosperous days of his career. ‘It is not’, he added, ‘for loving England less but for loving Ireland more that I stand now before you.’90 Meagher had declaimed with dignity: ‘… the history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it … judged by that history, the treason of which I have been convicted loses all guilt – is sanctified as a duty – will be ennobled as a sacrifice’.91
The jury in O’Brien’s case had brought in a strong recommendation to mercy, and it was not thought that the death sentence would be carried out. However, O’Brien typically refused to apply for a pardon, which was the only legal means of granting him a reprieve, and a special act of Parliament had to be passed in the following year enabling the government to transport him for life instead. He was sent to Tasmania with Meagher, McManus and John Martin, who had meanwhile been convicted for sedition in his paper, the Irish Felon. In Tasmania they were joined by Mitchel, who after his year in Bermuda had spent a further eleven months on the high seas journeying via South America and the Cape.
In Tasmania O’Brien, again typically, alone refused to give his parole at first. He was confined to a solitary existence in and around a cottage on a small island off the coast of Tasmania, and made an abortive attempt to escape which was betrayed. Later, as his health deteriorated, he gave in and became a ticket-of-leave man like the others, with the run of a district about thirty-five miles long by ten miles wide.
McManus, Meagher and Mitchel all eventually escaped from Tasmania to America, having planned their escapes while on parole with the aid of the Young Irelander, P. J. Smyth, who had come specially from America for that purpose.92 O’Brien was finally pardoned with Martin in 1854, and allowed to return to Ireland and the bosom of his embarrassed family in 1856.93 Though it is sometimes said that he ‘took no further part in public life’,94 this is not strictly so. A curiously dignified figure, even to those political enemies who regarded his antics of 1848 as ridiculous, he continued to appear on the fringes of public life, writing letters to newspapers and identifying himself with aspirations for constitutional nationality until his death in 1864. ‘Erratic’ was the respectful term of opprobium Unionists reserved for him. In 1859 he visited America, where he met Mitchel, Meagher and O’Gorman again. The New York Express wrote: ‘There is a hesitancy and diffidence about him which perhaps does not attract favourably at first, but … there is something in him which rivets the hearer in spite of himself.’95
Mitchel, Meagher and O’Gorman were all to make new lives for themselves in the stimulating and demanding conditions of the still evolving nation on the other side of the Atlantic. The need to earn a living there, to establish a social identity in a strange society, to find both the material and psychological security necessary for day-to-day existence always set up a personal conflict between the demands of America and Ireland in the minds of even the most spirited and determined emigrant advocates of the Irish ‘cause’. The very imprecision of this cause and its slightly theoretical nature in contrast with the hard facts of life in the States was part of this conflict. The conflict was resolved in many different ways, but usually so as to dilute the amount of energy directly applied to Ireland.
Some, like O’Gorman, chose the easy way out, abandoning all further serious thoughts of Irish nationalism. He died in 1895, a distinguished New York judge. D’Arcy Magee, though he retained an interest in Ireland, equally firmly renounced the rebelliousness of his youth, became postmaster-general of Canada, and was assassinated by an extreme Irish separatist in 1867.
Meagher continued to breathe fire and lived quite successfully off it in the form of lectures or journalism. When he did finally take the field it was not in Ireland at all but in the country of his adoption. In the early years of the American Civil War he fought in the three-thousand-strong Irish brigade of the Union Army at the great battles of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, taking command with the rank of general after its commanding officer had been taken prisoner. Both the brigade and its general showed outstanding bravery and dash. At Fredericksburg, of the twelve hundred men Meagher led into action only 280 were fit for action the next morning.96 An exasperated Confederate general burst out during the battle: ‘There are those damned green flags again’,97 and a Confederate soldier wrote home to his wife: ‘Why, my darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up all along our lines.’98 But out of the battle line Meagher’s military career seems to have been less distinguished. He left the army under something of a cloud, with accusations of drunkenness and incompetence and even talk of a court-martial hanging over him.99 He died in 1866 when acting-governor of the district of Montana, which had not yet become a State. Drunk or ill, or possibly both, he fell overboard from a steamboat moored on the Missouri where he was spending the night and disappeared in the rapid current. His wife searched the river’s banks for two months for his body without success.100
Of all the émigrés of this time Mitchel perhaps maintained the best balance in his attitude to Irish affairs. He lived by journalism, running a newspaper himself first in New York and then in the South where he lived during the Civil War. He became a stern advocate of the Confederate cause, and, as one might have expected from his remarks about his fellow convicts on the Bermuda hulks, indulged in no sentimental libertarianism towards the Negro slaves. He was prepared to involve himself in Irish affairs whenever prospects seemed to him realistic, which was less often than more bombastic Irish patriots preferred to assume. Mitchel actually ended his life in Ireland in 1875 in the very house in which he was born, having just been elected Member of Parliament for Tipperary, though unseated as a convicted felon.
Curiously, T. B. McManus was to prove the most effective Young Irelander in the long run, but as a corpse. Having settled in California, where he showed little further interest in the cause of Irish nationality, he died there in 1861. The return of his body to Ireland and its subsequent funeral in the streets of Dublin was made the occasion for a mass patriotic demonstration which inaugurated in Ireland the first hopeful phase of a new movement altogether.