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Fear, like self-pity, is a prison of its own making.
why does money have to be the marker of a man? That was the thing about America he most despised, measuring existence by the size of one’s pile.
Better to think of what could come next in a run of extraordinary luck, a commodity oversubscribed to the Irish.
“The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic,”
The melodies of this nation and its favorite instrument were a particular target of English hatred.
the harp.
What had the Irish done to deserve these cruelties? They had refused to become English.
The systematic savagery, the stripping of ethnic pride and religious freedom, the many executions of men of conscience: he carried these stories throughout his life, the weight increasing with the years.
The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.”
The remedy was one of the most exhaustive campaigns to strip a people of their pride of place that any government had ever devised—the Statutes of Kilkenny. Starting in 1367, assimilation was outlawed. Nearly three dozen laws criminalized Irish dress, Irish hairstyle, Irish sport, down to a detailed description of the lawful way to mount a horse. Punishment for riding without an English saddle was jail: the offender’s “body shall be committed to prison, until he pay a fine according to the King’s pleasure.”
Beyond the Pale—that was beyond all civilization, an unruly Ireland living on its own terms.
Silken Thomas Fitzgerald,
After breaking with a corrupt Rome that would not grant him his first divorce, Henry declared himself leader of a new English church—from now on, the state religion of Ireland as well.
Irish Catholics were ordered to become Anglicans or forfeit their land and all their holdings. Outside the Pale, this edict had the effect of a mortal ordering the sun to rise at midnight on a winter’s eve.
To populate these newly stolen lands, the English brought in Protestant settlers, many from Scotland, and were generous with their handouts. So was born another hyphenate from this soil: the Scotch-Irish.
Under the Act of Settlement, Cromwell’s soldiers and their supporters would seize more than half of all the good land in Ireland, about eight million acres. Any landowner who took part in the fight against Cromwell was arrested and sentenced to a life of bondage, his land confiscated. In this way, another 40,000 Irish were deported to the West Indies as slaves on sugar plantations.
“No person of the popish religion shall publicly teach school or instruct youth, or in private houses teach youth.”
The campaign to strip the Irish of their religion had the opposite effect, making them more loyal to their faith. Certainly, Rome was corrupt, deceitful, the Church ruled by a knot of conspirators whose pronouncements were delivered on a breeze of hypocrisy. The Church meddled in the affairs of every Catholic nation, blessing murder of their enemies and of nonbelievers. They persecuted men of science
and voices of common sense. Even as the Renaissance brought fresh light, art and thought to Europe, as the Reformation prompted half of the continent to turn away from the medieval mandates of Rome, as the Age of Enlightenment spawned thousands of conversions from belief to reason, the Irish clung to their Roman Catholicism. For the same reason that hurling never died, that the harp became a national symbol, that epic poems were still recited in Gaelic, religion was a way for a conquered nation to remain defiantly Irish.
“I have seen the Indian in the forest, and the negro in his chains and thought that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland,” Beaumont wrote after two long reporting tours in 1835 and 1837. “An entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland.”
Irish high society was a fraud, “the pretentious aping of English taste, ideas and fashions,” he called it. His worst fear was that he would become “a silken and scented slave of England.”
Douglass drew enormous crowds. “I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man—not as a thing, but as a child of the common Father of us all,” he wrote.
The Irish: good God, everyone knows they’re prone to high drama. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,”
“Let earnest truth, stern fidelity to principle, love for all who bear the name of an Irishman sustain, ennoble and immortalize this cause,”
What motivated Meagher, the fount of his fury, was the fast-developing famine;
The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned.
And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved.
Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.
The Irish are a “selfish, perverse and turbulent people,” said the man in charge of relieving their plight.
“The man who will listen to reason, let him be reasoned with. But it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can alone prevail against battalioned despotism. Then, my lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral.”
Those who were not hungry, who had standing and the promise of a good life like Meagher, were now bound by conscience to take a great risk.
“England has bound this island hand and foot. The island is her slave. She robs the island of its food, for it has not the power to guard it. If the island does not break its fetters, England will write its epitaph. Listen to a few facts . . .”
In place of food, Russell sent another 16,000 troops to Ireland.
It took five to eight weeks to sail to the American mainland, four months or more to Australia. The English wanted them gone, particularly to Canada and Australia, two of the Empire’s big empties in need of field hands and laborers.
“The language of sedition,” he told a cheering crowd, “is the language of freedom.”
Meagher conceived an idea for a flag: one third green, one third orange, as a nod to the Protestant north, and a unifying white in the center.
He had plenty of regret—over the timing of the revolt, the failure to secure support from Catholic priests, the poor organization of the clubs, the foolish belief that starving people
might put up a fight against the British Empire. Worst of all: two years of agitation never came to a climax—there was no showdown, nothing to rouse the Irish on three continents.
“My lords, you may deem this language unbecoming in me, and perhaps it may seal my fate. But I am here to speak the truth whatever it may cost. I am here to regret nothing I have ever done, to retract nothing I have already said. I am here to crave with no lying lip the life I consecrate to the liberty of my country . . . No, I do not despair of my poor old country, her peace, her liberty, her glory. For that country I can do no more than bid her hope. To lift this island up, to make her a benefactor to humanity instead of being the meanest beggar in the world, to restore her to her native
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England would never be able to kill the spirit of the people. “Beyond these shores, whenever two or more Irishmen are gathered together, everything almost can be done.”
The passage in the North Atlantic made many of those exiles feel that the greatest gamble of their young lives was a terrible mistake. Typhus, of course, was much feared. So was the outbreak of fire, from cooking in tight quarters. But what most terrified the uprooted, most of them dirt farmers and laborers unfamiliar with the ocean’s tantrums, were storms.
Here they were, sentenced to life under house arrest. For what? Fighting to gain in Ireland the very freedom that had now been granted on their island penitentiary. A paroled rapist, trailing sheep on a Tasmanian bluff, had more political rights than a law-abiding citizen of Erin.
at least 160,000 Irish. It was the densest concentration of Irish anywhere: more than one in four New Yorkers in a city of nearly 600,000 had been born in Meagher’s homeland.
The Irish killed themselves with liquor, with accidents prompted by drink, with neglect, with disease, with violence, but would never end their lives by their own hands, for that would ensure that misery followed them to eternity.
Between 1847 and 1851, about 1.8 million immigrants landed in New York City, of which 848,000 were Irish.
The fastest-growing political party in the United States at the time—the
the Know-Nothings—did not.
The Know-Nothings vowed to close the gates and keep the newly arrived from becoming citizens.
And America was not by design a haven for the world’s rejects. It was a Protestant nation, Anglo-Saxon, and would descend into Babylon if it allowed itself to be mixed with “mongrel races” and “Papists,” the Know-Nothings charged.
At a huge rally in Kensington, Pennsylvania, where immigrant textile mill workers and factory hands lived, one speaker said the Irish were “scum unloaded on American wharves.” The nativists stormed through Irish neighborhoods, burning St. Michael’s Church, St. Charles Seminary and St. Augustine’s Church. The mobs moved on to Philadelphia proper, forcing the mayor to declare martial law. When a nun stood in the door of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, defying the rioters, she was hit in the head by a shower of rocks and fell, unconscious. The nativists overran the Hibernian Hose Company, a
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