Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  If Wildgoose Lodge and its aftermath set gentry and tenants at each other’s throats, it also brought terrible pressures to bear on Catholics in surrounding villages like Roodstown. The Ribbon Society demanded unqualified allegiance to its insurgency, while landlords and magistrates threatened bloody reprisals against those who offered succor to the rebels. If the Kirks threw in their lot with the Ribbonmen, they were “degenerate felons” marked for execution; if they turned their backs on their own kind, they were “villainous traitors” risking Edward Lynch’s fate. For a family long sensitive to the epithet “Butchy,” it must have been an excruciating dilemma.

  Unrest built in Louth as crop prices continued to fall. Then, during the 1840s, the potato crop—prime source of food for most Irish peasants—failed for five consecutive years. Turning potato fields throughout Ireland black with rot, the blight proved a national disaster of unspeakable proportions. Especially acute in the desolate West, the famine took a terrible toll even in fertile Louth. By October 1846, bands of starving men roamed the Louth countryside, forcing themselves on local relief schemes.

  Many landlords took advantage of the Great Famine by evicting tenants who had fallen into arrears on their rent. Since eviction was the worst calamity that could befall an Irish farmer, the landlords’ new strategy prompted a resurgence of Ribbonism. The society would issue one warning to those who pursued “this reckless policy,” then if the landlord persisted, a Ribbon tribunal would sentence him to death.

  In December 1851, James Eastwood, an English landlord with an estate in Castletown, decided to evict two of his tenants on the Sunday after Christmas. When Ribbon remonstrances proved fruitless, an officer of the society named Barney Quin came to the county seat of Dundalk to recruit assassins among Ribbonmen of the area. After meetings at Rafferty’s Public House, Burns’s Tavern, and Lawless’s Public House, Quin selected Thomas Belton, twenty-four, Patrick McCooey, thirty-four, and an itinerant laborer, the forty-nine-year-old James Kirk.

  A cousin of Roodstown’s Owen Kirk, James had been born in Inniskeen just six years after Butchy Kirk’s death. Bearing the very name of the informer, he must have grown up with special maledictions heaped upon him; according to legend, he had sworn to redeem the family honor. Casting his lot with the Ribbon Society, he did not shrink from the ultimate act of rebellion. On Christmas Eve, as light snow fell over Castletown, Kirk and his two accomplices intercepted Eastwood as he strolled his estates, clubbing him with heavy stones and leaving him for dead at the edge of a quarry. But the landlord survived. Five days after the attack, Kirk and McCooey were arrested on the information of a paid informer—publican Michael Lawless—who testified that he had overheard Quin and three men plotting the assassination in his tavern on the night of December 22. Largely on Lawless’s testimony, Kirk and McCooey were sentenced to death.

  On July 31, 1852, the most celebrated execution in county history took place in the square before the Dundalk courthouse. A double row of constabulary ringed the square, backed by a squadron of lancers. At ten minutes to twelve, the condemned men, arms pinioned with leather straps and white caps on their heads, were led to the scaffold. McCooey exhibited “much weakness,” chanting over and over, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me.” In contrast, James Kirk displayed his “usual firmness.” At high noon, the hangmen wound strips of black crepe over the prisoners’ eyes. Around their necks went ropes of silk, woven for the occasion by prisoners in the Cork jail. At a signal from the prison’s governor, the two men were “launched into eternity.” For an hour their bodies hung from the gallows, “an object lesson to those who watched.”

  But the Kirks drew a different lesson from the one the British magistrates had intended. In the family’s collective memory, the exploits of James Kirk the Ribbonman soon exorcised the shame of James Kirk the Traitor—though they still might hear the chorus of “Butchy” in marketplace and tavern, somehow they succeeded in erasing all recollection of the informer. As generations went by, these themes of loyalty and betrayal were to run like bold threads through the family’s history, weaving a tapestry in which heroes and villains, patriots and turncoats, were pitted relentlessly against each other, with the Kirks—and their descendants, the McGoffs—invariably enlisted in freedom’s legion.

  Before the Great Famine was over in 1851, death, eviction, and emigration to America had eroded the population of rural Ireland. In 1841, Roodstown had 208 residents; a decade later, only 172 remained. The Kirks hung on. Although Owen and Cath were dead by now, the cottage next to the old Taaffe castle was occupied by their oldest son, Bryan, his wife, Bridget, and their five children.

  The Kirks were less dependent on the land than most of their neighbors, for Bryan was a tailor, an itinerant craftsman who made clothes for the villagers and outlying farmers. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, ready-made clothes were largely unknown in rural Ireland. At fairs and markets, one might find a few secondhand suits, known as “Lord-ha’-mercys” because they came off the backs of dead men, but most farmers still supplied hand-woven cloth to the village tailor, who made up a suit to measure. Sometimes Bryan Kirk worked at home; more often he traveled to his customer’s home, carrying needles, thread, and scissors in a leather pouch.

  The Kirks continued to live in spartan simplicity. The old thatched cottage Owen had built in 1802 was now divided down the middle by a flimsy partition. To the left was a kitchen with a stone hearth; to the right, a bedroom where the Kirks spent the night on straw pallets spread out on the clay floor. On either side was a small window which did little to relieve the dark, damp, and cold which pervaded the cottage in all seasons.

  Other than Kirk the tailor, Hardy the blacksmith, and Rorke the cooper, Roodstown offered its twenty-five families little in the way of commerce or diversion. For those they went three miles east to Ardee or two miles west to Stabannon. By the 1850s, Ardee was a town of 2,500, with a tanyard, an oat mill, and eighteen alehouses. But it was to Stabannon that the villagers went on Sundays to hear Father Corrigan chant the Latin Mass in the whitewashed chapel; there they went to quaff ale at Geraghty’s, or dance to the fiddling of old Jamie Farrell. And it was there that the Kirks’ second son, Patrick, attended John Mackin’s “hedge school,” so known because it had long been illegal for any Catholic youth to get an education and priests and schoolmasters gave instruction hidden behind a hedge. By 1851, Mackin’s school was legal enough, but it retained a clandestine air, conducted as it was in a former stable on a side lane behind a high thorn hedge.

  As Patrick grew to manhood, he could see nothing to hold him in Roodstown. He had no wish to follow his father into the tailoring trade, even less to scratch out a living farming Lord Cremorne’s land.

  Nothing had happened since the Great Famine to improve the lot of the Irish peasant. Affronted by mounting Catholic belligerence, many landlords deserted Ireland for much of the year, taking their pleasure in England. The Third Lord Cremorne, a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, shuttled between his London town house and his Monaghan manor, with little thought for his Louth estates.

  Many Louthians had their eyes on events across the Atlantic, where the Union armies were crushing the Confederacy. In February 1865, the Dundalk Democrat—a principal voice of Louth’s Catholics—detected “a curious affinity between the state of things in Virginia and the state of things in Ireland. In Virginia, planters have too much power—an unjust and cruel power over their laborers. In Ireland the landlords have too much power—a power of life and death to their tenants. It is a usurped power, precisely like that which buys and sells the Negroes.”

  When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the same editor could scarcely contain his delight. A prolonged civil war “would have prostrated Kingdoms and Empires in its march,” he wrote, “but based on Democratic liberty the American Republic has wrestled with it and conquered. The fact proves that a government of the people is more powerful than that of aristocrats and kings.”

  Evidently Pat Kirk
was equally impressed by the American example, for just three weeks after Appomattox he crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, where—with 758 others—he boarded the S.S. Bosphorus. After six weeks in steerage he arrived in Boston on June 5, 1865.

  Pat’s first stop was an unlikely one for an Irishman fresh off the boat: suburban Somerville, then almost exclusively Yankee. Friends from County Louth had found him a job in a Somerville brick works. They may also have introduced him to Mary Quinn, a recent emigrant from the Louth town of Drogheda, for on July 19, Pat and Mary were married at St. John’s Church. A few months later they moved to South Boston’s Lower End, then teeming with newly arrived Irish, and began building a family: a son, Bernard, born in May 1866; a daughter, Mary, in July 1869.

  The Kirks sank shallow roots, moving every year or so from one grim tenement to another: 220 Second Street, 92 Athens Street, 110 Bolton Street. These flats were scarcely larger than the thatched hut Pat had left behind and, in most respects, were even less pleasant and healthful. Landlords had divided warehouses and town houses into ten or twelve apartments, stacking the newcomers in attics, basements, and closets. Most houses had only one sink and a single privy serving up to a hundred people. Lacking direct access to the street, tenants dumped their garbage into the courtyards, where it lay for months in stinking heaps.

  In the winter of 1871, a tuberculosis epidemic raced through the squalid warrens of the Lower End, felling men, women, and children by the hundreds. The Kirks’ two-year-old daughter, Mary, took ill in February and died in May. By then her mother had contracted the disease as well, putting up a longer fight but finally succumbing on July 26. A stunned Pat Kirk buried his wife and daughter side by side in Holy Cross Cemetery. For a few months longer he struggled to keep things together, working as a day laborer, but jobs were scarce, there was nobody to look after his four-year-old son, Bernard, and the cramped flat on Bolton Street was filled with painful memories of his two Marys. Late that fall, Pat packed his few belongings and took his remaining child back to Ireland, where they moved into the Roodstown cottage with his father, Bryan the tailor. For the next fifteen years, Pat worked other men’s land as a hired hand, earning ten pence a day. He never remarried, relying on his mother and in-laws to help raise Bernard.

  By 1890, the Irish countryside was once more in turmoil. Falling agriculture prices and fresh evictions made tenant farming more precarious than ever. To Bernard Kirk, then twenty-three, Boston beckoned much as it had to his father a quarter century before. Pat Kirk had never forgotten the hardships endured, the terrible losses suffered, in that flinty Yankee town, but Bernard ultimately overcame Pat’s misgivings and, late in April, father and son set sail aboard the S.S. Pavonia. Pat’s premonitions proved all too sound; only four months after his return to Boston, he died of a heart attack and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, next to his wife and daughter.

  The Irish colonized Boston by county: emigrants from Galway settled in Roxbury, those from Cork in South Boston, those from Kerry in Bay Village. Counties Louth and Meath were drawn first to the North End, replicating there the social landscape of northeastern Ireland. In 1891, Bernard Kirk lodged in a rooming house at 239 Friend Street, a narrow lane hard by the docks, where he worked as a day laborer. Among other Louthians in that house were Peter and Bridget Sharkey from Ardee and their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Catherine. Confronting each other daily in those close quarters, Catherine and Barney fell in love and were married on February 5, 1893. Six months later, the Kirks left the North End, crossing the narrow strip of gray water to Charlestown, where they settled at 72 Chapman Street in the southern lee of Breed’s Hill. Like other North Enders who made that same move toward the turn of the century, the Kirks were known as “Dearos,” after their occasional bouts of nostalgia for “the Dear Old North End.” But, like other newcomers, they soon transferred their allegiance to Charlestown, which had huddled on that rocky coast for two and a half centuries.

  On March 29, 1630, the brig Arbella set sail from Southampton, England, with a company of Puritans bound for Massachusetts. Aboard ship, the company’s leader, John Winthrop, delivered a sermon expressing the extraordinary intensity of their community-to-be:

  “We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ condition our own … We must consider that we shall be like a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

  On June 12, the Arbella landed at Salem, where an advance party of the Massachusetts Bay Company had established a commercial outpost. But Salem did not please the newcomers, and soon they resumed their search for their “city upon a hill,” selecting the narrow Charlestown peninsula between the Charles and Mystic rivers, where a small party from Salem had settled two years before.

  The new party of one thousand made Charlestown a substantial community and the capital of the infant colony. But it was not to be Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.” The peninsula was too cramped and lacked adequate drinking water. The bloody flux flashed through the travelers. Then came word that the French were preparing to attack. Through the autumn, small groups left Charlestown, establishing settlements at Watertown, Roxbury, Medford, and, directly across the Charles River, on the Shawmut peninsula, soon to be renamed Boston. Winthrop himself left for Boston in October. His dream of a single consecrated city was dead. But his notion of a Bible Commonwealth lived on in the separate towns which now dotted the tidewater flats. Although Charlestown was temporarily depleted, it soon began growing again and by midcentury had taken its place as one of the principal towns of the colony.

  In some respects, New England towns were modeled on the English townships from which their settlers came, the ideal village they had left behind. But unlike those ancestral communities with their sturdy walls and mossy marketplaces, Charlestown and its neighbors were artificial creations, literally hewn from the wilderness and constantly in jeopardy—if not from wild animals or Indians, then from the vagaries and passions which can so easily rend such delicate human constructs. This perpetual state of crisis accounts, in part, for the intensity of their communal life, their almost desperate insistence on mutual obligations. Perhaps the greatest fear of all was of violating the “covenant,” the sacred compact which the settlers had made with God and with each other. The covenant was the stone on which the community was built, the basis of its determination to become “a fellowship of visible saints.” A townsperson who broke its stern commandments endangered not only himself but all his colleagues, and risked bringing down God’s wrath on the entire community.

  Thus the intense pressure for conformity to a shared set of beliefs, customs, and institutions. By the very act of joining the congregation, the Puritan accepted not only one God and one religion but one polity, one law, one allegiance. The town could not tolerate diversity; it could not live with aberration. So most towns took steps to guarantee homogeneity. Sudbury barred “such whose dispositions do not suit us, whose society will be hurtful to us.” Dedham banned “the contrarye minded.” In 1634, Charlestown’s town meeting voted that “none be permitted to sit down and dwell in the town without the consent of the town first obtained.” Even after a person was received into the town, he could be expelled by a process known as “warning out.”

  Such rigid enforcement of uniformity was possible in communities engaged only in subsistence agriculture and fishing. But by the mid-seventeenth century, Charlestown, like Boston, was breaking out of such isolation, becoming a trading center for the region. Rampant individualism and the increasing specialization of a mercantile economy had largely eroded Winthrop’s dream of a community in which private concerns would forever be subordinated to public needs.

  Still, Charlestown could never quite forget the purity of that vision. The less it resembled Winthrop’s model, the more seductive became the memory of that archetypal New England town, harmonious, consensual, cemented by a single
faith and a devotion to the common cause. For more than three centuries to come, that notion burned like a beacon, summoning the people of Charlestown to an increasingly unrealistic ideal of community.

  Through most of the eighteenth century, Charlestown shunned insubstantial myth for the solid clink of shillings in the coffer. Then, in the 1770s, it found itself transformed once again into a potent symbol, an example which would help bring down an empire.

  Charlestown’s conspicuous role in the Revolution stemmed less from the revolutionary fervor of its populace than from its critical location. British-occupied Boston was like a pollywog, its tail connected to the mainland at Roxbury, its head pointing across the bay at Charlestown. It was to Charlestown that Paul Revere rowed on April 18, 1775, there to take horse and carry word of the British attack to Lexington; and twenty hours later, it was back through Charlestown that the battered British column retreated to Boston. By June, Roxbury and Charlestown were the fronts on which General Thomas Gage’s 5,000 redcoats were bound to confront the 15,000 armed colonists who had massed around Boston.

  Early in June came word that the British planned to break out of that vise by driving at Roxbury, then assaulting Charlestown. Resolving to fortify Bunker Hill, the Committee for Public Safety assigned the task to three regiments commanded by Colonel William Prescott. By error, Prescott built his redoubt on the lower, more vulnerable Breed’s Hill. So when the battle was joined on June 17, General William Howe’s light infantry, grenadiers, and Royal Marines could turn the colonists’ flanks and attack the hill’s defenders from three sides. Although Prescott’s farmers and minutemen fought valiantly, the British ultimately stormed the hill, sending the Americans streaming back along the peninsula.