The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  So between St John, New Brunswick, and the borders of New York perished the peasantry whom both O’Connell and Meagher loved so much and yet were distant from; their very journey an index of the failure of O’Connell’s alliance with the Whigs. Saved by ice, at the end of October the quarantine station of Grosse Île was closed down, and Father McGoran, a priest who had left two brothers dead of fever there, was last to leave, boarding the final ship of the year, the Alliance. Aboard it, he gave last rites to six of the passengers who died before Quebec.

  Those stricter passenger statutes gave some protection to the United States. The Boston City Council established a quarantine station at Deer Island, at the entrance to Boston Harbour. But the penalties for landing fever-carriers ashore were such that captains of fever ships tried to avoid Boston. The number of patients on Deer Island between June 1847 and the following February was about 2,500, whereas Grosse Île harboured as many as that every week. The Irish who were healthy enough to land in Boston occupied in particular the Eighth Ward in North Boston, where huge, fire-trap tenements dwarfed Paul Revere’s House. The look of the ragged, hungry, verminous Famine immigrants unleashed much anti-Irish hysteria, as from New York to Baltimore Irishmen and women were suddenly begging on the icy streets of the eastern United States. In New York Irish immigrants settled downtown, notably in the Sixth Ward, which took in the East River waterfront, the Bowery, Broadway, and from below Canal Street down to City Hall. New York’s quarantine station on Staten Island was served by a steam ferry, so that families settled as healthy in Sixth Ward rookeries could go to Staten directly or indirectly from the city. There were officially 1,300 deaths in New York from typhus.

  The Nation had already warned its readers that Irish arriving at New York were likely to be imposed on by ‘runners of the boarding houses, who try … to get possession of them and their luggage, and when once obtained, they charge what they like for that entertainment.’ The Nation urged immigrants to see the agent of the Irish Emigrant Society, founded in Manhattan in 1841, which met all arriving ships. In its office in Lower Manhattan, immigrants could seek advice on jobs and lodging, and report swindlers and unjust captains. Through the society, they could also send passage money back to Ireland, and valid pre-paid tickets. The Emigrant Society offered the Irish arrivals their first tentative gestures of leverage and power, so that they felt for the first time that they had indeed entered a new world.

  Now that ceaseless tragedy was the daily order of Ireland, those transported earlier lived lives almost of banal well-being in their distant quarter of New South Wales. Hugh Larkin and Mary Shields did not escape the average, bitter nineteenth-century bereavements though. In December 1847, a second child, Mary, was born and lived only eleven days. Hugh performed his own baptism of her, pouring the waters of Monaro over her head, having been trained since childhood in the importance and potency of baptism. With Mary still ailing, he took the small coffin and his dead child by cart to burial somewhere in that immense country. Mary had now lost both daughters she had given birth to, O’Flynn’s Bridget and Larkin’s Mary, and that must have weighed appropriately on her.

  It was apparent to her that they must marry for the sake of young Tom Larkin, now three years old. On the one hand, there was no doubt that Hugh and Mary, being now in some senses and not by their own choice dead to the old world, could not countenance marrying outside the Church. But the priests were not as easily convinced. In their eyes the fact that wives or husbands in the northern hemisphere were unreachable did not justify new unions at the earth’s extreme south. An Attorney-General of New South Wales, Roger Therry, who lived thirty years in the colony, was well aware of the marriage stratagems of some of his convict brethren. He told of how a man transported from Cork had left his wife and two children behind in Ireland. On becoming free, he wished to marry within the colony. He was able to produce a letter, complete with a Cork postmark forged in Sydney in red ink on the corner of the envelope. The letter, purporting to be from his brother in Ireland, indicated that the man’s dear wife had died in the bosom of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, a touch which worked well, said Therry, with the clergy.

  In the end, Hugh and Mary managed to marry just before Hugh’s conditional pardon was granted, when in theory he still needed permission from the Convict Department. This wedding prior to Hugh’s freedom could have occurred only because Esther Larkin and John O’Flynn had died in Ireland—and the oral record says Esther did not; or else Hugh and Mary used some device like the one mentioned by Therry. The ceremony took place on 16 March 1848, the eve of St Patrick, at St Peter and St Paul’s Catholic Church at Goulburn. The invocation of St Peter and St Paul would have comforted the couple—it was a pledge that they were re-entering the Communion of Saints.

  The marriage came at the end of an Australian summer and of another fatal Irish winter. News of the immutable Famine was in every paper they flinchingly read to each other, or had read to them. The Famine fell over their plentiful bush table, and made its claim upon them at dead of night, when they were released from distracting labour and lay together, as spouses in this hemisphere, wondering what was happening in the parallel universe.

  There was now a new governor in New South Wales. Well-meaning Gipps had left in 1846 in a state of failing health and with the general disapproval both of the progressives, who saw him as too much a servant of the Crown, and of the squatters, who believed him too lenient on Aboriginals and indifferent to their own problems of tenure. The new governor, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, had fought at the age of sixteen years in the battle of Waterloo, and had had experience of colonial government in both St Edward’s Island in Canada and in the Leeward Islands.

  It was FitzRoy who on 1 June 1848 signed the conditional pardon of Hugh Larkin. In this ornate document, towards the bottom of its page of print and penmanship, lay the clause: ‘Provided always … that if the said Hugh Larkin, shall at any time during the continuance of the term of his said Sentence, go to, or be in, any part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, then this Pardon shall thenceforth be and become wholly void.’ He could not do a Magwitch, and take his dark, knowing benevolence even temporarily back to Galway.

  Hugh and Mary did not settle permanently in Goulburn until after the conditional pardon, but Hugh had an intention now to give up the remote stations. He and Mary left that boulder-dotted high plain, going away as their own people, possessed of freedom of movement and the rights of ambition. In late October 1848, he bought for £25 a town allotment in Cowper Street, Goulburn, and set to work to build a house upon it. An infant Anne, born of Mary Shields/Larkin on 30 November 1848, was healthy and like her elder brother Tom, now five years old, would live on into another century.

  Mary and Hugh, townspeople now, heard regular reports of Ireland from the pulpit of St Peter and St Paul. The offerings plate came around for Famine relief. The voices of their bush children, speaking in a potent, crow-harsh Australian accent, confirmed their distance from the Irish disaster, but also evoked other children who spoke more liquidly in Limerick or Galway.

  The future seemed promising for these convicts’ children, but utterly limitless for the children of the employer, Brodribb, the two young Brodribb daughters and a small son. But in the middle of 1849, when Hugh and Mary were establishing themselves in Goulburn, Brodribb’s wife fell ill, and almost at once his daughters. It was diphtheria. The doctor from Cooma ‘had their hair cut off, and cold applications applied to their heads.’ At the end of July 1849, in the same room where her mother and sister lay, Brodribb’s eldest daughter died. Brodribb rode by phaeton 25 miles to Cooma for a coffin. Eight days later the second daughter died in great suffering. Mrs Brodribb recovered but the ‘loss of our daughters weighed heavily on her mind.’

  William Bradley, Brodribb’s employer, also suffered grief. During his journey to Europe, he lost his sickly wife Emily, whom Italy was meant to cure.

  But for the moment, Hugh Larkin’s wife and children b
loomed.

  In March 1849, the Goulburn magistrates’ bench authorised the final release to Hugh of £47 5 shillings and 6 pence deposited in his name in the savings bank. When handed to him by an officer of the bench, it was without any doubt the biggest sum of money he had ever seen at the one time. He bought another town lot in Grafton Street, from which he decided to conduct the business of chandler or hardware dealer, and where he and his family now lived. His behaviour bespoke confidence, and some ambition.

  The Goulburn in which he and Mary were emancipists was a township of 3,000 people, but served an immense hinterland of hamlets, farmers and settlers. It was very likely to seem a pulsing metropolis to a man who grew up in Lismany and had been in Monaro for so long. Though lit by evil-smelling oil lamps, it had an urban brightness. Hugh had gone into the bush in 1834, fifteen years earlier, when the newspapers had been full of the names of felon absconders and complaints about convict behaviour. The Australia into which he emerged now had proceeded beyond the lambasting of felons and emancipists. The Sydney Morning Herald of 5 July 1848 announced that of the now 220,000 settlers in Australia, an auspicious 80,000 were females. The Herald took delight in a colony ‘thus blessed with the political liberties for which the millions of Europe are dying, and with those material comforts without which political liberty is an empty name.’ The political liberties of New South Wales were as yet more in prospect than in reality—the franchise was property-based, and the larger land-grabbers occupied the Legislative Council. But progressives had definitively ended transportation to New South Wales. The attempted landing of shipfuls of ‘exiles,’ trusty prisoners from British prisons, was resisted by mass meetings at Circular Quay, Sydney. The exile ships were forced to go elsewhere, the Hashemy to Port Phillip, the Mount Stewart Elphinstone to Moreton Bay, now Brisbane, far to the north.

  Yet though anti-transportationists had brought transportation to New South Wales to a stop, they were at the same time champions of the rights of emancipated convicts. It was in itself a triumph of New South Wales democracy that the Larkins were not placed in the position of an underclass. They drank clean water, ate well and opened the door of their Grafton Street, Goulburn, chandlery business for passing trade, seeking to serve in particular the large Irish community of Goulburn and its broad hinterland.

  10

  FIASCO AND NOBLE GESTURE: THE REBELLION OF YOUNG IRELAND

  The position we stood in; the language we had used; the promises we had made; the defiances we had uttered; our entire career, short as it was, seemed to require of us a step no less daring and defiant than that which the Government had taken.

  Thomas Francis Meagher,

  July 1848

  Young Ireland had spent the winter of 1847–8 in hectic certainty that their poorer fellow countrymen and women would not lie prostrate in misery beyond the coming summer. The Young Ireland Confederation, inaugurated at the Rotunda a year past in January 1847, spawned enthusiastic Confederate clubs throughout Ireland which, unlike the highly social ’82 Club, had no quasi-military uniform. But they were more purely political, and took some interest in potentially bearing arms. Young lawyers, journalists, merchants joined in numbers—and some landowners. They represented the network necessary for so-called spontaneous uprising.

  Old Ireland had not forgiven Young Ireland their defection from the Liberator. When in September 1847, O’Brien, Meagher and others went to Cork to address Confederate clubs there, they had to talk their way in through the stage door of the Theatre Royal. From the galleries in the theatre Old Irelanders screamed at Tom Meagher, ‘Who killed O’Connell?’ Then in November, when O’Brien bravely went with Meagher and Mitchel to Belfast, to argue the Confederate cause with both Protestant and Catholic Repealers at a rally at the Music-Hall, they found themselves besieged by furious Old Irelanders, and hurled rocks shattered a number of windows.

  Against a background of continuing mass desperation, there had been one hopeful sign—the potato harvest of 1847 came up at last unmarred but in desperately small quantities, most seed potatoes having been eaten. If Esther and her sons had managed to plant the previous spring they were in a minority. But the apparent end to blight caused Trevelyan to decide in the spring of 1848 that the emergency and the need for relief were at an end. This increased the grim, radical conviction of John Mitchel that matters were so bad that a popular revolution would occur in Ireland at harvest time, 1848. The masses would not watch the crops ship out once more.

  Mitchel himself was about to be heavily influenced by a new voice, however. From the area of Tinakill in Queen’s County (now Laois) came articles written on a farmhouse table by a ‘deaf, near-sighted, ungainly, and deformed’ young man, suffering from a congenital spinal disease. His name was James Fintan Lalor, he came of a farming family who had been engaged in anti-tithe politics, and he despised the ideas both of Repeal and of Carlyle, the latter’s concept of revolution as a form of spontaneous combustion. ‘I would never contribute one shilling,’ he told Mitchel, ‘or give my name, heart, or hand, for such an object as the simple Repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union.’ The matter of land—that was what counted. ‘A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.’ The deformed young man in Tinakill chastised Mitchel for believing a successful rebellion would occur without planning. ‘I want a prepared, organised, orderly and resistless revolution,’ wrote Lalor. ‘You would have an unprepared, disorderly and vile jacquerie.’ The ‘frieze-coats,’ said Lalor, those still-functioning farmers whose few crops would likely be taken for rent at harvest time, were ripe to rise, but Young Ireland wasted energy on questions of “defensive” or “offensive” wars and did nothing to prepare or train potential battalions. Lalor, mocking all the theoretical talk of Meagher and Mitchel, wrote, “Ireland are ready to strip for battle, and none flinched but the fire-eaters.”

  Smith O’Brien spent the early new year of 1848 drafting a peaceable charter for the Irish Confederation in his study at Cahirmoyle. He set out on the train from Limerick to deliver its charter at the Rotunda, believing that Mitchel and his allies, chief amongst them that unlikely radical the Ulster landlord John Martin, must be prevented from leading the Confederation into an under-planned revolution. Meagher’s defence of the concept of the Sword was reasonable. But Mitchel, most of the moderates believed, was unrealistic: ‘The peasantry of the South, at that time unfamiliar with arms, and accustomed to rely chiefly upon their shillelaghs, he represented to himself as Calabrians or Tyrolese, with rifles always in their hands and ammunition in their pouches.’

  While Ireland perished or fled, some of the most decent and least physically discomforted gentlemen tried to resolve how Esther Larkin’s mass of fellow sufferers could best be rescued from powerlessness. In a series of meetings at the Rotunda in January and February of 1848, Mitchel’s small group pushed one of Lalor’s strategies: a rent strike by tenants, and a poor-rate strike—a refusal to pay the tax which kept the workhouses going—by all sympathetic landowners. These devices, said Mitchel, would cause an ugly display of authority by the British government, and a corresponding desperation amongst the poor, both of which would generate the revolution. Mitchel was not, he claimed, suggesting that oppressive landlords or their agents be shot down from hedges, but it was time to trigger an uprising. The time for achieving results by parliamentary means had long gone. Now, ‘There is no opinion in Ireland worth a farthing that is not illegal.’

  The lawyer Richard O’Gorman nicknamed Mitchel’s faction ‘Infant Ireland.’ But young Meagher plaintively wished Thomas Davis was alive to guide everybody. Duffy said of Meagher that he ‘would have gone to battle for Ireland more joyfully than to a feast’ but ‘refused to consent to a policy, which he considered rash and hopeless.’ Though Tom Meagher had invoked the most intense martial images, he still believed that the Confederation would succeed in redeeming Ireland by using moral force, as O’Brien proposed. For the Confederation’s strength lay in
the reality that it was not corrupt like Repeal, sought no money, did not condone thuggish methods, permitted the broadest spectrum of Irishness.

  Young Ireland expended huge and futile energy on these arguments, the night-time debates sometimes not ending until weary Confederates stumbled out of the Rotunda to their carriages at three o’clock or later. And the main resolutions were very like the peace proposals of the Liberator, which two summers ago Meagher had countered with his withering Sword speech. At ten o’clock on a raw Saturday morning in early February, with John Martin in the chair, the Confederates voted for O’Brien’s moderate principles by 318 to 188. Rifle clubs, which Mitchel wanted, were also voted down. But even those who opposed Mitchel, like Richard O’Gorman, forced Duffy to promise to publish Mitchel’s apologia for his position in the Nation.

  It was between Duffy and Mitchel that the greatest rancour now existed. Mitchel could no longer work at the Nation, and so had no prospects of income. He went back to 8 Ontario Terrace, where, amidst all this turbulence of opinion and threats of guerrilla war, 28-year-old Jenny Mitchel was raising their three sons and two daughters as well-washed, well-mannered, well-instructed young Dubliners from the Presbyterian tradition.

  Mitchel was supported by Jenny for she knew that John, wheezing and orating, was always the sort of man whose first reaction to disaster was to publish. Now his schoolfriend John Martin suggested ‘a new weekly Mitchel-ite paper,’ financed in considerable part by Martin. Mitchel thought at first he would need to go to Cork or Belfast to begin a new paper, that there was something vaguely dishonourable about confronting Duffy’s Nation in its own city. But Martin and the young journalist Devin Reilly dissuaded him. Why abandon the capital to equivocal voices? So Mitchel, Martin and Reilly found an office in Trinity Street, not far from the Nation, and began the United Irishman, named to honour Mitchel’s father and the principles of 1798. The first issue emerged in February 1848, and included material from the Young Ireland priest Father Kenyon and Eva of the Nation. She had not renounced the Nation; most Young Irelanders did not see Mitchel and the Nation as being so far apart.