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

by Thomas Keneally

  In good humour, the Irish argued for the sword or the revolver, while awaiting the all-clarifying signal from Stephens, still in hiding in Dublin. But they needed orders soon. John Devoy was already hiding twenty men of the 87th Regiment who had come to Ireland on Christmas leave from Portsmouth, and soldiers were every day walking away from the army to hide and await the imminent uprising. A sergeant of engineers named O’Brien, home on leave from Woolwich, put in front of Devoy a radical plan for blowing up Woolwich Arsenal. Stephens rejected with abhorrence the proposition of bringing terror to England. But the concept had been released into the air.

  John Boyle O’Reilly had divided his enlistees into two Fenian troops, and acquired the key of an unused postern gate, through which he could take his squad on a moment’s notice out of barracks to join a revolution. ‘The signal never came,’ Devoy complained, ‘and all his and other men’s risks and sacrifices were thrown away through incompetent and nerveless leadership.’

  O’Reilly was looking out the barrack windows of Ireland Bridge, Dublin, on the afternoon of 12 February 1866 when he saw one of his fellow conspirators arrested and led to the guardhouse. He went through the soldierly motions, but was himself put under arrest within forty-eight hours. As he was led across the barrack yard, his commanding officer, Colonel Valentine Baker met him, shook his fist in his face, and said: ‘Damn you, O’Reilly, you’ve ruined the finest regiment in the service!’

  O’Reilly and other Fenian soldiers were placed in Arbor Hill military prison on Dublin’s north side. O’Reilly claimed to have been put through a session of threats and blows from a muscular provost sergeant. But the expectation of imminent uprising sustained him. Others have confessed, O’Reilly was told, so why can’t you? How do you think we knew to arrest you? As he was taken back to his cell, the old warden, a retired soldier, murmured, ‘You better do as he says, O’Reilly. And damn ye, I’d like to choke you with my own hands if you do.’

  Devoy was arrested in Pillsworth’s public house in James’s Street on 22 February 1866. In severe anguish, some soldiers now yielded information. The risk of mass execution for treason or, in other cases, desertion, was a prospect likely to panic men with wives and young children. O’Reilly’s fellow prisoners in grey Arbor Hill included O’Reilly’s friends Colour Sergeant Charles McCarthy and Privates Patrick Keating and James Wilson of the 5th Dragoon Guards, Private Michael Harrington of the 61st Foot, and Sergeant Thomas Darragh of the 2nd Queen’s: veteran soldiers with distinguished martial careers. Thomas Darragh was a veteran near to middle age, a Fenian, a Protestant, and also a member of the Delgany Orange Lodge. In the 2nd Queen’s he had spent from 1844 to 1859 in various forts in South Africa, and had then gone with his regiment to Hong Kong before being shipped back to Dublin. Avuncular Michael Harrington had fought in nearly every action of the Punjab campaign of 1848, winning a medal and two clasps for bravery. When the Indian mutiny broke out in 1857 the 61st was stationed at Cawnpore, focus of the mutiny by Indian soldiers. Harrington distinguished himself in the desperate fighting that followed, and once the rebellious Indian sepoys were crushed, he was decorated again. The prisoner James Wilson had served for seven years in the Bombay Artillery and travelled at various times in America, India and Syria. He had re-enlisted in the 5th Dragoon Guards, and was sworn into the IRB in 1864.

  The leader of them all, James Stephens, remained in hiding until March 1866, when with the help of Fenian port officials he escaped with his wife to France. Miss Ellen O’Leary, the already sentenced John O’Leary’s sister, was in Paris to greet him, and she later told Denieffe that although she herself sent money to assist the prisoners, ‘No financial assistance came from Stephens … and according to Eddie O’Leary, John O’Leary’s younger brother who was in Paris at the time, it required two cabs to take their baggage to the hotel.’

  Rainy spring came to Arbor Hill’s dismal yards, yet still, each day, the military Fenians who had kept faith expected to hear the onset of rebellion beyond the walls. On 27 June 1866, however, the day before his twenty-second birthday, with nothing having developed, O’Reilly’s trial began in the mess room of the 85th Regiment at the Royal Barracks. The charge against him was that he had come to a knowledge of the intended mutiny of Her Majesty’s forces in Ireland and had failed to give information on the ‘said intended mutiny’ to his commanding officer. The president of the 15-officer court martial was the colonel of the 5th Dragoon Guards, and the prosecutor Captain Whelan of the 8th Regiment. O’Reilly was advised by counsel, Mr O’Loghlen, to plead not guilty. The first witness against him, Lance Corporal Fitzgerald of his own 10th Hussars, reported on a Fenian conversation between Devoy, O’Reilly and himself in Pillsworth’s public house. The second witness was a less willing one, Private McDonald of the 10th Hussars. McDonald bravely denied there had been any Fenian conversations at Pillsworth’s. He was so careful not to remember anything that the president of the court, Colonel Sawyer, was moved to remark, ‘Public houses must be mortal slow places according to your account.’

  The next witness, Private Denny, gave more conventional evidence, including that at Hoey’s in Bridgeport Street, O’Reilly had tried to swear him into the Fenians. O’Reilly believed Sergeant Dellworth had got to Denny and turned him with threats of violence. It was more than possible, after the Irish evasions and gallantries of earlier soldier witnesses, that counsel for O’Reilly could pass off all Denny’s evidence as circumstantial. But Private Patrick Foley of the 5th Dragoon Guards, the man Devoy would mention as the only thorough-going betrayer, now appeared. Foley said that at Barkley’s public house, O’Reilly’s conversation had been directly on electing a president when Ireland became a free republic. At two other pubs, he had heard explicit Fenian utterances from Trooper O’Reilly. ‘I reported to my colonel in February the subject of the conversation,’ said Foley. On cross-examination, Foley admitted, ‘I took the Fenian oath. I did not call God to witness.’

  The president of the court addressed his panel of officers and the court was then cleared, and the result not known until officially promulgated at the Horse Guards in London. On 9 July 1866, formal sentence of death was passed on some of the military prisoners—McCarthy, Keating, Darragh, Chambers—but not yet O’Reilly. Some days passed again before O’Reilly was taken before the reconvened court and his death sentence was read to him. This was a serious business, to confront execution at the age of twenty-two, with summer well advanced and no sign of deliverance. He faced it with an exceptional maturity. It was soulless routine which sapped his spirit, rather than such arresting and absolute possibilities as execution.

  The same day, O’Reilly was told the sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. In all, sixteen military Fenians had been condemned to death and had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. A number of others received lighter sentences. Seven of the men originally sentenced to death, however, had deserted their posts, walking away in uniform and bearing their arms. These were to have the letter ‘D’ dug with an awl into the flesh above their hearts, and the wound treated with indelible ink so that it would always blackly declare their desertion.

  A penal eternity lay ahead of O’Reilly, a young man bursting with imagery, political passion, restless energy, and the usual hormones. It was possible to be an imprisoned poet, but, given no paper, he was reduced to scratching lines of verse on the wall with a piece of slate. At least one compelling military rite interrupted the tedium. On the afternoon of Monday 3 September, in the parade square of the Royal Barracks, Dublin, in the presence of the 5th Dragoon Guards, the 92nd Highlanders, and three other infantry units—a complement of at least 3,500 men—O’Reilly and other Fenian soldiers were paraded bareheaded. The ‘Rogue’s March’ was played as the Fenians made their transit of infamy across the square. In the middle of the drill ground, each was halted to listen to the reading of his sentence, to be stripped of his military uniform, reduced to his underwear, and ordered to pick up convict clothing which lay on the ground
. The drums played a bare, dull, condemnatory tattoo as the prisoners were escorted off the square under guard to be driven to Mountjoy prison on the north side of town by the Royal Canal. Many years later, one of the informers, probably Foley, approached in Boston a man he had betrayed, the prosperous and rescued O’Reilly, and confessed that his life had become intolerable; he pleaded for money, and was given an amount on condition that he remove himself from Boston. But such powerful gestures were beyond imagining at the moment.

  The stay at Mountjoy was brief. The administration did not want these men in Ireland. Chained to a friend, Corporal Chambers, O’Reilly was, like civilian Fenians, shipped across the Irish Sea by steamer. Put on a train with barred and painted windows, he was taken to Euston station in London, and marched along Euston Road, where the locals were somewhat used to seeing chained convicts proceeding eastwards to Pentonville prison. Later O’Reilly and other Fenian soldiers were transferred to Millbank prison, on the site where the Tate Gallery now stands. Here they found some of the civilian Fenians, and much emotional energy was spent trying to make contact under a regime of silence and isolation. O’Reilly was able to extract a nail from his three-plank bed, and used it to write poetry. One morning an unknown benefactor threw a copy of the Imitation of Christ, the mystical work by Thomas à Kempis, through the iron bars of the door. It was the sort of unpietistic, graphic, absolutist work which appealed to O’Reilly.

  Then, in early winter 1866, he was taken from his cell, chained to other Fenians, marched through the streets and transferred in the usual barred railway carriage to Devon. Here his string of men were herded up a bleak road into the renowned and dreaded high moors prison at Dartmoor, comfortless above its various drainage works. The Fenians found themselves in a special section, in cells made entirely of iron, 7 feet long by 4 wide. Ventilation came from a 2-inch hole at the bottom of the door. Prisoners were generally employed by day in a huge project to drain the moor below the prison by building trenches in the glutinous soil. It was damp, awful work, and over it all lay the Sisyphus-ian reality that the moor was undrainable. In some of their drain-digging the prisoners encountered remains identified by warders as American prisoners captured during the war of 1812, and of French Napoleonic prisoners-of-war. According to his biographer, O’Reilly, with Chambers and McCarthy, erected a small plaque to the memory of the French and Americans who died in Dartmoor prison from 1811 to 1816.

  When the drainage work flooded, prisoners worked in the bone shed, a large ill-ventilated hall in which sat an open space full of animal material. Men were required to pound the bones and adhering tissue into dust or jelly. Bean porridge was the Dartmoor staple, O’Reilly later recorded, and boiled salted beef, with rye coffee the bitter morning drink. Like other convicts O’Reilly devoured mudcake-weed roots in the drainage ditches. Occasionally, too, he ate tallow.

  24

  RE-MAKING MONTANA; VIOLATING CANADA

  The governor is next.

  Note attached to the corpse of James Daniels,

  Helena, Montana, 1866

  While in Ireland a new and more numerous generation of political prisoners were facing trial, the acting governor of Montana, now close to middle age, was absorbed by Montanan and American questions.

  When Thomas Francis Meagher had first come to Virginia City, the resident federal judges and other lawyers and worthies who had, as a clique, run Montana until now, paid him an early visit. And they persuaded him that under the Organic Act, which had created Montana Territory, he lacked the power to call a meeting of the territory’s House of Representatives, because Montana’s last legislature had dissolved itself under Edgerton without providing for further elections. He did not want to act ultra vires—a sure way of being censured or summoned back to Washington. But he felt it a pity, for he was aware that Montana, which had been a Republican demesne, was through increases in population turning Democrat. In September 1865, just as he was arriving, a federal election had taken place to send a member for Montana Territory to Washington, and a Democrat Union veteran named Colonel McLean had defeated the machine of the young Republican war veteran, Wilbur Fiske Sanders.

  Though Libby would not be arriving until the spring, the general enjoyed a sociable Christmas season in freezing Virginia City and then in Helena, Montana’s largest town, visited by way of a succession of passes, including 9,000-feet-high Elkhorn Pass. There citizens including Andrew O’Connell, the territory’s Fenian Centre, and others made continual demands for a legislature to pass laws on commercial matters, to settle legislative questions of land and mining rights, to enable the appointment of territorial officials in townships that had been instantaneously created by random gold discoveries. A legislature was also needed to do away with the undue rewards voted by Edgerton’s earlier legislature to the federal judges, to take the regulation of law and order away from the vigilantes of the Vigilance Committee, who imposed summary punishment both on miscreants and opponents, and if necessary to vote to raise militias for the protection of settlers. In early 1866, Meagher explained to a Helena crowd that when he had first come to the territory he had fallen into the hands of a bad adviser who had told him he lacked power to convene a territorial parliament. Now he advised President Johnson that he intended not only calling the legislature together in the spring of 1866, but also calling a convention, from which he was confident a popular application to be admitted to the Union as a state would emerge. To Secretary of State Seward he wrote: ‘On more maturely considering the powers vested in me by the Organic Act and the laws of the territory, I came to the conclusion that a Legislature did legally and constitutionally exist here, and that it was legally and constitutionally within the scope of my prerogatives to summon it into action.’

  Meagher was roundly accused by the Montana old guard, amongst whom Federal Judge Munson and young Wilbur Fiske Sanders were notable, of changing his stripes and becoming a ‘Missourian kind of Democrat.’ The reference to ‘Missourian’ Democrats arose from the fact that a considerable phalanx of General Sterling Price’s Confederate army had retreated into Montana after their failed invasion of the state of Missouri. They were heavily Democrat, frequently willing to crow that Price’s had been the only Confederate army not to surrender. Wilbur Fiske Sanders’s implication was that Meagher quickly saw the political base these secession-tainted Democrats would provide for him, and that this was what caused him to call the legislature. The charge would be repeated, fairly uncritically, even by historians. It seemed crucial to some members of the Montana establishment, then and later, that from early 1866 Meagher be written off as the crassest of political opportunists, at dalliance with Secessionists, a reckless violator of the Organic Act, a tyrannical opponent of the public will, and a man in all of whose decisions strong liquor took too substantial a part. Meagher’s call for a territorial convention was attributed by Wilbur Fiske Sanders entirely to his desire to become a future Senator from Montana. Of course, to be Senator from Montana, albeit a Republican one, was precisely the ambition which possessed Sanders himself. In fact, in Meagher’s calling of a territorial convention, a case could be made for his statesmanship. He saw that statehood would obviously serve as a device to deliver Montana from the narrow power of the Vigilance Committee. Public and personal considerations coincided in Meagher’s motivations.

  By early 1866 too he must have been well acquainted with, and personally appalled by, the shameful history of Governor Edgerton. Edgerton had, as citizens complained to Meagher, made it possible for the Republicans to have a majority in the original territorial legislature by devising an oath which depicted Democrats as betrayers of the Union. At the very first Montana federal election in September 1864, after its separation from Idaho, Sidney Edgerton had denounced the Democrats in the name of his nephew, Republican candidate for Congress, Sanders. He called a Democrat meeting a ‘disloyal demonstration,’ even though many of the men he attacked had served in the Union army. Some elected representatives had not been willing to take it
. When Democrat Colonel McLean won, Edgerton withheld his certificate of election, arguing that there were 2,500 votes still to come in from soldiers at Fort Union, an outpost near the present town of Three Forks. Sanders had already packed his bags for Washington when two honourable Republican elders pressured Edgerton to issue the election certificate to McLean.

  Because Hell’s Gate Canyon was still frozen and the delegates to the territorial convention from Missoula Canyon would not be able to reach the capital, Meagher’s convention would not meet until 26 March 1866. But for whatever reason, the climate did not delay the earlier election and gathering of Montana’s House of Representatives. This new, heavily Democrat legislature met in some rented upstairs rooms in Virginia City on 5 March, and the Montana Democrat described the scene: ‘In front of the House of Representatives Chambers, a band of music commenced playing National Airs and thirteen rounds were fired, and then the Stars and Stripes were raised on the legislative halls.’

  Not all citizens were delighted. The acting governor knew of the frenzy of letter-writing to Washington from angered parties in Montana. Did Meagher ever ironically compare his situation to that of Governor Denison of Van Diemen’s Land—a remotely placed administrator, trying to make representations to the central authority before others fatally undermined him? The degree of vituperation against Meagher is seen from the letter of a Republican, William Chumasero, to Senator Lyman Trumbull. When Meagher came to Montana, said Chumasero, ‘on his first arrival in Virginia City he became intoxicated and remained so for a number of days in his room polluting his bed and person in the most indecent and disgusting manner … In Virginia, it is publicly stated in the streets that the Executive Office was the place of rendezvous for the vilest prostitutes.’ Chumasero also claimed that the legislature had been convened in rooms above whiskey shops rented at an inflated price from the governor’s supporters. Paper was supplied to the legislature ‘at $50 per ream from a Democrat stationer.’ Whatever can be said of Meagher’s drinking or his taste in Virginia City prostitutes, a good part of this graphic list of crimes was hearsay. For none of the territorial newspapers bitterly opposed to Meagher gave any hints of such seraglio extravagance, and none accused him of having overpaid to rent the assembly rooms, as they would have been pleased to do had Chumasero’s stories been true.