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

by Thomas Keneally

  Perth, Western Australia, 20th May, 1871

  My Dear Friend, In order that you may recollect who it is that addresses you, you will remember the night of 17 January, 1866, some of the Fifth Dragoon Guards being in the old house in Clare Lane with John Devoy and Captain McCafferty. I am one of that unfortunate band and am now under sentence for life’s penal servitude in one of the darkest corners of the earth, and as far as we can learn from any small news that chances to reach us, we appear to be forgotten, with no prospect before us but to be left in hopeless slavery to the tender mercies of the Norman wolf.

  It was a letter which in its desperation made all appropriate claims and exploited all appropriate imagery. It was of course seen and indeed published by O’Reilly and by Devoy. At consecutive conventions of the growing United Brotherhood or Clan na Gael, in 1872 and 1873, Devoy spoke of the Australian prisoners and their claims upon the concern of Irish nationalists everywhere. Thomas Fennell, in his late twenties, former Western Australian prisoner settled in New York, had already suggested to Devoy the idea of buying a ship to export grain or some other commodity to Western Australia, thus using it as a self-funding vehicle of escape. In both 1872 and 1873 the Clan executive had doubted their capacity to raise the funds which would be necessary for that sort of enterprise. In modern day terms the acquisition and setting up of a sailing vessel and cargo were roughly equivalent to the modern purchase and fitting out of a 747 jet. But the remaining Fenian prisoners were unquiet claimants upon the attention of their fellow Irish.

  News of the death in Dublin, under the care of O’Reilly’s two sisters, of his father William at sixty-three years of age shook him that year. His father had not had an ample pension, and he was without too many friends—it seemed he had made enemies in the National School system. But O’Reilly had been able from 1870 to remit cash to ease his father’s end, and now had the means and the freedom to commemorate him publicly and honour his name in front of some of Boston’s illuminati.

  Kindly Jessie Woodman being now beyond O’Reilly’s reach, he had begun calling on a Miss Mary Murphy of Charlestown, the child of Irish immigrants, who lived with her widowed mother Jane Murphy, née Smiley. Her Fermanagh immigrant father John had died in her childhood at less than forty years of age, but had left them with means to live with modest gentility. O’Reilly had been led to her through reading her story in a publication called the Young Crusader, and told the editor he would like to meet her. On 15 August 1872, when Mary was twenty-two years old, and O’Reilly twenty-eight, they were married in St Mary’s, Charlestown. Mary Murphy seemed his wholesome Columbia, the cure to intolerable and even guilty memory. But she had sought an early chance to tell him that she did not want to be considered a poet or novelist; that unlike him she had no literary addiction.

  The young couple moved to an elegant town house in Winthrop Street, Charlestown, and began a married life which would produce four daughters—Mollie, Eliza, Agnes and Blanid—in eight years. The daughters grew up devoted to their father—he did not bring from his imprisonment the hair-trigger irritability which had marred O’Brien’s family life. Mary O’Reilly was loyal but, always allowing for four difficult births, it is true that she and her husband were never at one in mind and spirit. She did not become a grand companion in adventure, as Jenny had been to Mitchel, or Libby Townsend to Meagher. Naturally, there was a side of O’Reilly which frightened her. An indefinable condition of ill health would overtake handsome Mary in the 1880s.

  Even in the first years of marriage, O’Reilly relished a poetic repute through contributing to the Pilot and various metropolitan papers a variety of narrative verse, including the enormously popular series called Uncle Ned’s Tales, at least one of which he had first performed on Hougoumont. But catastrophes which did not at first seem to bode well for O’Reilly struck the Pilot. The editorial offices in Franklin Street were burned to the ground in the Great Fire of Boston on the Saturday evening of 9 November 1872. At last new quarters were taken on Corn Hill, which, within days, themselves burned to the ground. The Pilot then moved to Washington Street, where nine months later another fire partially damaged the premises. ‘When the fire comes to Boston nowadays,’ wrote O’Reilly, ‘it comes looking round all the corners for its old friend the Pilot. It is evident that the fire has a rare appreciation of a good newspaper.’ In these black events lay the seeds of O’Reilly’s ultimate proprietorship of the paper. Patrick Donahoe, proprietor of the Pilot, lost $300,000 on his fire insurance. Boyle O’Reilly forewent wages and made financial contributions to try to save Donahoe. So soon after escaping from Australia, waking at night to the first panic of thinking himself still in Bunbury’s leaky huts, it was hard for him to see himself as a potential owner.

  O’Reilly had gathered a Boston salon who met in his rooms in Staniford Street. Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce was Irish, a physician and a poet, but Boston literary figures Charles E. Hurd and Edwin Percy Whipple were Old Yankees. At Young’s restaurant, where members of the group would sometimes go for dinner, they encountered Emerson, an occasionally visiting Walt Whitman, or Joaquin Miller. Through literary evenings such as those hosted by Whipple, literary editor of the Globe, O’Reilly, who weekly commented on the struggle for the Irish vote and remained solidly Democrat, made beloved Republican friends. It may in fact have been at Whipple’s that he first met Wendell and Anne Phillips, founding veterans of the abolition campaign of the 1830s, now in their sixties, and still agitating for a range of liberal Republican objectives, from labour reform to women’s rights to prohibition.

  Phillips gave O’Reilly entrée into the community of heroes of the abolition struggle. Pioneer abolitionists included William Lloyd Garrison, now in his mid-sixties, who had once visited O’Connell to discuss abhorrence of slavery. Garrison was considered the greatest of them all. A freed slave, veteran of the Underground Railroad, wrote to Garrison from Saratoga on 22 June 1874, ‘The good you have done for our Race has been penned by the recording Angel … a black man can now walk the streets of Saratoga without fear of being recognised by some slave holder from when he had made his escape.’

  The aging Lydia Maria Child was also a noble and impressive soul—and literary as well. Her most famous and influential book, however, was An Appeal in Favour of the Class of Americans called Africans. Her memories included collaring a man who was shaking his fist in Mr Phillips’s face at an anti-abolition demonstration outside the Music Hall—‘and her surprise when he tumbled down.’ This formidable New Englander had volunteered to nurse John Brown when he lay wounded in Virginia. She, Garrison and Phillips thus belonged to that class of abolitionists most Irish considered extreme. They combined their abolitionism with temperance and prohibition, strictures culturally repugnant to the Irish.

  O’Reilly’s attitudes to black America, as they would emerge in the Pilot and elsewhere, were influenced by these splendid figures. He was at ease with Wendell Phillips’s idea that the destiny of the coloured American, not the liberation of Ireland, was the chief agenda item for the United States. ‘The day is fast coming,’ O’Reilly wrote of the former slave, ‘when this man’s claim cannot be answered by a jest or a sneer … this man’s children and grandchildren are coming, and they are receiving the same education in the same schools as the white man’s children. In all things material before God and man, they will feel that they are the white man’s equal. They are growing above the prejudice, even before the prejudice dies.’ On this he was at odds with many of his poorer constituents.

  Yet when Phillips stood for the office of governor in Massachusetts, in a political alliance with another Republican, the former Union general, Benjamin F. Butler—‘Beast’ Butler, as the citizens of New Orleans, which he had governed during the Civil War, called him—O’Reilly would not permit himself to vote Republican, even though his filial affection for Wendell Phillips lasted a lifetime. Indeed O’Reilly obviously approved of the fact that the Democrat machine in Boston had become better organised in the mid-1870s, an o
bjective which the Irish, with their glee for faction, were well suited to bring about. One potent Irish party boss was Patrick McGuire, and another was O’Reilly’s patron and friend Patrick A. Collins. So accomplished were they at ‘getting out’ and keeping the Irish vote in line, that in the end, in 1878, Beast Butler had to move to the Democratic party to convince the Irish to support him.

  O’Reilly made much use of his splendid, panelled study in Winthrop Street. His Songs from Southern Seas was published in book form in 1873. The volume was dedicated to ‘My Dear Wife’ and her ‘Rare and Loving Judgment,’ but also honoured Captain Gifford of Gazelle, who had that year died, too young, of fever on board his ship off the Seychelles. O’Reilly’s literary reputation was, he would always consider, now made by the kindly comments of Edwin Percy Whipple, literary editor of the Boston Daily Globe from 1872, a short, glittering-eyed Boston guru in his early fifties when O’Reilly first met him. Whipple’s two chief works, Character and Characteristic Men and Literature in the Age of Elizabeth, had given him a large place in the city’s literary scene. His Sunday soirées attracted the literary figures of what was called ‘the Golden Age’ in Boston. As in the 1880s, Boston began to lose its literary pre-eminence, so too would Whipple, but O’Reilly remained always until Whipple’s death in 1886 his grateful friend. O’Reilly declared, ‘You were the first distinguished literary man who recognised anything serious in my poor work; and you cannot know, because you cannot be a foreigner … how delightful and vitalizing it is to be recognised.’ To Whipple, O’Reilly could confess how much at home he felt in Boston, despite the normal bifurcation of the Irish soul in exile. ‘Now my foreign feeling exists only in your tenacious joke. I am more Bostonian than any of you … Truly, if I were not editor of ‘The Pilot’ … you never would think me such a terrific Papist and Paddy.’

  By the time the poems were published to good notices in Ireland, the United States and Australia, a new and eminent Boston literary club had come into being, with O’Reilly as a devoted member. The Papyrus Club developed from a reception given in December 1872 by the newspapermen of Boston to the visiting explorer, discoverer of David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley. Amongst the membership of the Papyrus were O’Reilly’s Irish friends Dr Joyce and Collins, but also Francis H. Underwood, first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Alexander Young and George M. Towle, historians, the artist William M. Hunt, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, descendant of Mayflower people and Civil War veteran. Aldrich’s most popular work, a Yankee Tom Sawyer-ish book, The Story of a Bad Boy, was selling superbly well in the year the escapee O’Reilly came to Boston. Aldrich would go on to be a renowned and powerful editor of the Atlantic Monthly throughout the 1880s. Altogether, this group was not characteristic of the company most escaped or pardoned Fenians kept, was planets removed from Warder Woodman’s Koagulup Camp, and was an index of how quickly O’Reilly had embraced progressive Yankeedom, and with what enthusiasm it had embraced him.

  The conversational charm and gifts of soul which had caused men to cooperate at their peril in his deliverance from Western Australia kept him a popular figure with most of Irish Boston and with Boston at large. As early as the 1872 International Musical Festival, O’Reilly gave the occasional address after 23,000 voices sang the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, 100 Boston firemen hammering out the rhythm on a hundred anvils. Employing oratory akin to that of Citizen Kane, he spoke about the phenomenon of the newspaper as ‘a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a Day. It is a photograph, of twenty four hours’ length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year’s newspapers—which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written—and we give them to the girl to light the fire.’

  In letters to his aunt in Preston, he showed something of his private life. His late mother’s picture hung in his home in Winthrop Street, ‘and I have it grandly framed and hung in our parlour. My little Mollie loves to kiss it, and I can only allow her to kiss the frame for fear of injuring the picture.’ Mrs Mary O’Reilly was ‘getting strong again, from the birth of our second baby, our Eliza Boyle O’Reilly.’

  It was not certain though that Mrs Mary O’Reilly would be fully strong again. She suffered acutely in childbirth, and would in modern times have stopped bearing any further children. To do him credit, O’Reilly—unlike less sensitive men—never spoke a negative word about her, but her ill health, post-natal and somewhat depressive, was an unspoken shadow over the household.

  Having lost tens of thousands of dollars through the cruel succession of fires, Patrick Donahoe had at last in 1876 to sell the Pilot. Buyers were scarce and the only credible consortium to make an offer was one consisting of the Most Reverend Archbishop John Williams of Boston and John Boyle O’Reilly.

  It is worth wondering whether O’Reilly felt trapped by the fact the archbishop had found three quarters of the $100,000 purchase price. The archbishop was an American, and a gentle extrovert not given to pietistic scruple. He accepted that the bulk of his flock were Irish but did not carry from childhood or youth any set ideas on Irish politics. And though O’Reilly remained a moderate in terms of what should be done in Ireland—Home Rule, not revolution—the presence of the archbishop did not lead him to mute what some saw as an idiosyncratic blend of opinion. Now, though in debt, O’Reilly was a man of genuine substance, as long as he made the paper work. He was to be its editor, and to receive an excellent salary of $5,200 a year. As editor, he would have the support of good writers, including the recently liberated Denis Cashman, his wise friend aboard Hougoumont, and ultimately of James Roche, who in the late 1850s had run the Irish News for Meagher.

  There were more than the usual creditors to be paid out. A number of the Irish poor of Boston had invested small sums of money with Donahoe, who had acted as something like a banker. The total amount was $73,000, and in strict legal terms these unsecured creditors were not entitled to be repaid. But neglect of the poorer depositors would have been morally offensive to the new editor and the Archdiocese of Boston, and would as well have brought social odium. Roche claimed that within ten years all these voluntarily assumed obligations had been paid out of a newspaper which, with the twin benefits of good management and continuing immigration, grew continually in circulation.

  At the age of thirty-two, an editor and a significant Bostonian, the Atlantic Monthly having published his verse, O’Reilly was also becoming perhaps the leading occasional poet of Massachusetts, and a noted one in America as a whole. One of his verses marked the Boston celebration of the centenary of O’Connell’s birth in 1875.

  Races and sects were to him a profanity:

  Hindoo, and Negro and Celts were as one …

  He wrote and performed a poem at the opening of the Chicago armoury of an Illinois State Guard regiment, on Meagher’s doomed brigade at Fredericksburg.

  Twelve hundred the column, their rent flag before them,

  With Meagher at their head, they have dashed at the hill!

  Their foemen are proud of the country that bore them;

  But, Irish in love, they are enemies still …

  Thousands wept. But the prisoners of Western Australia and England remained on his soul.

  A few months after his failure to get endorsement for a rescue effort for the Western Australian Fenians at the 1873 Clan na Gael convention, John Devoy received a letter from the prisoner James Wilson. Wilson, like Hogan before him, listed complaints about Noonan, including Noonan’s lack of care for the soldier Fenian William Foley, who had been released with a weak heart and lacked money. But then the writer moved on to crucial business: ‘There are some good ports where whalers are in the habit of calling and several other towns in the interior of the country … There is a guard of Pensioners at Fremantle and Perth. They are about 300 strong all told … So you see that it would not be much risk for any vessel, whaler or otherwis
e, to run in on some pretence or other.’

  The soldier Fenian Keating, who had clasped O’Reilly’s hand on the convict deck of Hougoumont, died the following January in hospital in Western Australia, Wilson at his side, and was buried in a grave next to Luke and Lawrence Fullam. Now Wilson wrote a second letter, dated 15 June 1874, which became known in Clan circles as the Voice from the Tomb. It detailed these Fenian deaths in a remote place. ‘This is as true Holy Writ,’ wrote the 35-year-old Wilson, ‘most of us are beginning to show symptoms of disease, in fact we are all ailing to a greater or less extent.’ Wilson was sincere in expecting death, even if as yet his chief anguish may have been mental. He was aware of how failed escape and solitary confinement had prematurely aged the 32-year-old Thomas Hassett, and of how unsettled that former great exponent of the sabre, Martin Hogan, had been to read smuggled press of the reception of the Cuba Five and other groups. ‘And what a death,’ Wilson wrote, ‘is staring us in the face, the death of a felon in a British dungeon, and a grave amongst Britain’s ruffians …’ The paragraph which had the greatest impact on Devoy and members of the Clan ran, ‘Now, dear friend, remember that this is a voice from the tomb … Think that we have been nearly 9 years in this living tomb since our first arrest, and that it is impossible for mind and body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them.’