While they were gradually dismantled during the eighteenth century, the last of the Penal Laws endured until 1829. By that point, Anglo-Irish landlords owned four-fifths of the island, which was ruled directly from London after the abolition of the Irish Parliament by the 1801 Act of Union.
Stubbornness ran deep in Ireland’s old clans, however. Try as the English might to exterminate the proud, ancient Celtic culture, the defiant Irish refused to conform. No matter how many laws were passed, there was one thing no government could take from the Irish—their will to resist.
In parishes across Ireland, hatred of the English was in the mother’s milk. Huddled around fireplaces, boys like Stephens listened to tales of great Irish rebels like Hugh O’Neill, Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet who dared to raise arms against the Crown. The heroes in the stories might not have liberated Ireland, but they achieved immortality by their willingness to resist and fight in the face of overwhelming odds.
* * *
For millions of poor Irishmen, the potato was the ultimate superfood. Laden with vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates, the nourishing tubers flourished in Ireland’s cool, moist soil. The Irish ate potatoes for every meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The average adult workingman in Ireland consumed a staggering fourteen pounds of potatoes, equivalent to three thousand calories, per day. The average adult Irishwoman a little over eleven pounds.
Because they required less space to grow than other crops, potatoes became ever more vital to survival as British policies continued to constrict farm sizes at the same time that the island’s population nearly doubled to over eight million people between 1800 and 1845.
In the first days of September 1845, farmers reported that the early potato harvest had never been better. Then, without warning, from County Donegal in the north to County Cork in the south, one-third of the island’s wonder crop suddenly failed. Black spots scorched potato plant leaves. Stalks withered. Bewildered farmers excavated potatoes pockmarked with lesions. Even those tubers that appeared healthy on the outside contained a putrid mush inside.
When the horror reappeared in 1846, the devastation was near total, with more than three-quarters of the crop lost. The potato blight exposed Ireland’s dangerous dependence on a single crop and sparked one of the worst famines in Western European history.
The harsh winter months of early 1847 presaged a year so ghastly that it would go down in history as “Black ’47.” Frantic farmers sprinkled holy water on their fields. Rats feasted on the corpses of the famished who died on the sides of roads as they wandered in search of food. Emaciated figures, tired of a diet of grass and seaweed, dug their frostbitten fingers into the rocky ledges above the crashing Atlantic as they scaled cliff sides to harvest seagull eggs.
The pestilence had arrived in Europe aboard vessels that departed American ports in 1843 carrying the microorganism Phytophthora infestans. After infecting the lowlands of the European continent, the deadly potato spores crossed the English Channel to the British Isles. Ireland’s damp conditions proved a superb breeding ground, and the island’s dependence on the potato greatly magnified its impact.
Through the duration of the Great Hunger, between 1845 and 1852, approximately two million people fled Ireland. They sailed to England, North America, and beyond. Another one million people perished from starvation and diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Jail populations in Ireland exploded as the starving broke the law just so they could dine on the guaranteed meals given to inmates. All of Ireland, however, had become a vile prison, and the truly desperate decided to escape.
* * *
In the months following the first appearance of the potato blight, the British prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reacted quickly with relief measures that prevented mass starvation. Peel’s government established relief commissions, purchased significant amounts of American corn for controlled sale, and persuaded Parliament to repeal tariffs on imported grains. His actions, however, brought about the downfall of his government in June 1846, because merchants complained about government meddling in the marketplace.
Reluctant to interfere with the invisible hand guiding the free market, the ensuing government under Lord John Russell took a much different path toward Irish relief. It kept stores of corn shuttered. Vowing that “Irish property must support Irish poverty,” the government transferred full responsibility for funding workhouses and relief programs to Ireland’s property owners and tenants. The resulting spike in taxes further exacerbated the problem, because debt-ridden landlords forced out unproductive farmers, causing the eviction rate to soar nearly 1,000 percent between 1847 and 1851. Other landlords found it cheaper to ship tenants abroad than pay for their relief, which forced many of Ireland’s poor into exile.
The British government did feed the starving—as long as they worked for their sustenance. Through a new public works program, the hungry toiled for ten or more hours a day, often on useless tasks. The Irish hammered big rocks into smaller ones. They built roads connecting two points in the middle of nowhere. Projects were grueling and monotonous—intentionally so. Charles E. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of relief measures, didn’t want Irish stomachs to become too full, lest they become dependent on government handouts. “Relief ought to be on the lowest scale necessary for subsistence,” he advised.
Like others in Britain, Trevelyan saw the Great Hunger as a long-sought divine opportunity to depopulate Ireland and transform it from a backward agrarian economy into a modern, dynamic one, like Britain itself. “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” Trevelyan wrote. “That calamity must not be too much mitigated.” Who was he, a mere civil servant, to combat the will of God? The solution to the “Irish problem” had finally been delivered.
Many Irish Catholics believed the British were more concerned about the spread of moral deprivation and idleness than of hunger and disease. For seven centuries, the British had taken away Ireland’s land, its rights, and its independence. Now, as a final indignity, they took away Ireland’s food under armed guards at a time when it needed it most. Although far more food was imported into Ireland than was exported during the Great Hunger, it still galled the Irish that wheat, oats, barley, and other grains left its ports to England and other destinations.
Conditions worsened in 1848, and anger and frustration sprouted from Ireland’s barren fields. A microorganism might have caused the potato blight, but many Irish Catholics, tired of being second-class citizens in their own homeland, placed the blame for the disaster elsewhere.
* * *
As the Great Hunger continued to gnaw away at Ireland, support swelled for a movement of youthful, middle-class intellectuals that came to be known as Young Ireland. They embraced Celtic literature, history, and mythology and advocated for a revival of the Irish language. Their weekly newspaper, The Nation, published poems and ballads along with book reviews and articles. Young Ireland was not a sectarian movement but a union of both Protestants and Catholics. The Protestant intellectual Thomas Davis, the first editor of The Nation, was its most powerful voice before his untimely death of scarlet fever at the age of thirty in 1845.
While Young Ireland didn’t preach physical force, it also didn’t disavow its use. The collection of poets, journalists, and barristers believed in the power of words but knew that sometimes action was needed as well. That led to a break with the more moderate Repeal Association headed by Daniel O’Connell, the stalwart nationalist who preached nonviolent constitutional resistance. As nationalists watched Ireland’s people perish or flee in the wake of the British government’s feeble response to the Great Hunger, they grew more radicalized and increasingly viewed O’Connell’s preference to compromise with the British as capitulation.
While O’Connell—known as “the Liberator” for his successful campaign to repeal the last of the Penal Laws and gain the right of Catholics to sit in the B
ritish Parliament—advocated the eradication of the 1801 Act of Union and restoration of the Irish Parliament, Young Irelanders sought nothing less than a fully independent republic.
Few Young Irelanders were more militant toward the British than John Mitchel, the son of a Presbyterian minister. When Mitchel’s rhetoric grew too hot for The Nation, he started his own broadsheet, The United Irishman. It sizzled with accusations against the Crown, which he held directly responsible for the Great Hunger.
In his columns, Mitchel advocated a “holy war to sweep this island clear of the English name and nation.” He published directions for street warfare. He referred to Britain’s lord lieutenant as “Her Majesty’s Executioner-General and General Butcher of Ireland” and argued that food grown in Ireland should stay in Ireland.
After seeing famished children as he traveled between Dublin and Galway, he wrote, “I saw Trevelyan’s claw in the vitals of those children; his red tape would draw them to death; in his government laboratory he had prepared for them the typhus poison.”
The British were feeding three million people per day at the height of the Great Hunger, and it permitted hundreds of thousands of refugees to resettle inside Great Britain. Still, Mitchel’s accusations of genocide took root. The seven-hundred-year history of English rule had fueled Irish nationalism—at home and abroad with the diaspora—and would for decades to come.
In the first months of 1848, another contagion swept across Europe that eventually settled in Ireland. That February, the French overthrew King Louis Philippe in a relatively bloodless affair that led to the establishment of the Second Republic. The political earthquake sent shock waves across the Continent as liberals revolted against monarchies and absolutist governments in Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Prague, and Budapest.
The “springtime of the peoples” shook the British government and inspired members of Young Ireland to launch their own revolution. Their bitterness toward the British, always at a low simmer, finally bubbled over.
By May 1848, the British government had heard enough from Mitchel. It introduced a new crime—treason felony—just to lock him up. On July 22, the British Parliament suspended habeas corpus, allowing authorities to imprison rebels indefinitely. They raided The Nation and issued warrants for the arrest of Young Ireland’s leaders.
The rebels were determined to resist. Irish republicans weren’t going to starve like dogs. If they were going to die, it would be on the battlefield.
* * *
The sound of iron striking iron rang across the Irish countryside during the summer of 1848 as blacksmiths hammered out pikes on their anvils. By the light of the summertime moon, Stephens and his fellow rebels gathered on Moll Mackey’s Hill outside the medieval town of Kilkenny to perform military drills and practice formations. Few of the Irishmen owned rifles or muskets, so they armed themselves with improvised spears, pitchforks, and scythes they had grabbed from their barns.
On the evening of July 25, Stephens attended a Young Ireland meeting at Kilkenny’s town hall and became swept up by patriotic fervor. He heard that the British had suspended the right to bear arms in cities such as Dublin, Cork, and Kilkenny. Persuaded to lend his voice to the cause, Stephens delivered his maiden speech as a rebel. “Treasure your arms as you would the apples of your eyes, and bury them safely in the hope of a happy resurrection!”
After the meeting, Stephens heard a rumor that a detective had arrived in town with a warrant for the arrest of William Smith O’Brien, a Young Ireland founder who had fled to Kilkenny and its environs. The time for action had arrived. Stephens returned home, grabbed his dagger, and rushed out into the Irish night.
Accompanied by other rebels, Stephens found O’Brien the next morning in Cashel at the house of the Young Irelander Michael Doheny. A longtime member of the British House of Commons, the forty-four-year-old O’Brien had an atypical pedigree for an Irish revolutionary. Although descended from the medieval Irish high king Brian Boru, who defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, the Cambridge-educated, Protestant landlord looked, talked, and worshipped more like an Englishman than an Irishman. The patrician was a politician, not a soldier. Yet while other Young Irelanders urged him to delay any uprising until after the harvest, O’Brien wanted to wait no longer. He asked for volunteers, and Stephens stepped forward.
* * *
Even in battle, O’Brien adhered to a set of manners. He first targeted a police barracks in the County Tipperary village of Mullinahone. Stephens, who had been named an aide-de-camp, stormed through the door with O’Brien and another rebel, taking the six constables inside by surprise. The chief constable begged the rebels to return with a larger force because he and his fellow officers would lose their jobs if they surrendered to only three rebels. His appeal to O’Brien’s sense of decency worked. O’Brien ordered his men to leave and come back in fifteen minutes with more insurgents. Sure enough, as soon as the rebels departed, the policemen darted out a back door, never to return.
Two days later, Stephens took charge of thirty Young Irelanders in Killenaule when news arrived of an approaching cavalry. Clad in a white coat, Stephens cut a conspicuous figure as he ordered the construction of a makeshift barricade of turf carts and timber beams. As the cavalry galloped up to the barrier, Stephens pointed the rebels’ only rifle at the commanding officer of the dragoons. The captain insisted he didn’t have a warrant for O’Brien’s arrest and simply wanted to pass through.
Stephens ordered his men to hold, but they craved a fight. “General, in the name of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, will you give the word?” one of them implored. “Steady,” whispered Stephens, who faced the decision of whether a gunshot would strike a blow for Ireland or lead to more deaths of his fellow citizens. He lowered his gun and allowed the authorities to pass through one at a time.
The villagers hailed Stephens as a hero for getting the troops to back down without firing a shot. “We want the little man in the white coat!” they shouted. “Fellow countrymen,” Stephens replied, “this is not the time for words but for deeds.”
* * *
The next day, Stephens crouched along the road to Ballingarry, where the rebels had erected another blockade. He watched as a forty-five-man unit of the Irish Constabulary, the British-controlled paramilitary police force, approached, then suddenly swerved at a fork in the road. Armed with pikes, pitchforks, and two dozen guns, the rebels ran in pursuit of the police, who took refuge inside a two-story gray stone farmhouse on a small crest.
To barricade the farmhouse’s entryways and windows, the police smashed doors and broke apart wooden furniture. Outside, eighty rebels surrounded the house and hurled rocks behind the protection of a five-foot garden wall. Stephens and Terence Bellew MacManus, a Liverpool shipping agent who packed up his green-and-gold uniform and abandoned his business when he heard of the planned uprising, took cover in the stables in the rear of the house. MacManus dragged hay bales to the back door with plans to set them ablaze, in order to smoke out the enemy, only to find that his ragtag insurgents lacked matches. Instead, MacManus fired his revolver into the hay, until a spark caused the bales to smolder.
O’Brien immediately ordered the fire doused, explaining that the house’s owner, the widow Margaret McCormack, had arrived in hysterics because five of her young children were trapped inside. The Young Ireland leader opted instead to tramp through the widow’s cabbage garden, approach the parlor window, and shake hands with the police through a firing gap in the barricade.
“We are all Irishmen, boys. I am Smith O’Brien, as good a soldier as any of you,” he said before demanding their guns. The police refused the order. As O’Brien backed away, a voice from the mob yelled, “Slash away, boys, and slaughter the whole of them!” The rebels fired rocks, and the police fired their guns. Although at a disadvantage in ammunition, the Young Ireland leader refused to call a retreat. “An O’Brien never turned his back on an enemy!�
�� he declared. Displaying cooler heads, Stephens and MacManus forcibly removed their commander from the line of fire as bullets kicked up dirt all around them.
Young Ireland rebels including James Stephens exchange gunfire with policemen during the 1848 rebellion in what became derided as the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch.
As the rebels scattered, Stephens spotted a mounted policeman on the scene. He forced the officer to dismount, swapped his nondescript hat for O’Brien’s flamboyant green-and-gold one, and told him to gallop away from danger.
Stephens directed the remaining rebels to hide on both sides of the road in order to ambush arriving police reinforcements. In the ensuing gunfire, Stephens watched two rebels drop dead next to him. He felt a searing pain in the fleshy part of his right thigh and another on his left hip. Stephens crumpled to the ground with two gunshot wounds, playing dead until the policemen continued their march.
Having survived what was sardonically called the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch, Stephens recovered at a friend’s house. But with the authorities closing in, he went in search of another Young Irelander, a man who would become a brother in arms for the next twenty years.
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 2
