by Mark Bailey
These anti-immigrant sentiments produced the deeply sectarian, Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts—not unlike this century’s Patriot Act and other anti-immigration laws—targeting foreign-born “aliens” as well as political expression. The Naturalization Act of 1798, for example, extended the amount of time required to become a U.S. citizen from five to fourteen years. This made it harder for immigrants to vote. The Alien Friend and (the separate) Alien Enemies Acts made it easier for U.S authorities to deport immigrants who could be deemed dangerous to the security of the United States, without the right of trial or appeal. Finally, the Sedition Act called for imprisoning those seen as critics of the federal government. One of the first public figures prosecuted under these laws, in 1800, was an Irish immigrant, Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon.
In this climate, Thomas’s own future looked bleak. And so he languished in a Scottish prison. He was able to visit with other Irish prisoners, and his wife, Jane, relocated to a house nearby and even became pregnant during these years. She gave birth to a daughter, Jane Erin, in April 1802. Escape, however, seemed impossible. The best Thomas could hope for, upon his eventual release, was a fresh start in America, but even this hope was a complicated one. His mother, still mourning her older son’s death, was unsettled to hear that Thomas was pondering a move to America. She feared she might never see her son again, writing, “Between you and us there will be a gulf over which we cannot pass.”
Upon Thomas’s 1802 release, with the condition that he not return to Ireland, he first went to Europe, in the summer, and was joined there briefly by his brother Robert. Robert Emmet had not given up on hopes for a successful Irish rebellion and had even been meeting with Napoleon about yet another French invasion of Ireland. Thomas spoke to his younger brother about moving to the United States, a desire he’d harbored since 1798, when U.S. and British officials had conspired to keep the Emmet family out of America.
Robert, though, seemed to feel something like destiny calling him back to Ireland. “When I came to Ireland, I found the business ripe for execution,” is how Robert put it later, describing his willingness to participate in the 1803 rebellion. “I was asked to join in it. I took time to consider and after mature deliberation I became one of the provisional [United Irishmen] government.”
The year 1802 ended on another sad note for the Emmet family. December brought with it the death of Dr. Robert Emmet, the family patriarch, whose nationalist sympathies had so influenced his sons’ thoughts and actions. Dr. Emmet was buried in St. Peter’s churchyard on Aungier Street. He did not live to see the next attempt to liberate Ireland or the central role his son Robert played in that uprising—or the price Robert paid.
THE IRISH PROCLAMATION of Independence distributed just before the 1803 uprising was explicitly modeled on the American Declaration of Independence.
“You are now called on to show the world that you are competent to take your place among nations, that you have a right to claim their cognisance of you as an independent country, by the only satisfactory proof you can furnish of your capability of maintaining your independence by your wresting it from England with your hands,” the proclamation reads. “[This] solemn declaration we now make. We war not against property. We war against no religious belief. . . . We war against English dominion. . . . If we are to fall, we will fall where we fight for our country.”
In the end the proclamation “was nothing less than a complete programme for administering the country during and immediately after the rebellion. . . . And it had Robert Emmet’s imprint all over it,” Dr. Patrick M. Geoghegan has written.
Irish rebels attempted to seize control of Dublin Castle and other strategic symbols of British rule on July 23, 1803. The British were initially caught off guard, but a subsequent uprising in Wicklow failed to materialize, and then rumors—possibly started by the British or by Irish double agents—spread that the uprising was actually postponed. Robert fled to the mountains of Wicklow, where he was arrested in late August. He was brought to Dublin Castle, then Kilmainham prison, and charged with treason.
Executions of the rebels began on September 1. Before he was sentenced to death, Robert Emmet delivered a rousing speech that would go on to become a rallying cry for later generations of Irish rebels: “Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written.”
Here, then, is one description of Robert Emmet’s subsequent execution, in language not unlike that which we hear coming out of the Middle East today.
The punishment for treason was very specific. Emmet’s body was taken down and placed on a table by the scaffold. The Executioner then removed a sharp blade from his tunic and cut the head from the corpse. Grabbing the head in his hand he carried it to the front of the Gallows and proclaimed in a loud voice: “This is the head of a traitor Robert Emmet.” Emmet’s blood seeped down from the table and ran onto the pavement. Some women came forward to dip their handkerchiefs in it and take them away as souvenirs. The Executioner’s voice continued: “This is the head of a traitor Robert Emmet. This is the head of a traitor.”
Elizabeth Emmet died later the same month. By 1804, then, Thomas had lost both of his parents as well as two brothers. Just as subsequent generations of Irish immigrants would, Thomas saw America as a place to start anew, and he set sail from Europe that very year, writing to a friend, “I wish most earnestly and anxiously to embrace you all again, but it must be on American ground; and if you wish to see me, come there.”
IF REVOLUTION HAD been a primary motivation for Thomas when he was in Ireland, it seemed something shifted during his years in America. There, in this new nation based upon Republican principles, the nuts and bolts of politics, lawmaking, and building coalitions became increasingly central to his activism. He never lost his zeal for ending injustice and oppression, but more and more he did so from within the system. It was, in fact, men like Thomas who served as a clear and inspiring role model to me when I decided in the mid-1970s, after years of activism from the outside, to enter electoral politics.
Thomas had sailed for America with four of his children—the eldest, Robert, and three daughters, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Jane. Three younger sons remained in Dublin for several months before joining the rest of the family in March 1805. As soon as he arrived in America, Thomas had an opportunity to make a statement about racial equality, an issue that would eventually tear America apart.
Joseph McCormick, with whom Thomas had been imprisoned in Fort George, Scotland, tried to sell his friend on the benefits of living in the American south. But Thomas replied, “You know the insuperable objection I have always had to settling where I could not dispense with the use of slaves and that the more they abound, the stronger are my objections.”
Indeed, once in America, not only did Thomas become a prominent defender against the rise of anti-Catholic bigotry, but one of his first legal cases in the United States was the defense of a fugitive African American slave in New York. “Some supposed of the Irish what has been asserted of the Negro race, that the Irish were an inferior, semi-brutal people incapable of managing the affairs of their country,” he once noted.
When Thomas arrived in New York, there was already a fledgling Irish American political network (albeit Protestant dominated) centered around the Clinton family. Charles Clinton came to the United States from Longford, serving as a colonel in the French and Indian War. His son George served as governor of New York and as Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. His nephew DeWitt Clinton was mayor of New York City, where it so happened there was an opening at the bar, following the recent death of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr. Controversy quickly ensued, however, when objecti
ons were raised about an “unnaturalized” citizen such as Thomas practicing law. This is more than a bit ironic, since Hamilton himself was an immigrant. But Thomas and his Irish American allies weathered the storm—and thus began his career in America, building up and channeling the growing political clout of the Irish American community.
Although the fury of the Alien and Sedition Acts had abated, it was still a toxic time for Irish Catholics and other immigrants. The city’s first Catholic Church had been established fewer than two decades earlier in 1785. This was a time when people such as U.S. Congressman Harrison Gray Otis could openly worry over “hordes of wild Irishmen [and] the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world coming here with a view to disturb our tranquility.”
Thomas himself “was viewed by the opponents of Mr. Jefferson’s administration as a fugitive jacobin,” according to a chronicle of his life written by Charles Glidden Haines. But he toiled mightily on behalf of New York’s ethnic and religious minorities, a project that would eventually bear fruit as Irish Catholics in New York slowly but surely attained a political voice.
IN 1807 THOMAS at last had the opportunity to test the growing strength of the Irish American community, and get some political revenge as well. None other than Rufus King—who had once boasted of the hatred he’d earned among the Irish community—ran for governor of New York. This was the same Rufus King who’d blocked efforts by Thomas and his family to emigrate following Thomas’s arrest in Ireland in 1798.
Thomas vigorously organized the Irish community and other elements of Jefferson’s new coalition to defeat King, who blithely claimed that he was content to let the public decide between “me and these foreigners.” Thomas wrote openly about King’s role in blocking his family’s emigration— which might very well have saved Robert Emmet’s life. “The misfortunes which you brought upon the objects of your persecution are incalculable. . . . I should have brought along with me [to America] my father and his family, including a brother, whose name perhaps even you will not read without emotions of sympathy and respect,” said Emmet. Indeed, as Robert Emmet’s biographer contends, “If the entire Emmet family had emigrated to the United States in 1798, the history of Ireland would have been very different.”
The story struck a chord with the public, and King lost the governor’s race. But the past was still a source of great pain for Thomas. He confessed to a friend, Peter Burrowes, that he could not “bear to tread on Irish ground” and walk over “the graves of my nearest relatives and dearest friends.” At another point he lamented that “there is not now in Ireland an individual that bears the name of Emmet”—though he would add prophetically that the family name would “perhaps be remembered in its history.” In that he was right, both in history and in the given names of so many children of the diaspora, myself included.
Thomas went on to found a law firm, which to this day still practices under the name Emmet, Marvin & Martin. One contemporary witness described him in court as “a rollicking middle-aged Irish squire.” He “had roguish Hibernian eyes, a very florid complexion, was of sound physical make. . . . and he used a musical, expressive and variable voice, pleasantly tinctured with a winning Corkonian brogue. He was persuasive and convincing, rather than strictly eloquent, but eminently graceful in gesture and pose.” In 1809, Emmet served as executor of his much-admired old friend Thomas Paine’s will. In 1812, he was appointed attorney general of New York State, though he only held the office for a year.
Thomas committed himself to the country he had adopted. He lamented the seemingly intractable divisions between Protestants, Catholics, and dissenters in Ireland, but affairs there eventually receded for him. As one friend, Samuel Mitchill, put it, Thomas “placed his pen in the inkhorn and never marked paper with it again on that subject.”
As a lawyer, he proved he could be a man of government while remaining very much of a man of the people as well. He argued cases before the Supreme Court, commanding the attention of that august body, but in 1824, he also got involved in a legal clash between New York Irish Protestants and Catholics. On July 12, bands of Protestant Orangemen had marched through a heavily Catholic enclave in Greenwich Village, shouting and singing anti-Catholic songs such as “Croppies Lie Down.”
The Orangemen “succeeded so well” in enraging the Catholics “that they received a most humiliating thrashing,” Thomas noted. When it came time to sentence the Irish Catholic laborers, the judge seemed ready to rule in favor of the Orangemen, “not supposing apparently that there could be another side [and] was about to pass sentence.” Even though he himself had long given up the bullet for the ballot, once he’d heard about the state of agitation to which the Catholic men had been pushed, Thomas spoke out in court “of the disgraceful state of intolerance which then existed in the city, and of the great injustice suffered in consequence.” The presiding judge, “on hearing how matters stood, forthwith discharged the prisoners without even a reprimand being deemed necessary.”
ACCORDING TO ONE biographical sketch, on November 12, 1827, Thomas “entered a New York court-room apparently in full health and spirits, to conduct a trial.” He was suddenly struck ill and died the next day. He was sixty-three years old.
Thomas was buried at St. Mark’s on the Bowery, and the city’s Irish American community raised money to erect an impressive monument to his memory. But there is another monument to Emmet’s memory that must be mentioned. Just two years after his death—following the 1820s campaign for Catholic emancipation led by Daniel O’Connell—the British Parliament, fearing another Catholic revolt, passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829, paving the way for full Catholic political participation in Irish life. It was a towering and momentous achievement and one the Emmet family had ultimately played a central role in achieving.
Over time, the act might gradually have led to a more just and prosperous way of life for Catholics, were it not for a black rot that mysteriously started appearing on the leaves of potato plants in Ireland in September of 1845.
WHEN LOOKED AT as a whole, Emmet’s life—both the radical political activity in Ireland and the legal and electoral work in the United States—ultimately symbolizes the transatlantic Irish revolutionary movement. The Irish patriots who came after, from civil rights activist John Devoy right up to Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams, understood the importance of the Irish diaspora when it came to the movement for Irish freedom. Thomas, in the end, was a prophet of multicultural equality.
In 1903, exactly one hundred years after Robert Emmet’s execution, several of Thomas Addis Emmet’s direct descendants sat in a Brooklyn music hall and listed to the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats deliver a passionate speech about Thomas’s life and revolutionary zeal. A decade later Patrick Pearse—a future martyr of 1916—visited the same music hall. Of Thomas Emmet, Pearse told the crowd, “There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice but there are [also] in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the souls of the generations, the heroes who stand midway between God and Men.”
In 1922, Thomas Addis Emmet’s grandson, Thomas Addis Emmet III, organized his grandfather’s reburial in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, the final resting place of many of Ireland’s most prominent patriots. And yet, given his influence, both in Ireland and in the United States, in our long march toward liberty and justice, it is clear that Thomas Addis Emmet is not dead in any final sense of the word.
Thomas Emmet Hayden passed away on October 23, 2016. Like his namesake, Hayden was a once radical political activist who grew committed to electoral politics. Born almost two centuries after Emmet, he joined in that same long march, fighting for liberty and justice throughout his entire life. Like Emmet too, Tom Hayden is not dead in any final sense of the word.
At the request of Tom Hayden, this essay was completed posthumously by Tom Deignan.
THE CARETAKER
Margaret Haughery (1813–1882)
BY ROSIE O’DONNELL
I remember one night, while trying to clear my head, walking around New Orleans alone, I saw a statue of a woman—a monument in disrepair, the pedestal buried by weeds and surrounded by trash. I stepped closer, and the white, stained marble figure looked, well . . . familiar. She was stocky, maternal, her arm around a child. She looked like my mother and my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother all the way down the line. My line. She looked like the people I saw in photos when I did Who Do You Think You Are? for NBC, during which time I discovered the treacherous journey from Ireland to America that my own family had taken.
The statue stayed with me long after I left. It was the familiarity but also I think the sturdiness, the resolve. She looked like she had been standing there for hundreds of years and damn well intended to be there for hundreds more. A survivor here in a city that was reeling, among poor and suffering people themselves all fighting to survive.
I walked back to my hotel. Images from the morning scrolled through my brain—a refugee camp in Baton Rouge; thousands of people in beat-up trailers with swollen eyes and battered spirits; little kids running around in the summer heat with nothing to do, no toys to play with, no lemonade to drink—no relief. Those days in Louisiana haunt my mind and my dreams. I will never shake it. The hurricane had destroyed everything they’d known. The pain of watching it all was enormous. Sadness swallows me still.
