Ultimately disappointed, the party left town and headed west for Cashel, Doheny’s town. Meagher himself, dispatched by O’Brien, arrived on horseback at Doheny’s hiding-place at the bottom of Slievenamon, and moved on with him to other areas, rallying people, seeing pikes being forged in village smithies. He rode back even into his home town of Waterford, and had to leave at the gallop to escape patrols of the British army, which for the moment was concentrating itself in the major cities. The countryside would be left open for several days to Young Ireland’s reconnaissance.
For the Young Irelanders, the story was everywhere the same, even in Cashel. The police lay low, waiting to gauge rebel strength. But Confederate clubs proved not as numerous, organised or well-armed as they had sometimes boasted to headquarters in Dublin. There was no question that the peasantry and much of the middle class wanted revolution. But no sooner did that sentiment emerge than other voices, particularly those of the clergy supported by Old Ireland aldermen, advised the call of conscience, asked people to think of the vengeance that would descend on the first town to rise.
On a country road outside the town, O’Brien, his party retreating in two carts, had been joined by some leading Young Irelanders from Dublin, including Meagher’s schoolfriend Pat Smyth. James Stephens, a Kilkenny bookseller’s son, one day to command an international Irish revolutionary body, also turned up with the awkwardly earnest Dublin law clerk Patrick O’Donohoe, who was grateful to be greeted by O’Brien, and thus have his life redeemed. Some thought the best move now was to arrange escapes to America or France. O’Brien and others would be feted in New York or Paris, and be able to apply the heat of world opinion. But even after Cashel, O’Brien was committed to resistance, and had decided to head east to the inaccessible hilly country which ran north-south between Cashel and Kilkenny. If things continued to go less than splendidly they would be able at least to hide until the shipping off of the new harvest unleashed the rage of the people. In all this frenzied movement through the summer countryside, the Young Irelanders moved in a wakeful fever of expectations or a grind of disappointment. Nor did they seem to realise that many of their countrymen and women were so Famine-struck and deranged as to be more unfit for action than any other peasants in Europe.
From this point on, an inner nucleus of O’Brien, Dillon, O’Donohoe and Stephens moved around a rectangle of villages in eastern Tipperary, while others, including Doheny and Meagher ranged widely in a number of directions but always returning to make occasional contact with O’Brien.
As O’Brien’s party travelled towards the network of villages in and on the edge of the Tipperary collieries, unbidden crowds gathered and again hope flared. On their entering the village of Mullinahone, for instance, the chapel bell was ringing and thousands gathered in the market square. O’Brien stood in his carriage, a spectacular figure in his paramilitary cap and trim suit, and addressed the mass of people. Though the local police waited outside their station, nodding approval, again two Catholic clergymen of the town ‘appeared by his side, and openly resisted his advice.’ But after the priests left the square more villagers still came. Amongst the 2,000 enthusiastic men, said the law clerk O’Donohoe later, some bore muskets, pikes and pitchforks, and others promised to procure them.
Perhaps 3,000 people remained bivouacked in the square and around the commons of Mullinahone that night while like a soldier-king from Shakespeare, O’Brien went walking from one campfire to another, the nobleman face-to-face with the peasant for the rare fraternal purpose of rebellion. And then the clergy would follow behind him. Whatever their motives, the priests would be accused of dispersing the risen people because they did not want an annual parliamentary grant to the seminary at Maynooth to be threatened; nor did they want to encourage the red republicanism which had left the Archbishop of Paris dead.
Yet O’Brien would prove a most scrupulous rebel. It was not until the day after he entered Mullinahone and found half of his overnight army vanished, that he barricaded the road and walked over with Blake Dillon, O’Donohoe and others to the Mullinahone police station. There he was met by five policemen on whom he called to surrender their arms. But a senior constable announced through the stone doorway that if he and his fellows gave up their arms to a small number of men they would be dismissed, and then, in Famine time, where would their families find food? To O’Donohoe’s amazement, O’Brien let the police persuade him that if he came back with thirty men, they would willingly give up. While O’Brien and a disbelieving Dillon and Patrick O’Donohoe set out to attend to these niceties, the police escaped from the station back door, taking their weapons with them.
Next day in nearby Ballingarry, O’Brien climbed on to the chapel wall and addressed the gathered people. His terms had become more modest by now. He asked that they protect him long enough for the harvest to come in. He told them to respect property, and urged married men to remain at home and labouring men to stay at work. He wanted no man who could not bring with him three days’ provisions of bread or biscuit. One can imagine his hollow-faced army incredulously telling their families that O’Brien required of them three days of bread and biscuit. This was not their old dream of the bread taken from the mouth of landlords and given to their children.
It was in Ballingarry that the young Irish woolbroker from Liverpool, Terence Bellew MacManus, caught up with O’Brien. This apparently wealthy young merchant (some would later say his business was in trouble) was dressed in the fashion of 1848 European rebels—a cap, green with a gold band, on the back of his head, riding boots and a black leather bandolier. So MacManus was in place to see another example of O’Brien’s war-making. It was at dawn on the seventh day of the march across the south that O’Brien, up early after resting in a farmer’s house, met young men running into town to say cavalry was coming. Blake Dillon, James Stephens the bookseller’s son, and O’Donohoe began to erect barricades of spare wood, drays, old furniture generously loaned by local people, to block either end and the middle of the main street. A troop of hussars, light cavalry, travelled right up to the first blockade, and an officer in command, a Captain Longmore, asked could he be allowed to pass? Blake Dillon told him he could not. A wild cheer was heard from the largely unarmed people who were coming from side-streets to man the second and third barricades. O’Brien ordered O’Donohoe and Dillon to let the troop pass if the officer gave his word of honour not to arrest any of them. ‘Whereupon a space was opened in the barricades and the officer and his men passed on. There is no doubt if a collision had taken place we would have killed or captured the entire troop.’ With that O’Brien’s second chance of revolutionary success galloped away. Soon rain began to fall and the rebels took dismal refuge in a hut on the road to Urlingford colliery.
Elsewhere, in a farmhouse on the southern side of Slievenamon, Meagher had interviewed the presidents of a number of clubs and concluded that though the rising was four or five weeks before the harvest, it could work now if O’Brien took some decisive action. Everyone wanted to prevent O’Brien’s capture, but they were also waiting for him to manifest himself. The bloodless seizing of the police station at Mullinahone and the dismounting and disarming of the cavalry unit would have served as a good start in this direction.
Meagher, O’Mahony, Devin Reilly, Doheny and others arrived in Mullinahone later that day as a lively party in an Irish jaunting car. Rebels saw them coming and discharged pistols and waved hats and green branches. Now a final council of war took place in a public house in a mining village a little way west. O’Brien reiterated that when the garrisons of the big towns emerged, as they soon would, he would not skulk—he would be visible to the people even on Slievenamon, he said. Doheny suggested genuine revolutionary steps, urging O’Brien to issue a proclamation ‘confiscating the landed property of the country and offering it as the gage of battle and reward of victory.’ Doheny also suggested a war order ‘directing the people to live at the expense of the enemy.’ But, O’Brien answered, only an aggressive act
on the part of government could justify ‘such a sweeping proceeding.’ It was the Liberator, not John Mitchel, who cast a long shadow over rebel deliberations in that hotel.
O’Brien was to stay for now in this area, a region in which there were at least people who would intervene to prevent his arrest, while other leaders were to disperse and generate an appearance of strength, of a countryside in revolt, by lighting beacon fires on tops of the surrounding mountains.
Tom Meagher was eager and unexhausted. Ordered to Waterford once more, for a last attempt to raise men, he started off on a hard ride over the lovely Comeraghs. After visiting Waterford, it was in these mountains that Meagher was to take up a post, and have regular fires lit and maintained. Doheny was to keep an eye on the town of Clonmel and warn O’Brien of any movement of the garrison there. Mitchel’s young journalist friend, Devin Reilly, was to go to Kilkenny on the same sort of mission as Meagher’s.
Saturday 29 July was the day that settled everything. After a few hours’ sleep in the colliery public house, O’Brien and his party took their cart back to Ballingarry, where, priest or not, there were some ordinary people willing to fight. MacManus, riding ahead, arrived in the main street as a young man rushed up to his stirrup to tell of an approaching police column. Surrounded by townspeople, he called on them to build a barricade across the main road on the edge of town. O’Brien himself stationed some of the men who had guns on hillocks of mine slag either side of the road. In the ditches he placed others, including women, usually obedient to the priest but obeying now imperatives of their hungry situation, armed merely with stones and pikes. Of 200 people serving in this ambuscade, the Young Irelander Patrick Kavanagh says that two thirds of them had no weapons.
From behind the barricade, Young Ireland saw a strong body of armed police cresting the hill to the east outside the town. Forty-six men, under the command of a Sub-Inspector Trant from Callan, came to within 600 yards of the barricade, formed a line and advanced. O’Brien’s army uttered their contempt and rage from the slagheaps, ditches, windows and barricade. The force of police were about a hundred yards from the barricade when without warning they turned to the right and ran at the double up a laneway. Believing they were fleeing, the rebels began to race across country to cut them off. MacManus complained, ‘All we could do or say was of no avail and in about two minutes we were alone.’
The Young Irelanders now followed their runaway supporters and found that in fact the police had taken possession of a small two-storeyed, two-chimneyed house surrounded by a stone wall, on land named Boulagh Common. They were barricading the windows, and Kavanagh could see in each of them ‘six or seven long dark tubes ready to blaze away on us at any moment.’ O’Brien and MacManus and about a dozen men took shelter behind a haystack—a haggard, as it was called—at the back of the house, and MacManus suggested heaping hay around the door and lower windows and setting it afire. O’Brien refused. For one of his rebel army told him a Widow McCormack owned the house, was away at the time, and her five children, all under ten years of age, were within.
Mrs McCormack returned a little later to find her windows barricaded with furniture and bristling with carbine barrels. At the front of the house MacManus stood up with O’Brien and two unidentified ‘brave fellows’ to accompany Mrs McCormack through the gate in the fence, through her cabbage patch, and around the corner of the house to a partially clear window, to inquire after the infants. O’Brien called, ‘I want you to give up your arms, we shall not hurt a man of you, you are Irishmen.’ Grotesquely, a number of policemen stretched out their hands to shake O’Brien’s. But while O’Brien was up at the sill, said MacManus, ‘ruffians’ on the rebel side began hurling stones from behind the wall, and suddenly forty carbines were discharged at the besiegers. O’Brien was at the time standing about 3 yards from the house, MacManus about 7. Two men fell beside MacManus, one dead, the other wounded. MacManus fired, and then all the rebel musketry, perhaps a little more than two dozen guns, broke out. O’Brien, MacManus and the howling widow retreated through the rage of fire.
O’Brien understood quite clearly that this was the revolution, begun, full of promise, morally feasible. An excellent cache of pistols and carbines could come out of it, and a stylish victory enlarged upon in retelling around a cowed Ireland. To pursue this prize, Patrick Kavanagh, the Young Ireland youth, left his position to move up to the house, heard a crash, and fell. A bullet had passed through his thigh, ‘grazing the main artery.’
Then MacManus and a few of the proletarian rebels thought it time to edge their way up to the back door with bundles of hay. A pikeman lifted up a load of it, a musketeer knelt down, laid the musket along it and fired. The hay would not burn. Meanwhile, the firing from within the house was orderly and concentrated. The pikemen, scythe-bearers and stone-throwers began to retreat before it. ‘I found the entire mob,’ said the militant MacManus, ‘had been drawn off with the exception of about twelve brave fellows who still lined the wall and kept up a straggling fire.’ MacManus led these musketeers to a place of safety at the gable end of the stables, and went back to O’Brien by the fence and insisted he should leave the field. ‘This he refused to do and returned again and again under the fire of the windows, declaring he would rather perish than turn his back on the enemy … he was the last man who left.’
After further exchanges, two priests came up the hill, one of them Father Fitzgerald of Ballingarry, who knew the names of the fallen and would give them the last rites once the firing stopped. ‘When I was entering the wicket in front of the house,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘one man, John Walsh, was lying outside the gate on his back, quite dead. Another young man named Bride, a widow’s son, was dying outside the wall, having received his death wound from a bullet in passing over it.’ But the McCormack children would all survive the siege.
There would be commentators on both sides of the conflict who believed it might have been a mercy had O’Brien been fatally wounded with Walsh and Bride, and witnesses stated that he was indeed courting death. Perhaps the police marksmen inside went to trouble not to shoot him, and at last he was persuaded to walk away. At the bottom of the hill MacManus and others encountered a mounted policeman and took his horse from him. O’Brien walked on to the point near the original Ballingarry barricade, where the ‘well-clothed, well-mounted’ priest had collected retreating peasants. ‘O’Brien addressed them and tried to rally them, but the spell was on them.’ MacManus got the policeman’s horse, put a man on either side of the bridle and told them to take O’Brien, dazed by failure, back through Ballingarry. MacManus took a short cut across the field to the village ‘but to my mortification on turning round I again beheld him returning to where the young priest and the mob were standing.’
MacManus located O’Brien’s rented carriage parked in the village, and drove it up to the bottom of the hill to get O’Brien away. He could find no one. O’Brien had clearly made his escape. A new body of police estimated at 100 were lined out along walls and ditches and were firing at the junction where the priest and his parishioners had been. The few remaining foot-soldiers of the uprising told him that the young Confederate from Kilkenny, James Stephens, had been one of the wounded. MacManus rode towards Slievenamon, marvelling that the casualties had been so light, particularly since the range was so short, about 12 yards between wall and house.
The Illustrated London News correspondent, on the scene within twenty-four hours, told his English readers, ‘The story of Smith O’Brien creeping away among the cabbages is only a story…. In the eye of any military man his positions and conduct were censurable for their indiscreet daring.’ Indeed Father Fitzgerald, who had no reason to praise O’Brien, later wrote that the rebel leader ‘had no protection from the constant fire.’
The Times correspondent was able to report by Monday that the green at Ballingarry, where O’Brien drilled his rebel forces, ‘is to-day a “tented field” for the soldiers of Her Majesty the Queen.’
Richard O’Gorman
of Young Ireland had already been in Limerick visiting clubs at the time of Young Ireland’s foray through the south. He held rallies in towns and villages along the Shannon and was sheltered in rural homes at night. The people of the town of Abbeyfeal declared for immediate resistance, and seized the Limerick and Tralee mail, taking possession only of official dispatches and passing private letters unopened on to the local postmaster. But when the news came from Ballingarry of the disaster there, the Abbeyfeale force dispersed in ‘sullen despair.’
Meagher had earlier assured young D’Arcy McGee that if he collected 400 to 500 Scots and landed them in the west, he would be as famous as the American privateer John Paul Jones. But while McGee was making arrangements in Edinburgh, a mechanic who had previously lived in Dublin recognised him by his small stature and his strangely African features, and reported him to the police. The Scottish Young Ireland committee told him to make immediately for the west of Ireland and prepare to receive the invasion force there. He took a train to Carlisle, and found himself sitting opposite the Grand Chaplain of the Orangemen, Thresham Gregg, who, McGee claimed, knew him but said nothing.
Crossing to Belfast, he found the newspapers contained Lord Lieutenant Clarendon’s wily letter from Dublin Castle to the Catholic primate of Ireland, Archbishop Murray, offering to alter the new Colleges Act to the liking of the Catholic bishops and to remodel the Bequests Bill to their benefit. McGee headed for Sligo. There were only 100 British soldiers in the area, he was told, and the barracks in Sligo were protected by a thin 8-foot wall, which the Confederates felt could be easily breached. McGee was put in contact too with the Sligo Molly Maguires, Ribbon-like societies which would later make a transatlantic crossing and establish themselves in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. Their local leader told him, ‘Bring us this day week … assurance that the South has risen, or will certainly rise, and we will enrol two thousand men before the week is out.’ Exaggerated or not, in that statement lies some hint of the potential significance of Ballingarry. McGee was sheltered in the country around Ben Bulben, and got news from Scotland that though 400 had been ready to land in the west, their movement had been cancelled by the news from Ballingarry.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 24