Historical Papers, Part 3, From Volume VI.,
J >>
John Greenleaf Whittier >> Historical Papers, Part 3, From Volume VI.,
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 This eBook was produced by David Widger [widger@cecomet.net]
HISTORICAL PAPERS
BY
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
CONTENTS:
HISTORICAL PAPERS.
DANIEL O'CONNELL
ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.
THE BORDER WAR OF 1708
THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT
THE BOY CAPTIVES
THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812
THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS
THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
GOVERNOR ENDICOTT
JOHN WINTHROP
HISTORICAL PAPERS
DANIEL O'CONNELL.
In February, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a speech in the United
States Senate, which was intended to smooth away the difficulties
which his moderate opposition to the encroachments of slavery had
erected in his path to the presidency. His calumniation of
O'Connell called out the following summary of the career of the
great Irish patriot. It was published originally in the
Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadelphia, April 25, 1839.
Perhaps the most unlucky portion of the unlucky speech of Henry Clay on
the slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up to
scorn and contempt the great Liberator of Ireland. We say an attempt,
for who will say it has succeeded? Who feels contempt for O'Connell?
Surely not the slaveholder? From Henry Clay, surrounded by his slave-
gang at Ashland, to the most miserable and squalid slave-driver and small
breeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the name
of O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear and
hate the eloquent Irishman. But their contempt, forsooth! Talk of the
sheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears to
the pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!
After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing the
advertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--
"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt down
and proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of that
entire section. Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognize
in the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States at
the Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked to
take of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better have
consulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating him
with contemptuous silence. He would exclude us from European society, he
who himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received with
scornful repugnance into it! If he be no more desirous of our society
than we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-
intercourse will exist between us. Yes, sir, I think the American
Minister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity by
regarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons as
the malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and the
libeller of a foreign and kindred people."
The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones of
congratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skill
and dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolved
himself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke of
policy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of the
Union. But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to these
premature rejoicings. "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irish
agitator has been made use of against us with no small success," say the
New York papers. "They failed," says the Daily Evening Star, "to
convince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of his
country,' or that there was an excuse for thus denouncing him."
The defeat of the Whigs of New York and the cause of it have excited no
small degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator. In
this city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to the
aid of Henry Clay,--
"A tom-tit twittering on an eagle's back."
The learned editor gives it as his opinion that Daniel O'Connell is a
"political beggar," a "disorganizing apostate;" talks in its pretty way
of the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice," etc.; and
finally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assures
us that "his weakness of mind is almost beyond calculation!"
We have heard it rumored during the past week, among some of the self-
constituted organs of the Clay party in this city, that at a late meeting
in Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, and
publish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and so
much of the latter's speeches and writings as relate to American slavery,
for the purpose of convincing the countrymen of O'Connell of the justice,
propriety, and, in view of the aggravated circumstances of the case,
moderation and forbearance of Henry Clay when speaking of a man who has
had the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" of
our country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginia
slave-traders.
We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagacious
committee. We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals to
the sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished. We
should like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interests
and welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of this
publication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblest
champion.
But who is Daniel O'Connell? "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!" say the
Tory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe and
apprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he is
wielding,--a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate of
Europe. "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission into
European society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--
a man whose "wind should be stopped," say the American slaveholders, and
their apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the Philadelphia
Gazette, and the Democratic Whig Association.
But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the world
will do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more for
human liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own
oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and
purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened
by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British
colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will be
remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of
Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,
detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall
have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and
Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of
slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who
in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned
against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an
egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world
which God and nature are urging forward."
The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated
in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the
plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that
wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of
feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the
untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the
development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause
of liberty and the welfare of man.
The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his
native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England
and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a
new era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriot
has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of
his country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, however
pure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth was
yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of
freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--the
relic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument of
despotism--a game
"which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at."
But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed
against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the
united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over
prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy
where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of
man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by
weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.
Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this
triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of
political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of
the strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic of
Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for
the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The Catholic
Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by
their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield
submissively to the supremacy of the people.
[The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political
unions." In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq., at
the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the
following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the
Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and
father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell."]
Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations to
their centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were
effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in
motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to
every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the
disturbed centre of a lake.
The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in this
country. Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholic
religion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against its
conscientious followers. The cruel persecutions of the dissenters from
the Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors of
the Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simple
dwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocities
peculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessary
consequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon the
constitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveous
disabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacy
or power.
Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies should
thus be overlooked,--the undeniable truth that religious bigotry and
intolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted of
one century have been the persecutors of another. In our own country,
it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in New
England the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on pain
of death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in Catholic
Maryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty of
conscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietly
through the same streets to their respective altars.
At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found the
people of Ireland divided into three great classes,--the Protestant or
Church party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church party
constituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possession
the government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland,
controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy,
magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country,
holding their property and power by the favor of England, and
consequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probably
twice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade and
manufactures,--sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in
feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic
brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the
Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and
almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion
of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of
landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly has
a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as
"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons
to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There was
no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or
religious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them."
The following facts relative to the disabilities under which the
Catholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of
1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of those
laws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland upon
the necks of the remainder.
A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholic
commoner in the House of Commons. A Catholic could not be Lord
Chancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master or
Keeper of the Rolls; Justice of the King's Bench or of the Common Pleas;
Baron of the Exchequer; Attorney or Solicitor General; King's Sergeant at
Law; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman of
Sessions for the County of Dublin. He could not be the Recorder of a
city or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county,
city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or other
governor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; Privy
Councillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary
of State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the Privy
Seal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor Lord
Mayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a member
of a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for the
maintenance of a clergyman, or for the support of a chapel or a school;
and in corporate towns he was excluded from the grand juries.
O'Connell commenced his labors for emancipation with the strong
conviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish people
could overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union of
action could only be obtained by the establishment of something like
equality between the different religious parties. Discarding all other
than peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placed
himself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressive
laws. Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddened
spirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldiery
found no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, the
Catholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pure
and peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration. His
influence was felt in all parts of the island. Wherever an unlawful
association existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once to
detect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch its
deluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies. In his presence
the Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irish
clansman forgot his feuds. He taught the party in power, and who
trembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could only
be obtained by justice and kindness. He entreated his oppressed Catholic
brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands
to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too
humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of
wrong.
The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood
thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the
darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and
steadily from all its ancient altars. Shoulder to shoulder gathered
around him the patriot spirits of his nation,--men unbribed by the golden
spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer
and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator,
wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion
of Catholic and Protestant,--the sash of blended orange and green, soiled
and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins,
and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the
droppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty and
resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory
struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its
fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action,
until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at once
from the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed back
from Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung from
the reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his native
land, at once its disgrace and glory,--the conqueror of Napoleon; and, in
the words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from around
him, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistible
genius of Universal Emancipation.
On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took his
seat in the British Parliament. The eyes of millions were upon him.
Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed her
confidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names and
brilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long and
dark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold and
British patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irish
pride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms against
their sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hung
with breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last great
champion was subjected.
The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.
The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled
magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among
the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat
in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the
Kerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the first
occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded
justice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his hand
to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his
heart was with it.
Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the
redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great
measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed
not a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his first
efforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harsh
avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery
luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland
suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;
the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what
they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to
London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and
patriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry,
the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union,
became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British
Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been
feared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers of
derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that
very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan
failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken
down.
No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a
greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of
colonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured
forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of
pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on
the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the
slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered
into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the
shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He
did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had
grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to
be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated." He left Sir Robert
Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests
of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood,
building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and
spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding
sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as
well as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy
that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be
acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would,
he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what cast
or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political,
intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. He
was for justice,--justice in the name of humanity and according to the
righteous law of the living God.
Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to our
glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his
own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted
no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiastic
admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should
have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of
slavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever man
has been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has been
directed: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancient
liberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing the
foot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; and
last, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, and
dragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadly
embrace of her oppressor. American slavery but shares in his common
denunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pity
for the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down.
In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of
that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed
Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain
the sense of the people." It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's
indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted
out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The Irish
Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the
United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. It
diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and
cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it
established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to
corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threw
no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has
O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange
ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity
on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. [Letters to the
Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.]
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7