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The Felon's Track by Michael Doheny

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[Illustration: Michael Doheny]




THE FELON'S TRACK

OR

HISTORY OF THE ATTEMPTED OUTBREAK

IN

IRELAND

Embracing the Leading Events in the Irish Struggle from
the year 1843 to the close of 1848


BY

MICHAEL DOHENY

Author of "The American Revolution."


Hurrah for the mountain side!
Hurrah for the bivouac!
Hurrah for the heaving tide!
If rocking the Felon's Track!


_ORIGINAL EDITION_

WITH D'ARCY M'GEE'S NARRATIVE OF 1848, A PREFACE,
SOME ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR'S CONTEMPORARIES,
AN INDEX, AND ILLUSTRATIONS


DUBLIN

M.H. GILL & SON, LTD.

1920



_Printed and Bound in Ireland by
M.H. Gill & Son, Ltd.
50 Upper O'Connell Street
Dublin_


_First Edition_ 1914
_Second Impression_ 1916
_Third Impression_ 1918
_Fourth Impression_ 1920




[Illustration: General Shields]


_Dedication._

TO

GENERAL JAMES SHIELDS

UNITED STATES SENATOR, ETC.


DEAR SIR,--

In dedicating to you this narrative, I have been influenced by one
consideration only. I have no title to your friendship. I cannot claim
the most remote affinity with your career in arms. There is nothing
connected with this sad fragment of history, either in fact or hope, to
suggest any association with your name or achievements. But as my main
object is to show that Ireland's failure was not owing to native
recreancy or cowardice, I feel satisfied that of all living men, your
position and character will best sustain the sole aim of my present
labour and ambition.

In past history, Ireland holds a high place; but her laurels were won on
foreign fields, and the jealous literary ambition which raised adequate
monuments to these stormy times denied to her swords the distinction
they vindicated for themselves in the hour of combat. The most
brilliant, unscrupulous and daring historian of France degraded the
niggard praise he accorded them by making it the medium of a false and
contemptible sneer. "The Irish soldier," says Voltaire, "fights bravely
everywhere but in his own country."

Without pausing here to vindicate that country from such ungrateful
slander, it is enough to say that you were not placed in the same
unhappy position as the illustrious exiles from the last Irish
army--soldiers of fortune in the service of a foreign prince. You were a
citizen of this free Republic, and a volunteer in its ranks; it was
_your_ country, and you and your compatriots who followed the same
standard did no dishonour to those who were bravest among the brave on
the best debated fields in Europe.

In the wreck of every hope, all who yet cherish the ambition of
realising for Ireland an independent destiny, point to your career as an
encouraging augury, if not a complete justification for not despairing
of their country. It is because I am among those that I have claimed the
honour of inscribing your name on the first page of this, my latest
labour in her cause.

I remain, dear Sir,

Very respectfully and sincerely yours,

MICHAEL DOHENY.

_New York, Sept. 20, 1849._




PREFACE


The Irish Confederation still awaits its historian. Three of its leaders
have left narratives of its brief and momentous career, but, of the
three, Doheny alone participated in the Insurrection that dug the
political grave of Young Ireland. In "The Felon's Track," written hot on
his escape from the stricken land, he tells the story vividly and
passionately. It has morals deducible for all manner of Irishmen, and
one for those English statesmen who comfort themselves with the illusion
that Irish Nationalism, like Jacobitism, is a platonic sentiment. The
man who, roused from his bed at midnight by tapping fingers on his
window and a voice whispering that insurrection was afoot, rose and rode
away in the darkness to join himself to its desperate fortunes was no
young man ardent for adventure. Michael Doheny, when he left his home
and his career to engage in the fatal enterprise, was a sober
middle-aged barrister, a man of weight and fortune into which he had
built himself by the hard toil of twenty years. His social anchorages
were deep-cast--and no mere sentiment provokes such a man to throw aside
the hard-won harvest of his life and risk the rebel's or the felon's
fate.

In the leadership of the Young Ireland party Michael Doheny was, save
Smith O'Brien, the oldest man and, like O'Brien, his counsels while
courageous were always restrained. There was little other likeness
between the men. Doheny sprang from the poorest class of the Irish
farmers. At Brookfield, near Fethard in Tipperary, where he was born in
May, 1805, he followed the plough on his father's little holding,
earning literally his bread in the sweat of his brow, and educating
himself how he could, for his people were too poor to pay for his
schooling. His indomitable perseverance and his thirst for knowledge
overcame the formidable obstacles of fortune, and at thirty years of age
the poor peasant boy had become a barrister of reputation for ability
and fearlessness. He returned to his native county to become the most
popular and trusted of its "counsellors"--the advocate who did not fear
to face and beard Influence and Ascendancy in its courts. The city of
Cashel had had much of its property alienated and long enjoyed by local
magnates whom none were willing to offend. Doheny fought and defeated
them and regained the purloined estates for the people. He was made
Legal Adviser to the Borough of Cashel and when later the pestilence
fell upon the place, and even the men employed to carry the sick to
hospital lost courage and fled, Doheny showed the same manly example of
citizenship and duty which years later forced him "on the Felon's path,"
by carrying in his strong arms to shelter and relief the deserted
victims of the plague. Davis who marked his character, and knew that on
such men a free and self-respecting Ireland must be rebuilt induced him
to enter the Repeal movement of 1842, and in its councils he swayed the
influence of a strong, sincere, able and incorruptible man until the
Association fell into the toils of the English Whigs. Then he quitted
it and formally adhered to the Young Irelanders. To them he was
invaluable for his eloquence--less brilliant and polished than that of
Meagher, but more effective in its appeal to the heart of the peasantry
whom Doheny knew better than any of his colleagues. On a platform he
triumphed, but with the pen he was often ineffective. His admiration and
reverence for Davis misled him into laboriously imitating Davis's style,
and the result was what it must always be when one man attempts to
express his ideas not in his own way but as he thinks a greater man
would express them. Much that would have been impressive and lucid as
Doheny becomes unimpressive and clouded as Doheny-Davis. In a few of his
verses and "The Felon's Track" Doheny the writer will survive. As a man
who gave up all to help his country and served her like a gallant son,
his memory must be honoured while Ireland has virtue.

The Irish Confederation, on whose council Doheny sat, was noble in
conception, true in policy and able and honest in its membership. Never
in the leadership of the modern Nationalist movement has there been the
peer in genius and character of the men who founded and inspired that
brilliant and short-lived organisation. In its career it went nearer to
bridging the differences of class and creed in Ireland than any previous
organisation since the Volunteers at Dungannon proclaimed themselves
Irishmen and hailed their oppressed Catholic countrymen fellow-citizens.
But the Confederation was not yet six months old when it was called on
to face a situation in Ireland as terrible as that which confronted
Irishmen when Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill lay dead and Cromwell marched at the
head of his iron legions to the conquest of a distracted country. The
failure of the potato-crop which menaced Ireland with serious loss at
the birth of the Confederation in January, 1847, threatened the
destruction of the people by the middle of 1847. The Relief measures
provided by the English Whig Government set up a system under which
places, large and small, were provided for some thousands of persons of
political influence. Their tenure of employment depending upon the
ministry, they used that influence to the end of sustaining the
ministry, while the unfortunate small farmers who had hitherto kept on
the right side of the line between poverty and pauperism were forced to
the wrong side. Of all the measures passed under the guise of relieving
"the famine-stricken Irish" the most infamous was that measure which
provided that no farmer should be accorded relief if, the produce of his
farm having gone to discharge his rents, rates and taxes, he hungered
and yet strove to hold his farm. Before he was permitted to receive any
help from the public funds he was required to surrender his land and
become a pauper. Thus under pretext of relieving famine, pauperism was
propagated.

Be it remembered that all this time there was no _famine_ in Ireland.
The potato-crop, indeed, had failed as it had failed in Great Britain,
France, Germany and other countries at the same period, but the corn
crop was fat and abundant. Each year of the so-called famine, food to
maintain double the whole population was raised from the Irish soil. It
was exported to England to feed the English people. Nobody starved in
Germany. The German governments ordered the ports to be closed to the
export of food until the danger had passed. The Irish Confederation
demanded the same measure. "Close the Irish ports," it called to the
British Government, "and no man can die of hunger in Ireland." The
British Government, instead, flung the ports wide open. The great
principle of Free Trade required that the Irish should export their food
freely. Relief ships from foreign countries laden with the food
subscribed by charitable people to succour the starving Irish met
occasionally ships sailing out of the Irish ports laden with food reaped
by the starving Irish. On the quays of Galway the unhappy people wailed
as they saw their harvests borne away from them, and were admonished by
the butt-ends of British muskets, the British Government meantime
passing Relief measures which provided employment for hordes of English
officials and Irish understrappers, and pauper-relief for those who
surrendered their manhood and their property--the cost of this relief,
like the cost of the passage of the Act of Union, being debited to
Ireland--a generous loan in fact.

No doubt a union of the whole Irish people would have rendered all this
impossible. The Irish Confederation worked hard to bring about this
essential union. Directly and indirectly it achieved for a moment a
semblance of national unity. The Irish Council, composed largely of the
resident landlords--who mostly endeavoured to alleviate the
distress--came into being, reasoned with the Government and, when the
Government ignored reason, fell to pieces. George Henry Moore, a young
sporting landlord and a Tory (afterwards, as a result, to become a
Nationalist leader), conceived the design of getting all the Irish
members of the British Parliament to act together against the existing
British Government or any British Government which did not deal honestly
and effectively with the crisis. With the Marquis of Sligo, a nobleman
who did his duty to his tenantry during the Famine, Moore travelled
around Ireland and secured between sixty and seventy Irish members of
Parliament and forty-five Irish peers to subscribe to his independence
programme. They met in Dublin, resolved boldly, departed for London
cheered by the nation, and crumbled there at the Premier's frown. When
the Tory Lord George Bentinck proposed that instead of pauperising the
Irish by a vote of four or five millions for relief there should be a
vote of sixteen millions for railway construction, the Premier, Lord
John Russell, threatened the Irish members with his displeasure if they
supported Bentinck, and the majority of them thereupon opposed the
proposal of reproductive work for the people in lieu of pauper relief.

It was in these circumstances Mitchel put forward his policy in the
Confederation of arming the people and bidding them hold their harvests.
The Confederation rejected the policy, still hoping to effect a national
union. Through such a union alone, it declared, could national
independence be achieved. Doheny strongly opposed Mitchel on this
ground. Mitchel's reply was simple. He had been and was ready to follow
the aristocrats of Ireland if they would lead. They would not lead, and
meanwhile the people perished. Therefore he would urge the people to
save themselves. The policy of the Confederation in normal times would
have been nationally sound. The circumstances had become abnormal, and
Mitchel's policy was suited to the abnormal circumstances. His
conviction that the British Government was deliberately using the
potato-crop failure for the purpose of reducing the Irish
population--which then was equal to more than half the population of
England and a menace to that country, as one of its statesmen
incautiously admitted--was a conviction not shared by the bulk of his
colleagues. They shrank from it as men will shrink from a conclusion
that horrifies the human nature in them. Mitchel went outside the
Confederation to preach his policy, and he might have preached it
without result had not the French Revolution turned men's minds to the
contemplation of arms and armed opinion. The arrest, indictment and
conviction of Mitchel, Doheny has described graphically. The reasons
that prevailed against attempting Mitchel's rescue, Doheny cogently
states. There is no reason to doubt that an attempt to rescue Mitchel
would have been a failure in its object. But there are occasions when it
is wiser to attempt the impossible than to acquiesce. The unchallenged
removal of Mitchel in chains from Ireland had a moral effect on the
country that was worth 20,000 additional troops to the Government.

Thereafter, the Confederation vacillated in its policy and finally
permitted itself, in its desire for Unity as the potent weapon, to be
extinguished in favour of an Irish League which was to combine
O'Connellites and Young Irelanders. The Irish League met once, and died.
The Confederation had been hoodwinked. Doheny who opposed the
amalgamation, retired to Cashel, severing his connection with the former
Confederation. He was, therefore, free in honour to have taken no part
in the insurrection, since it was begun by men from whom he had
withdrawn. But when the voice in the night whispered through his window
that his former colleagues had crossed the Rubicon, Doheny, like the man
he was, rose and rode forth to make the fatal passage and stand or fall
with them.

From this point, Doheny's narrative may be supplemented and corrected by
information that was not at the time he wrote available to him. Meagher,
Leyne, M'Gee, O'Mahony and MacManus, have left in newspaper articles and
in MS. accounts of what happened in the light of which Doheny's
narrative must be read.

On Thursday, July 20th, 1848, the British Government issued a
proclamation ordering the people of Ireland to surrender their arms.
Thomas Francis Meagher, who was at the time in Waterford, issued a
counter-proclamation to the people of that city bidding them to hold
them fast. He then hurried to Dublin to consult with his colleagues and
he arrived in the metropolis the next day. There had been a strong
division of opinion in the Confederate clubs as to how the Government
proclamation should be treated, the general feeling of the rank-and-file
inclining to open resistance. The leaders counselled a waiting policy
until the harvest had been gathered, the arms to be concealed meanwhile.
This counsel prevailed against the remonstrance of one of the Dublin
leaders that if heaven rained down loaded rifles they would wait for
angels to pull the triggers. If the insurrection could have been
postponed until the harvest the counsel would have been sound. The
Young Ireland leaders forgot, however, that the Government had one
powerful weapon in reserve with which it might force their hands--the
Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. On July 21st Meagher and his
comrades and the Dublin leaders discussed and arranged the outline of a
contingent insurrectionary plan for the autumn. O'Brien left for Wexford
and O'Gorman for Limerick to organise those counties. The next morning
the news reached those who remained in Dublin that the Habeas Corpus Act
had been suspended, and that a warrant was on its way to Ireland for the
arrest of Smith O'Brien. The choice left was to fight, to become
fugitives, or to surrender. Dillon, M'Gee, Reilly, P.J. Smyth and
Meagher decided hurriedly on the first course. They rejected the
proposal to begin the fight in Dublin, as they believed it would be
hopeless with the resources at their disposal to contend against a
disciplined garrison of 11,000 men in a city a large proportion of whose
population was hostile. Kilkenny was regarded as a stronghold of the
Confederation, and Dillon suggested it should be the objective. Dillon
and Meagher quitted Dublin to seek O'Brien; Reilly and Smyth started for
Tipperary, and M'Gee for Scotland where it was hoped the Glasgow Irish
could be induced to rise, seize some of the Clyde steamers and effect a
landing in Sligo or Mayo which might rouse Connacht and western Ulster
to the assistance of the South.

Dillon and Meagher left Dublin on the night of the 22nd of July by the
mailcoach for Enniscorthy. Neither had the slightest hope of a
successful insurrection, but they felt that honour and its future
survival demanded that a nation must reply to the command of a foreign
power to gag its mouth and throw down its arms by drawing the sword.
They found Smith O'Brien at Enniscorthy and he joined in their views.
Father Parle and the people of Enniscorthy undertook to defend O'Brien
by force of arms if any attempt were made to arrest him there, and
agreed that if he went into Kilkenny and Tipperary and succeeded in
arousing those counties Wexford would take up arms. O'Brien and his
colleagues moved towards Kilkenny through Graiguenamanagh where the
people received them with enthusiasm, and they arrived in what they
hoped to make again the provisional capital of Ireland in the evening of
the 23rd of July.

[Illustration: Terence Bellew MacManus]

The considerations in favour of beginning the insurrection in Kilkenny
were sound. It was the one Irish city of importance inaccessible to
British naval power, it offered a convenient rallying-centre for the
counties of Tipperary, Waterford, and Wexford upon which the Young
Ireland leaders relied, the country around it was well-adapted for
defensive fighting against superior forces, and it had an historic
appeal to the Irish imagination. The arrival of the insurgent leaders
was hailed with joy by the people, and there was no doubt of the
readiness of the populace to fight. But an examination of the military
resources of the place showed that the British forces consisted of 1,000
troops in a strongly-defended position, while amongst the Irish there
were but 200 armed men and the gunsmiths' shops in the city could not
arm a hundred more. The decision not to strike the first blow at
Kilkenny in the circumstances was inevitable. It was agreed to make
for Carrick-on-Suir, another Young Ireland town, seize the place and
march at the head of the elated Tipperarymen on Kilkenny. On Monday,
July 24th, O'Brien, Meagher and Dillon left for Carrick-on-Suir, and on
the way they were received with enthusiasm at Callan, where the 8th
Hussars--mainly composed of Irishmen--manifested sympathy with the
insurrectionary propaganda. Near Carrick they were joined by John
O'Mahony, a landed proprietor of the neighbourhood, afterwards to become
famous as the founder of Fenianism. By descent, education and character
a leader of men, O'Mahony had thousands of followers among the people
ready to rally to any venture for Ireland at his call. "His square,
broad frame," wrote Meagher, "his frank, gay, fearless look; the warm
forcible headlong earnestness of his manner; the quickness and
elasticity of his movements; the rapid glances of his clear full eye;
the proud bearing of his head; everything about him struck us with a
brilliant and exciting effect, as he threw himself from his saddle and,
tossing the bridle on his arm, hastened to meet and welcome us. At a
glance we recognised in him a true leader for the generous, passionate,
intrepid peasantry of the South." O'Mahony strongly advised them to
begin the insurrection that night in Carrick, and he left to collect the
peasantry. O'Brien and his comrades proceeded to the town where the
people received them with frenzied enthusiasm, calling out to be led
immediately to the fray. "A torrent of human beings rushing through
lanes and narrow streets"--such is Meagher's description of the
scene--"surging and boiling against the white basements ... wild,
half-stifled, passionate, frantic prayers of hope ... curses on the red
flag: scornful delirious defiances of death.... It was the Revolution if
we had accepted it." But it was not accepted. The local leaders were
unworthy of the people. They persuaded O'Brien to go elsewhere. It was a
cardinal and egregious mistake which he regretted within twenty-four
hours. Had he brushed the quavering local leaders aside and given the
word to the imploring people of Carrick the insurrection of 1848 would
have become respectable. O'Mahony's followers to the number of 12,000
were on the march to Carrick when the news reached them of O'Brien's
departure. Disheartened they broke up and returned to their homes.

Doheny's account of what happened after the fatal retreat from Carrick
needs to be amplified in connection with the final error of O'Brien's
leadership. At the Council of War on the 28th of July O'Brien rejected
the proposal to seize for the use of his followers all things needful,
paying for them with drafts on the future Irish Government, and he
declined the other practical proposal to offer farms rent-free to all
who fought for Ireland. Neither would he assent to the suggestion that
he and the other leaders should go into hiding until the harvest was
reaped. Willing to fight and ready to die, he would not consent to
conduct a revolution on revolutionary lines. The departure of Doheny and
others--save Devin Reilly, who urged the abandonment of the insurrection
as hopeless--was in pursuance of their plan to await the gathering of
the harvest.

O'Brien's attitude at the Council of War destroyed the last hope of the
insurrection. He expected to get men to fight under his standard while
he essayed no adequate provision for their support in the field, and
interdicted them from interference with private property to supply them
with the necessaries of the campaign. No nobler and braver man has
appeared in modern Irish history than William Smith O'Brien, but at the
head of an insurrectionary movement he was incompetent. There was none
of his lieutenants who, in his position, could not have made the
insurrection to some extent formidable.

That it could have been successful, few will believe. Mitchel and
Meagher agreed that 1848 would not have been the year of Liberation. But
the former held very justly that the insurrection if it grew to
respectable dimensions might have forced terms from England. The
attitude of France at the time was a factor in the situation. The
pro-Irish minister, Ledru-Rollin, had been checked by the pro-English
minister, Lamartine, but General Cavaignac and Louis Napoleon were, for
divergent reasons, inclined to help Ireland against England, and
assurances had been given that if an Irish insurrection gained
considerable initial successes the French Government would exert
influence on England. A successful blow at Carrick and a subsequent
seizure of Kilkenny and proclamation of Irish independence from that
city was possible, and if realised would have probably led to the
counties of Waterford and Tipperary rising en masse. How far the
insurrection would have spread outside those counties is problematical,
but in the year 1848 they were counties which presented difficulties to
regular troops and advantages to insurgent forces. According to M'Gee,
Sligo was willing to rise if the South made a good beginning and the
Bishop of Derry, Dr. Maginn, sent a message to Gavan Duty that he was
willing to join in the insurrection at the head of his priests once the
harvest was reaped. Doheny's criticism of the action of some of the
Tipperary priests is justified. But of others it is to be remembered
that they were not in sympathy with Young Ireland, that they were not
bound to support an insurrection undertaken irrespective of them, and
that they could not be expected to take the initiative. There were at
least two priests in Tipperary prepared to lead their parishioners to
the insurgent standard if O'Brien struck at any point a successful blow.
O'Brien's indecision was the real cause why the insurrection died in its
birth.

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