Col. Thomas Hungerford.
Carbery Independents, Captain Commanding, William Beecher.
Doneraile Rangers, Col. St. Leger Lord Doneraile.
Bantry Volunteers, Col. Hamilton White.
That Col. Hamilton White is very likely the same White who got the title of Lord Bantry, fourteen years after, for making a show of resisting the landing of the French in Bantry Bay in 1796. The whole army of those volunteers of ’82 was officered by the English landlord garrison of Ireland—in every county of Ireland; and so much English were they, that they would not allow a Catholic Irishman into their ranks. Why, the great Henry Grattan himself opposed the admission of Catholic Irishmen into the ranks of the Irish Volunteers. In his opposition to a motion made in the Irish Parliament House in 1785, he said:
“I would now wish to draw the attention of the House to the alarming measure of drilling the lowest classes of the populace by which a stain had been put on the character of the volunteers. The old, the original volunteers, had become respectable because they represented the property of the nation. But attempts had been made to arm the poverty of the kingdom. They had originally been the armed property—were they to become ‘the armed beggary?’ ”
The words “the armed beggary” are italicized in the history I quote from. And who profited by that “beggary” of the unarmed people? The plunderers who made them beggars, and who assembled in Dungannon—not to free Ireland, but to fortify themselves in the possession of their plunder.
I don’t know how it is that on this subject of the volunteers of ’82, I think differently from other people. I can’t help it; ’tis my nature some way. And I’m cross and crooked other ways, too. I remember one day, thirty odd years ago, in The Irish People office in Dublin, the company in the editor’s room were talking of Tom Moore, the poet. I said there were some very bad things in his writings, and I did not care to laud to the skies an Irishman who would tell us to
“Blame not the bard,
If he try to forget what he never can heal.”
The editor remarked that I did not understand his writings.
I suppose I did not. Nor do I suppose I understand them to-day; for I cannot yet conceive how any Irishman can be considered an Irish patriot who will sing out to his people, either in prose or verse, that it is impossible to free Ireland from English rule. Show me that anything else is meant by the line,
“If he try to forget what he never can heal,”
and I will apologize to the memory of Moore. That is what England wants the Irish people to learn. That is what she wants taught to them. And that is what she is willing to pay teachers of all kinds for teaching them—teaching them it is better to forget the evils they never can heal—better forget all about Irish freedom, as they can never obtain it. That’s the meaning of the song, and while I have a high opinion of the poetic talent of the man who made it, I cannot laud the spirit of it, or laud the maker of it for his patriotism; I incline rather to pity him in the poverty and cupidity that forced him, or seduced him, to sing and play into the enemy’s hands.
CHAPTER V.
THE EMIGRANT PARTING.—CARTHY SPAUNIACH.
In the year 1841, the family of my father’s brother Cornelius, sold out their land and their house, and went to America. In that house the priests used to have their dinner on “Conference” days in Ross. My uncle had recently died. His widow was Margaret, the daughter of Daniel O’Donoghue, who belonged to a family of O’Donoghues whom England had plundered. She had four daughters and two sons: Mary, Ellen, Julia, Margaret, Denis and Daniel. They settled first in Philadelphia. All the girls are dead; Julia died lately, a nun in a convent at Altoona, Penn. The two boys are living in Jackson, Tenn. It is that family started to bring out my father’s family from Ireland, when they heard in 1847 that my father died, and that we were evicted. One incident of the time that my uncle’s family left Ross made a picture in my mind that will remain in it forever. Sunday night a band of musicians came from Clonakilty, and they were playing at the house all night. It couldn’t be a happy Harvest-home festival. It was the sadder one of a breaking up of house and home. Monday morning those “Irish missioners” started for Cork. I joined the procession that went with them out of town. Out at Starkey’s, at Cregane, it halted. There, there was crying all around by the people, as if it was a party of friends they were burying in a graveyard.
I came back home with the company. My father was not able to go out of the house that day. He asked me all about the parting; and when I had told my story he commenced to cry, and kept crying for a half an hour or so. He made me ashamed of him, for here was I, a mere child, that was strong enough not to cry at all, and here was he, crying out loudly, as if he was a baby.
That’s the picture I cannot get out of my mind. But I cry now, in spite of me, while writing about it.
The English recruiting-soldiers would come to Ross those days and take many of the boys away with them, and then there was more crying of mothers, at having their children join the red-coats. Some man that I did not know was in our house for a few weeks. He remained in bed all the time. He had me at his bedside much of the time, telling me stories and playing with me. One dark night he came downstairs. The backdoor was opened, and out he went. I saw his shadow going up through the hill of the Fairfield. Mary Regan was the only strange woman in the house at the time, and she cryingly kissed and kissed the man before he left the house.
When I grew up to manhood I occasionally visited Ross, and Mary Regan would ullagone at seeing me, and draw a crowd around, telling of the little child who was the playmate of her boy when he was in the Hue and Cry on the run, and never told any one a word about his being for weeks in his father’s house. Her boy was Jemmie Regan, who had ’listed some time before that, and had deserted.
I saw another Ross deserter in the city of Lawrence, Mass., some quarter of a century ago. I was lecturing there one night. I was telling of Jillen Andy, whom I buried in the year 1847 without a coffin. A tall, grey-headed man in the audience commenced to cry, and came up to the platform to embrace me. I saw him in Ross when I was a child, when as a red-coat soldier he came home on furlough. He had lived next door to Jillen Andy. He was John Driscoll, the sister’s son of that North Cork militiaman, Dan Roe, of whom I have spoken in a previous chapter as having been at the battle of Vinegar Hill. This John Driscoll of Lawrence had deserted from the English Army in Canada, and reached America by swimming across the river St. Lawrence.
I am writing too much about crying in this chapter. It is no harm for me to add that I must have been a kind of cry-baby in my early days, for when I grew up to be big, the neighbors used to make fun of me, telling of the time I’d be coming home from school, and how I’d roar out crying for my dinner as soon as I’d come in sight of the house.
The life of my boyhood was a varied kind of life. I had as much to do as kept me active from morning till night. Early in the morning I had to be out of bed to drive the hens out of the fields. The two town fields were bounded at the eastern side by the Rock village, inhabited mostly by fishermen. The fishermen had wives; those wives had flocks of hens, and those flocks of hens at dawn of day would be into the fields, scraping for the seed sown in springtime, and pulling down the ripening ears of corn coming on harvest-time. No matter how early I’d be out of bed, the hens would be earlier in the field before me. My principal assistant in chasing them out and keeping them out was my little dog Belle. The hens knew Belle and knew me as well as any living creature would know another. But they were more afraid of Belle than of me, for when I’d show myself at the town side of the field, going toward them, they’d take their leisure leaving the field when Belle was not with me; but if Belle was with me, they’d run and fly for their lives.
Belle and I stole a march on them one day. We went a roundabout way to get to the rear of them. We went up Ceim hill, and by the old chapel schoolhouse, and down through the Rock. Then Belle went into the field