as part of a movement which sought to protest President Lincoln’s Draft Bill, conscripting men between the ages of 20 to 45 into the Union Army. Many poorer Irish resented conscription and increasingly turned their anger on Lincoln’s Republican Party and African-Americans, both of whom they blamed for the Civil War. Beginning on 13 July 1863, many Irish looted the New York homes of wealthy republicans, burned down a home for African-American orphan children and killed a number of African-Americans, a good many of whom were found lynched from lampposts. Lasting for four days, the draft riots resulted in the death of 1,000 people and left New York economically weakened. An eyewitness to the fighting on the streets, O’Donovan Rossa was appalled by the rioting and was horrified by the behaviour of the Irish community. O’Donovan Rossa witnessed looting and unbridled violence, recalling: An old man remonstrated with one of the wreckers, and was struck and thrown down. I went to take up the fallen man, and the man who struck him pulled a pistol out of his pocket and put it to my face. ‘Oh’ said I. ‘I’m only doing what you yourself would do if you saw a poor man struck down by a young, hearty man such as you are.’ My comrades came around me, and the fellow did not pull the trigger of his pistol.17
Settling in Brooklyn, at No. 226 Schermerhorn Street, he lived with a relative, Timothy Donovan, who had emigrated to America in 1836. He now witnessed the spectacle of the Union soldiers parading and drilling or relaxing in tents. Meeting with John O’Mahony, he found the majority of the Fenian Brotherhood had enlisted as soldiers in the Union Army and took solace in a perspective that as the Irish in America were training as soldiers, ‘they might be better able to fight the battles of Ireland against England’.18 With O’Mahony, he visited armouries, drill rooms and meeting places of the Fenian Brotherhood. Aside from his political duties, O’Donovan Rossa also went into business with his cousin, Denis Donovan, and ran a saloon selling imported Irish whiskey and stout to the thriving Irish-American community in New York. Establishing their business at the corner of Madison Street, it was noted that his name was proudly displayed over the door. Around the same time he had also applied for naturalised American citizenship, and coming before the Court of Common Pleas in New York, he declared his intention for American citizenship.
O’Donovan Rossa also used the opportunity of his move to America to visit his mother Nellie, who he had not seen since she had emigrated to America in the late 1840s. Nellie had been living in Philadelphia with O’Donovan Rossa’s brother and when he had visited her, arriving at ten o’clock in the evening, she did not know who he was. Identifying himself, she still disbelieved her son. Rossa then directed her to a scar on his head, which he received in his youth, and feeling the scar, Nellie broke down crying and embraced her child. Reminiscing about the past and learning of the present, Nellie and Rossa stayed up all night talking and crying; he recalled that in the years since he had last seen his mother she had become a tragically changed woman who looked as old as his grandmother: ‘She was nothing more than a sorry caricature of the tall, straight, handsome woman with the hooded cloak, that was photographed, and is still photographed, in my mind as my mother.’19
O’Donovan Rossa moved back to Brooklyn after staying with his mother for a week and resumed his duties with the Fenian Brotherhood. He also had the occasion of meeting with Thomas Francis Meagher at New Jersey in the company of O’Mahony, who he claimed had introduced Meagher into the Fenian Brotherhood. Meagher left a favourable impression upon O’Donovan Rossa, and the young Irishman found him to hold a deep interest in Irish affairs. That evening he had travelled with O’Mahony to New York City where he was introduced to Colonel Michael Corcoran, a Sligo-born commander of the 69th New York Regiment, who was hosting a gathering for senior officers within the Fenian Brotherhood. O’Donovan Rossa recalled how all gathered had toasted Ireland and the Irish Republic.20 Later on, O’Donovan Rossa made the company of William O’Shea, a friend of his from Bantry who had been charged during the Phoenix Trials in 1859. O’Donovan Rossa lamented that he did not have enough time with O’Shea, who was killed shortly afterwards in the American Civil War. Another friend that he had met in America was Michael O’Brien. Originally from Cork, they had been friends while living in Ireland and met again in America. O’Brien told O’Donovan Rossa that he intended to join the Union Army, and O’Donovan Rossa tried to dissuade him, O’Brien argued that he needed military training, and fighting for the United States was the best way to achieve this. Unable to dissuade O’Brien from joining the Union Army, Rossa accompanied him to enlist and watched as he was measured, recorded and sworn in. While waiting on his friend, Rossa was continually asked whether he would consider enlistment within the army, on each occasion, he refused. Waving O’Brien off after his initial enlistment, O’Donovan Rossa would never see his friend again: while surviving the Civil War, Michael O’Brien would be executed in 1867 as a Manchester Martyr with William Allen and Michael Larkin, in the first political executions since Robert Emmet. He took his place within the great pantheon of Irish Nationalist Heroes. Michael O’Brien was not the only friend O’Donovan Rossa lost while in America. In the course of his visit he had learned that Eileen, his wife, had died in Ireland on 9 July 1863. The fact that she had died while he was in America left O’Donovan Rossa distraught. His grievance was compounded by the fact that he could not be with his son Stephens, who had been given to the temporary care of the Buckley’s. Returning to Ireland immediately he gave up all plans of settling in America. Throughout the remainder of his life, O’Donovan Rossa did not like to talk about Eileen. Her death, like that of Nora, continued to greatly affect him. Eileen was buried at Castlehaven; Stephens was taken into the care of his maternal grandmother. For a second time he was a widower.
4
THE IRISH PEOPLE AND THE TRIAL OF O’DONOVAN ROSSA
In 1863, the IRB began to publish its own newspaper called The Irish People. In quite an audacious move, the IRB had established the newspaper at No. 12 Parliament Street, within walking distance of Dublin Castle, the British Headquarters. The establishment of the newspaper was enthusiastically supported by James Stephens as a propaganda medium and to disseminate Fenian ambitions. The establishment of the newspaper was a calculated risk, however, considering it would bring attention to the IRB.1 At the time, O’Donovan Rossa recalled that there was much consultation over the newspaper’s establishment, with many leading figures fearing it could be ‘injurious rather than serviceable to the society’.2 He remembered how those who had supported the newspaper argued it was a practical necessity and apart from the desire to spread the Fenian ideal, the establishment of the newspaper was also grounded in an urgent need to raise funds so that the IRB would not be entirely reliant on the Fenian Brotherhood. He also recalled how others had suggested that a Fenian newspaper could become a means of offering an alternative perspective to the moderate nationalism of the dominant nationalist paper, The Nation, owned by A. M. O’Sullivan. O’Donovan Rossa agreed with the establishment of a newspaper, and while in America he received an invitation from Stephens to come to Dublin and act as the newspaper’s business manager. Eagerly accepting the invitation to return to Ireland, he left America in July and moved permanently to Dublin. His role as business manager meant that he was responsible for the circulation and dispatching of the newspaper at home and abroad, paying the staff and ensuring that the paper arrived at newsagents promptly. Later he would write articles under the pseudonym ‘Anthony the Jobbler’ and produce poetry, such as his famous ‘The Soldier of Fortune’. He wrote several leading articles for the newspaper including ‘Do-nothings’, ‘As good as any when the time comes’, ‘The first man to handle a pike’ and ‘The martyr nation’. The latter article, ‘The martyr nation’, gives a good example of O’Donovan Rossa’s beliefs at the time of writing:
The fact that the Irish people are being today destroyed – some of them in soul and body stares us in the face … instead of flying, we believe it to be our duty to remain in the old land, face the evil, and meet the destroyer with his own weapons … we do not contemplate Ireland Catholic or Protestant – we contemplate her free and independent; and we extend the love and fellowship, to everyman, of every class and creed who would endeavour to make it so.3
O’Donovan Rossa was joined at the newspaper by Thomas Clarke Luby, who functioned as the newspaper’s
