The Easter Rising and Irish America: Watching 1916

When the Easter Rising began in Dublin on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, the news had an ocean to cross. For the Irish American diaspora, in the parishes and tenements of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, word arrived in fragments: a rebellion in the city centre, the General Post Office seized, a republic proclaimed at its door. The first reports were thin, delayed and contradictory, and some of them were wrong. But emigrant families did not read this story the way their neighbours did, because for them it was not foreign news. It was the country their mothers and fathers had left. And some of the money behind the Rising had been gathered, dollar by dollar, in their own halls.

This post follows the 1916 Rising from the far side of the Atlantic: who paid for it, how it was watched, and why the executions that came after changed diaspora opinion almost overnight.

The money that crossed before the news did

Irish republicanism had an American wing long before 1916. Clan na Gael, the republican organisation of the emigrants, had been raising money in Irish communities across the United States for decades. Its guiding figure was the veteran Fenian John Devoy, whose weekly paper, the Gaelic American, had a circulation of some 28,000 by 1916, most of it Irish households. Between 1913 and 1916 the Clan is believed to have sent around one hundred thousand dollars across the water to arm and organise the movement at home. Devoy himself reckoned it a small sum with which to start an insurrection, and still more than any Irish rising before it had ever had behind it.

The men in Dublin knew where part of their support lay. The Proclamation that Patrick Pearse read outside the General Post Office on the first morning said so plainly, describing Ireland as “supported by her exiled children in America”. The diaspora was not a bystander to the Rising. It was written into the document itself.

Easter Week, read from three thousand miles away

The Rising lasted six days. On Saturday, 29 April, Pearse ordered an unconditional surrender, stating that it was to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin’s civilians. The fighting had been largely confined to Dublin, though the fear was not: in Mayo, as in Boston, families waited on rumour.

By then the transatlantic cable, working since 1866, had been carrying the story to America for most of a week, in bulletins that raised more questions than they answered. For many emigrant households the first full account came not from the wires at all but by post, weeks later, when someone at home could finally sit down and write what they had actually seen and heard. The paper record travelled slower than the cable, and carried more.

The first reaction among Irish Americans was anything but united, and it is worth saying so honestly. Home Rule had been passed in 1914 and then suspended for the duration of the war, and much of the diaspora had trusted that constitutional road. Irishmen had enlisted in their thousands for the war in Europe, and plenty of Irish American families had cousins in British uniform in France that spring. To some readers, the Rising looked like a blow against everything the parliamentary movement had slowly built. To others it was the old cause out in the open at last. Most people held their judgement and waited for names.

The executions turn the Irish American diaspora

What happened next settled the argument. Between 3 and 12 May, fourteen men were executed by firing squad in the stonebreakers’ yard of Kilmainham Gaol, beginning on 3 May with Patrick Pearse, Thomas Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh. Thomas Kent was shot in Cork on 9 May. James Connolly, so badly wounded that he could not stand, was shot on 12 May. All seven signatories of the Proclamation were among the dead, and Roger Casement was hanged in London that August.

The executions did not come at once. They came in instalments, morning after morning across nine days, and each day’s list crossed the wires and renewed the shock. Opinion that had been divided at the end of April was largely united by the middle of May. In Philadelphia, Joseph McGarrity of Clan na Gael condemned the executions as an injustice and asked Americans for sympathy and fair play towards Ireland, and he spoke for a great many. People who had shaken their heads at the Rising itself found they could not defend the manner of its ending. In Ireland the same turn was happening at the same speed, and for the same reason.

From shock to organisation

Sympathy became structure quickly. The Friends of Irish Freedom, founded at the Irish Race Convention of 1916, grew into a mass movement that at one point counted some 275,000 members, and it kept Ireland in front of American opinion through the years that followed. Money, newspapers and public meetings all did their quiet work.

In Ireland, the tide can be read in a single result. At the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin swept the country. Within weeks the first Dáil had met in Dublin, and the War of Independence that followed had begun. The diaspora that had watched 1916 through the wires would follow that war the same way, and help pay for it too. The Rising itself had been put down in six days. The argument it started ran for another seven years, and in some families it has never fully ended.

May 1916 at one family’s fireside

Book Six of the family’s letters covers exactly these years, and its May 1916 letter is among the hardest in the series to read. Delia Gallagher, writing from Ballycastle, Co. Mayo, to her cousin Sean Ryan in New York, has to put the Rising and the executions on paper while feeling in her own parish is still divided. Two months later she is writing about the Somme, where Irish regiments suffered terrible losses in the same summer. That was the true shape of 1916 for an ordinary townland: two griefs at once, and no tidy side to stand on.

Her cousin in New York, reading her letter weeks after the events it described, stands for every emigrant family that lived through that season at a distance, dependent on the post for the truth of it. The envelope from home carried what the headlines could not: how it actually felt in one house, on one road, in the west of Ireland.

Book Six closes in December 1918, with the election and Sinn Féin’s landslide, the very result the Rising’s afterlife had made possible. Read in order, Delia’s letters from 1916 to 1918 trace the whole turn of feeling at the pace it actually happened, one month at a time, which is something no summary written afterwards can quite do.

If this is the period your own people carried with them to America, it sits at the centre of the rising and war years of Book Six, twelve letters that hold 1916 with the gravity it asks for. The whole story runs longer still, across the eight Books of one Irish family’s century, from the Famine to the end of the Second World War.