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John Devoy

1842–1928

 

When John Devoy died in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 29th September 1928, the eighty-six-year-old Irish patriot was virtually penniless.  The last of the old Fenian leaders, he had given his whole life to the cause of Ireland.  In its report of his death, The Times said he was 'the most bitter and persistent, as well as the most dangerous enemy of this country which Ireland has produced since Wolfe Tone'.  He had lived to see Ireland gain her freedom, but it had brought him no reward beyond the joy of being proved right.

      Devoy had been born in Kill, County Kildare, on 3rd September 1842, the son of a small farmer.  His father was involved in both the movement for Catholic emancipation led by DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and in the more revolutionary Young Ireland.  Their house was full of debate on the future of Ireland and what direction it should take.  For John Devoy there would be no doubt: it was to be the revolutionary road.

      After the famine, the family moved to the city, where his father worked in a brewery.  While working as a clerk, John also attended some courses at the new Catholic University (then in the charge of its founder, the famous priest John Henry Newman).  He joined the Fenians, and in 1861 the French Foreign Legion in order to learn the art of war.  He spent a year in Algeria, which the French were in the long process of subduing.

      Returning to Ireland in 1862, recognized as a born conspirator, he was placed in charge of the Fenian scheme to subvert the British army by placing Fenians widely throughout its ranks.  Efforts were made to arrest him in September 1865, but it was not until he was captured in the aftermath of the escape of James Stephens, the Fenian 'Head Centre', in February 1866, that he was betrayed and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.  In 1871 he was released with four other Fenians on condition that they left the British Empire.

      Devoy immigrated to the United States, where he and his friends were greeted warmly by the Irish community.  He joined the New York Herald as a reporter, and rose to being in charge of the foreign desk.  But in 1879 James Gordon Bennett dismissed him for supporting CHARLES PARNELL [5], whom the proprietor opposed.

      In New York, Devoy worked in succession on the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Journal, and on the Herald and Evening Post in Chicago.  Then, in 1881, he set up his own paper in New York, the Irish Nation, and became a leading figure in Clann na Gael, the Fenian party.  From 1875 to 1876 he helped to organize the rescue of the exiled Fenian prisoners from Fremantle Prison in Australia.  He obtained funds from the Clan to support the work of the submarine pioneer John Philip Holland in building his Fenian Ram, intended to help destroy the British navy.  But his greatest achievement was through his journalism and his role as a pivotal figure around which others banded.

      In 1878 MICHAEL DAVITT [24] arrived to lecture in the United States.  In October, he and Devoy called for a new policy for the Fenian movement, which was to be called the New Departure.  This meant that the revolutionaries would rally behind Charles Parnell and the parliamentary party in Ireland and support the Land League.  Devoy then sent a telegram to the party, offering conditional support to Parnell.  He travelled to Europe, but at a meeting in Paris in January 1879 the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood rejected the notion of the New Departure as put to them by Devoy and Davitt.  In April and June, Devoy and Davitt met Parnell in Dublin, and the New Departure went ahead.

      Devoy reported on his mission to Europe at the Clan na Gael convention in August in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.  The Irish Americans were left divided among themselves over what should be done.  Their interests were now involved both in Ireland and, more complexly, in America.

      In the US census of 1880 the Irish were estimated at 27.8 per cent of the foreign-born population.  The children of Irish-born parents were estimated at 2,756,054.  At a convention of the New York Irish Republicans in Saratoga, John Devoy and others planned to detach the Irish vote from the Democrats and move it, if they could, to the Republicans.

      In 1882, a crucial year in Irish history, which saw the murder of the chief secretary of Ireland and one of his officials in Dublin's Phoenix Park by terrorists, and the reintroduction of rigorous measures to suppress protest and discontent in Ireland, Devoy published The Land of Erin, a statement of his views on the terrible past and the possible future of the country.  In the Irish Nation he focused on trying to break the relationship between England and America, but the paper was closed down in 1885.  On 30th August 1900, before the US presidential election, Devoy formed with Patrick Egan and Patrick Ford the Irish-American Union to oppose the policies of the Republican William McKinley, who they saw as advocating imperialism and an understanding with Britain.  Instead, they urged support for William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic and populist candidate - a reverse of what they had wanted in 1880.  McKinley won.

      In 1903 Devoy founded a weekly, The Gaelic American, which expounded the ideas of the Fenians and Clan na Gael, which had now withdrawn its support from the reunited Irish party.  With Judge Daniel Cohalan, Devoy then worked in the coming decade to unite the disparate aspects of the Irish movement.

      During the first years of the First World War, up to 1917, when America came in on the Allied side, Devoy was in touch with German agents eliciting support for the Irish cause by way of guns for the Easter week uprising and defence funds for ROGER CASEMENT [94].  Yet when the new nation emerged and EAMON DE VALERA [2] visited America as president of the Irish republic in 1920, relations were difficult; the leadership of Ireland was evidently passing from Irish Americans back to native Irish.  This generated a certain sense of ill feeling.  However, Devoy supported the Irish Free State when it came into existence, and he finally returned to Ireland on a brief visit in 1924, the year after the civil war ended.  As an American, he opposed the League of Nations and the World Court, those brainchildren of Woodrow Wilson's 'new order', because he felt they posed entangling external alliances to American freedom.

      He was then working on his memoirs, Recollections of an Irish Rebel.  His collected correspondence has proved a rich source for historians interested in the details of the Irish revolutionary movements.  He kept alive the old Fenian tradition, at last passing it on to a younger generation who had fought in 1916 and in the troubles.  For that reason his remains were brought back for burial in Ireland, with honours from the new government, but his best work had been the creation of not only the modern Irish state, but the unity of the Irish-American community.