John Boyle O'Reilly

Artist Info

John Boyle O'ReillyMeath, Ireland, 1844 - 1890, Boston

O'Reilly, John Boyle (1844–1890), Irish nationalist and writer, was born on 28 June 1844 at Dowth Castle, co. Meath, 4 miles from Drogheda, second of three sons and five daughters of William David O'Reilly (d. 1871), who for thirty-five years was master of the national school attached to the Netterville institution for widows and orphans there, and Eliza Boyle (d. 1869/70), daughter of a Dublin tradesman. He was educated by his father, and in 1854 became an apprentice compositor on The Argus newspaper in Drogheda, replacing an older brother, William, in order to ensure that the premium of £50 would not be lost.

The apprenticeship terminated when the proprietor of the newspaper died in 1858. In late summer 1859 O'Reilly went to Preston, England, where an aunt resided, becoming a compositor on The Guardian, a local newspaper. After mastering shorthand he was elevated to reporter. In early 1863 O'Reilly returned to Ireland, enlisting in May as a trooper in the 10th hussars. A moderately built man of 5 feet 7½ inches, but athletically inclined, O'Reilly was regarded as a model soldier. Whether he joined the Fenian movement before or after enlisting in the army is uncertain but he became an active recruiter for it only from October 1865 after meeting John Devoy, who in spite of later differences in political outlook remained a lifelong friend. According to Devoy's later account, he then enlisted as many as eighty other Irish soldiers (Devoy, 152–9). On 13 February 1866 O'Reilly was arrested and on 9 July condemned by a military court martial to death, a sentence that was quickly commuted to twenty years' imprisonment. After brief incarceration in Mountjoy gaol, Dublin, then in English prisons, O'Reilly was transported to Western Australia, arriving on 10 January 1868. After a short and fairly comfortable confinement in Freemantle as an assistant in the library he was sent to Bunbury. There he soon became a constable in the convict colony but unlike the political prisoners of 1848 O'Reilly was subjected to ordinary regulations. With the aid of Father Patrick McCabe he absconded on 18 February 1869 to an American whaler. Following a perilous journey, during which he narrowly evaded capture, he reached Philadelphia on 23 November 1869 where he immediately took out his first American naturalization papers. He quickly decamped for New York before travelling onwards to Boston, which he reached on 2 January 1870. Fenian connections obtained him a clerkship in a shipping office, and in spring 1870 he joined The Pilot. O'Reilly remained associated with this Catholic newspaper for the rest of his life. One of his first assignments as a correspondent was to accompany the Fenian raid on Canada in June, an escapade about which he expressed frank reservations. O'Reilly's mother had died while he fled to America; on 17 February 1871 his father also passed away. On 15 August 1872 O'Reilly married Mary Murphy of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who was the daughter of Irish immigrants. They had four daughters between 1873 and 1880.

O'Reilly began writing while being held for court martial at Arbour Hill, Dublin. His poem ‘The Old School Clock’ dates from then. He continued writing while in Western Australia, and by the time of his arrival in Boston was known for his daring escape and as ‘the poet’. With Devoy and others in 1876 he helped organize the escape of six Fenians prisoners from Western Australia. In the same year he and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston purchased The Pilot, which O'Reilly edited until his death. He was a committed supporter of the American Democratic Party and advocated advanced positions, championing the cause of southern black people and the toleration of Jews while emphasizing the duties of American citizenship. O'Reilly rapidly established himself in literary, intellectual, and political circles to an extent unusual among recently arrived Irish immigrants. He helped found the literary society the Paphyus Club in 1873, becoming its president in 1879. O'Reilly was prominent in the formation of the Catholic Union of Boston in March 1873, serving as recording secretary. He became a friend of Wendell Phillips. In 1873 he committed himself to the new demand for home rule in Ireland, urging Fenians to give the new movement a fair trial. In 1875 O'Reilly was chosen as the poet for the celebration of Daniel O'Connell's centenary celebration in Boston. In 1878 he promoted the American lecture tour of Michael Davitt, recently released Fenian prisoner. At the close of the decade O'Reilly endorsed the ‘new departure’ which linked Fenianism and the ‘active’ section of Irish parliamentarians headed by Charles Stewart Parnell. A regular lecturer, he also published Songs from the Southern Seas (1873), Songs, Legends and Ballads (1878), and Moondyne (1879) during his initial decade in Boston. This last, a portrayal of convict life in Western Australia, was particularly popular, running through numerous editions. In 1879 he was president of the Boston Press Club and in the following year helped form the Cribb Club, dedicated to boxing. This sport fascinated O'Reilly, who was a proponent of ‘muscular Christianity’. In 1888 he authored The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport to ‘bring into consideration the high value, moral and intellectual as well as physical, of those exercises that develop healthy constitutions, cheerful minds, manly self-confidence, and appreciation of the beauties of nature and natural enjoyment’ (p. xi).

During the 1880s O'Reilly's hectic work schedule continued. His voice was by then a prop to the constitutional home-rule movement. He assisted Parnell's tour of North America at the beginning of 1880 and helped found the Irish National Land League of America in March, chairing its first national convention in May. During the imprisonment of Parnell and others in Ireland (1881–2), O'Reilly was at the forefront in urging that home rule should supplant the land agitation as the chief plank in the national programme. He was present in an unofficial capacity when in April 1883 the Irish National League of America was inaugurated in Philadelphia. Identifying with the conservative wing of Irish-American nationalism, he worked to break the influence of the radical Patrick Ford of the Irish World, and he eschewed the dispute between Alexander Sullivan of Chicago who controlled the Irish National League and Devoy. His writing won acclaim as well, and O'Reilly was selected to write odes in commemoration for many celebrations such as the reunion of the army of the Potomac at Detroit in 1881, and in 1888 for the dedication of the monument to Crispus Attucks in Boston. O'Reilly received several major recognitions. In 1881 Notre Dame University (Indiana) awarded him an honorary doctor of laws and Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) made O'Reilly an honorary Phi Beta Kappa. In 1889 Georgetown University (Washington, DC) gave him an honorary doctorate.

O'Reilly was a workaholic who suffered from chronic insomnia. To Devoy on 3 May 1886 he complained, ‘I am terribly overworked and cannot go to sleep’ (O'Brien and Ryan, 2.281). His work schedule was hectic and the health of his wife, who had been an invalid for several years, was a strain. On 3 March 1890 he began a strenuous lecture tour of the American west, returning exhausted to Boston on 5 May. He died there on 10 August 1890 from a self-administered overdose of chloral for insomnia. His funeral on 12 August in Boston was hugely attended; he was interred in Holyhood cemetery, Brookline, Massachusetts. Subsequently memorials were erected in his native Dowth and in Western Australia, and a park was named in his honour in Charlestown, Boston. The final stanza of ‘The Feast of the Gael’ written for St Patrick's day epitomized O'Reilly's vision of an inclusive Irish people, something increasingly out of fashion in the militant nationalism sweeping over his native land, revealing why his appeal stretched far beyond his own community:

Then drink, all her sons—be they Keltic or Danish,

Or Norman or Saxon—one mantle was o'er us;

Let race lines, and creed lines, and every line, vanish—

We drink as the Gael: ‘To the Mother that bore us!’

(Roche, 555)

Alan O'Day

Sources

J. J. Roche, Life of John Boyle O'Reilly together with his complete poems and speeches (1891) · W. O'Brien and D. Ryan, eds., Devoy's post bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols. (1948–53) · J. Devoy, Recollections of an Irish rebel (1929); repr. (1969) · T. N. Brown, Irish-American nationalism, 1870–90 (1966) · C. C. Tansill, America and the fight for Irish freedom, 1866–1922 (1957) · M. Davitt, Life and progress in Australasia (1898) · J. O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896) · J. Denieffe, A personal narrative of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (New York, 1906); facs. edn (Shannon, 1969) · DAB · F. R. Walsh, ‘The Boston Pilot: a newspaper for Irish immigrants, 1829–1908’, PhD diss., Boston University, 1968 · T. W. Moody, Davitt and Irish revolution (1982) · United Ireland (16 Aug 1890) · United Ireland (30 Aug 1890) · The Nation (16 Aug 1890) · DNB