1916 (22 page)

The IRB also saw the outbreak of war as an opportunity to exploit Britain’s difficulty. Bulmer Hobson later recounted: ‘In the autumn of 1914, under the influence of [Seán] MacDermott, the Supreme Council of the IRB decided they would embark on an insurrection against the
British government before the European war came to an end.’
³⁹
Although there were some objections, MacDermott and Tom Clarke were delegated to pursue the matter, which they did without much further consultation with the rest of the Supreme Council. They did work with a similarly small group from within the General Council of the Irish Volunteers, thus secretly committing that organisation to a rebellion also. All of this needed money, and the Clan and the Irish-American community began sending funds to both the IRB and the Volunteers. In September and November £2,000 was sent to the IRB when Thomas Ashe and Diarmuid Lynch returned to Ireland.
⁴⁰
It was recognised that when the Irish Volunteers and the National Volunteers split in the autumn of 1914 a good portion of the money was seized by Redmond’s forces. Funds had to be sent to the Irish Volunteers right away. The Cohalan papers show that $10,000 was withdrawn from the Irving National Bank on 20 October by the treasurer of the Irish National Volunteer Fund (and also taken to Ireland by Lynch), followed by another $15,000 on 12 November (taken to Ireland by John Kenney). More monies followed and in 1915 the Clan created an ‘arms fund’ to raise new money. Much of this was couriered to Ireland by an IRB messenger, Tommy O’Connor, who worked on a White Star passenger liner making regular transatlantic crossings.
⁴¹
The Clan also continued to subsidise Casement in Germany, although not the expenses of the Irish brigade. Funds for Casement were sent through the German embassy and by couriers, such as John Kenney, Seán T. O’Kelly, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Plunkett’s sister Philomena, and the Philadelphia lawyer, Michael Francis Doyle.
⁴²
Indeed, as plans for the Rising developed, quite apart from providing funds, Devoy, McGarrity, and Judge Cohalan became the main link between the IRB in Ireland and the German embassy and government.

It is fair to say that the Irish-American community was not unanimous in their support for Germany in the war. This should not be surprising; even people who did not favour the Allies and did not want the United States involved in the war found German objectives and practices to be deplorable. However, there was a significant portion of the Irish-American community who consistently saw all British actions as ruthless and selfish and regarded Germany as a possible saviour of Irish fortunes. In the aftermath of the sinking of the
Lusitania
, a turning point in the war, a large public meeting was held on 24 June 1915 in Madison Square Garden in New York. An enormous crowd of 75,000 people, largely Irish-Americans and German-Americans, came to hear the key speaker, William Jennings Bryan, President Wilson’s former secretary of state, who had just resigned
over the strength of Wilson’s
Lusitania
note to the Germans. Georg von Skal chaired the meeting and Devoy and Jeremiah O’Leary were among the speakers. O’Leary, who ran the American Truth Society and published an anti-British journal called
Bull
, became so outspoken in his criticism of Britain and the United States, as it edged closer to war in 1916 and 1917, that he was eventually tried for treason.
⁴³
Devoy, although he was regarded as a ‘confidential agent’ by the German embassy and his newspaper was barred from the mails when the United States entered the war, managed to avoid treason charges. James K. McGuire, the former mayor of Syracuse, New York, fully embraced an Irish-German alliance and wrote two books promoting the idea:
The King, the Kaiser and Irish freedom
in 1915, and
What could Germany do for Ireland
? in 1916. Years later all of these people would be accused of being in the employ of the German embassy.
⁴⁴

There were Irish-Americans employed by the German embassy, largely to sabotage the sale and shipment of munitions to the Allies in the war. Captains von Papen, von Igel, and Karl Boy-Ed hired Irish-American dock workers on both coasts to go on strike in order to slow down and disrupt the shipments, and to place incendiary devices on munitions ships to disable or sink them at sea. To expand this programme Captain Franz Rintelen von Kleist, of German naval intelligence, was sent to the United States in 1915, rather separate from the embassy. Because of his prestige and his good relationship with Devoy and other Clan leaders, James Larkin was actively recruited to serve as an intermediary between the Germans and the workers. Larkin had numerous meetings with the Germans, to the extent of being shown explosive facilities in Hoboken, New Jersey, and seems to have taken their money from time to time, but refused to become an active participant in their sabotage.
⁴⁵
These activities linked the Irish and the Germans in the public mind in the United States and also served to demonstrate to the Germans the reliable anti-British sentiment of the Irish. These activities also came to the attention of the American government. On 18 April 1916, in an effort to stop the sabotage in the munitions industry, secret service agents raided the offices of Captain von Igel in New York. When the files and paper in the office were seized, much of the correspondence between Devoy and Judge Cohalan and the German embassy fell into the hands of the American government. There was immediate alarm that information about the Rising and its date would become public knowledge, or at least be conveyed to the British. Devoy, however, sent a reassuring note to McGarrity in a thinly disguised code:

I know you will be anxious after hearing of the fire in the house to learn if we all came off safe. I am glad to be able to inform you that all the papers relating to the property were saved except one little scrap, and that will not be much of a loss. The sale will come off on time and everything looks all right. We were very anxious for the whole day, but when the firemen got through with their work of salvage we found we had no cause for worry.
⁴⁶

Nine days later, and six days after the Rising, the British asked the State Department for any relevant information but were turned down by Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
⁴⁷
Devoy, who despised the Wilson administration, publicly maintained that the Rising had been betrayed by the United States government. In fact, British intelligence had by this time broken the German code and was reading German transatlantic messages and had most of the material the American government had seized.

As the war unfolded there was a growing feeling among the Clan leaders that something had to be done to shape public opinion within the Irish-American community. By the autumn of 1915 Devoy became the centre of a discussion about the need for a national meeting to create a platform for opponents of Redmond and the current home rule measures. In December the idea of an Irish race convention was settled and on 15 January 1916 invitations were sent to Clan members; on 9 February the ‘call’ went out to the Irish-American community for a meeting in New York on 4 and 5 March.
⁴⁸
The invitations were sent to Irish-American organisations all over the United States to send delegates. Well over 2,000 people attended, making it the largest Irish-American meeting ever held, and it was a perfect venue for strong speeches in favour of Irish self-government. The most important accomplishment of the Race Convention was the creation of a new public organisation, the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF). The president was Victor Herbert, famous composer and grandson of Samuel Lover; the treasurer was Thomas Hughes Kelly; and the secretary was John D. Moore – all blue ribbon figures, although the Executive Committee was dominated by Clan members. One of the first acts of the Friends was to create a bureau in Stockholm, Sweden, staffed by the former US diplomat, T. St John Gaffney, who was to serve as a link to Germany. The FOIF drew thousands of people across the United States, particularly from the moribund UIL, and specific provisions were made for associate membership for existing local Irish-American societies.
⁴⁹
Of
course no mention was made of the coming Rising in Ireland, although in retrospect it is clear that the organisation was intending to provide American support for the Rising and the subsequent Irish struggle. Indeed, the FOIF became the most important Irish-American nationalist organisation in the country over the next five years.

Although the plans for the Rising were worked out in 1915 and early 1916, under the leadership of Tom Clarke, the number of people involved remained a handful of the IRB and Volunteer leadership. The Americans had facilitated the movement of messengers in and out of Germany, but John Devoy was not informed of the actual Rising until 5 February 1916. He recounted receiving a coded message through Tommy O’Connor from the Supreme Council of the IRB. O’Connor began to decipher the message, but when the first sentence read ‘Nobody but the Revolutionary Directory and the chief German representative must know the contents of this,’ Devoy took the message home and decoded the rest of it himself. The key passage informed him that the Rising would take place on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916 and that the Germans were to ‘send a shipload of arms to Limerick quay’ between 20 and 23 April.
⁵⁰
Devoy immediately took these instructions to Captain von Papen, and the Germans provided a ship, the
Libau
, sailing by the name
Aud
, a similar Norwegian vessel. The ship was loaded with captured Russian rifles and ammunition, and the key element for an effective military effort in the Rising was set in motion. On 14 April, another courier, Philomena Plunkett, the daughter of Count Plunkett, delivered a note with instructions that the weapons be delivered on Saturday 22 April. Devoy duly conveyed this change of date to von Papen and the message was sent to Germany. However, the
Aud
had already sailed and, without a radio, was beyond reach.
⁵¹

When the ship arrived off Tralee on the 20th, as arranged, there were no Volunteers to meet it – a result, perhaps, of the extreme secrecy surrounding the whole enterprise. The vessel was eventually hailed by a royal navy ship and escorted to Cobh (Queenstown) where its crew scuttled the ship. This misadventure deprived the Rising of a substantial supply of weapons and had the additional consequence of upsetting the timing by one day. In a second misadventure, Casement, by this time disillusioned with the Germans and disappointed in his effort to recruit a substantial Irish brigade from among Irish prisoners of war, was brought by submarine to Tralee Bay where he, Captain Robert Monteith and Sergeant Julian Beverley (Daniel J. Bailey) were landed on Banna Strand. Although Casement and Beverley were soon arrested, Monteith avoided detection in 1916 and eventually made his way to the United States. Casement may have hoped to cancel the Rising, but his capture, together with that of
the
Aud
, certainly contributed to Eoin MacNeill’s decision to do so. Thus when the Rising started on Easter Monday morning, on the orders of Pearse, Clarke, Connolly, and the others, the chance for surprise, for new weapons from Germany, and for a full complement of the Volunteers, had been lost.

The circumstances of the Rising in Dublin on Easter Monday 24 April 1916 are examined elsewhere in this volume. When the General Post Office was captured a coded message was sent to John Devoy in New York, ‘Tom successfully operated today’, which alerted him and his Clan colleagues to the fact that the insurrection had started.
⁵²
For the next few weeks Devoy and others had to rely on the garbled newspaper reports from Ireland and Britain. Devoy’s
Gaelic American
printed brave stories that were largely conjecture.
⁵³
The reaction across the United States, among both the general public and most of the Irish-American community, was largely disapproval of the Rising as a mad escapade, probably rather cynically prompted by the Germans. However, with the executions of the signatories to the Proclamation and several others, opinion shifted to increasing criticism of the British authorities. Within the Irish-American community, the newly organised FOIF became a driving force in arranging for public meetings and passionate speakers denouncing Britain’s ruthlessness and its hypocrisy in purporting to wage a war in Europe in defence of small nations. Even people outside the Irish community could see the irony in the situation. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in England:

I wish your people had not shot the leaders of the Irish rebels after they surrendered. It was a prime necessity that the rebellion should be stamped out at once, and that the men should be ruthlessly dealt with while the fighting went on; but [Sir Edward] Carson himself had just been in the cabinet, and he and the Ulstermen about two years previously had been so uncomfortably near doing the same thing, and yet had been so unconditionally pardoned, that I think it would have been the better part of wisdom not to extract the death penalty …
⁵⁴

The political dimension of these protests focused in the summer of 1916 on several congressional resolutions asking the British government to spare the life of Roger Casement, tried and convicted of treason in London in June. After extensive discussion the Senate passed a modified resolution seeking clemency for ‘Irish political prisoners’ on Saturday 29 July. The document was delivered to the White House, sent to the State Department, and then on 2 August encoded and cabled to the embassy in London and decoded there. The result was that although the resolution was delivered to the Foreign Secretary on the morning of 3 August, Casement had been hanged earlier that day. The British government had been kept fully informed of this whole procedure by their ambassador in the United States, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, who told the Foreign Secretary privately: ‘You will of course be prepared for a great explosion of anti-British sentiment to take place in case of Casement’s execution.’
⁵⁵
This refusal of the British government to be moved by this appeal from the United States provided plenty of ammunition to the Clan and the FOIF in their subsequent campaigns on behalf of Irish independence.