XIX.
On resuming my studies, I decided to enter the Detroit College of Medicine, and so, taking my family with me, I settled down there. There were many reasons for my change of residence, not the least important of which was that connected with the unpopularity which I found attached to me in my old home after my return from the Canadian affair. O’Neill had many opponents, and by these opponents I was attacked in company with O’Neill, and the others engaged in the affair, for having ruined the organisation by the premature “invasion” which had taken place. Therefore, I thought it better to remove to another quarter where this state of feeling did not exist, and where my Irish record would be of service to me in the future. As far as Detroit was concerned, I fixed upon it because of the desire of Judge M‘Micken that I should become acquainted with, and obtain as much information as I could about, Mackay Lomasney—whose name will be familiar in connection with the London Bridge explosion—and others just settled down there.
Lomasney was, in the eyes of the authorities, an important man; and his subsequent career, terminating with the attempt to blow up London Bridge, in which he lost his own life, fully justified their estimate. He had been engaged in the ’65 and ’67 movements in Ireland, had been charged with the murder of a policeman and acquitted, but sentenced to twelve years’ penal servitude for his work as a rebel, and, with others whose names will appear later, had been amnestied in the year 1870. He had now settled down in Detroit as the proprietor of a book-store; and as he was known to be a most active revolutionist, much curiosity was felt as to what he was actually doing. I formed a very pleasant acquaintance with Mackay Lomasney, and found him a most entertaining man. The future dynamitard was at this time about twenty-eight years of age. Though of youthful appearance, his face was a most determined one, and the way in which it lent itself to disguise truly marvellous. When covered with the dark bushy hair, of which he had a profusion, it was one face; when clean-shaven, quite another, and impossible of recognition. Acting, as he constantly did, as the delegate from the American section to the Fenians at home, this faculty of disguise proved of enormous service, and may very well have had disastrous effects on police vigilance. I have seen Lomasney both shaved, on his return from Ireland, and unshaved, in his American life; and in all the men I have ever met, I never saw such a change produced by so easy a process. I may dismiss Mackay Lomasney from this point of my story by saying that, beyond his activity in connection with the establishment of the Irish Confederation, his movements gave little ground for apprehension, and, as far as the Confederation was concerned, its development proved of very little account.
But, if the Confederation was to accomplish little, the men who with Lomasney took part in its initiation were not without their claims to attention. Foremost amongst them were two bearing names destined to be familiar in latter-day politics. These were O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy. As both will be found constantly strutting across the stage of Irish-American affairs from this date, I will pause here to refer to them in some little detail.
Jeremiah O’Donovan—the “Rossa” was, he claims, added in early years as the outward and visible sign of the alleged fact of his being directly descended from the Princes of Rossa—was, at the time of his arrival, one of the most popular men amongst the Irish in the United States. Sentenced to imprisonment for life for taking part in the ’65 movement, he had, according to general rumour, undergone the severest of sufferings and indignities in the British dungeons. A strong current of sympathy set in in his favour in consequence, and as both in public and private he lost no opportunity of dilating upon his grievance, the sentiment was in no sense allowed to waver or grow weak. The man whose name was to be so closely associated with dynamite and devilry in later years, did not at this time suggest by his appearance the possession of any undue ferocity. His face, though determined, was yet not without its kindly aspect, while his love for the bottle betrayed a jovial rather than a fiendish instinct. His fierceness, indeed, lay altogether in speech. Voluble and sweeping in his language, he was never so happy as when pouring out the vials of his wrath on the British Government.
Devoy, the notorious author of the “New Departure,” was at once seen to be a man of weighty influence. Forbidding of aspect, with a perpetual scowl upon his face, he immediately conveyed the idea of being a quarrelsome man, an idea sustained and strengthened by both his manner of speech and gruffness of voice. Experience of Devoy’s character only went to prove the correctness of this view. Quarrelsome and discontented, ambitious and unscrupulous, his friendships were few and far between; and had it not been for his undoubted ability, and the existence of those necessities which link adventurers together, he could never have reached the prominent place which he subsequently attained in the Fenian organisation.
With their fellow-prisoners who had been amnestied, General Thomas F. Bourke, Thomas Clarke Luby, Edmond Power, and Henry S. Meledy, together with James J. O’Kelly, late M.P. for Roscommon, but then a struggling reporter on a New York paper, Rossa and Devoy brought the Irish Confederation into existence, and formed its first “directory” or executive. They indulged in the wild hope of being able to gather in all the scattered Irish under one banner, and to put an end once and for all to the dissensions and divisions which had so disastrously affected Irish affairs in the past. They were disappointed. Not by their unaided efforts was this to be accomplished. Indeed, the Confederation was never popular. It was regarded as a sort of close corporation “run,” as we say in the United States, in the interest of the exiles, and, as a consequence, was jealously viewed by the rank and file. Every effort that could be made to bring about a fusion was tried by these men, but without success. Even Stephens himself was brought over from France and put at the head of affairs; but his name had lost its charm, and he had to return to Paris a discredited man.