Limerick gave orders to close all the public houses in the village. I was in at the house of Mrs. Collins, an aunt-in-law of mine, when the police came in, with orders to clear the house. “If you tell me to go out,” said I to Mrs. Collins, “I will go out.” “I won’t turn you out of my house,” said she. “If you put your hands on me, and tell me to leave this house,” said I to Sergeant William Curran, or to Dockery (who now keeps a hotel in Queenstown), “I will leave it.” “I won’t put my hand on you,” said the policeman; “my orders are to have Mrs. Collins clear the house, and I can’t do more.” The police went out; I and my friends went out after them, telling Mrs. Collins it was better for her to close up, for Limerick was lord of the manor, and lord of her license to keep house.
The police in the street arrested Patrick Donovan. Some girls named Dillon, first cousins of his, snatched him away from the police and rushed him into their house. John Limerick read the Riot Act. Potter, the Chief of Police gave the order of “fix bayonets,” et cetera. The women in the windows, at each side of the street, were screaming in alarm. Patrick Spillane, the Master-instructor of the Skibbereen band (now in Rochester, N. Y.), stood up in his carriage and addressed the people, denouncing the village tyranny they were witnessing; Dan. O’Donoghue, one of the bandsmen (a Protestant), in a scuffle with a policeman, broke his trombone. I asked Potter, the Chief of Police, what did he mean to do now, with his drawn swords and fixed bayonets? He said he meant to quell this riot. I told him there was no riot but what was made by Mr. Limerick.
Five or six other magistrates were there. I knew Doctor Somerville and John Sidney Townsend. I got talking to them; they told me to go home. I told them I would stay at home that day only that threats from John Limerick had been coming to my house all the week that if I set my foot in Union Hall again it would be worse for me.
Things gradually quieted down; the police were ordered off the ground, and peace was restored. There were lots of summonses next day; McCarthy Downing was employed for our defence, and some fines were adjudged against a few of the people. But that was not the worst of it. Many of them who filled situations lost their places. A few national schoolmasters, who were in the village that day were suspended, and did not teach school in Ireland since. One of them was John O’Driscoll, who died in Boston a few years ago.
A few days after this Union Hall affair I called into the Beecher Arms Hotel in Skibbereen and met John Sydney Townsend. We talked of the affair of the previous Sunday. I said affairs had come to a queer pass when an Irishman, in his own country, would be forbidden to tread its soil. Why, said I, if you yourself were in a foreign land, and if any one insulted you because that you were an Irishman, you would resent the insult. He took off his coat and his vest, took hold of my hand and placed it on his shoulder, to let me feel his shoulder-blade that was out of joint. “I got that,” said he, “in Australia, in a fight with fellows that were running down the Irish.” He got that middle name, Sidney, from having lived several years in Sydney, Australia. What a pity it is that men like him will not fight for Ireland in Ireland. Most of them are found on the side of Ireland’s deadliest enemy—their enemy, too, if they would only rightly understand it.
The spirit of the men in the south of Ireland was running ahead of the times—running into fight with the laws of the English enemy before the Fenian organization in America or Ireland had made any adequate preparation for a successful fight. Many of the men had gone to America, and many of them went into the American army, to learn the soldier’s glorious trade—as much for the benefit of Ireland’s freedom as for the benefit of America’s freedom. Patrick Downing, Denis Downing and William O’Shea were in Cork Jail with me in 1859. In 1863 I made a visit to America and saw Patrick Downing, Lieutenant-Colonel of the Forty-second Tammany Regiment; William O’Shea, captain in the same regiment; Denis Downing, captain in a Buffalo regiment, and I saw Michael O’Brien, the Manchester martyr, enlisted into a Jersey regiment. O’Shea was killed in the war. Denis Downing lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, Patrick Downing was wounded many times. All dead now, and many more dead, who with their last breath, wished it was in a fight for Ireland against England they were dying. I’ll go back to Skibbereen for a while.
Things were getting so hot there in the year 1863, and there was in the line of business and employment, such an English boycott upon men who were suspected of belonging to the organization that many of them left the town and went to America. I left the town myself, and went with a party of them—Dan Hallahan, Wm. McCarthy, Simon O’Donovan, John O’Gorman, Jerrie O’Meara, and others, having made arrangements with my family to be away a few months.
The word “boycott” was not in the English language then, but the practice of the work it represents had been put in active use against me by the landlords of the district. None of them would deal with me or enter my shop. Small loss that, so far as it concerned the landlords personally. But when it came to be known all around that any tenant who would enter my shop would incur the displeasure of the landlord and the landlord’s agent, it was a different thing; it was there I felt their power against me. I sold all kinds of farm seeds, and I found some farmers, who lived five miles out of town, coming in and waking me up in the dead hour of night to buy their supply of seeds from me. Then, some of the landlords that were given to the encouragement of the cultivation of crops for the feeding of cattle, would give orders to the farmers for all kinds of clover and grass seeds, and would pay the shopkeeper’s bills for those seeds. I got my due share of those orders during some years; but all at once they ceased coming to me, just as if a council meeting of landlords had been held, and it was decided that no orders be given on my house, and no bills for seeds be paid that were contracted in my house.