Finally, on the last day of May, 1802, word comes that the prisoners are to be sent to Hamburg. Thence it is Neilson’s intention to depart for America. But will he bring William with him, or send him home to his mother? The boy himself cannot bear the idea of parting with his father: “he has been in tears this hour past because I won’t promise to take him with me.”
The final decision is to send back William to his mother, and the son of one of the prisoners, Mr. Chambers, returning, one of these days, to Belfast, poor William was torn from his father and sent back to his mother and sisters.
He was to see his father once more. Braving all dangers, Samuel Neilson stole back to Ireland, for one last glimpse of its dear shores, and accompanied by faithful Jamie Hope, rode from Dublin to Belfast, to see his beloved wife and children, ere he bade them farewell for ever.
Less than nine months after his arrival in America, poor Neilson died, his giant frame worn out by all he had endured during his long imprisonment, as truly a martyr for Ireland as if he had perished, with so many others of his comrades, on the scaffold of ’98 or ’03.
Mrs. Neilson, soon after the break up of the Star, embarked in a small line of business, and God prospered her little enterprise. “She was enabled,” says Madden, “by the fruit of her industry, to bring up her children respectably, to give them education, and to leave them—such as it would have been her husband’s pride to have found them, had he lived to have seen them in their ripe years—trained to virtue and matured in useful knowledge.
“Miss McCracken, speaking of her, says: ‘Mrs. Neilson was a very superior woman, a most exemplary wife and mother, for whom I had the highest esteem, and continued on terms of intimacy and friendship, from 1795, when I first became acquainted with her, until her death. I never saw a family so well regulated, such order and neatness, on such a limited income; and such well-trained children, most amiable and affectionate to each other, and so respectful to their mother, and all so happy together—it was quite a treat to spend an evening with them.’ This excellent woman, esteemed and respected by all who knew her, even by those to whom her husband’s political principles were most obnoxious, struggled for her family during her husband’s imprisonment and exile and subsequently to his death, and died in November, 1811, in her forty-eighth year. Her remains were interred at Newtownbreda. The inscription on her tomb truly describes her to have been, ‘A woman who was an ornament to her sex; who fulfilled in the most exemplary manner, the duties of a daughter, wife and mother.’”
There remains only to tell, as briefly as may be, the story of her children, for of this woman, in a special degree it is true to say, that she has no history but the history of her husband and family. Poor William, whom we have learned to love as dearly as any of his masters in Fort George, lived long enough to show the fruits of the remarkable education he had received there—but alas! not long enough to confer on his country the benefits which all those who knew him expected from him. After a brilliant course at the Academical Institution, Belfast, he embraced a commercial career, where his splendid talents ensured for him a speedy success. His employers described him as “a young man of the most splendid talents we have ever known; there was no subject in mercantile affairs that he could not make himself master of. In public affairs he soon became conspicuous, and had he lived he would have been an ornament to his country.”
Alas! his career was cut by his death from yellow fever in Jamaica on February 7th, 1817.
Of the four daughters of Samuel and Anne Neilson, Anne (who lived much with Mrs. Oliver Bond) married a Mr. Magennis, in New York, and died there at an advanced age. Sophia and Jane married gentlemen of the name of McAdam, and one lived in Belfast, the other in New York. Mary, the youngest, married William Hancock of Lurgan, and was the mother of the distinguished statistician, William Neilson Hancock, LL.D.