Three years my grandfather passed in London and, later, seven years in Dublin before he met his future wife in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. There, previous to my father’s birth, two sons, George and Louis, died, George at the age of six, and Louis in infancy. But when my father was six months old, “red-headed, whopper-jawed, and hopeful,” as he would repeat, the famine in Ireland compelled his parents to go with him to America, setting out from Liverpool, England, in the sailing-ship Desdemona.
The autobiography goes on:
“Father told me that an overcrowded passenger-list prevented his leaving Dublin with my mother, with me at her breast, in a ship named the Star of the West that burned at sea during the trip. But because he told me this does not mean that it was so. His Gascon imagination could give character or make beauty wherever these qualities were necessary to add interest to what he was saying.
“They landed at Boston town probably in September, 1848, he a short, stocky, bullet-headed, enthusiastic young man of about thirty, with dark hair cf reddish tendencies and a light red mustache, she of his height, with the typical long, generous, loving Irish face, with wavy black hair, a few years his junior, and ‘the most beautiful girl in the world,’ as he used to say.
“Leaving mother in Boston,—where, by the way, I am beginning this account in the hospital fifty-six years afterward,—he started to find work in New York. In six weeks he sent for her. He said we first lived in Duane Street. Of this I knew nothing.
“From there we went to a house on the west side of Forsyth Street, probably near Houston Street, where now is the bronze foundry in which the statue of Peter Cooper which I modeled was cast forty-five years later. There my brother Andrew was born on Hallowe’en in 1850 or 1851, and there I made the beginning of my conscious life.
FRANCIS I. McCANNA, ESQ.,
of Providence, R. I.
A Valued Member of the Society.
“The beginnings of my father’s business were peculiar, since what interested him infinitely more than his store were the two or three societies to which he belonged and of which he was generally the ‘Grand Panjandrum.’ There were constant meetings of committees and sub-committees when there were not general ones. The principal society was the ‘Union Fraternelle Française,’ a mutual-benefit affair of which he was one of the founders and for many years the leading figure.”
My grandfather enjoyed as well the making of speeches at Irish festivals, where he would round off his conclusions with spirited perorations in the Gaelic tongue. Also he became an abolitionist, a “Black Republican,” during the Civil War; while, to involve matters still further, he was a Freemason who insisted on associating with the Negro Freemasons, and presiding at their initiations. The white Freemasons thereupon blacklisted him.