Theobald Wolf Tone (1763-1798), orator and advocate of the freedom of Ireland, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He wrote pamphlets exposing British misgovernment, joined Protestants and Catholics in political fraternity, and founded at Belfast the first Society of United Irishmen, which William Chambers promptly joined. It is believed that at this time the green flag of Ireland was adopted, by uniting the orange and the blue. It is certain that at this time, green became the national color, although an emerald green standard was used in the sixteenth century.
One of these United Irishmen was Samuel Brown Wylie, who became the celebrated pastor, preacher, and Doctor of Divinity in Philadelphia. He left Ireland in 1797. In God's providence, exactly one century afterwards, the names of Chambers and Wylie were united in Philadelphia in that of a memorial church.
Wolf Tone, as secretary of the Roman Catholic committee, had already entered into secret negotiations with France and had to fly to the United States in 1795. He was afterwards captured on one of the ships of the French squadron, which was to invade Ireland.
The French having occupied Holland, had had a great fleet built in the Zuyder Zee to co-operate with the United Irishmen, but at the battle of Camperduin, off the coast of North Holland, October 11th, 1797, the British Admiral Duncan destroyed the French and Dutch fleet, and the high hopes of those who looked for Irish independence were dashed to the ground. Hundreds of them fled.
Tried and sentenced to death, Wolf Tone committed suicide in his cell, November 19th, 1798. His son afterwards served in the armies of France and the United States and wrote the biography of his father. Ever since 1797, the British navy has had a ship named "Camperdown".
In Scotland I have had the pleasure of visiting the Duncan estate near Dundee, and in Holland of seeing Camperduin and its vicinity, both of land and water.
The defeat of the French fleet and the imprisonment, trial, and sentence of their leader, Wolf Tone, drove the United Irishmen into an insurrection of despair. At the battle of Vinegar Hill, in May, 1798, the revolt was crushed and the French general Humbert surrendered. Forthwith the British constables began their hunt for each one and all of the United Irishmen to land them in prison.
William Chambers was, as we have seen, arrested and thrown into prison at Stewartstown. In some way he escaped and eluded those who were seeking him, until he made his way down to the ship, on which his family was leaving Ireland for America. Besides his wife with her little boys, James and John, the latter an infant of three months at the breast, were other emigrants on board. In the hold, there was a stock of cabbages and down among these vegetables the refugee father hid himself. The British officers came on board and searched the ship from stem to stern to find their man, but his wife had encouraged him to get so deeply under the material for sauerkraut, and had covered him up so well, that, unable to find him, they imagined he must have fled elsewhere. It was not until the ship was well out at sea that William Chambers rose up from among the cabbages and made himself visible. In later years, John Chambers visited the Stewartstown prison in which his father had been incarcerated.
In the slow ship they were knocked about on the wintry Atlantic during a stormy voyage of fourteen weeks, but happily arrived in the Delaware Bay, just when the buds were bursting, and the landscape of spring time putting on its fresh mantle of green. After their sea weariness the peach-orchards of Delaware must have looked as "fair as a garden of the Lord."
The Mayflower, which in 1620 bore the Pilgrims to America, was bound for the same beautiful region, then vaguely called "Virginia" but these people in 1799 were pilgrims bound to the forests of Ohio, the first of the Pilgrim states beyond the Alleghenies.[3]