Daniel O'Connell

Kerry and France O'Connell was born at Carhan House, near Cahersiveen, County Kerry, to the O'Connells of Derrynane, a wealthy Roman Catholic family that, under the Penal Laws, had been able to retain land only through the medium of Protestant trustees and the forbearance of their Protestant neighbours. His parents were Morgan O'Connell and Catherine O'Mullane. The poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was an aunt; and Daniel Charles, Count O'Connell, an Irish Brigade officer in the service of the King of France (and twelve years a prisoner of Napoleon), an uncle. O'Connell grew up in Derrynane House, the household of his childless uncle, Maurice "Hunting Cap" O'Connell (landowner, smuggler and justice of the peace) who made the young O'Connell his heir presumptive. In 1791, under his uncle's patronage, O'Connell and his younger brother Maurice were sent to continue their schooling in France at the English Jesuit college of Saint-Omer. Revolutionary upheaval and their mob denunciation as "young priests" and "little aristocrats", persuaded them in January 1793 to flee their Benedictine college at Douai. They crossed the English Channel with the brothers John and Henry Sheares who displayed a handkerchief soaked, they claimed, in the blood of Louis XVI, the late executed king. The experience is said to have left O'Connell with a lifelong aversion to mob rule and violence. 1798 and legal practice After further legal studies in London, including a pupillage at Lincoln's Inn, O'Connell returned to Ireland in 1795. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, while maintaining the Oath of Supremacy that excluded Catholics from parliament, the judiciary and the higher offices of state, had granted them the vote on the same limited terms as Protestants and removed most of the remaining barriers to their professional advancement. O'Connell, nonetheless, remained of the opinion that in Ireland the whole policy of the Irish Parliament and the London-appointed Dublin Castle executive, was to repress the people and to maintain the ascendancy of a privileged and corrupt minority. On 19 May 1798, O'Connell was called to the Irish Bar. Four days later, the United Irishmen staged their ill-fated rebellion. Toward the end of his life, O'Connell claimed, belatedly, to have been a United Irishman. Asked how that could be reconciled with his membership of the government's volunteer Yeomanry (the Lawyers Artillery Corps), he replied that in '98 "the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty." Whatever the case, O'Connell had little faith in the United Irishmen or in their hopes of French intervention. He sat out the rebellion in his native Kerry. When in 1803, Robert Emmet faced execution for attempting to renew the rebellion against what was now a United Kingdom crown and parliament, O'Connell declared that as the cause of so much bloodshed Emmett had forfeited any claim to "compassion". In the decades that followed, O'Connell practised private law and, although invariably in debt, reputedly had the largest income of any Irish barrister. In court, he sought to prevail by refusing deference, showing no compunction in studying and exploiting a judge's personal and intellectual weaknesses. He was long ranked below less accomplished Queen's Counsels, a status not open to Catholics until late in his career. But when offered he refused the senior judicial position of Master of the Rolls. Family In 1802, O'Connell married his third cousin, Mary O'Connell. He did so in defiance of his benefactor, his uncle Maurice, who believed his nephew should have sought out an heiress. the marriage was happy and Mary's death in 1836 was a blow from which her husband is said never to have recovered. == Political beliefs==

Church and state O'Connell's personal principles reflected the influences of the Enlightenment and of radical and democratic thinkers some of whom he had encountered in London and in masonic lodges. He was greatly influenced by William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (public opinion the root of all power, civil liberty and equality the bedrock of social stability), and was, for a period, converted to Deism by his reading of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. By 1809, he had returned to the Church, "becoming thereafter more devout by the year". Yet in the 1820s, he was still regarded by some as an "English rationalist utilitarian", a "Benthamite". For a time Jeremy Bentham and O'Connell did become personal friends as well as political allies. At Westminster O'Connell played a major part in the passage of the Reform Act 1832 and in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (an international cause in which he continued to campaign). He spoke in defence of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, censured flogging in the army and opposed the death penalty for all but murder. He welcomed the revolutions of 1830 in Belgium and France, Such liberalism (as "thorough", William Ewart Gladstone suggested, as that of an English liberal with "no Ireland to think of") made all the more intolerable to O'Connell the charge that as "Papists" he and his co-religionists could not be trusted with the defence of constitutional liberties. O'Connell protested that, while "sincerely Catholic", he did not "receive" his politics "from Rome". At the same time, he insisted on the political independence of the Church. In 1808 "friends of emancipation", Henry Grattan among them, proposed that fears of Popery might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs, a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. Even when, in 1814, the Curia itself (then in a silent alliance with Britain against Napoleon) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", O'Connell was unyielding in his opposition. Refusing any instruction from Rome as to "the manner of their emancipation", O'Connell declared that Irish Catholics should be content to "remain forever without emancipation" rather than allow the king and his ministers "to interfere" with the Pope's appointment of their senior clergy. Church and nation In his travels in Ireland in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population". The people looked to the clergy, and the clergy "rebuffed" by the "upper classes" ("Protestants and enemies"), had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people; [a] state of affairs altogether peculiar to Ireland". Such was the unity, O'Connell argued, the bishops would have sacrificed had they agreed to Rome submitting their appointments for Crown approval. Licensed by the government they and their priests would have been as little regarded as the Anglican clergy of the Established Church. In most districts of the country, the priest was the sole figure, standing independent of the Protestant landlords and magistrates, around whom a national movement could be reliably built. But for O'Connell a weakening of the bond between priests and their people would have represented more than a strategic loss. In "the heat of combat", he would let slip his repeated emphasis on the inclusiveness of the Irish nation to suggest Catholicism itself as the nation's defining loyalty. and indeed that Catholics in Ireland are "the people, emphatically the people" and "a nation". For O'Connell's newspaper, the Pilot, "the distinction created by religion" was the one "positive and unmistakable" mark of separating the Irish from the English. The Catholic Bishops came out in support of O'Connell's stance, resolving "most energetically to oppose any such arrangement, and that they look upon those that labour to effect it as the worst enemies of the Catholic religion". Disavowal of violence Consistent with the position he had taken publicly in relation to the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, O'Connell focused on parliamentary representation and popular, but peaceful, demonstration to induce change. "No political change", he offered, "is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood". His critics, however, were to see in his ability to mobilise the Irish masses an intimation of violence. It was a standing theme with O'Connell that if the British establishment did not reform the governance of Ireland, Irishmen would start to listen to the "counsels of violent men". Abandonment of the Irish language Irish was O'Connell's mother tongue and that of the vast majority of the rural population. Yet he insisted on addressing his (typically open-air) meetings in English, sending interpreters out among the crowd to translate his words. At a time when "as a cultural or political concept 'Gaelic Ireland' found few advocates", O'Connell declared: I am sufficiently utilitarian not to regret [the] gradual abandonment [of Irish]... Although the language is associated with many recollections that twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication is so great, that I can witness, without a sigh, the gradual disuse of Irish. O'Connell's "indifference to the fate of the language", a decade before the Famine, was consistent with the policies of the Catholic Church (which under Paul Cardinal Cullen was to develop a mission to the English-speaking world) and of the government-funded National Schools. Together, these were to combine in the course of the century to accelerate the near-complete conversion to English. There is no evidence to suggest that O'Connell saw "the preservation or revival or any other aspect of 'native culture' (in the widest sense of the term) as essential to his political demands". ==Emancipation and the agrarian crisis==

The "Liberator" 1789–1856) To broaden and intensify the campaign for emancipation, in 1823, O'Connell established the Catholic Association. For a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), this, for the first time, drew the labouring poor into a national movement. Their investment enabled O'Connell (derided by his enemies as the "King of Beggars") to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed in the hands of authorities and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords. one of their number challenged O'Connell to a duel. John D'Esterre had thought O'Connell might back down, for he had earlier refused a challenge from an opposing lawyer. The former royal marine was in any case confident of his aim. Recognising that his reputation would never be safe if he again demurred, O'Connell accepted. The duel took place on 2 February 1815 at Bishopscourt, County Kildare. Both men fired. O'Connell, unharmed, mortally wounded D'Esterre. Distressed by the killing, O'Connell offered D'Esterre's widow a pension. She consented to an allowance for her daughter and this O'Connell paid regularly for more than thirty years until his death. Some months later, O'Connell was engaged to fight a second duel with the Chief Secretary for Ireland (and future Prime Minister), Robert Peel, O'Connell's repeated references to him as "Orange Peel" ("a man good for nothing except to be a champion for Orangeism") being the occasion. Only O'Connell's arrest in London en route to their rendezvous in Ostend prevented the encounter, and the affair went no further. But in 1816, following his return to faithful Catholic observance, O'Connell made "a vow in heaven" never again to put himself in a position where he might shed blood. In "expiation for the death D'Esterre", he is said thereafter to have accepted the insults of men whom he refused to fight "with pride". The Catholic Relief Act became law in April 1829. It was not made retroactive so O'Connell had to stand again for election. He was returned unopposed in July 1829. Such was O'Connell's prestige as "the Liberator" that George IV reportedly complained that while "Wellington is the King of England", O'Connell was "King of Ireland", and he, himself, merely "the dean of Windsor". Some of O'Connell's younger lieutenants in the new struggle for Repealthe Young Irelanderswere critical of the leader's acclaim. Michael Doheny noted that the 1829 act had only been the latest in a succession of "relief" measures dating back to the Papists Act 1778. Honour was due rather to those who had "wrung from the reluctant spirit of a far darker time the right of living, of worship, of enjoying property, and exercising the franchise". Tenant Disenfranchisement and the Tithe War Entry to parliament had not come without a price. With Jeremy Bentham, O'Connell had considered allowing George Ensor, a Protestant member of the Catholic Association, to stand as his running mate in the Clare election. But Ensor had objected to what he identified as the "disenfranchisement project" in the relief bill. Receiving its royal assent on the same day, the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, brought the Irish franchise into line with England's by raising the property threshold in county seats five-fold to ten pounds. This eliminated the middling tenantry (the Irish "forty-shilling freeholders") who had risked much in defying their landlords on O'Connell's behalf in the Clare election, and reduced the overall electorate in the country from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. Rationalising the sacrifice of his freeholders, O'Connell wrote privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually "give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands". The Young Irelander John Mitchel believed that this was the intent: to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses. Once in Parliament, however, O'Connell did speak in favour of parliamentary reform, invoking "the great principle of democratic liberty" in support of a broader franchise. tenants had been banding together to oppose evictions, and to attack tithe and process servers. De Tocqueville recorded these Whiteboys and Ribbonmen protesting:The law does nothing for us. We must save ourselves. We have a little land which we need for ourselves and our families to live on, and they drive us out of it. To whom should we address ourselves?... Emancipation has done nothing for us. Mr. O'Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament. We die of starvation just the same. In a Letter to the People of Ireland (1833) he also proposed a 20 per cent tax on absentee landlords for poor relief, and the abolition of tithes This exempted the majority of cultivatorsthose who held land at will or from year to yearfrom the charge, while offering those still liable a 25 percent reduction and a forgiveness of arrears. It did not, as feared, lead to a general compensating increase in rents. ==Campaign for repeal of the Union==

The meaning of Repeal O'Connell's call for a repeal of the 1800 Act of Union, and for a restoration of the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782, which he linked (as he had with emancipation) to a multitude of popular grievances, may have been less a considered constitutional proposal than "an invitation to treat". objected that with a Catholic parliament in Dublin, "which they would be sure to have out and out", this would be an arrangement impossible to sustain. Separation from Great Britain was its "certain consequence", so that Repeal was a practical policy only if (in the spirit of the United Irishmen) Catholics were again "joined by the dissenters"the Presbyterians of the North. But for O'Connell, the historian R.F. Foster suggests that "the trick was never to define what the Repeal meantor did not mean". It was an "emotional claim", an "ideal", with which "to force the British into offering something". "Testing" the Union O'Connell did prepare the ground for the Home Rule compromise, eventually negotiated between Irish-nationalists and British Liberals from the 1880s to 1914. He declared that while he would "never ask for or work" for anything less than an independent legislature, he would accept a "subordinate parliament" as "an instalment". But for the predecessors to Gladstone's Liberals, Lord Melbourne's Whigs, with whom O'Connell sought accommodation in the 1830s, even an Irish legislature devolved within the United Kingdom was a step too far. Having assisted Melbourne, through an informal understanding (the Lichfield House Compact), to a government majority, in 1835 O'Connell suggested he might be willing to give up the project of an Irish parliament altogether. He declared his willingness to "test" the Union: The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Britons if made so in benefits and in justice, but if not, we are Irishmen again. Underscoring the qualifying clause"if not we are Irishmen again"historian J.C. Beckett proposes that the change was less than it may have appeared. Under the pressure of a choice between "effectual union or no union", O'Connell was seeking to maximise the scope of shorter-term, interim, reforms. O'Connell failed to stall the application to Ireland of the new English Poor Law system of Workhouses in 1837, the prospect of which, as de Tocqueville found, was broadly dreaded in Ireland. To defray the cost O'Connell urged, in vain, a tax on absentee rents. But as regards the general conduct of the Dublin Castle administration under the Whigs, Beckett concludes that "O'Connell had reason to be satisfied, and "the more so as his influence carried great weight in the making of appointments". Reforms opened the police and judiciary to greater Catholic recruitment, and measures were taken to reduce the provocations and influence of the pro-Ascendancy Orange Order. The Irish people were being "purchased back into factious vassalage." Northern opposition Conscious of their minority position in Ulster, Catholic support for O'Connell in the north was "muted". William Crolly, Bishop of Down and Connor and later Archbishop of Armagh, was ambivalent, anxious lest clerical support for Repeal disrupt his "carefully nurtured relationship with Belfast's liberal Presbyterians". O'Connell "treasured his few Protestant Repealers". But to many of his contemporaries, he appeared "ignorant" of the Protestant (largely Presbyterian) majority society of the north-east, Ulster, counties. O'Connell seemed implicitly to concede the separateness of the Protestant North. He spoke of "invading" Ulster to rescue "our Persecuted Brethren in the North". In the event, and in the face of the hostile crowds that disrupted his one foray to Belfast in 1841 ("the Repealer repulsed!"), he "tended to leave Ulster strictly alone". Perhaps persuaded by their presence through much of the south as but a thin layer of officials, landowners and their agents, O'Connell proposed that Protestants did not have the staying power of true "religionists". Their ecclesiastical dissent (and not alone their unionism) was a function, he argued, of political privilege. To Dr Paul Cullen (the future Cardinal and Catholic Primate of Ireland) in Rome, O'Connell wrote:The Protestants of Ireland... are political Protestants, that is, Protestants by reason of their participation in political power... If the Union were repealed and the exclusive system abolished, the great mass of the Protestant community would with little delay melt into the overwhelming majority of the Irish nation. Protestantism would not survive the Repeal ten years. Exchange with Disraeli In April 1835, O'Connell sparred with Benjamin Disraeli who, while campaigning as an English by-election, had reportedly branded the Irish leader "an incendiary and a traitor". According to the extensive coverage of his response in The Times, having drawn attention to Disraeli's "Jewish origin", in speech in Dublin O'Connell suggested that the young Peelite had, not only the "perfidy, selfishness, depravity, and want of principle" typical of a would-be Tory MP, but also the qualities of "the impenitent thief on the cross . . . the blasphemous robber". Notwithstanding that O'Connell had publicly criticised Pope Gregory XVI's treatment of Jews in the Papal States and bragged of Ireland being the "only Christian country ... unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews", his comments elicited charges of anti-Jewish slander. Disraeli demanded "satisfaction". As it was known that O'Connell had forsworn duelling following the death of D'Esterre, the challenge went to his duelling son, and fellow MP, Morgan O'Connell. Morgan, however, declined responsibility for his father's controversial remarks. The future Conservative Prime Minister did not prevail in his by-election against the incumbent Whig, but the dispute (which Disraeli recounted throughout his career) propelled him for the first time to general public notice. Their leader had declared himself "a decided advocate of universal suffrage" because no one could properly fix "where the line should be drawn" between servitude and liberty. When in 1831 workers in the Dublin trades created their own political association, O'Connell moved to pack it. The Trades Political Union (TPU) was swamped by 5,000 mostly middle-class repealers who by acclaim carried O'Connell's resolution calling for the suppression of all secret and illegal combinations, particularly those "manifested among the labouring classes". When in 1841 the Chartists held the first meeting of the Irish Universal Suffrage Association (IUSA), a TPU mob broke it up, and O'Connell denounced the association's secretary, Peter Brophy as an Orangeman. From England, where the Irish-born leader of Chartism Fergus O'Connor had joined the IUSA in solidarity, Brophy denounced O'Connell in turn as the "enemy of the unrepresented classes". The renewal of the campaign In April 1840, when it became clear that the Whigs would lose office, O'Connell relaunched the Repeal Association, and published a series of addresses criticising government policy and attacking the Union. The "people", the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen, whom O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation, did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal; neither did the Catholic gentry or middle classes. Many appeared content to explore the avenues for advancement emancipation had opened. The suspicion, in any case, was that O'Connell's purpose in returning to the constitutional question was merely to disconcert the incoming Conservatives (under his old enemy Sir Robert Peel) and to hasten the Whigs return (entirely the view of Friedrich Engels: the only purpose of Repeal for the "old fox" was to "embarrass the Tory Ministers" and to put his friends back into office). Meanwhile, as a body, Protestants remained opposed to a restoration of a parliament the prerogatives of which they had once championed. The Presbyterians in the north were persuaded that the Union was both the occasion for their relative prosperity and a guarantee of their liberty. In the June–July 1841 Westminster elections, Repeal candidates lost half their seats. In a contest marked by the boycott of Guinness as "Protestant porter", O'Connell's son John, a brewer of O'Connell's Ale, failed to hold his father's Dublin seat. The "Repeal election" 1841 (Source: 1841 United Kingdom general election--Ireland) Population of Ireland, 1841 census: 8.18 million. Against a background of growing economic distress, O'Connell was nonetheless buoyed by Archbishop John McHale's endorsement of legislative independence. Opinion among all classes was also influenced from October 1842 by Gavan Duffy's new weekly The Nation. Read in Repeal Reading Rooms and passed from hand to hand, its mix of vigorous editorials, historical articles and verse, may have reached as many as a quarter of a million readers. O'Connell planned to close the campaign on 8 October 1843 with an even larger demonstration at Clontarf, on the outskirts of Dublin. As the site of Brian Boru's famous victory over the Danes in 1014, it resonated with O'Connell's increasingly militant rhetoric: "the time is coming", he had been telling his supporters, when "you may have the alternative to live as slaves or to die as freemen". Beckett suggests "O'Connell mistook the temper of the government", never expecting that "his defiance would be put to the test". When it waswhen troops occupied ClontarfO'Connell submitted at once. He cancelled the rally and sent out messengers to turn back the approaching crowds. When released after three months, the charges quashed on appeal to the House of Lords, O'Connell was paraded in triumph through Dublin on a gilded chariot. But, approaching seventy years of age, O'Connell never fully recovered his former stature or confidence. Having deprived himself of his most potent weapon, the monster meeting, and with his health failing, O'Connell had no plan and the ranks of the Repeal Association began to divide. ==The Famine and the break with Young Ireland==

The Queen's Colleges controversy In 1845, Dublin Castle proposed to educate Catholics and Protestants together in a non-denominational system of higher education. In advance of some of the Catholic bishops (Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin favoured the proposal), O'Connell condemned the "godless colleges". (Led by Archbishop McHale, the bishops issued a formal condemnation of the proposed colleges as dangerous to faith and morals in 1850). The principle at stake, of what in Ireland was understood as "mixed education", may already have been lost. When in 1830 the government proposed to educate Catholics and Protestants together at the primary level, it had been the Presbyterians (led by O'Connell's northern nemesis, the evangelist Henry Cooke) who had scented danger. They refused to cooperate in National Schools unless they had the majority to ensure there would be no "mutilating of scripture." But the vehemence of O'Connell's opposition to the colleges, was a cause of dismay among those O'Connell had begun to call Young Irelandersa reference to Giuseppe Mazzini's anti-clerical and insurrectionist Young Italy. O'Connell declared himself content to take a stand "for Old Ireland", and accused Davis of suggesting it was a "crime to be a Catholic". Whigs and the Famine Grouped around The Nation, which had proposed as its "first great object" a "nationality" that would embrace as easily "the stranger who is within our gates" as "the Irishman of a hundred generations," the dissidents suspected that in opposing the Queen's Colleges Bill O'Connell was also playing Westminster politics. O'Connell, who by September 1843 was again hinting at the possibility of a renewed alliance with the Whigs, Charles Edward Trevelyan, who as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury became "virtually dictator of relief for Ireland" put a stop to the government's import and distribution of food with exception only for far western districts (O'Connell's home county Kerry included), where dependence on the failed potato crop was such that there was scarcely trade in any other description of food. As "temporary relief for destitute persons", the government opened soup kitchens. They were closed a few months later in August of the same year. The starving were directed to abandon the land and apply to the workhouses. When the courts absolved him, O'Connell pressed the issue. In 1847 the Repeal Association tabled resolutions declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms. The Young Irelanders had not advocated physical force, but in response to the "Peace Resolutions" Meagher argued that if Repeal could not be carried by moral persuasion and peaceful means, a resort to arms would be a no less honourable course. O'Connell's son John forced the decision: the resolution was carried on the threat of the O'Connells themselves quitting the Association. Meagher, Davis and other prominent dissidents, among them Gavan Duffy; Jane Wilde; Margaret Callan; William Smith O'Brien; and John Blake Dillon, withdrew and formed themselves as the Irish Confederation. In the desperate circumstances of the Famine and in the face of martial-law measures that a number of Repeal Association MPs had approved in Westminster, Meagher and some Confederates did take what he had described as the "honourable" course. Their rural rising broke up after a single skirmish, the Battle of Ballingarry. Some of the "Men of 1848" carried the commitment to physical force forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)Fenianism. Others followed Gavan Duffy in focussing on what they believed was a basis for a non-sectarian national movement, the struggle for tenant right. In what Duffy hailed as a "League of North and South" in 1852 tenant protection societies helped return 50 MPs. The seeming triumph over "O'Connellism", however, was short-lived. In the South Archbishop Cullen approved the Catholic MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting government positions. In the North William Sharman Crawford and other League candidates had their meetings broken up by Orange "bludgeon men". ==Opposition to slavery in the United States==

O'Connell championed the "civil and religious liberties" of people throughout the world including those of peasants in India (subject, under the East India Company, to "a system of monstrous and perfect oppression") Maoris in New Zealand, Aboriginal people in Australia and Jews in Europe. It was, however, his unbending abolitionism, and in particular, his opposition to slavery in the United States, that demonstrated commitments that transcended Catholic and national interests in Ireland. For his Repeal campaign, O'Connell relied heavily on money from the United States, but he insisted that none should be accepted from those engaged in slavery (a ban extended from 1843 to all those emigrants to the American South who in daring to "countenance the system of slavery" he could "recognise as Irish no longer"). In 1829 he had told a large abolitionist meeting in London that "of all men living, an American citizen, who is the owner of slaves, is the most despicable". In the same Emancipation year, addressing the Cork Anti-Slavery Society, he declared that, much as he longed to go to America, so long as it was "tarnished by slavery", he would never "pollute" his foot "by treading on its shores". When Stevenson challenged O'Connell to a duel, a sensation was created in the United States. On the floor of the House of Representatives the former U.S. president, John Quincy Adams spoke of a "conspiracy against the life of Daniel O'Connell". In the United States, fearful that it would further inflame anti-Irish nativist sentiment, Bishop John Hughes of New York urged Irish Americans not to sign O'Connell's abolitionist petition ("An Address of the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America"). I have been assailed for attacking the American institution, as it is called,Negro slavery. I am not ashamed of that attack. I do not shrink from it. I am the advocate of civil and religious liberty, all over the globe, and wherever tyranny exists, I am the foe of the tyrant; wherever oppression shows itself, I am the foe of the oppressor; wherever slavery rears its head, I am the enemy of the system, or the institution, call it by what name you will. I am the friend of liberty in every clime, class and colour. My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island. Noit extends itself to every corner of the earth. My heart walks abroad, and wherever the miserable are to be succored, or the slave to be set free, there my spirit is at home, and I delight to dwell. The black abolitionist, Charles Lenox Remond said that it was only on hearing O'Connell speak in London (the first international Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840) that he realised what being an abolitionist really meant: "every fibre of my heart contracted [when I] listened to the scorching rebukes of the fearless O'Connell". In the United States William Lloyd Garrison published a selection of O'Connell's anti-slavery speeches, no man having "spoken so strongly against the soul-drivers of this land as O'Connell". It was as an abolitionist that O'Connell was honoured by his favourite author, Charles Dickens. In Martin Chuzzlewit, O'Connell is the "certain Public Man", revealed as an abolitionist, whom otherwise enthusiastic friends of Ireland (the "Sons of Freedom") in the United States decide they would have "pistolled, stabbedin some way slain". ==Death, legacy and commemoration==

Following his last appearance in parliament, and describing himself "oppressed with grief", his "physical power departed", O'Connell travelled on a pilgrimage to Rome. He died, age 71, in May 1847 in Genoa, Italy of a softening of the brain (Encephalomalacia). In accord with his last wishes, O'Connell's heart was buried in Rome (at Sant'Agata dei Goti, then the chapel of the Irish College), and the remainder of his body in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. His sons are buried in his crypt. John O'Connell opposed Duffy's Tenant Right League, and eventually accepted, in 1853, a sinecure position as "Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper" at Dublin Castle. Reputation as a landlord An article appearing in The Times on Christmas Day, 1845, created an international scandal by accusing O'Connell of being one of the worst landlords in Ireland. His tenants were pictured as "living in abject poverty and neglect". The Irish press, however, was quick to observe that this was a description of famine conditions and to dismiss the report as a politically motivated attack. To manage his property O'Connell employed a kinsman, John Primrose, who had a reputation as a strict agent. But when cholera struck the Kerry coast in 1832, he instructed Primrose to "be prodigal of relief out of my means--beef, bread, mutton, medicines, physician, everything you can think of". When the Great Famine hit in 1845, he wished his son Maurice "to be as abundant to the people as you can", and was so intent on securing relief that he sought to buy the government food depot in Cahersiveen, an offer refused from the Treasury by Trevelyan. Eulogies and interpretation on O'Connell Street in Dublin Calling O'Connell an "incarnation of a people", Honoré de Balzac noted that for twenty years his name had filled the press of Europe as no man since Napoleon. Gladstone, an eventual convert to Irish Home Rule, described him as "the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen". In France, Flora Tristan, mocked as "O'Connell in petticoats", imitated the Liberator's rhetorical flourishes and his policy of nominal subscriptions in support of a very different emancipatory project, her Chartist-inspired vision of a single "Workers' Union". Frederick Douglass said of O'Connell that his voice was "enough to calm the most violent passion, even though it were already manifesting itself in a mob. There is a sweet persuasiveness in it, beyond any voice I ever heard. His power over an audience is perfect." O'Connell's oratory is a quality to which James Joyce (a distant relative) plays tribute in Ulysses: "a people", he wrote, "sheltered within his voice." Other Irish literary figures of the independence generation were critical. W. B. Yeats found O'Connell "too compromised and compromising" and his rhetoric "bragging". Those who declared their continued fealty to the Republic that had been proclaimed in 1916 on what was now O'Connell Street, dismissed his legacy in similar terms. The predominant interpretation of O'Connell in the last generation may be that of a liberal Catholic and political pragmatist, as portrayed in Oliver MacDonagh's 1988 biography. His more recent biographer Patrick Geoghegan seeks to return O'Connell to the national story. Echoing a reassessment that was offered by Eamon De Valera, he has O'Connell forging "a new Irish nation in the fires of his own idealism, intolerance and determination" and becoming for a people "broken, humiliated and defeated" its "chieftain". Professor Maurice J. Bric, a native of O'Connell's own native Cahirsiveen, Emeritus Professor of History at University College Dublin and director of the Daniel O'Connell Summer School, rejected the argument. Memorials In 1855, O'Connell's plot at Glasnevin Cemetery was marked with a 55m-high Irish Round Tower. Shut in 1971 when damaged by a loyalist bomb (retaliation for the IRA's destruction of Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street), the tower was re-opened in 2018. His statue (the work of John Henry Foley) was erected in 1882 at the bottom of Sackville Street, renamed O'Connell Street in 1922. O'Connell Streets also exist in Athlone, Clonmel, Dungarvan, Ennis, Kilkee, Limerick, Sligo, and Waterford. A Daniel O'Connell Bridge, opened in 1880, spans the Manuherikia River at Ophir in New Zealand. A set of Irish postage stamps depicting O'Connell and valued at two, three, and nine pence was issued on 22 June 1929 to commemorate the centenary of Catholic Emancipation. There is a statue of O'Connell outside St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, Australia. Derrynane House, O'Connell's home in Kerry, has been converted into a museum honouring the Liberator. On Friday, 12 September 2025, the Central Bank of Ireland issued a commemorative coin in both gold (€50) and silver (€15) commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O'Connell. Film O'Connell's life was the subject of a 2022 feature film produced by Red Abbey Productions titled The Liberator. == References ==

• • • • • • • • 8 vols: Vol. I. 1792–1814 Vol. II. 1815–1823 Vol. III. 1824–1828 Vol. IV. 1829–1832 Vol. V. 1833–1836 Vol. VI. 1837–1840 Vol. VII. 1841–1845 Vol. VIII. 1846–1847 • • • • == External links ==