From 1848, as the country moved out of the worst years of the Great Famine of 1845–50, a middle-class and clerical cohort with ambitions to reform the land system emerged in Ireland, especially in Leinster and Ulster. The nascent tenant right movement was an amalgam of liberals, radicals, priests and republicans who formally constituted themselves as the Tenant League in 1850. The Tenant League, in essence, was founded to achieve security for the tenant farmer through constitutional means in a period of extreme economic uncertainty in the wake of the Famine. This political development gave succour to a popular anti-landlord rhetoric which was utilised in the press, on platforms at large assemblies, and in smaller gatherings in chapels, barns and houses. The progress of politicisation encouraged a violent conspiratorial agrarianism which deployed arson, aggravated assaults, threatening letters, intimidation and assassinations that seriously worried many of the landed gentry. This article is concerned with interpreting this process in several baronies on the Ulster borderlands comprising Counties Armagh, Monaghan and Louth, which became widely known for their lawlessness in 1849–52. As the opening salvos of agrarian violence in the region began to unsettle the local constabulary from 1849, a hostile gentry and Tory press scrambled for explanations and, in doing so, connected the disturbances with the growing constitutional agitation. Indeed, the league's detractors were correct in their perceptions that a link existed; as the league gained momentum from late 1850 and into 1851 a parallel increase in violence, which continued into early 1852, manifested itself. The outbreak then peaked in ferocity from January 1852 when government moved to suppress the disorder, and as the economy began to recover from 1853 onwards agrarian violence and agitation diminished.
Few studies of the 1849–52 period have addressed simultaneously the subjects of agrarian protest and the activities of the Tenant League during those years. Existing studies deal with the Tenant League and agrarian violence separately, as if each functioned in a vacuum, and none address in earnest the relationship between illegal methods of intimidation, assault and assassination, and constitutional political mobilisation. Frank Wright's chapter on the Tenant League in his monumental study of Ulster politics is probably the most substantial contribution. Wright documents Ulster politics before the introduction of the home rule bill of 1886, with particular focus on the balance of sectarian forces and electoral coalitions, demonstrating how Liberalism managed to hold back pan-Protestantism until the imagined Catholic threat became too great. It is unsurprising, therefore, that when discussing Tenant League agitation his emphasis was on the ideas of liberal-minded league leaders such as William Sharman Crawford and Dr James McKnight, while agrarian secret societies were not examined comprehensively.Footnote 1 J. H. Whyte's two studies also elucidate the activities of the Tenant League, but these are similarly confined to the high politics of the period.Footnote 2 Andrew Shields's work on Connacht and the Tenant League is a worthy provincial study which underscores the league's top-down nature, the resultant limited base of the movement and the need for clerical support to provide it with some vitality. Again, however, the focus remains the political machinations of the league's leaders.Footnote 3
The existing studies of agrarian violence during the years 1849–52 in Ulster are also narrowly focused. Kyla Madden surveys agrarian violence around Forkhill, south Armagh, between 1832 and 1852 without seriously delving into the peculiarities of the immediate post-Famine period or addressing the rise of the Tenant League.Footnote 4 Michael McMahon has analysed the assassination of a single land-agent, Thomas Douglas Bateson, on the Templetown estate in 1851, but he concentrates on that incident alone and due consideration is not given to the political agitation of the league or the wider agrarian protest in the region.Footnote 5 Though Thomas McKeown and Kevin McMahon address the succession of killings which occurred during the protest, they also neglect the political dimension, as well as the widespread intimidation and non-homicidal violence which engendered a great deal of panic among the establishment.Footnote 6 More recently, Breandán Mac Suibhne's book on west Donegal and the agrarian outrage prevalent there during the 1850s has addressed key questions including memory, parochial relations, localist politics, and the move away from violent agrarianism by some sections of the community soon after the Great Famine. It has also taken stock of the fusion of agrarian violence, the organised networks of proto-political Ribbonism and the Molly Maguire secret societies within the context of post-Famine adjustment.Footnote 7
The time is therefore ripe to add to the existing body of literature on post-Famine adjustment by analysing agrarian violence and the impact of constitutional political developments on lower-class collective action during the years 1849–52. This article addresses, firstly, the socio-economic context for agrarian protest during this period. Then, secondly, the ebb and flow of the protest will be traced. Contrary to the studies presented by some of the above-mentioned scholars, the violence experienced on the Ulster borderlands during this period assumed the form of a concerted protest which emerged in one district with more vigour after it had been suppressed in another.Footnote 8 It will be argued subsequently that a correlation existed between the violence carried out during the disorder and the political mobilisation of the Tenant League. Finally, the long-term ramifications of this period for the ‘land question’ in the following decades will be assessed and it will be contended that, ultimately, though the violence of these years may have been transient, by 1852 the blueprint of post-Famine anti-landlordism and the symbiotic relationship between moral and physical force on the question of the land had been charted for decades to come.
I
The wider borderlands of Ulster comprise Counties Donegal, Fermanagh, Cavan, Monaghan and Armagh, and the adjacent counties in Connacht and Leinster. These outer lying, and primarily Catholic, counties differed from predominantly Protestant Antrim and Down, or what Wright termed ‘inner Ulster’. In the mid-nineteenth century, the economic prosperity of rural ‘inner Ulster’ was sustained by the existence of market-oriented farmland in Belfast's hinterland and a weaver belt which straddled the southern shores of Lough Neagh. By contrast, the largely Catholic and Irish-speaking borderlands were densely populated, subdivided and impoverished. Economic activity was generated by the reclamation of wasteland, seasonal migration and illegal distillation.Footnote 9 The violent agrarian protest of 1849–52 was waged within this latter social and economic backdrop.
The agrarian protest, which utilised violent and intimidatory tactics to curb evictions and lower rents, was carried out, geographically speaking, in the portion of the borderlands where Ulster meets with Leinster on the Monaghan, Armagh and Louth county boundaries as displayed in Map 1. The baronies most affected were Cremorne, Farney, Upper Fews, Upper Orior, Lower Dundalk and Upper Dundalk. Thus, the term ‘borderlands’ will be used to denote this area. P. J. Duffy attempted to delineate the geography of this region in the following way: ‘like many borderland regions this one eludes precise definition. It is best left as a vague entity relatively easily identified in the landscape: from the north of Dundalk it is distinguished by a mountain wall towering over the plain of Louth extending right across Dundalk Bay. From the heights above Ardee the drumlin “swarm” curving around south Monaghan and Cavan is clearly visible as a different and difficult region’.Footnote 10 As the protest gained vitality, the region was also branded ‘the disturbed districts’ by the press and so this second term will also be used interchangeably with the former.Footnote 11
Map 1. Affected baronies in the counties of Louth, Monaghan and Armagh, 1849–52.
The districts from which the majority of the disturbances were reported were overwhelmingly Catholic. In 1861 in the baronies of Upper Orior and Upper Fews, where most violence occurred in Armagh, over 50 per cent of the population was Catholic with less than a third adhering to one or other of the Protestant denominations. The pattern of Catholic majorities was similar in the two baronies of north Louth, and the barony of Farney in south Monaghan. Only in the barony of Cremorne, which encompassed east and mid-Monaghan, and where much of the Tenant League agitation occurred, was there a slightly higher proportion of Protestants at around 33 per cent.Footnote 12 According to the census of 1851 many of these baronies, and in particular the parishes of Derrynoose, Creggan, Forkhill and Ballybay (all central to the disturbances), saw sharp decreases of up to a quarter in population as a result of the Great Famine.Footnote 13 In the midst of mass emigration, starvation and destitution, English literacy rates rose to the detriment of the Irish vernacular and there were emerging signs of a newly class conscious and educated peasantry. Between 1841 and 1851 across Counties Armagh, Monaghan and Louth the rates of illiteracy in English dropped by up to 10 per cent among some categories.Footnote 14
This growth in literacy was satiated by an increase in the distribution of provincial newspapers. The immediate post-Famine period on the Ulster borderlands also saw the first issue of the nationalist and pro-tenant right organ, the Dundalk Democrat, published from October 1849. Its beginnings were closely tied to the opening of Dundalk station on the Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway in February that year.Footnote 15 The newspaper's total reach is difficult to assess, but the Democrat itself claimed that in Carrickmacross Union alone it circulated seventy copies, ‘a greater number than all the other papers in Ireland circulate there’.Footnote 16 Indeed, the railway system modernised transport for Ulster's inhabitants and its extension closed the gap between town and country by increasing the mobility of the populace and the flow of print.Footnote 17 By the outset of 1850 in eastern Ulster, the borderland town of Castleblayney and the weaving centre of Armagh city were linked with Belfast.Footnote 18
The Great Famine wrought severe social devastation and communal resistance to the collection of rents began to be reported from Ulster's borderlands during 1848.Footnote 19 From 1849 resistance to the payment of rent and evictions became more pronounced as agricultural prices reached a century low. By 1850, prices for agricultural produce on the Belfast market were less than two-thirds their levels four years previously.Footnote 20 The late 1840s were also poor harvest years for crops other than the potato. In September 1850 a ‘highly respectable farmer’ from County Louth wrote to the Newry Examiner, a liberal organ, suggesting that landlords ought not to charge any rent that year due to a failure in the wheat crop which was relied upon for the payment of rents.Footnote 21 A traditional account from the early twentieth century by the north Louth Gaelic scholar, Tomás Mac Cuileannáin, described how, during the Famine, ‘the oat crop was the rent crop, but when the potatoes failed the people made full use of [i.e. consumed] the oats’, leaving them unable to meet the rent.Footnote 22
As the wave of petty Famine-related crime began to decline from early 1849, beatings and assassinations began to increase almost in inverse proportion. Resident Magistrate (R.M.) Millar, speaking at a petty sessions sitting in Loughgall, south Armagh, took note of this trend when he declared in January 1851 that ‘a gradual diminution of crime has taken place during the last year, or year and a half’ but that assaults of an aggravated nature had now become frequent.Footnote 23 Although the fundamental source of the disturbances was the nationally low agricultural prices and consequent unaffordable rents and evictions, several local socio-economic factors exacerbated violence in and around south Armagh. These circumstances included the over-valuation of land, a lack of landlord investment, low levels of paternalism, the fragmented nature of estates, and high levels of absenteeism.Footnote 24 A proliferation of profit-seeking agents, bailiffs and landlords who were readily vilified by the Tenant League also played their part in provoking unrest.
Resident magistrates’ reports, such as those made by Millar, and classified in the National Archives of Ireland under the heading ‘Outrage Reports’, are crucial in building up a composite picture of the violence and its interaction with political events as they unfolded. R.M. Arthur French, based at Dundalk, fed copious amounts of information to Dublin Castle regarding the activities of agrarian secret societies in north Louth. R.M. Matthew Singleton, who operated in Newry, provided detail on the disturbances in the Armagh barony of Upper Orior especially. In Monaghan, R.M. Edward Golding, who resided at Castleblayney, sent in numerous reports of the violence, while he also offered testimony before the parliamentary inquiry in 1852 where he elaborated on some of the social factors which he believed motivated the conspirators. Golding's evidence, however, provides a salutary reminder that conflict of interest must be taken into account when deploying resident magistrates’ reports. Golding, who frequently denounced the Tenant League, was a land agent himself and was thus far from impartial.Footnote 25
Though not without their own class and state-oriented biases, stipendiary magistrates were regularly waged government employees from outside the region who were billeted in the affected areas. Captain Bartholomew Warburton, for instance, had been a paid magistrate for twenty-eight years prior to his dealing with the disturbances on the borderlands in c.1852. In that capacity he had been stationed in all but three counties in Ireland. Warburton, who was based in Forkhill, County Armagh, but who held authority over the three disturbed counties,Footnote 26 provided frequent accounts for the central administration. Stipendiary magistrate P. C. Howley was the most prolific when it came to dispatching reports on both the Tenant League and agrarian crime to Dublin from his base at Carrickmacross. His willingness to converse with local Catholics who toiled under unaffordable rents and his documenting of league meetings were invaluable in unravelling the story of violence and political agitation in the borderlands region of Ulster during the years 1849–52.
What of those whom the magistrates attempted to monitor and arrest? The agrarian conspirators responsible for mounting the protest were drawn from among the lower section of the peasantry. Small and middle-sized tenants, agricultural labourers, and lower middle-class tradesmen also featured. These groups were interlocked in a class struggle with the middle and upper-class owners and administrators of the land. Among those who effectuated the 1849–52 disturbances (as detailed in Table 1) were a publican, a herdsman, a sidecar driver, a navvy, a number of labourers, small farmers of perhaps four or five acres, and farmers with larger holdings of twenty and thirty acres. Internal violence and disputes among this lower class were also a feature of the disturbances, but the preponderant trajectory of the most serious violence was from below and aimed in the direction of those above them in the social hierarchy.Footnote 27 The accounts of contemporary officials pinned the disturbances on the younger generation of this lower-class cohort.Footnote 28 Though fear was certainly a factor in achieving compliance, these youthful agrarian rebels enjoyed the support of a large section of the Catholic community who openly backed their violent actions.Footnote 29
Table 1. Agrarian assassinations and aggravated assaults in the ‘disturbed districts’, 1849–52
II
The violence carried out by these groups owed its immediate material origins to unaffordable rents and evictions, and was in turn stimulated on a political level by the tenant right issue. Tenant right was often ambiguous, but it rested on a mutual understanding between landlord and tenant regarding the free sale of the tenant's interest in his holding. In other words, the ‘good will’ that existed between landowner and farmer which led to ‘fair rent’ and fixity of tenure was worth monetary value should the tenant wish to sell his property.Footnote 30 Thus, tenant right, or the ‘Ulster custom’ as it was also known, incorporated what later became known as the ‘three Fs’ of fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale.
The initial, tentative, public moves towards gaining legislative recognition for tenant right had been made in the mid-1830s by William Sharman Crawford. A liberal member of the gentry, Sharman Crawford introduced an Irish land bill to parliament and organised the first public meeting calling for the recognition of tenant right in law at Comber, County Down, in 1835. As Dowling has remarked, ‘tenant right from this date forward became a nationwide question’.Footnote 31 Overpopulation and pressure on the land in pre-Famine Ireland had also stirred a wider debate on land tenure, resulting in the setting up of the Devon Commission in 1843. Having established the commission, however, Tory secretary for the home department, James Graham, deemed that the alleviation of such problems was not to be found in legislative reform. A modest bill, the primary feature of which was to offer some compensation for improvements made to holdings, did not pass through the House of Lords. Nonetheless, as MacDonagh has written, ‘the Devon commission represented a turning-point in Britain's Irish policy. For the first time the landed system as a whole was placed in the arena of potential reform’.Footnote 32
As agrarian capitalism advanced and landlords realised, after the onset of the Great Famine, that to stay solvent they would need to become more fiscally ruthless, the mutual understanding necessary to preserve tenant right gradually began to break down.Footnote 33 In Ulster, the land bill proposed in 1848 by Chief Secretary Somerville, which only recognised compensation for improvements made on holdings within the previous twenty-one years, attacked tenant right at its core by negating improvements which had been made to farmsteads over the course of generations. Since tenant right was also dependent on the availability of capital for its purchase, the unaffordable rents caused by the depression in agricultural prices had also wiped out its market value. Consequently, the lowering of rent levels came to form one of the demands made by tenant farmers as well.Footnote 34 These various concerns spurred Presbyterian farmers and some of the Catholic clergy and shopkeeping middle classes (the latter eager to protect tenant farmers on whose business they depended) towards constitutional agitation.
One of the pillars of this newly emergent agitation in Ulster were the reporters of the Dundalk Democrat, The Nation and the Belfast-based The Vindicator. From early 1848, the Catholic owned pro-tenant right The Vindicator set out its stall for the approaching conflict by criticising landlords who would not reduce their rents or recognise tenant right. The organ declared, utilising language which would soon be echoed by distressed smallholders, that Ulster's farmers would never relinquish the fight to the landlord class who hid ‘under cover of laws made and enforced for the benefit of the few, to the detriment of the many’.Footnote 35 On the borderlands, the Newry Examiner blamed the violence on the Democrat, branding it the ‘murder press’ and accusing it of disseminating the doctrine of ‘certain French socialists’ who ‘taught that property is robbery’.Footnote 36 However, the pro-tenant right liberal Examiner and Democrat found themselves as strange bedfellows when they rebuffed the Tory press for attempting to forge connections between the violence and the Tenant League. The Examiner decried the ‘stale trick, that of mentioning facts together, and leaving ignorant and credulous minds to assimilate them’.Footnote 37 Evading the central question of whether Tenant League activity stimulated the unrest, the nationalist Democrat sought to shift the focus onto the landlords: ‘The blood which has been so shed we place on the head of that monster which is desolating the country, Irish Landlordism.’Footnote 38 The Nation, meanwhile, observed how similar attempts had been made to link O'Connell's constitutional movements to agrarian violence in the pre-Famine period.Footnote 39
Another integral pillar of the agitation were the orators. Lectures delivered by speakers such as the Presbyterian Reverend David Bell were as scathing in their attacks on landlordism as the polemics of the reporters. During the early nineteenth century Bell had been influenced by a local anti-landlord tendency around his native Ballybay, County Monaghan. Despite Ballybay also having been a stronghold of Orangeism, the language and ideology Bell espoused reflected a radical Presbyterian tradition. From 1848, Bell, who would go on to become a Fenian in the 1860s, was a prominent figure on platforms agitating in favour of tenant right. At Ballybay in the early days of the agitation on 11 January 1848, for example, a crowd of 2,000 assembled to hear him speak.Footnote 40
From this early point also, the activities of tenant righters such as Bell overlapped with those of republicans when the Young Ireland-led Irish Confederation became involved in the growing tenant right movement in Ulster in an attempt to garner Protestant support for their nationalist objective of winning repeal of the Act of Union. To this end, in May 1848, placards were posted extensively around Counties Armagh and Down which called on the ‘tenant-farmers, cottier tenants, and working-classes’ of the area to assemble on Saturday 20 May at Shane Hill, County Down. The placards also advertised the objectives of the meeting: a reduction in rents in light of the agricultural depression, a new valuation of land, and the founding of tenant right associations in the area.Footnote 41 The United Irishman reported that many of those present were Protestants and Orangemen and the Young Irelander, and Catholic, Michael Doheny addressed the meeting. The Northern Whig, which counted 500 in attendance, reported that while Doheny did not pour scorn on the institution of landlordism or direct the crowd to organise along class lines, his oration, in which he stated that tenants had an equal right to the fruits of their labour, was a militant call to arms; a ‘pike and gun speech’.Footnote 42 In the spring of 1849 Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy was released from confinement after being imprisoned for his part in the July 1848 rising. He quickly began to exert a republican influence in the tenant right movement. Since his incarceration, Duffy had recalibrated his policy from one which promoted physical force to one that focused on resolving the land question. He then turned to forging alliances with Sharman Crawford and with Frederick Lucas of The Tablet, while he reissued The Nation (an organ hitherto primarily concerned with the issue of repeal) with the intention of promulgating the cause of tenant farmers.Footnote 43
Early 1849 also saw the advent of agrarian crime as a significant phenomenon in north Louth with numerous incendiary fires reported, as well as three aggravated assaults, the non-fatal shooting of a bailiff named Samuel Coulter and the assassination of two land stewards, the Clarke brothers, in a dispute over evictions and/or employment.Footnote 44 It soon became clear that members of the fraternal Catholic Ribbon secret societies had been involved in the killing of the two Clarkes when a Ribbon document was discovered on one of the chief suspects, Michael Connolly. A publican (the typical occupation of Ribbon parish masters), Connolly was arrested on suspicion of participating in the killing along with James Walsh (a herdsman) and Neal Quinn, who was described in the press as a farmer of thirty acres.Footnote 45 In fact, Quinn, who resided in the townland of Tawnamore, parish of Creggan, was listed in Griffith's valuation in 1854 as having occupied only one acre with a value of £1 10s.,Footnote 46 and this may have provided a financial incentive for carrying out the attack. Ultimately, the police failed to find enough evidence against the men. Walsh fled to America while on bail and the case against the three broke down in the winter of 1849.Footnote 47 By this time incendiary fire attacks had spread to south Armagh and workers employed constructing railway lines in the region known as navvies – recognised for their militancy and among whom Ribbonism was prevalent – had become involved in the agrarian protest.Footnote 48
III
It was not until 1850 that the violence intensified to the point where the authorities began to take serious notice. That year the ‘disturbed districts’ as a whole witnessed more violence, with agrarian outrage doubling in both Armagh and Monaghan compared to the previous year. For the first six months of 1850 the disturbances in Louth remained at the same level as the previous year. County Armagh, however, saw an increase in outrages in early 1850. The number of threatening letters sent multiplied, while there were several aggravated assaults in the spring.Footnote 49 In May, Robert Lindsay Maulever, land agent to the Tipping estate in south Armagh, was assassinated on the road between Crossmaglen and Culloville, at Crievekeeran. The attackers fired a shot at Maulever from the side of the road and then proceeded to attack him at close quarters with bludgeons. Joshua Magee, solicitor and coroner at the inquest into the agent's death, wrote to The Times noting Maulever's cruelty and expressing his opinion that poor estate management, which included rack-renting and leaving the land in waste, had motivated the attack. Moreover, 200 civil bills for rent had been served on the estate's tenants who were to be brought before the petty sessions and processes taken against them for rents they could not hope to meet, only adding to the hostile atmosphere created by numerous evictions which had been carried out previously.Footnote 50 Indeed, private correspondence between Maulever and the landowner, Tipping, demonstrates that although the agent was willing to offer some abatement in rent if a new valuation of land was carried out on the estate, he was determined to evict those in arrears. Following the swearing in of a sheriff for that purpose, Maulever wrote obstinately that he would journey to Crossmaglen where ‘I shall soon be able to show power’.Footnote 51 Three men, John McAtavey, Patrick McNally and Brian Hanratty, were arrested and charged with the killing, yet only Hanratty was put on trial. The prosecution rested on the evidence of a number of informants who claimed they saw Hanratty on the same road as Maulever at the time of the killing, as well as the discovery of blood-soaked clothing belonging to Hanratty and an injury he had allegedly sustained to his head in the attack. However, in what appeared to be a case of jury intimidation, Hanratty was acquitted.Footnote 52 The case prompted the Newry Telegraph, a Tory enemy of the tenant right movement, to foist the blame on the tenant righters and state that such incidents were ‘the natural products of that demoralisation which is the handiwork of agitators whose trade is to perambulate the country promulgating pernicious doctrines relative to social rights and duties’.Footnote 53
The Telegraph seemed to be vindicated as the tenant right movement gained momentum over the summer of 1850. On 20 June, Reverend Bell addressed an aggregate meeting of farmers in Belfast where he castigated the landowner Lord Shirley for having acted as a ‘merciless destroyer’ by evicting hundreds of families on his estate in south Monaghan.Footnote 54 On 29 June, both Bell and the Catholic cleric Michael Lennon of Crossmaglen, spoke on the platform at a meeting in Dundalk. The Democrat described the gathering as ‘large and influential’ and reported that the formation of the Louth Tenant Protection Society had arisen from the meeting.Footnote 55 In August 1850, the various local tenant right associations coalesced to form the Tenant League. The league quickly became known by the moniker ‘The League of North and South’ as it attempted to fuse the primarily Presbyterian agitation in ‘inner-Ulster’ with that being advocated by prosperous Catholic southern farmers for the ‘Ulster custom’.Footnote 56 The Catholic hierarchy of Ulster, including Bishop Charles McNally of Clogher and Archbishop Paul Cullen of Armagh, supported the league, while Bishop Michael Blake of Dromore, though not as enthusiastic as his two colleagues, also backed the organisation.Footnote 57 Localised meetings on the issue of tenant right continued to be held, as at Carlingford, County Louth, on 10 September where a ‘numerous meeting’ took place and cheering was elicited from the crowd when a change in the laws which governed the relations between landlords and tenants was advocated.Footnote 58
Accusations citing the league's alleged role in the disturbances with regards to more minor clerical figures surfaced elsewhere, as on the Shirley estate in south Monaghan at the close of 1850. Due to its congested nature and the large numbers of impoverished cottier tenants residing on its lands, socio-economic tensions had been to the fore on the estate since the 1840s.Footnote 59 In September 1850, George Morant, agent for Lord Shirley, claimed that the beating of Owen McCabe, a bailiff's assistant on the estate, had been instigated by a parish priest at Sunday mass. McCabe swore to Morant that the local Catholic cleric, Father Luke McKeon, had spoken out against bailiffs in Corduff chapel, calling them ‘rascals’ who earned a ‘filthy salary’. Morant also stated that he had been informed that a ‘blasphemous proclamation’ had been ‘hawked about the fair’ in the town by tenant righters.Footnote 60 Morant's battle with both the local clergy and those agitating for tenant right continued well into the 1860s, and became bound up in electoral contests.Footnote 61 Whether McKeon was a member of the league or not is unclear, but others such as Father Michael Lennon of Crossmaglen, were certainly members. In fact, Lennon had been appointed secretary of the Armagh Tenant Protection Society. Though he later denounced the violence, he had effectively emboldened those behind it when he had written to the Democrat in October 1850 condemning the laws governing the land system and calling on farmers to ‘be up and stirring’.Footnote 62
Conservative anti-Catholic organs continued to draw links between the violence, the league and Catholicism as late as 1853 when the Belfast News Letter proclaimed that ‘the social malady is spreading rapidly throughout the North since the League agitators commenced their labours in alliance with the priests of Rome and the scribes of revolutionary papers’.Footnote 63 In pre-Famine Ireland, priests were the traditional agents of social control and, as Connolly has written, ‘relations between priests and people bore the marks of a strongly authoritarian culture’.Footnote 64 This culture was bolstered from 1850 to 1875 by an increased discipline and conservatism among the Catholic clergy, a process spearheaded by Cardinal Paul Cullen during what Larkin termed the ‘devotional revolution’.Footnote 65Although clearly jaundiced in its views, the Tory Belfast News Letter was not incorrect in highlighting the correlation between the violence and the rhetoric of some priests. Such clergymen need not necessarily have given their loyalty to ‘Rome’. A vocal minority, including clerics such as McKeon and Lennon, and Presbyterians such as Bell, were more than capable of inspiring violent attacks on those who transgressed the unwritten land code.
In early October 1850, the first public meeting of the formally constituted Tenant League in the borderlands region was held at Ballybay. The Nation reported that Catholic and Presbyterian clerics, influential landowners, professional men, traders and substantial tenant farmers were ‘amply represented’, as well as ‘thousands of the tenant farmers and peasantry, who attended from the several districts of the county’.Footnote 66 One observer, writing in The Nation to correct its figure of a 15,000 attendance, estimated that there were upwards of 50,000 at the meeting.Footnote 67 A lower estimate of 3,000 to 4,000 was made by the constabulary, who took notes in plain clothes in the crowd and reported that ‘several expressions against the landlords’ of Monaghan were made.Footnote 68
If landlords were vilified at such meetings, they were not attacked along denominational lines and a strong non-sectarian ethos was evident at the foundation of the league in Ulster. Charles Gavan Duffy, who was central to organising the Ballybay rally, later recounted that the other key organiser, Reverend Bell, overlooked the predominantly Catholic towns of Carrickmacross and Monaghan as potential sites for the meeting. Instead, he selected Ballybay due to its strong Orange constituency, in an attempt to unite the religions.Footnote 69 A flag of orange, green and blue, ‘emblematic of the union which has taken place among men of different creeds and denominations’, was raised over the main platform at the meeting.Footnote 70
However, by 1851 this philosophy had begun to come under strain. That year, religion became a contentious issue when Tenant League agitation became engrafted onto a protest by pro-Catholic Liberal M.P.s – formed into the Independent Irish Party – who opposed the introduction of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill which sought to suppress efforts by the Catholic church to use episcopal titles encompassing the names of U.K. cities, towns or districts.Footnote 71 Ulster's Liberal M.P.s were conspicuous by their non-membership of the Independent Irish Party due to their reluctance in backing a clearly religiously-motivated campaign.Footnote 72 Some Catholic clerics, irate that Westminster might interfere in the appointment processes of their church, organised meetings to defeat the bill. Locally, one such gathering was held on 23 February 1851 at Carrickmacross where resolutions were adopted against the Whig Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, for daring to introduce the bill to parliament.Footnote 73 Despite the Tenant League having begun as a promising cross-sectional alliance, the controversy around the bill gave succour to those who sought to destroy it in favour of the landed interest with cries of ‘No Popery’. The 1852 election in Ulster consequently assumed a sectarian character.Footnote 74
IV
Following the formal establishment of the league in the region, the winter of 1850 saw a sharp upturn in agrarian crime in the ‘disturbed districts’ (which included the initial meeting location of Ballybay in its western portion).Footnote 75 Around Crossmaglen, the constabulary began to report nocturnal gatherings of men numbering a dozen or so. In one instance where the police surprised the conspirators they found in their possession ‘several notices, directed to the neighbouring farmers, threatening them with violence if they would dare to pay rent’.Footnote 76 Around the same time, Thomas Crummy, a bailiff who lived near Newry, was dragged out of his house naked by a group of 100 men, who said they had come a long way, from Crossmaglen. The attackers warned him not to serve ‘any more ejectment processes, to put no person out and to throw away down no more houses’.Footnote 77 As agrarian crime increased in the winter of 1850 and into early 1851, the league had evidently enjoyed a measure of success in instilling an anti-landlord mentality in many tenant farmers and their labourer allies. Stipendiary magistrate for Monaghan, P. C. Howley, spoke to lower-class Catholics in Carrickmacross's rural hinterland during this period and concluded that they held an enmity towards the laws governing the land system. In their view the reason for the violence was simple, and the language they used reiterated that deployed already by The Vindicator. The tenantry ‘gave it as their plausible excuse for being connected with such an illegal confederacy that they would be swept off the face of the earth by the Landlords whom they say make laws solely for their own benefit’.Footnote 78
By early 1851, in Monaghan, the Farney Tenant Right Committee, which was composed of clerics of both denominations and some of the Catholic middle class, had been founded at Carrickmacross,Footnote 79 while a similar grouping, the County Armagh Preparatory Committee of the Irish Tenant League, was also established in Armagh city shortly afterwards.Footnote 80 The Armagh committee issued a defiant printed address upon its formation, in which it called for a meeting of the county's tenant farmers and declared: ‘Let not the fear of landlord influence deter you from coming forward; the tenants on every estate should unite and march boldly to the place of meeting, A landlord may injure one tenant for asserting his constitutional rights, but he cannot, he dare not, interfere with a united body.’Footnote 81 There was a continued upswing in agrarian crime figures in January and February 1851. Louth was more disturbed during these early months than it had been during the same period in 1850. In late January, R.M. French observed that ‘the county is in a very unsatisfactory condition’.Footnote 82 However, there was a lack of will by some elements such as the Newry Examiner to treat the protest as seriously. The violence was downplayed to reduce the cost of rates being paid to maintain the police force and to minimise the damage being done to the Tenant League's reputation by the Tory press.Footnote 83 But the paper's claim that tranquillity prevailed rang hollow as the spring brought a fresh wave of violence in all three districts, with County Armagh witnessing a surge in house attacks and aggravated assaults.Footnote 84
Large public meetings continued to be venues for anti-landlord rhetoric throughout 1851 as, in spite of the obstacles, Tenant Leaguers continued to wage their non-sectarian, class-based agitation in the region. In March, at Carrickmacross, placards of an ‘inflammatory nature’ were posted in the neighbourhood calling for a meeting of the league to select candidates in the upcoming elections for Poor Law Guardians. In mid-March up to 800 assembled at a meeting held in the Catholic chapel in the town over which Reverend Bell and numerous Catholic priests including the clerics James Duffy of Magheracloon, and McNally and McDonnell of Carrickmacross presided. McNally stated that the men of Farney had ‘too long borne with the intolerable and unrelenting oppression of landlords and their underlings’. The clerics were joined on the platform by middle-class Catholic figures and by serving Poor Law guardians Thomas Callan and Michael McMahon, among others.Footnote 85 As William Feingold has noted, the election of tenants to Poor Law boards was part of a process whereby the psychological power of the landed elite was being challenged. In the 1870s ‘the tenant class no longer regarded themselves as abject slaves’ and they came to believe they were ‘entitled to posts of honour and prestige in local government’.Footnote 86 Howley reported that during the 1851 meeting ‘the speeches were of a very exciting nature’, that ‘landlords were compared to reptiles and ought [to] be banished’, and that those who voted against league nominees were branded ‘an enemy of his country and a friend to the oppressors of the poor’. Significantly, the latter phrase found its way into a threatening letter sent to landlord Meredith Chambré of north Louth around the same time.Footnote 87
Conspiratorial attempts to initiate small-scale rental strikes were also reported from the ‘disturbed districts’ in early 1851. In March, police out on patrol at night near Cloghog, County Armagh, came across a contingent of twenty men marching in military order. The next morning threatening notices directed at farmers who continued to pay rent were found posted on a nearby chapel and school.Footnote 88 By this stage of the protest the efforts of tenant farmers, labourers and their allies in the Tenant League to build resistance to the payment of rent had gained widespread support among the populace on some estates. Arthur Johnston Jr., a landowner from near Carrickbreda in south Armagh, claimed in April 1851 that in the barony of Upper Orior a ‘very general combination against the payment of rent existed’.Footnote 89
V
Violence continued to increase steadily throughout April and May 1851 and there was a surge in aggravated assaults in all three districts. On 2 May 1851 Samuel Coulter, an ‘extensive farmer’ and bailiff, who had been attacked earlier in 1849, was assassinated near his home at Shortstone in north Louth for assisting in evicting families. Coulter left for the fair at Crossmaglen that morning on horseback and was beaten severely on the road and killed. As well as acting as head bailiff on an estate near his own lands, Coulter had given evidence at a number of eviction cases during the previous quarter sessions at Ballybot, County Armagh, where decrees for eviction, which were expected to be swiftly enforced, were granted.Footnote 90 Patrick McKeever, Owen Murphy, Michael Campbell and Patrick McCann, all described by the Democrat as ‘small farmers’ and listed in Griffith's valuation as having resided in townlands on the Louth/Armagh border, were arrested on the evidence of a ‘strolling woman’ named Mary Dullaghan who claimed she had been in McKeever's home where she heard him declare that he would carry out the act.Footnote 91 Subsequent arrests of William McElroy and Patrick Reel seemed to signal progress in the police investigation. However, as the weeks passed, and the police sought to build a case against the six men now in custody, the unreliability of witnesses to the assassination and the difficulty of finding concrete evidence proved their undoing. The men were released on bail on 17 July 1851 and later fled to America.Footnote 92 Coulter's killing had signalled a change in the Newry Examiner’s views on the violence. It no longer sought to downplay the agrarian protest to suit its own agenda and instead called on government to act to suppress the disturbances. A reward of £100 for information that would lead to the conviction of Coulter's killers was subsequently offered by the administration and it was agreed that the constabulary force in the county be augmented.Footnote 93
While the police were attempting to solve the Coulter killing, a young man named Bernard McEnteggart was killed on Sunday 15 June 1851 at Annas, County Louth, as he was on his way to mass with his sister Anne McQuillan. Two men approached McEnteggart and his sister as they walked along the railway tracks and beat the unfortunate youth to death with sticks. McEnteggart, only eighteen years old, appears to have been the victim of a land dispute over a seventeen-acre plot which his father, William McEnteggart, had become embroiled in with a certain Felix McArdle. McArdle occupied upwards of thirty acres in the townland of Carrickleagh in the barony of Louth which was rated at £19 annually.Footnote 94 The dispute seemed to centre on the eviction of three previous tenants from the plot by a land agent named John Woolsey.Footnote 95 Woolsey later took it upon himself to investigate the crime and his involvement instigated a campaign of intimidation against him and his hostelry in Dundalk using placards with Ribbonite undertones.Footnote 96 Patrick Kieran was later arrested and tried for McEnteggart's killing, but the jury again ruled for an acquittal, no doubt heavily influenced by the unprecedented testimony of the victim's sister, Anne McQuillan, in defence of the accused. The Examiner commented on the popular support for the alleged assassin, McKiernan, as he left the courtroom a free man and the large group gathered outside ‘vied in the cordiality of their welcomes’.Footnote 97 The community later repaid Anne McQuillan when, during the harvest in September, ‘about two hundred men assembled on the lands … where the body of McEnteggart was murdered, and cut down and made up [her] corn’.Footnote 98 The man later identified as the killer, Francis Corrigan, may have had a financial motive in carrying out the assassination as Griffith's valuation lists him as occupying only ten perches of land which were rated at a value of only six shillings.Footnote 99 Those who had supported McKiernan evidently viewed the authorities as illegitimate and they may have recognised what was an attempt by the police to convict an innocent man. Indeed, the presence of additional police in the region, drafted in following the attacks on Coulter and McEnteggart, had heightened antagonisms between locals and the state. In December 1851, a threatening letter reached John McClean, who had been tasked with collecting the police cess levied for the auxiliary force in the region, which warned that anyone who supported the constabulary collecting money for a ‘tryenical [sic] government’ would be shot.Footnote 100
In the midst of the escalating violence, the local tenant societies based at Ballybay, Dundalk and Carrickmacross continued to meet through mid-1851. However, the initial burst of optimism felt during late 1850 had not translated into organisational advances due a lack of the type of grassroots activists who would later propel land agitations. As a result, contributions from local farmers to the Tenant League's central treasury were not forthcoming. The Democrat, calling the situation ‘disgraceful’, complained that the £300 resolved to be collected from the farmers of County Louth had not been received and the nationalist organ still awaited the formation of local tenant societies in each barony. Louth (excluding Drogheda) donated only £11, given by a sole benefactor, Reverend Bannon, while Castleblayney tendered just £3 7s. and Ballybay contributed £4 18s. 4d.Footnote 101
The league also displayed poor internal discipline and coherence. In Ballybay, the tenant society was split into opposing bodies due to personal and organisational disagreements, rather than from sectarian or class-based discord.Footnote 102 According to an internal inquiry conducted by the league, Reverend Bell and a Catholic cleric named Brennan had been ruled ‘out of order’ in seceding from the Ballybay Tenant Right Central Committee which was left under the stewardship of Edward Goodwin and James Hughes. Bell appears to have been something of a maverick and the dispute had stemmed from his failure to consult the committee when planning a dinner organised for a league deputation from Dublin.Footnote 103
The top-down nature of the league was emphasised by the continued suspicions of some tenant farmers who attended its public meetings. An anonymous correspondent from Cootehill, County Cavan, writing to the Democrat in May 1851, pointed out how one of the speakers on the platform of a Tenant League meeting in Louth had been cursing landlords, yet the correspondent was a tenant of the speaker and had petitioned him for a reduction in rent as a result of the sentiments expressed on the platform. The landowner refused to reduce the rent, prompting the Cootehill tenant to doubt the value of the present agitation which he saw as full of ‘fine talking’, but little action.Footnote 104 Ultimately, these limitations resulted in low attendances at meetings and participation in league activism. An aggregate meeting, intended to bring league supporters and activists from north and south together, was held near the River Boyne at Drogheda, County Louth, on 14 July 1851 but attracted a crowd of only 600 and ‘very little excitement’ was reported by police from the gathering.Footnote 105
Despite these shortcomings, the anti-landlord language used by some clerics at the larger meetings and propagated in the newspapers also came to be utilised at small gatherings of tenant farmers during the period. Evidence of one such gathering, held at Drumashion on the Gosford Estate, County Armagh, in December 1851, suggested that the tenant farmers present were prepared to accept the leadership of Catholic curates on agrarian issues and listen to speakers who advanced notions of dual-ownership of the land, one of whom remarked that ‘the land was not the landlords, they were only trustees, the tenants are as well entitled to the land as they the landlords’.Footnote 106 The anti-landlord sentiment expressed at the Drumashion meeting also owed its origins to deteriorating relations with tenants as a result of the vast debts accumulated due to the Gosford estate's expansion and the building of Gosford Castle from the 1820s.Footnote 107 Moreover, a longstanding sectarian settlement policy had seen Catholics on the estate relegated to the poorer rented lands.Footnote 108 Crucially, the Drumashion assembly also demonstrated that there had been a transfer of ideas from thinkers such as James Fintan Lalor, the County Laois Young Irelander and land agitator, to tenant farmers, who by 1851 had begun to discuss his concepts at local meetings. Lalor had promoted views like those expressed in Drumashion during the worst year of the Great Famine in 1847 when he stated that ‘the absolute (allodial) ownership of the lands of Ireland is vested of right in the people of Ireland’ and that ‘no man has a right to hold one foot of Irish soil otherwise than by grant of tenancy and fee’ from the people.Footnote 109 Though he died in 1849, Lalor's views would not be expressed in their full verve until the late 1870s. Yet, as Thomas O'Neill has written, his thoughts strongly influenced Charles Gavan Duffy and the Tenant League of 1850.Footnote 110
VI
One of the primary consequences of the changed attitudes towards landlords engendered by the league was a shift in the profile of those targeted for beatings and assassination as resistance to unaffordable rents and evictions intensified in the winter of 1851. Where fellow smallholders had, prior to this, borne the brunt of attacks, now middle and upper-class figures such as agents and landlords began to feel the wrath of the secret societies. In December 1851, Thomas Douglas Bateson, land agent to the Templetown estate in the parish of Muckno, which bordered the Tenant League stronghold of Ballybay, was assassinated near Castleblayney due to his having initiated a process to evict numerous families. Landlord–tenant relations had been souring for generations, as the estate's papers reveal. In the eighteenth century, Viscount Templetown described his tenants privately as ‘ill-disposed, useless, idle, ungrateful, good-for-nothing vagabonds … [who] won't work and those who can won't pay; and if any agent with the greatest indulgence proposes to them to pay something, they will tell him to go to hell, and that if he persists, they will take his life’.Footnote 111
After inspecting Templetown's model farm on the morning of 4 December, Bateson made his way back to Castleblayney on foot. About a mile from the town on the Keady Road three assassins struck. The men initially fired a shot which missed its intended target and then rounded on him with sticks and stones, bludgeoning him to death.Footnote 112 In the wake of the attack, the Newry Examiner publicly defended Bateson, claiming he had reduced his tenants’ rent and always ensured they had employment.Footnote 113 This was contradicted by stipendiary magistrate Howley who, in private correspondence to the Castle following the killing, stated that Bateson had refused to give any abatement.Footnote 114 The Democrat alluded to a facet of the case omitted by the other papers. Before Bateson had been at the model farm, he had presided at the petty sessions in Castleblayney and upon leaving the courthouse he was approached by tenants who expected to be evicted by him the next day. The tenants pleaded with Bateson to halt the evictions, but he replied that he would evict them and that they ‘would find that the proceedings taken against them would not end in a farce’.Footnote 115 Only several weeks prior to Bateson's demise Howley had warned prophetically that ‘discontent about evictions and the non-reduction of rents … is much increased by the recent agitation of the Tenant League and promoted by some of its most active leaders resident at Ballybay. The lower-classes are organised … to war against the landed interest.’Footnote 116
The administration sprang into action following the killing of the high-status Bateson. A week after his assassination, on 10 December 1851, the parishes of Derrynoose and Keady in County Armagh, from which the authorities believed most of the violence radiated, were proclaimed under the Crime and Outrage (Ireland) Act, 1847.Footnote 117 Lord Rossmore, lord lieutenant of Monaghan, fulminated at how attacks had ‘got to such a pitch … on the borders of Armagh, Louth and Monaghan about Crossmaglen and “the black quarter” that property and life are no longer secure’.Footnote 118 However, the region's agrarian assassins remained undeterred and several weeks later another landlord named James Eastwood was attacked in north Louth. According to the Examiner, Eastwood had been approached by three men on the road who ‘spoke angrily about tenants he had evicted at a place called Ball's Mill in Armagh where it was reported he evicted 6 or 8 tenants last year’.Footnote 119 In Monaghan, Howley complained that his request for additional police following Bateson's killing went unheeded by the central authorities and he remonstrated that he would be unable to quash the disturbances without a sufficient force.Footnote 120 Around the same time, a threatening letter sent to landlord Meredith Chambré, which illustrated the presence of levelling and nationalist attitudes among the agrarian protestors, accused him of being ‘an oppressor of the Poor … an idle-hearted rascal; besides, who prides in the downfall of his countrymen, we need not wonder – he is no Irishman’.Footnote 121
In early 1852, shootings, aggravated assaults and homicides continued in Counties Monaghan and Armagh.Footnote 122 In January, Reverend Bell was yet again reported to have used anti-landlord rhetoric similar to that found in the threatening letters written by the tenantry. The Armagh Guardian described how Bell had proclaimed at a league meeting at Carrickmacross that ‘landlords are like ravenous wolves and must have their fangs and claws pulled out and if that won't do they must be annihilated’.Footnote 123 With the dust not yet settled following the attack on Bateson, the attempt on Eastwood caused further shockwaves among local magistrates. Within the first week of the new year magistrates held meetings in Newry, Dundalk and Castleblayney which resolved that military forces be drafted in and special juries empanelled which would be immune to intimidation.Footnote 124 In the face of these meetings, however, conspiracy continued apace and in one instance Thomas Fortescue, a landlord who resided at Ravensdale Park in north Louth, discovered that £50 had been proffered for his assassination.Footnote 125 A threatening letter sent to Fortescue on 10 January 1852 signalled a move towards a more fundamental challenge to landlordism, while it also illustrated the nationalist undertones which had been a feature of the protest from its beginnings: ‘Sir, what Peel does that Ireland never would glow better till we got rid of the pauper landlords and the tyrants lot is grinding people into the earth with rack rents to keep their coaches and their glutton … the time is come to put an end to such scoundrels, the north has at last learned from the south.’Footnote 126 In some ways, many Ulster Catholics had never relinquished their claims to the land and carried with them a resilient folk memory of dispossession.Footnote 127 When asked by the Select Committee of 1852, established to inquire into the disturbances, whether he thought Catholics carried back their claim upon the land to the time of the confiscations, R.M. Golding, who was based in south Armagh, replied: ‘many of them I believe talk over it in their houses and among themselves. Traditions of that kind are very largely discussed among them; and I have known some of them keep maps of the estates which they considered they ought to have.’Footnote 128
The symbiosis of agrarian violence and political agitation which had developed by early 1852 is demarcated in Map 2 below where Tenant League activity and the presence of clerics with anti-landlord proclivities on the borderlands and its environs encircle, and are interwoven through, districts where the most serious incidents of outrage occurred. In order to halt this process and to prevent future attacks on landed gentry figures, the central administration, after much delay, acted in a decisive manner. Following successive conspiracies, threats and attacks against Bateson, Fortescue, Eastwood and Chambré, Dublin Castle put in motion the suppressive measures which would ultimately crush the agrarian protest. As the Newry Examiner noted, this came late in the day and the organ berated the measures that had been taken to stifle the protest throughout 1851 as ‘preposterous and absurd’, citing the fact that police were only drafted into an area after a killing had already occurred, ‘a line of policy that somewhat reminds us of shutting the stable door when the steed has been stolen’.Footnote 129 Evidence found in a file sent by an anonymous Dublin Castle clerk confirmed that through 1850 and 1851 government had responded only slowly to calls from the local magistracy to augment the various districts’ police forces.Footnote 130 This drip-feed policy was dropped abruptly after the class background of those targeted altered in the winter of 1851–2 and a special commission was duly established. The commission was designed to speed up the trial process and involve local magistrates and gentry as jurors. These jurors were to be above a certain valuation in the poor law, thereby excluding the lower classes.Footnote 131
Map 2. Ulster Borderlands unrest, 1849–52
Nevertheless as 1852 progressed, the gentry, who had escaped attack in the region in the pre-Famine period, remained the primary targets of the agrarian secret societies and, on 20 January, along the road between Meigh and Killevy, County Armagh, five men shot landlord and magistrate Meredith Chambré in the head, severely wounding him.Footnote 132 The Democrat reported that the attack had occurred in the darkness of night and Chambré had ‘received seven or eight heavy slugs in the face, head and neck’.Footnote 133 The motive for the attack was unclear, but two causes were probable; that Chambré had distrained crops for rent or that he had acted against agrarian conspirators in his capacity as a resident magistrate.Footnote 134 Whatever the motive, for government the commission could not get underway quickly enough and it commenced its business in Monaghan town on 27 January 1852, with the presiding judges having arrived the previous day accompanied by large squadrons of police, infantry and dragoons in a symbolic show of force.Footnote 135 Shortly afterwards, two cousins arrested for Bateson's killing, Francis and Owen Kelly, were tried in front of the special commission, but three successive juries (two of which were intentionally stacked only with Protestants) failed to find them guilty due to lack of evidence. By July 1852, one of the main informants in the case, a man named Casey, had recanted his testimony against the Kellys and both were released.Footnote 136 During the course of the special commission large numbers of crown forces had also been deployed along the roads and railways around the town, thus inhibiting the movements of the agrarian secret societies.Footnote 137 Nevertheless, this policy, combined with additional magistrates’ meetings in February, failed to curb the attacks.Footnote 138
By this point the violence had evidently affected aristocratic sensibilities as far away as London. Queen Victoria announced in her annual speech in February that ‘it is with regret that I have to inform you that the counties of Armagh, Monaghan and Louth have been marked by outrages of the most severe description’.Footnote 139 With the protest having gained an apparently unstoppable momentum, government sought to incriminate the Tenant League, and the movement's upper echelons were forced to eschew the violence. Speaking in the first week of February 1852, William Sharman Crawford, while also taking the opportunity to attack the land system, condemned the conspiracy and unrest.Footnote 140 The league would later convene a meeting in Dublin, in May, to refute claims made before the special commission in Monaghan by crown solicitor, Maxwell Hamilton, that ‘many outrages that had been perpetrated … were suggested or incited by members of the Tenant League’.Footnote 141
As the 1852 election approached, league candidates nevertheless continued to use language its detractors could easily seize upon in an effort to portray the movement as having provoked violence. In mid-May 1852 the County Monaghan Tenant Right Club met at the Railway Hotel in Castleblayney, with Reverend Bell and others present. They resolved to introduce Dr John Gray, proprietor of the Catholic nationalist Freeman's Journal, as the league's candidate for Monaghan.Footnote 142 Gray's manifesto asked the electors in his constituency whether they wished to ‘live like men, by your honest industry in the land of your fathers and not be banished by landlord tyranny?’Footnote 143 On 16 June 1852, a meeting attended by 500 people was held in Castleblayney, where Gray was officially nominated as the league candidate.Footnote 144 When polls opened in Monaghan on 23 July, the election, influenced by wider events surrounding the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, exhibited a politically factional and sectarian complexion. R.M. Geary reported that a ‘vast body of men, all armed with sticks and bludgeons and headed by Roman Catholic clergymen’ entered Monaghan town in support of Gray. By nightfall the Tenant League crowd had swelled to 7,000, contributing to the 20,000 throng in the town centre which included supporters of the Tory and Whig candidates. Rioting was ultimately only avoided by the presence of a large police force.Footnote 145
Despite a reform of the franchise in 1850 which allowed vast swathes of newly enfranchised tenant farmers to vote in the 1852 election, the Tenant League suffered a heavy defeat in Ulster. The loyalty of many Protestant voters to their landlords, upon whose grace they depended for tenant right value, sealed the league's electoral fate. When an upturn in the economic fortunes of Ulster's tenant farmers occurred due to the onset of the Crimean War from 1853, agitation decreased.Footnote 146 Although it lingered on to the close of the decade, by 1855 the pro-landlord Armagh Guardian could joyously boast that the Tenant League was ‘virtually defunct’.Footnote 147 The demise of the Independent Irish Party – also known as the ‘Irish Brigade’ – to which the Tenant League was allied, from the mid-1850s onwards, also contributed to putting loyalist and landlord minds at ease. The party had stood on a platform of repealing the Ecclesiastical Titles Act and achieving fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale for tenant farmers. However, the political climate was not conducive to the successful development of the party. According to J. H. Whyte, among the factors explaining the party's demise were the inadequacy of popular candidates and an over-reliance on the parliamentary aspect of agitation in an era where the structure of Irish politics would not allow for the rise of an autonomous party due to the continued existence of the patronage system which ensured Whig and Tory dominance.Footnote 148
During the summer of 1852 the special commission eventually began to have an impact in curbing agrarian unrest by ending the conspirators’ hopes of acquittal by a sympathetic jury. In early August 1852 two sets of executions took place within a week of each other, effectively ending the protest among the rural lower class. James Kirk and Patrick McCooey (the latter a navvy who confessed on the stand that he had been a Ribbonman) were hanged for the attack on Eastwood. The men were convicted on the evidence of Owen Hamill (a former Ribbonman and also a navvy) who testified that he had been in their company as they prepared to assassinate the landlord.Footnote 149 Three days later Francis Berry was executed for the attack on Chambré.Footnote 150 Berry, another Ribbonman, had been arrested in the days after the attack on Chambré and had quickly confessed his guilt and implicated his cousin, John Magennis, described by the Newry Telegraph as a ‘substantial farmer’. Indeed, according to Griffith's valuation Magennis rented numerous plots in different townlands in south Armagh and paid an annual rent of £14.Footnote 151 Magennis had evidently supplied the blunderbuss used by Berry and the other attackers as a certificate of registration for the gun left at the scene was found in his house.Footnote 152 In 1854 the policy of suppression adopted by government culminated in the hanging of three more men – Patrick Coomey, Bryan Grant and Neal Quinn – convicted of killing Bateson on the word of an informant named Pat Nogher.Footnote 153 By the summer of that year police forces in the area had been significantly reduced.Footnote 154 Ulster and the borderlands region experienced a sharp decline in agrarian crime through the mid-1850s, and where ‘Ribbonism’ and ‘agrarian murder’ had dominated the pages of the local press, coverage of the battles and political debates of the Crimean War commanded most attention.Footnote 155
VII
On the Ulster borderlands, the years from 1849 to 1852 were highly significant. While demonstrating many continuities with pre-Famine Ireland, they represented a watershed period. Several conclusions on the questions of geography, sectarianism and the longer term configurations of agrarian mobilisation and political activity can be drawn. Firstly, geographically, on the borderlands the pattern of an embryonic nexus of constitutional agitation and physical force that emerged during 1849–52 was regional, rather than local. In areas where the necessary mixture of landowner obstinacy, Tenant League activity and secret society tradition did not exist, the disturbances were markedly low-key, as in neighbouring Cavan.Footnote 156 However, the baronies of the borderlands where an intermingling of violence and politicisation occurred, rather than displaying any great distinction from Connacht and Leinster, bore striking similarities to the south. South Leinster, in reality the stronghold of the Tenant League during 1849–52, warrants considerable scholarly attention as similar parallels linking the oratory and writing of firebrand agitators and agrarian conspiratorial violence may also come to light when regional studies are embarked upon. But, for the broader question of Catholic Ulster's occasionally mooted detachment from the south, the character of the protest of 1849–52 on the borderlands, in its use of intimidatory techniques and controlled but at times ferocious violence, resembled Catholic agrarian protest elsewhere in the country.Footnote 157
What is striking about the violence, in fact, is that despite the presence of significant Protestants (including landlords, their agents, and lower-middling tenant farmers) in the region, it did not descend into sectarian tit-for-tat. Since Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly first remarked on the absence of studies on rural agitation in Ulster over thirty years ago, there remains a deficit in the literature on agrarian violence in the province, particularly with regards to the role religious tensions may have played.Footnote 158 On this point, several observations may be made. Firstly, although some of the men involved in agrarian violence were members of anti-Protestant Ribbon secret societies, the agrarian conflict of 1849–52 did not assume a sectarian character, not least because Ribbonism's modus operandi on the borderlands was primarily one of economic advancement on behalf of their own members, rather than agrarian struggle for the benefit of the wider peasantry.Footnote 159 Secondly, landlords around south Armagh evicted the lower classes of both Catholic and Protestant denominations,Footnote 160 and though the violent agrarian response originated almost entirely from within the Catholic community, Protestants were reportedly sympathetic to the protest when rent reductions were secured on their behalf.Footnote 161 Thirdly, agrarian protest was most violent and sustained in predominantly Catholic districts such as Crossmaglen,Footnote 162 while convictions secured for violent incidents such as assassinations all involved Catholics.Footnote 163 Though prejudice could have been at play in the arrests and convictions of these Catholics, there was little trace of Protestant involvement in incidents of agrarian crime. When asked by the Select Committee of 1852 whether he ‘had ever heard or known of other than Roman-Catholics being accused of committing agrarian crimes’, stipendiary magistrate Fitzmaurice replied that he had, ‘but it has been very seldom’.Footnote 164 Lastly, as Table 1 above confirms, those who were targeted by agrarian conspirators were not discriminated against on the basis of their religion, a fact supported by the evidence of contemporaries such as Deputy Inspector General Brownrigg and R.M. Golding.Footnote 165 One of the few cases where agrarian crime did overlap with sectarian enmity was a minor incident which occurred in 1851 when Arthur Johnston of Carrickbreda, County Armagh, received a threatening notice ‘ordering him to send away his bailiff on the ground[s] that he was the master of an Orange Lodge’.Footnote 166
The only connection that might be identified between agrarian disturbance and sectarianism arises in reports of Catholic social gatherings and feast nights during these years. These assemblies were invigorated by agrarian strife and consequently exhibited a more hostile demeanour than usual towards the police, as occurred at Camlough and Keady in 1849, and Derrynoose in 1850, when large bodies of well-armed Catholics clashed with the constabulary and Tory organs such as the Armagh Guardian warned that an anti-Protestant fervour had supposedly been whipped up among those gathered.Footnote 167 Yet, on closer examination, it seems clear that these incidents are best categorised as examples of Catholic self-assertion and anti-state sentiment, and were not in reality illustrative of sectarian hostility. Overall, on the borderlands between 1849 and 1852, despite the potential for sectarianism to permeate agrarian violence due to the presence of a substantial minority Protestant community in the region, the activities of the conspirators once again were largely in line with those in the essentially religiously homogenous southern provinces where inter-Catholic, and not intercommunal, violence predominated.
Finally, on the question of the activities of the Tenant League and agrarian conspirators of 1849–52 in a broader, post-Famine context: when outbreaks of agrarian violence which occurred after 1852 are examined, even on a rather superficial level, something of a pattern emerges whereby the presence or absence of constitutional agitation on the land question appears to affect the rates of agrarian crime. As Donnelly has noted, the slump of 1859–64 did not engender political mobilisation on the land. Instead, Fenian insurrection was a real possibility and though there was a slight rise in outrages between 1862 and 1864, and some middle and upper class individuals spoke in favour of land reform, there was no major surge in agrarian discontent.Footnote 168 By contrast, the years 1869–71, as W. E. Vaughan has documented, witnessed a serious outbreak of agrarian crime centred on County Westmeath which ‘coincided with the public meetings organized by a revivified tenant league’.Footnote 169 Less than a decade later, the Land League quickly grew into a mass movement after its foundation in 1879 and, as the studies of Paul Bew, L. P. Curtis and, most recently, Donnacha Seán Lucey make clear, an interaction between political mobilisation and agrarian violence could be discerned during the course of the Land War of 1879–82.Footnote 170
However, when it comes to the period 1849–52, Clark and Lee have both asserted that the closing of the social gap between town and country that necessitated the prosecution of the Land War of 1879 had not occurred, and the 1850s and 1860s revealed a disconnect between rural protagonists of agrarian violence, who sought to combat unaffordable rents and evictions through the use of extra-legal methods, and the urban-based leadership who advocated on behalf of tenants in newspapers and through speeches on platforms.Footnote 171 This assertion is correct, on one level. The Tenant League certainly had limitations which were specific to its time. Though efforts were made by some republicans in the Irish Confederation to marry the land and national questions in Ulster and elsewhere, the league was internally rudderless and lacked a unifying Parnell-type figure capable of introducing an iron discipline to proceedings. Nor could the Tenant League count among its rank and file the type of grassroots Fenian activists who would drive the Land War later on by gaining support and financial backing in local communities.Footnote 172
Yet, on another level, the Tenant League of 1849–52 laid the groundwork for the Land League of 1879–82 that followed in a way which has hitherto not been given due credit. In strategic and tactical terms, the elections to Poor Law boards and rent strikes deployed during 1849–52 would be redeployed by agrarian agitators, especially from the 1870s. The radical agrarian clerical tradition established by Reverend Bell and others in 1849–52 was also carried forward into the years of the Land War by priests such as Father Patrick Lavelle of Mayo.Footnote 173 The ‘scribes’ of organs such as the Democrat, meanwhile, who played a central role in the rising tide of anti-landlord consciousness from 1849, would be followed by a host of similar newspapers in subsequent years that wrote in favour of a substantial change in landlord–tenant relations. The New Departure was also prefigured by the tentative alliances of 1849–52 and the development of a synergy between the fierce rhetoric of Tenant League orators and the violence of agrarian conspirators. Above all, despite the ephemeral nature of the 1849–52 disturbances and a lull in open conflict between landlord and tenant for many years, the mentalities forged in the crucible of politicisation and violence during this period endured and would go on to shape the political and social course of post-Famine Ireland. As the early twentieth century Gaelic scholar Mac Cuileannáin put it, ‘craven subserviency had vanished. Bitter hostility had arrived’.Footnote 174
