Official America's Reaction to the 1916 Rising

The Wilson administration and the 1916 rising Professor Bernadette Whelan Department of History University of Limerick Chapter in Ruan O’Donnell (ed.), The impact of the 1916 Rising: Among the Nations (Dublin, 2008) Woodrow Wilson’s interest in the Irish question was shaped by many forces; his Ulster-Scots lineage, his political science background, his admiration for British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s abilities and policies including that of home rule for Ireland. In his pre-presidential and presidential years, Wilson favoured a constitutional solution to the Irish question but neither did he expect to have to deal with foreign affairs during his tenure. This article will examine firstly, Woodrow Wilson’s reaction to the radicalization of Irish nationalism with the outbreak of the rising in April 1916, secondly, how the State Department and its representatives in Ireland dealt with the outbreak on the ground and finally, it will examine the consequences of the rising for Wilson’s presidency in 1916. On the eve of the rising, world war one was in its second year as was Wilson’s neutrality policy. In this decision he had the support of the majority of nationalist Irish-Americans who were not members of Irish-American political organisations but were loyal to the Democratic Party.1 Until the outbreak of the war, the chief Irish-American political organizations, Clan na Gael and the United Irish League of America, had been declining in size but in August 1914 Clan na Gael with Joseph McGarrity as a member of its executive committee, shared the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s (IRB) view that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ and it acted to realize the IRB’s plans for a rising in Ireland against British rule. Immediately they reverted to their traditional strategy of internationalizing the Irish question and hoped to reap the benefits from strategic alliances with the German-American community and representatives of the German government.2 By 1916 the small group of ‘professional Irish politicians’, as British Ambassador Spring Rice called them, particularly John Devoy and Daniel Cohalan in New York, McGarrity in Philadelphia and John T. Ryan in Buffalo, who comprised the Revolutionary Directory of Clan na Gael, were hopeful that their German contacts would bring results specifically the occurrence of the IRB-planned rebellion in Ireland.3. Certainly they were vocal, unyielding and prominent in their pro- German sympathies, but they were not representative of Catholic Irish-Americans, the majority of whom may not have been pro-British but were not pro-German either particularly after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. While the British and US secret services targeted the radicals’ 1 activities, events in Ireland altered the quiescent attitude of the majority of Irish-American nationalists and forced Wilson to clarify his views on the Irish question. The Irish rising went ahead on 24 April but it was limited to a few areas, particularly the General Post Office in Dublin, due to confusion about mobilisation orders. Within five days, the leaders had been arrested along with approximately 3,500 others, 450 people had died, 2,614 had been wounded and the rebellion had ended.4 Nonetheless the short and long-term consequences reverberated in different ways throughout US politics, in the press and with the public. How did the State Department respond to these challenges? In April 1916, there three US consuls assigned to Ireland; Edward Adams in Dublin, Hunter Sharp in Belfast and Wesley Frost in the Cork office at Queenstown. They were responsible to Consul General Robert Skinner and Ambassador Walter Page based in London5 When the rising broke out in Dublin, not one US consul informed the State Department and it was summer before the matter was investigated in the Consular Bureau. Herbert Hengstler minuted on 21 August that the office had received ‘nothing about the rising’ from ‘Belfast, Dublin or Cork.’ The following day, Bureau Director Wilbur Carr could not understand the failure of the consuls in Ireland to report either to the Department or to the London embassy on recent ‘occurrences’ in their districts. He instructed the consuls to explain their ‘failure to report.’6 When Adams’ report on events during the rising, dated 29 November, reached Washington in December, it indicated that when the fighting broke out on Easter Monday he had been six miles away, at home with his son in Ross’s Hotel, Kingstown, county Dublin. His vice consul, John Claffey, lived in Lindsay Road, Glasnevin, which was closer to the city. In the following days, neither man was exempt from the travel restrictions placed on people due to the imposition of martial law. Claffey reached the consular office at 9 Leinster Street on 27 April ‘by going from doorway to doorway’, and he went there again on 2 May with permission from the military authorities, but it took Adams until 8 May to resume work in the office. On 25 April, he was prevented at gunpoint from going into the city to secure a pass to exempt him from the regulations. Twice in following days he was refused a pass and on 3 May he was even barred from returning to his home for a short while. Adams did not complain about his treatment to any official but instead patiently waited to get permission. When he obtained a pass on 4 May, some of the soldiers at the checkpoints refused to acknowledge it and to allow him passage into the city centre.7 By the time his thirty-four page, factual, day-by-day, account reached the State Department in December 1916, it was of little use. Adams attributed the delay in sending his report to the work involved in procuring accurate information, the tardiness in obtaining official statistics and the burden of ‘additional, general work incidental to the Rebellion and its resultant investigations, 2 correspondence, etc.’8 But it was evident from his report that much of it was culled from official publications, that he had little understanding of the reasons for the rising but that he felt that the ‘behaviour of the troops … is exemplary in every respect. Even when suffering from unfair attack … the men conduct themselves with remarkable patience and restraint.’ Finally, he admitted to being frightened by the ‘alarming’ events, particularly the shooting, fighting, rioting, burning and looting.9 But he insisted that when Claffey reached the office on 27 April, ‘naturally, no business could be transacted’ and that during his second visit on 2 May, Claffey telephoned him to say that there were ‘no important matters for attention.’10 When Adams finally reached the office on 4 May, he found that post had not been delivered, the telephone and telegraph service was under military control and he left for Kingstown.11 As will be seen, Adams did conduct some business during the rising, which could have been reported back to Washington, in the days surrounding the rising. The report from Belfast was markedly different. Sharp told the State Department on 15 September that, ‘not having any knowledge of the existence of political disturbances in my consular district, during the period mentioned’, he contacted the commissioner of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), who confirmed that ‘there had been no political trouble in Ulster’ during the previous five months and that the ‘general conditions of the province had been quite normal.’ But on 26 May, Sharp had replied to a query from Ambassador Page in London, as to whether one Peter Fox, a US citizen arrested during the rising, was registered at the Belfast consulate.12 Sharp replied the following day that Fox was not on his register of US citizens but that he had been arrested at Carrickmore, county Tyrone, as a ‘Sinn Féiner and Irish Volunteer.’13 Even though the rising did not spread to Belfast and the Ulster province, Fox was in fact one of 1,500 people rounded up by the RIC in Sharp’s consular district on Easter Tuesday, 25 April. Of those rounded up, 300 were arrested, 136 sent to Dublin prisons and the rest incarcerated in other parts of the country. The fate of US citizens arrested will be examined later. When, on 22 September, Sharp did file a report titled ‘Political conditions in Ireland’, it began with an examination of the reasons for the failure of the ‘disastrous rising’ and betraying his unionist proclivities, concluded that a united Ireland was entirely unacceptable to Ulster’s ‘leaders.’14 When Wesley Frost in Queenstown got around on 14 October to replying to Carr’s instruction, he explained that he had been without a vice consul, he was not obliged to submit political reports, he had no contacts with the insurrectionary movement and anyway his town was free of ‘trouble.’ But his eighty-four page report detailed significant rebellious activity in his consular district including that a company of Scots Guards took charge of the railway station in Queenstown and a ‘powerful’ dreadnought had been brought to Queenstown harbour and anchored 3 up the River Lee towards Cork city ‘in readiness to shell the city if necessary.’15 He provided personal experience of the ‘oppressive’ policing of the country at the time; ‘from this window of this consulate can be seen two plain-clothes men of the force, and another is on duty at the railway station 200 yards away, while there are always a score of uniformed men on duty in this town of 8,000 persons.’ He believed that the rise of the Sinn Féin movement was assisted by a ‘ponderable quantity of Irish-American money’ and a ‘little German-American money’ but the ‘stertorous plaint of “American dollars” appears entirely unjustifiable’.

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