Robert Emmet: Patriot, Martyr & Inspiration for Emmet County

Sept. 17, 2003

On a September day 200 years ago, Irish rebel Robert Emmet stepped off a scaffold and into eternity, hung for the crime of high treason before a crowd of hundreds on Thomas Street in Dublin.
The young Irish patriot was gone, but not forgotten. Today, there are three statues of Robert Emmet in America, numerous societies in his name, and several towns and counties named after him, not to mention Emmet County in Northern Michigan.
“He was so revered because a lot of the people who rebelled against the British in Ireland escaped to the United States,“ says Jim Gillespie of the BlissFest Music Organization, who‘s made a study of Emmet‘s life.
Last month, Gillespie organized the first annual Harbor Celtic Festival to honor Emmet‘s memory and bring the music of Ireland to the county that bears his name. One of his goals was to make county residents more aware of Robert Emmet‘s legacy to recapture the area‘s Irish roots.

DOWNTRODDEN MASSES
Robert Emmet was just 24 when he died in the aftermath of a second rebellion against Britain. His death capped five years of revolution in Ireland that killed some 30,000 people, often in waves of atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict.
Gillespie says the Emmet story dates back to the 13th century, when the family immigrated to Ireland from England. The Emmet family was of the landed, educated class who grew closer to the Irish people as injustices from British rulers mounted.
“The whole family was of the aristocracy, but decided to throw their hats in the ring with the downtrodden masses,“ Gillespie says.
“Emmet‘s father was a doctor who was pretty liberal for the time,“ he adds. “He offered free clinical services to some Irish Catholics, which was unheard of at the time.“
Stirred by the example of the American Revolution, the Emmet family fell in with the United Irishmen in the 1790s. The United Irishmen was a freedom movement which arose from an Irish volunteer army that had been established in 1782 to protect the island against the French. Weakened by the American Revolution, Britain had agreed to both the volunteer army as well as the establishment of an Irish Parliament in 1782, hoping to avoid a similar revolution in Ireland.
By 1797, the United Irishmen had established a secret army in Ireland and rebellion was brewing against British rule. The threat of separation from the British Empire was not small matter: Britain had maintained vast landownings in Ireland since its conquest by Oliver Cromwell more than a century prior, and Dublin, with 200,000 residents, was the second largest city in the empire.

A TIME OF REVOLUTION
The Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 reverberates to this day, pitting poor Irish Catholics against Protestant landowners and Irish patriots against British troops. Atrocities by both sides had the world aghast. In the town of Prosperous, British troops inflicted residents with the practice of “pitchcapping,“ covering their heads with tar and setting them aflame. Half-hangings for torture or dragging deaths by the neck were reported as common. Irish rebels fought back, attacking the British barracks at Propserous in May with spear-like pikes. “Most of the garrison were piked or burnt to death,“ reports author Thomas Pakenham in his book, “The Year of Liberty.“
The rebellion was broken over the course of a string of battles across the country between Irish militiamen and the far better trained and equipped British troops. It came to an end in October, 1798, when a British squadron captured a French invasion fleet that was coming to aid the rebels.

THE SECOND REBELLION
Emmet had a rebellious nature even as a student at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1793, he resigned from the school rather than submit to questioning by the British-leaning lord chancellor of Ireland, who was trying to gauge student support for the United Irishmen.
Here‘s what the Robert Emmet Website has to say about his involvement in the 1803 rebellion:
“In 1800 Emmet went to France and associated himself with the exiled leaders of the United Irishmen. In 1802 he gained assurances of support for Irish independence from Napoleon and the French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. Emmet then secretly returned to Ireland. He began organizing an armed rebellion, but his plans miscarried; in July 1803 he headed a force of about 150 men, armed chiefly with pikes, whom he proposed to lead in an attack on Dublin Castle. On the way, the group became unruly and was dispersed by a small body of British troops. Emmet fled into hiding in the Wicklow Mountains; after a few days he went to the home of his fellow patriot John Philpot Curran, whose daughter, Sarah, Emmet loved. He was captured there shortly afterward...“
By the time of Emmet‘s rebellion, the Irish were weary of fighting. “The older United Irish leaders were unenthusiastic; so were the ordinary Irish people,“ Pakenham writes of Robert‘s effort. “The rising ended in a scuffle in the Dublin streets.“
Gillespie says Emmet had Jeffersonian ideals about a free republic for Ireland, but his love for Sarah Curran may have been his undoing. “He got caught because he stuck around Ireland for too long, trying to convince her to go to America with him.“
Sarah barely escaped execution by the British after they discovered a letter from Robert to her and searched the family‘s home. Her father, who was furious that her romance had threatened the family‘s safety, ordered her out of his home. She took refuge with friends hundreds of miles away. Sarah ended up marrying a soldier and moving to Sicily, but according to legend, never recovered from her grief for Robert. The Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote of her:

“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers around her are sighing,
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.“

TO AMERICA
As for Robert‘s brother, Thomas, who was one of the leaders of the United Irish Executive, which directed the rebellion of 1798, he emigrated to America for a new career with a number of the other rebel leaders.
For the Irish, the failed rebellion meant a rise in rents, unemployment and the threat of famine. Up to 50,000 per year emigrated to England and Scotland. “But like all poor emigrants, the Irish had to take the worst jobs and live in the worst ghettos,“ Pakenham writes. “Their offspring went off to work as child labourers.“
Other political prisoners were conscripted as cannon fodder for foreign armies, or sent to Britain‘s penal colony at Botany Bay in Australia.
And some, of course, made their way to America, where the legend of Robert Emmet grew. Emmet County was known as Tonedagana County in honor of a local Indian chief until 1843. Its name was changed with several other Michigan communities that year in deference to Irish political power in the state. Today, a Robert Emmet Society still carries on the patriot‘s memory in the Petoskey area.
“He was of the landed gentry and didn‘t have to get involved,“ Gillespie notes. “He could have just cruised through life, but he became the darling of the underclass.“
Upon his capture, Robert Emmet was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On Sept. 20, 1803, he stepped up to the gallows outside of St. Catherine‘s Church in Dublin and reportedly said, “My friends, I die in peace, and with a sentiment of universal love and kindness to all men.“ He was decapitated with his heart still beating, and buried secretly in an unknown grave.

For more information on Robert Emmet, including his famous speech on the eve of his execution, check out www.robertemmet.org.