October 2012
History Selection |
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On this Day: October |
1st | 1600 - Robert Grave,
Church of Ireland Bishop, drowned together with his family at Dublin
Bay. 1812 - English balloonist James Sadler started a balloon flight from Belvedere House in an attempt to cross the Irish Sea. |
2nd | 1601 - Beginning of
Siege of Kinsale. 1649 - Beginning of the Siege of Drogheda. 1957 - The Voluntary Health Insurance Board as launched. |
3rd | 1691 - Treaty of
Limerick. 1938 - Britain's last remaining forts in the twenty-six counties were handed back to Ireland. 1970 - US President Nixon arrived in Ireland. 1975 - Businessman Tiede Herrema was kidnapped by the IRA. |
4th | 1857 - Grand Opening of St. Mary's Cathedral in Kilkenny. |
5th | 1968 - Police in Derry baton-charged a civil rights march. |
6th | 1980 - Mella Carroll became Ireland's first female high court judge. |
7th | 1843 - A proclamation was issued from Dublin Castle banning a Monster Meeting at Clontarf called by Daniel O'Connell. |
8th | 1974 -
Seán MacBride was awarded a half-share of the Nobel Peace
Prize. 2002 - Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams claimed that the raid on his party’s Stormont offices last week was an attempt to destabilise the peace process. |
9th | 1878 - St Mary's Cathedral in Tuam was consecrated. |
10th | 1773 - The Offerlane
Blues, a Volunteer corps, was founded. 1918 - The RMS Leinster was sunk by a German submarine with the loss of around 500 lives. 1977 - Mairéad Corrigan and Betty Williams won the Nobel Prize for Peace. |
11th | 1649 - Sack of Wexford by Cromwell's forces. |
12th | 1798 -
Battle of Tory Island. 1867 - The final convict ship to transport convicts to Australia, the Hougoumont, took 62 Fenians on board. 1975 - Canonization of Oliver Plunkett. 1984 - The IRA killed five people in an attack on a Brighton hotel during the Conservative Party Conference. |
13th | 1994 - Loyalist paramilitary groups announced a ceasefire. |
14th | 1318 - Battle of
Faughart, at which Edward Bruce was defeated. 1791 - The Society of United Irishmen formed in Belfast. 1866 - St Peter's Church, later to become a cathedral, opened in Belfast. |
15th | 1842 - The Nation newspaper was first printed in Dublin. |
16th | 1678 - Proclamations
against Catholic clergy and schools in Ireland were issued. 1961 - Cork airport opened. |
17th | 1171 - Henry II
landed at Waterford with an army. 1886 - John Dillon announced his 'Plan of Campaign' for Irish tenants against unfair rents. |
18th | 1382 - Death of
James Butler, 2nd Earl of Ormond and three times Lord Justice of Ormond. 1880 - Ballycastle railway opened between Ballymoney and Ballycastle. 1881 - The Irish National Land League issued their 'No Rent' manifesto. |
19th | 1649 - New Ross fell
to the English Parliamentarian forces. 1745 - Death of Jonathan Swift. 1795 - The brigs Trevor Totty and Nonpareil ran into trouble while crossing the Irish sea, reuslting in around 200 deaths. 1881 - The Irish National Land League was declared illegal. |
20th | 1794 - Col. John
Gustavus Crosbie killed Sir Barry Denny in a duel related to the Kerry
election. 2002 - The Irish people endorsed the Nice Treaty in a referendum. |
21st | 1803 - Thomas Russell, co-founder of the Society of United Irishmen, was hanged at Downpatrick Gaol. |
22nd | 1884 - Alice
Walkington became the first woman to be awarded a degree in Ireland. 1976 - President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resigned over the Emergency Powers Bill. |
23rd | 1641 - Beginning of
an attempted coup d'etat by the Irish Catholic gentry against the
English administration. 1831 - George Joseph Plunket Browne was consecrated as first Bishop of the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Galway. 1911 - 70,000 Unionists marched against Home Rule. 1970 - Charles Haughey, James Kelly, Albert Luykx and John Kelly were acquitted of conspiracy to import arms. |
24th | 1990 - The IRA forced three men to act as suicide bombers, resulting in seven deaths. |
25th | 1650 - Battle of
Meelick Island. 1920 - The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison. |
26th | 1878 - Founding meeting of the Mayo Tenants Defence Association. |
27th | 1645 - Archbishop
Malachy Ó Caollaidhe killed after attempted to recover Sligo
from Scottish Covenanters. 1651 - Hugh Dubh O’Neill surrendered Limerick. 1697 - Lightning struck Athlone castle, causing the arsenal to explode and unleashing a devastating fire. 1913 - James Larkin of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union was sent to prison for seditious language. |
28th | 1958 - The State
Opening of Parliament was televised for the first time. 1976 - Sinn Féin vice president Máire Drumm was assassinated by loyalists. |
29th | 1816 - The Wildgoose Lodge murders, during which eight people burned to death. |
30th | 1939 - More than two dozen air-raid sirens were tested across Dublin. |
31st | 1845 - An emergency
meeting of the British cabinet was held to discuss the potato failure
in Ireland. 1920 - District-Inspector Philip Kelleher was shot dead in the Greville Arms Hotel, Granard. As a reprisal, British forces entered the town and destroyed its main businesses including the hotel. 1973 - Three IRA prisoners escaped from Mountjoy Prison in a hijacked helicopter. 1996 - The first Irish language TV station, Teilifís na Gaeilge (TnaG), was launched. |
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Bolivar Heights,
Harper’s Ferry Jefferson County, Virginia October 9th, 1862 The town of Harper’s Ferry is built at the foot of the narrow tongue of land that thrusts itself out like a cutwater, separating the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers. It is known as Bolivar Heights. Just across the Potomac are the Maryland Heights, Washington County, Maryland. Over the Shenandoah beyond Loudon Heights lies Virginia proper. Before the war, Harper’s Ferry had a population of about 2,000. But now, like Fairfax Courthouse, Virginia, it was inhabited only by old men, black and white, women and children and a garrison then of Union troops. The Confederate Army evacuated it on the 19th of September after burning all the stores and government buildings. The Rebs left the once beautiful and comfortable town a heap of black ruins, save for a few small, mean brick and log huts. The saddest and the most humiliating sight to us here, and perhaps the heaviest loss to the United States government in this section of the country, was the celebrated Harper’s Ferry Arsenal and Armory. It was now one mass of ruins, with only a small portion of stone work standing. Our own forces had applied the fire fiend to keep it out of Confederate hands. This once magnificent and immense government structure, which manufactured firearms and artillery of every calibre and gave constant employment to twelve or fifteen hundred men, was destroyed. It was located by the side of the town along the river’s brink. |
![]() William
McCarter
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Here, drunkenness was very prevalent. We were
informed that when the
Rebel Army was in possession, it was even more so. To use the language
of an old citizen there, “whiskey ran like water.”
Our regiment was
here brigaded, becoming a portion of the famous Irish Brigade under the
command of General Thomas Francis Meagher. The brigade was part of
Hancock’s Division, Sumner’s Corps (2nd Army
Corps), Army of the
Potomac, General George B. McClellan, Commander-in-Chief. Sketch of General Meagher
In personal appearance, General Meagher was about 35 years old, five feet-eight or ten inches high, of rather stout build, and had a clear high-coloured complexion. He wore a heavy, dark brown moustache, closely trimmed. Except in battle, where he generally wore only the uniform of a private soldier, he nearly always appeared in the full dress of his rank. Meagher presented an exceedingly neat and clean soldierly appearance, marked and admired by all. He was a gentleman of no ordinary ability. In thorough military skill and in courage and bravery on the battlefield, he was second to none in the Army of the Potomac. In polished, gentlemanly manners and bearing (when himself), he was head and shoulders above any other man occupying a similar position in the army that I ever knew or heard of. His conversation was dignified. In point of education, his equal was hard to find. He spoke fluently not only English, but also Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Welsh, and the native Irish language. The latter sounded like a mixture of all the others jumbled up together, and was very seldom heard in the present day. Only a few of the natives of some of the wildest and most uncultivated parts of Ireland spoke it and even there that old, ancient language was fast going to decay. In kindness and thoughtfulness for his men, he was the shining light and bright star of the whole Union Army. Meagher made unceasing efforts to have his soldiers all well provided for and made comfortable. He often brought some poor, sick or perhaps dying soldier into his own private tent in cold weather. Wrapping him up there in blankets, Meagher administered with his own hands such medicine as was prescribed by the brigade’s head doctor. In the surgeon’s absence, the general prescribed for and administered himself such remedies as he thought were needed. As a physician, Meagher had considerable judgment. He was one of the very few military leaders who never required or would ask any of his command to go where he would not go himself. Meagher was first to lead the way. He was a soldier who not only prided in doing his own duty but encouraged and helped all under him to do theirs. Glory, honor and praise to his memory as a soldier, firm and true to his government and his country. But, alas, poor fellow, he had one besetting sin. It was the besetting sin of so many Irish then and now – intemperance. Meagher found an untimely grave in the broad waters of the Missouri, having either stumbled or fallen overboard drunk from a steamboat on that river. He was serving then his term of office as Governor of Montana. Meagher had been appointed Acting Governor after the close of the war. Thus ended the eventful career of one of the truest and best soldiers that ever drew a sword in defense of the Union and his adopted country. His death and the reported cause of it was sad and melancholy. Yet his many acts of kindness, bravery and heroism will long be remembered and cherished with pleasure and pride by many an American and by thousands of his own native countrymen of the Emerald Isle.[1] |
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The Capture of Charlestown, West
Virginia Early on the
morning of the
13th, our colonel sent me a message to be ready to accompany him to the
headquarters of General Meagher, about 200 yards distant, at ten a.m.
The general wanted to see me. I tried to think. Who could have told
General Meagher about me or what could he want with me? I was a perfect
stranger to him, one who perhaps he had never saw before except in the
ranks and then in the distance. Had I been guilty of any crime or
misdemeanour worthy of reproof or punishment?
The incident of
the cornfield
flashed upon my mind. Had I done wrong in refusing Col. Heenan
admittance into the camp at the dead hour of nearly midnight without
the countersign? Had I insulted him by telling him that I did now know
him then in my position as a guard at my post? But even in this, I did
not see how any charge could be brought against me for, in acting as I
did, I was simply doing my duty. I was carrying out the instructions of
my superior officer. In vain did any of my thoughts or ideas satisfy my
mind as to the real nature of General Meagher’s business with
me.
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![]() Thomas
Francis Meagher
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I, however, rigged myself up in
my dress uniform, brightened up all my buttons and brasses,
and presented a pretty fair soldierly appearance. I was fit for
inspection. I proceeded in accordance with orders to the tent of
Colonel Heenan, whom I found all alone reading a Philadelphia
newspaper. I saluted him and said, “Good morning,
Colonel.” |
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