Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/497

 youth, and was evicted in 1852 during the clearances that followed the great Irish famine. He emigrated with his wife and children to Lancashire, and settled at Haslingden. Here the boy Michael, as soon as be was able to work, was sent to a cotton mill. Forced in 1857 to mind a machine ordinarily attended by a youth of eighteen, he was caught in the machinery, and his mangled right arm had to be amputated. Thus disabled before he was twelve, he was removed from the factory and sent to a Wesleyan school. While still a lad, he organised a band of youths to defend catholic churches at Rochdale, Bacup, and Haslingden, which were threatened with destruction in anti-catholic riots. On leaving school, at about fifteen, he became in 1861 printer's devil and newsboy with a printer, who was also postmaster at Haslingden; afterwards he worked as book-keeper and assistant letter-carrier in the same employment. In 1865 he joined the Fenian organisation, and soon became 'centre' of the local (Rossendale) 'circle.' In February 1867 he was one of those told off to attack Chester Castle and seize the arms there. He first showed his abilities in extricating himself and his comrades from this fiasco. In 1868 he was appointed organising secretary of the Irish Republican Brotherhood for England and Scotland, and left his employment at Haslingden to assume the role of a commercial traveller in firearms, as a cloak for his revolutionary work buying firearms and shipping them to Ireland. On 14 May 1870 he was arrested at Paddington while awaiting a consignment of arms from Birmingham. Tried at the Old Bailey by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, he was sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude for treason-felony. The principal evidence against him was a letter which he had written to prevent a young Fenian (whose name Davitt never would reveal) from assassinating a supposed spy, but which bore on the face of it (as Davitt's aim in writing was to gain time for the interference of the heads of the organisation) an apparent approval of the deed. He spent over seven years in prison ten months in Millbank, and the remainder (except one month at Portsmouth in 1872) in Dartmoor. A pamphlet prepared by him in 1878, as the basis of his evidence (20 June 1878) before the royal commission on the working of the Penal Servitude Acts, gives a full account of what he endured, and how every prison rule was strained against him. On 19 Dec. 1877 he was released on ticket-of-leave, as a result of the exertions of Isaac Butt [q. v.] and the Amnesty Association. In prison he had thought out his plans for an Irish movement of a new kind, to blend revolutionary and constitutional methods, while abandoning secret conspiracy. He at once rejoined the Fenian movement, with the view of converting its heads to this plan. After lecturing for some months in Great Britain on behalf of the amnesty movement, he went in August 1878 to America, whither his family had emigrated. Here he met not only all the leaders of the constitutional and extreme Nationalists but also Henry George. The latter's land programme harmonised with and developed the views which Davitt had already formed independently in prison. Before leaving America, he made a speech at Boston, on 8 Dec. 1878, in which he outlined the new departure in Irish agitation. The essence of his suggestion was to bring the movement for Irish independence into close touch with the realities of life in Ireland by linking it up with the agrarian agitation, and to give the latter a wider scope by demanding the complete abolition of landlordism. On his return to Ireland he laid his plan before the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which rejected it. Davitt proceeded with the work on his own responsibility, enlisting the sympathy of most of the rank and file Fenians. He organised a meeting at Irishtown, Mayo, on 20 April 1879, when the new land programme was put forward. A second meeting, at Westport on 8 June, was attended by Charles Stewart Parnell [q. v.], whom Davitt had convinced of the possibilities of the new movement. The agitation rapidly spread through the west; in August Davitt grouped the various local committees into the 'Land League of Mayo.' The 'Land League of Ireland,' in which Parnell's influence was soon to clash with Davitt's, came into being in October. In November Davitt and others were arrested and tried at Sligo for their share in the movement; but the prosecutions were dropped early in 1880. After the general election of 1880, in which Davitt assisted to procure the successes of Parnell's party, he was expelled from the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood; he remained an ordinary member of the body till 1882. In May 1880 Davitt went to America to organise the American Land League, and to raise funds. On his return he founded the Ladies' Land League, and devoted himself to the task of preventing outrages in