Soon afterwards, O’Donovan Rossa made his way to Union Hall, a small fishing village in Cork. At Union Hall, O’Donovan Rossa continued to be a vocal republican, and engaging in republican songs and speeches, he came to the attention of the Local Resident Magistrate, John Limerick, who had let it be known that if he or anyone associated with radical politics returned to Union Hall they would be arrested. Never one to back down from danger, O’Donovan Rossa responded to Limerick’s threat by gathering some twenty colleagues and inviting them to Union Hall the following Sunday:
The rumour spread through the country that we would go to Union Hall next Sunday again, and that rumour was met by another one from the English side of the house that if we went we would never come back alive; that we would be shot down like dogs. It would never do for us to be intimidated; our cause would lose prestige. Sunday morning came, and after mass and breakfast some twenty or thirty of us from Skibbereen were on the road toward Union Hall. Limerick, the magistrate, had sent out requisitions to all the surrounding police barracks, calling the police to Union Hall that day, and on Sunday morning the police were marching in from Ross, Drinagh, Leap, Drimoleage, Ceharagh, Skibbereen, Glendore and Castletownsend. War and rumours of war were in the air, and the people the country around, seeing the armed police marching on the several roads toward Union Hall, followed them into the little city. The Men from Ross brought a band of music with them. They crossed the bay from Glendore in boats, and as the boats approached the quay at Union Hall Limerick, the magistrate, stood there and forbade them to land. I stood alongside of Limerick and told the men not to be driven back by such petty tyranny as this. That this was Irish soil and they had as good a right to tread it as Limerick had. Patrick and James Donovan, who are now in New York, steered their boat into shallow water and leaped ashore; the other men in the boat leaped after them. The bandsmen went to the house of Father Kingston and remained there for a short time.15
Limerick ordered that all the pubs in Union Hall were to be immediately shut by police. This was undertaken with a marked perception that Fenians in the locality would have made for local pubs. One local pub they went to was owned by O’Donovan Rossa’s aunt, Mrs Collins. Learning that the Fenian gathering was in her pub, Limerick directed police to meet with Mrs Collins. She refused to remove her nephew, however, but fearing Limerick would withhold her licence to sell alcohol, and thus ruin her business, O’Donovan Rossa and his gathering left the pub. Limerick read the Riot Act and the police, with fixed bayonets, engaged in a scuffle with the Fenians. While there were no arrests, some of O’Donovan Rossa’s friends were fined or lost their jobs when news of the Union Hall scuffle became known.
Life was getting increasingly hot for O’Donovan Rossa in Skibbereen and even if he were arrested the government did not need to prove any accusations against him because of his earlier guilty plea. With his business destroyed because of his politics as the more affluent customers stopped shopping with him, while landlords put pressure on their tenants not to do any business with him, O’Donovan Rossa decided to make for America, and in 1863, left with friends Dan Hallahan, William McCarthy, Simon Donovan, John O’Gorman and Jerrie O’Meara aboard the trans-Atlantic steamer The City of Edinburgh. Leaving on Fenian business, he left Eileen in Ireland to take care of their son, Stephens; he had intended for his family to join him later.
Arriving in America on 13 May, O’Donovan Rossa appreciated America. He had arrived at New York Harbour and taking in a view of the bustling metropolis, he contrasted its urbanity with its rural hinterland. Looking at the Staten Island Hills, which at this point could still be seen, he commented how they reminded him of his beloved Cork.16 Despite the beauty of America, however, he had entered a society in the midst of a brutal civil war. Within a month of his arrival, New York City had erupted into violent race riots as white immigrants, a good many of whom were Irish, attacked African-Americans as part of a movement which sought to protest President Lincoln’s Draft Bill, conscripting men between the ages of 20 to 45 into the Union Army. Many poorer Irish resented conscription and increasingly turned their anger on Lincoln’s Republican Party and African-Americans, both of whom they blamed for the Civil War. Beginning on 13 July 1863, many Irish looted the New York homes of wealthy republicans, burned down a home for African-American orphan children and killed a number of African-Americans, a good many of whom were found lynched from lampposts. Lasting for four days, the draft riots resulted in the death of 1,000 people and left New York economically weakened. An eyewitness to the fighting on the streets, O’Donovan Rossa was appalled by the rioting and was horrified by the behaviour of the Irish community. O’Donovan Rossa witnessed looting and unbridled violence, recalling: An old man remonstrated with one of the wreckers, and was struck and thrown down. I went to take up the fallen man, and the man who struck him pulled a pistol out of his pocket and put it to my face. ‘Oh’ said I. ‘I’m only doing what you yourself would do if you saw a poor man struck down by a young, hearty man such as you are.’ My comrades came around me, and the fellow did not pull the trigger of his pistol.17
Settling in Brooklyn, at No. 226 Schermerhorn Street, he lived with a relative, Timothy Donovan, who had emigrated to America in 1836. He now witnessed the spectacle of the Union soldiers parading and drilling or relaxing in tents. Meeting with John O’Mahony, he found the majority of the Fenian Brotherhood had enlisted as soldiers in the Union Army and took solace in a perspective that as the Irish in America were training as soldiers, ‘they might be better able to fight the battles of Ireland against England’.18 With O’Mahony, he visited armouries, drill rooms and meeting places of the Fenian Brotherhood. Aside from his political duties, O’Donovan Rossa also went into business with his cousin, Denis Donovan, and ran a saloon selling imported Irish whiskey and stout to the thriving Irish-American community in New York. Establishing their business at the corner of Madison Street, it was noted that his name was proudly displayed over the door. Around the same time he had also applied for naturalised American citizenship, and coming before the Court of Common Pleas in New York, he declared his intention for American citizenship.
O’Donovan Rossa also used the opportunity of his move to America to visit his mother Nellie, who he had not seen since she had emigrated to America in the late 1840s. Nellie had been living in Philadelphia with O’Donovan Rossa’s brother and when he had visited her, arriving at ten o’clock in the evening, she did not know who he was. Identifying himself, she still disbelieved her son. Rossa then directed her to a scar on his head, which he received in his youth, and feeling the scar, Nellie broke down crying and embraced her child. Reminiscing about the past and learning of the present, Nellie and Rossa stayed up all night talking and crying; he recalled that in the years since he had last seen his mother she had become a tragically changed woman who looked as old as his grandmother: ‘She was nothing more than a sorry caricature of the tall, straight, handsome woman with the hooded cloak, that was photographed, and is still photographed, in my mind as my mother.’19
O’Donovan Rossa moved back to Brooklyn after staying with his mother for a week and resumed his duties with the Fenian Brotherhood. He also had the occasion of meeting with Thomas Francis Meagher at New Jersey in the company of O’Mahony, who he claimed had introduced Meagher into the Fenian Brotherhood. Meagher left a favourable impression upon O’Donovan Rossa, and the young Irishman found him to hold a deep interest in Irish affairs. That evening he had travelled with O’Mahony to New York City where he was introduced to Colonel Michael Corcoran, a Sligo-born commander of the 69th New York Regiment, who was hosting a gathering for senior officers within the Fenian Brotherhood. O’Donovan Rossa