Patriot Games

Taig (or Teague): an even blacker ethnic aspersion than that used to name this space each month. Says Wikipedia: Rarely heard outside Ireland and Scotland, taig is the most vitriolic slur word in use against Irish Catholics and has been used by loyalists in Northern Ireland in slogans like: “If guns are made for shooting, then skulls are made to crack. You’ve never seen a better Taig than one with a bullet in his back” (It doesn’t roll from the tongue like poetry; but then they’re billyboys, not Irish lads.) With a bit more literary effort they did manage to coin: “Don’t be vague, kill a Taig”.

That brand of bigotry, though rarely reported in the US, and despite “the peace process”, remains prevalent. When a new housing development in Boveedy. Co. Derry was smeared recently with the notice: “no Taig buyers”, Sinn Fein councillor, Billy Leonard remarked: “To experience this type of graffiti in 2008 is truly disgraceful”. Well, Billy, who ya gonna call?

I was surprised though to run across the T-word while looking for a bit of inspiring Irish-American history to include in a July 4 greeting. What I found would more appropriately be added to a July 12 greeting.

Most Americans will remember that the Boston Massacre of 1770 involved British soldiers firing into a mob of Boston citizens. Some may recall from their Catholic or public school books the name Crispus Attucks, the first person hit. Few will remember that five citizens were killed, nor the names of any of the other 4 dead.

Attucks, a seaman, believed to have been born of an African father and Natick Indian mother, was known around the Boston docks as “a hard man and a drifter”. Like many Boston citizens, especially sailors, he resented the two regiments of British troops sent to the city 18 months earlier to keep order and assure collection of customs duties. Seamen were often forcibly impressed into the British navy, and as laborers ashore, had to compete with troops taking the king’s wages and working off-duty for lower pay. There had been confrontations that week with the soldiers, and this night several groups wandered the streets “looking for trouble”.

One group began harassing a guard at the Customs House and a detachment of soldiers came to his rescue. Attucks, at the front of a mob of about 60 people, some of whom were throwing rocks, ice and sticks, grabbed a soldier’s rifle and reportedly struck him to the ground with a club. The soldiers fired, and Attucks was killed, struck twice in the chest. Two others also died at the scene. The last of the five to die was Patrick Carr; an Irishman apprenticed to a local tailor, who lingered on nine days until his death on March 14—a sad but fortunate fact for the soldiers who killed him.

John Adams, recently the subject of a popular biography followed by a TV series, and who would later become second President of the US, decided to defend the soldiers. Considering the mood of the city, it was an unpopular choice at the time, But whether Adams was hedging his bets in the growing colonial struggle, we cannot know.

In arguing for the defense, Adams characterized the mob as:
“a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars… shouting and hazing and threatening life… whistling, screaming, and rending an Indian yell… throwing every species of rubbish they could pick up in the street.”

He also reminded the court that the leaders of that mob were not upstanding citizens of the good city of Boston: “And it is in this manner, this town has been often treated, a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprises,… and… there are not wanting persons to ascribe all their doings to the good people of the town.”

That Adams was defending the soldiers in a capital trial might be seen to excuse his use of such incendiary slurs to describe certain non-white, non-Protestant citizens of Boston. But even so, the fact that no objection was recorded is revealing. The prosecution counsel, John’s firebrand cousin Samuel Adams, didn’t call him to task on the issue. Nor is there evidence that any of the angry Americans packing the courtroom took exception that John Adams (soon to be enshrined among “The Founders”)* was using words oozing with such obvious religious, racial and class prejudice. It appears that despite their objections to paying taxes, the colonists’ ideas of who belonged in the liberty and equality fraternity, and who would be blackballed, pretty much matched those of their estranged relations back home in England.

John Adams won the trial, but it was not his eloquence or legal prowess that ultimately saved the British soldiers. Adams did not find it too ignoble to use as the knockout punch for the defense the alleged testimony of “the Irish Taig”, Patrick Carr, six months dead, in the first recorded use of the “dying declaration” exception to the rule that excludes hearsay evidence.

Dr. John Jeffries, one of the physicians who attended Carr, was called to the stand. Jeffries claimed he had a long conversation with the dying Carr who told him he felt the soldiers fired in self-defense.

Q. Were you Patrick Carr’s surgeon?

A. I was…

Q. Was he [Carr] apprehensive of his danger?

A. He told me… he was a native of Ireland, that he had frequently seen mobs, and soldiers called upon to quell them: whenever he mentioned that, he always called himself a fool, that he might have known better, that he had seen soldiers often fire on the people in Ireland, but had never seen them bear half so much before they fired in his life…

Q. When had you the last conversation with him?

A. About four o’clock in the afternoon, preceding the night on which he died, and he then particularly said, he forgave the man whoever he was that shot him, he was satisfied he had no malice, but fired to defend himself.

Now, whether or not Carr actually spoke as Jeffries testified, the words would be believable to a colonial jury. Carr, though a “Taig”, was a Christian, inclined to express forgiveness as death approached. And Carr’s statement that British soldiers had no inhibitions whatever against shooting people in Ireland would, unlike now, have been no news to those Americans, British exiles, packing the courtroom.

The fact that Jeffries was a Loyalist must have been known by both the prosecution and defense. When the Revolution finally began, Dr. Jeffries sent his family to England, then left with the British military and was commissioned Surgeon-General of the British forces in North America.

Cousin Sam Adams acid comment to discredit Jeffries’ crucial testimony was simply that the word of Roman Catholic Carr carried little weight in Protestant Boston.

*(You may have noticed that “The Founding Fathers” is no longer in polite usage—in deference I suppose to “The Founding Mothers.”)

Perhaps we’ll discuss other patriots next month.

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© Mike Morley 2008