The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866

A Belfast Panorama

Mary McNeill

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788550840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Despite outliving him by 68 years, Mary Ann McCracken's legacy is overshadowed by that of her more famous brother, executed United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken. She was, however, an abolitionist, a social reformer and an activist who fought for the rights of women and Belfast's poor throughout a long life that encompassed the most turbulent years of Irish history.

As treasurer, secretary and chair of the Ladies Committee, she helped girls from the Poor House learn crafts that would provide them with livelihoods. Dedicated to championing Belfast's poor, she was President of the Ladies Industrial School and she campaigned to abolish the use of climbing boys in chimney sweeping. Mary Ann was involved in early women's suffrage campaigns and prison reform schemes and was a passionate member of the Women's Abolitionary Committee. In her late eighties, she could be found on the docks, handing out anti-slavery leaflets to emigrants embarking for the slave-owning United States.

The motto of this remarkable woman, which accurately sums up her character, was, better 'to wear out than to rust out'. But her radical, humanitarian zeal and generous strength of character were indefatigable, and her contribution to Belfast life is still felt and celebrated today.

CHAPTER 1

FRANCIS JOY
1697–1790

I hope the present era will produce some women of sufficient talent to inspire the rest with a genuine love of Liberty and a just sense of [its] value … for where it is understood it must be desired … I therefore hope it is reserved for the Irish nation to strike out something new and to show an example of candour, generosity and justice superior to any that have gone before.1

So wrote Mary Ann McCracken to her brother in a Dublin prison. The date was 1797, she was twenty-six years of age and standing on the threshold of a long career of public interest in which she herself would strike out something new.

While there are some who reach fulfilment unaided by family tradition, and some who achieve it in actual antagonism to such influences, Mary Ann was one of those in whom all the various streams of inherited tendencies converge in strength, to produce a personality true to type but of greater vitality and excellence. So, in order to appreciate the ingredients that went to the making of her character, it is necessary to commence with her forebears and with a brief outline of the historical background of the town in which she lived.

After years of political, religious and economic upheaval following the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Commonwealth, and the Williamite wars, Belfast, in the first half of the eighteenth century, was entering on a period of comparative calm. Though on a smaller scale inevitably than in Britain, prospects of mercantile expansion were taking shape in the minds of her citizens, primarily in the trades and industries connected with an agricultural economy. By 1715 the town had developed from the small fortified ford of James I’s reign to take its place, after Dublin and Cork, as the third port in Ireland. Great quantities of beef, hides, tallow and corn were exported, and imports arrived from the northern ports of Europe as well as from France, Spain and Portugal. Indeed by the beginning of the century Belfast was not only well known on the continent as a place of considerable trade but, in a scale of credit appended by the Exchange at Amsterdam to the names of various commercial towns of Europe, its place was in the first rank.2 The possibilities of this increasing commerce were obvious to the enterprising townsfolk, but it was no less obvious that Irish trade and industry could never be fully expanded so long as the English parliament controlled Irish affairs and continued its policy of strangling any mercantile development that threatened to compete with English interests.

As the century progressed, all the constructive political thought in Ireland centred on freeing, by constitutional methods, the parliament in Dublin from the shackles that bound it to Westminster, viz. Poynings’ Law and the more recent enactment of George I, and in this struggle Ulster gave the lead to the whole country. Not only were the Belfast merchants, by reason of their distance from the capital, more independent of the ruling oligarchy than were the traders of Dublin, but their ideas and convictions had prepared them for just such a situation. Countless were the meetings, declarations and addresses asserting the sole right of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland to legislate for Ireland, and in all this the family of Francis Joy was to occupy a position of increasing influence.

Francis Joy, the maternal grandfather of Mary Ann McCracken, was born in Killead, Co. Antrim, in 1697, of prosperous farming stock.3 In due course he settled in Belfast as an attorney, and, while still a young man of twenty-four, married Margaret Martin, granddaughter of George Martin, Sovereign [or chief Burgess] of the town in the early days of the Commonwealth. Francis was an able and enterprising person. By his own exertions and by inheritance he was comparatively wealthy, and he and his wife must have occupied a prominent place in the growing professional and mercantile community of the little town. Both of them sprang from strongly Calvinist stock. The Joys had, in all probability, fled to England from religious persecution in France, coming to Ireland with the armies of James I.4 With the same armies came the Martins who settled near Belfast, but in 1649 Margaret’s uncompromising grandfather had had to seek refuge in Britain for refusing to billet Commonwealth troops in Belfast.5 Later he aroused the displeasure of the Lady Donegall [family name Chichester, the wealthy landowners of Belfast and neighbourhood] of the day by retiring on the Sabbath to his Presbyterian place of worship, after fulfilling his duties as Sovereign by attending her to her seat in the Parish Church.6 No doubt Francis and his wife had decided views on the stirring “New Light” controversy centring round subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and just then agitating profoundly the Presbyterian community in Ulster. These were also the years of the Test Act when Presbyterians as well as Roman Catholics were debarred from holding public office. But, in spite of controversies and disabilities, the law business prospered, family life was happy, and in due course Henry, Robert and Ann were born.

It was not, however, till he was forty years of age that the incident occurred which gave Francis Joy the opportunity to exert his enterprising ability far beyond the confines of his legal profession. In 1737, as a result of a bad debt,7 he found himself the owner of a small printing business, and, with no other preparation for a journalistic career, he decided to start the publication of a newspaper. On September 1st of that year there appeared from the sign of “The Peacock” in Bridge Street the first issue of The Belfast News-Letter which, as his grandson briefly but proudly remarks, was “the first newspaper printed in this town.”8 The full title of the paper was The Belfast News-Letter and General Advertiser and undoubtedly its function was to provide not only news, but a medium through which shippers and merchants might announce their goods, an indication of the growing importance of the trade of the town. We know nothing of the immediate motives which prompted the undertaking, but at the very moment when Belfast was awakening to a realisation of its importance Francis Joy provided the organ which welded its thought and proclaimed its views. He was too much of a lawyer to be rash and foolhardy, but if wisdom and foresight directed him towards certain action then obstacles were noticed only to be overcome.

Francis threw himself enthusiastically into the demands of his journal, but no sooner was the venture well started than a paper shortage had to be faced. Previously paper had been imported from France,9 now war on the Continent made this increasingly difficult, so a paper mill was bought in Ballymena. This in turn opened up fresh possibilities, and in 1745 Francis left Belfast and settled in Randalstown not so far from his early home, where he opened a larger mill, installing with the aid of a government subsidy of £200 some up-to-date machinery hitherto unknown in Ireland. The following description of this undertaking appeared in the Dublin Journal shortly after Francis’ death.

A laudable example of spirit and active enterprise in the late Mr. Francis Joy, of the County of Antrim, deserves to be recorded: This person was one of the first who brought to any perfection in Ireland the manufacture of printing and writing papers; after the erection of his paper engines Mr. Joy found himself at a great loss for fine rags in making fine paper, which even that part of the kingdom had not been accustomed to preserve; to remedy this Mr. Joy, at considerable pains and expense, for many years, made and distributed in all the towns and villages in the counties of Antrim, etc. great numbers of strong paper bags, to be affixed to walls in houses, in order to preserve rags – he published advertisements in the Belfast paper, intreating the public to save such rags – and not only gave a generous price for them, but encouraged, by considerable premiums, the gathering of such – he was in consequence, enabled to make annually large quantities of printing paper, clothier’s pressing paper, of from 11/6 to 14/- per ream, a great price at that time. But what deserves to be particularly noticed is the following fact, because it shews how far the intelligence and activity of a single man may promote the manufacturing interests of Ireland: Mr. Joy made ordinary writing paper and good printing paper from the backings or refuse of flax or tow, which article had, for many years, been exported in vast quantities from the North of Ireland to foreign parts.

The quantity and value of the paper made at one time by this truly patriotic man, was more than was made at that period through the whole kingdom, Dublin excepted, in which a Mr. Slater had most laudably distinguished himself in the manufacture of very fine papers, almost equal to Dutch, which at this time was generally used by merchants and others.10

At Randalstown this enthusiast for machinery erected also a flax dressing mill with some new and ingenious appliances – probably not unconnected with the supply of backings for his paper mill.

Though he had moved to the country, Francis kept in close touch with his children in town. His sons and his daughter married, there was an ever growing collection of grandchildren, and he watched the activities of these three families with loving interest. Only two letters written by him have escaped destruction and they are addressed to members of his family circle, – this to his son-in-law, the captain of a merchant vessel and the father of Mary Ann, is on paper bearing the watermark F. Joy:

Treehoge, 26th May 1760.

Son McCrackan

I congratulate you on your safe arrival: it gave me much ease and pleasure, after my reading a Paragraff in the newspaper, of sevl ships from the West Indies being taken by the French, on the coast of this Kingdom, finding the account of your arival inserted: Such good Providences demand our reasonable and religious acknowledgments. I am with affectionate Compliments to your kind and good Mother, my Daugr yr Wife and Child

Yr. Affect father

Frans. Joy11

“Reasonable and religious” – there could be no truer description of his way of life and of the attitude that he bequeathed to his children. Owing to the war with France there was constant danger of attack at sea, and Captain McCracken had already been a prisoner in the hands of the French. Earlier in the very year in which this letter was written, Thurot, with three French frigates, had entered Belfast Lough, captured the Castle at Carrickfergus and held it for several days. So this joyous welcome was indeed heartfelt, especially as the Captain’s wife was at this time expecting her second baby. The other letter was occasioned by sorrow:

Treehoge.

1 Dec. 1762.

Son Robert

I do sincerely join in your griefe, for the death of so good a wife and Mother of your young children. Had I thought I would have been usefull I would infalibly have gon to Belfast, on receipt of your brothers short Letter, even over all the obstructions which was in my way. I hope rational religious consideration will in time meetigate and abate your griefe and sorrow. She having lived a pious life of well doing, and tho now absent from the body is present with the Lord, enjoying immortal happyness, which, as you loved her, you ought not to grudge her of, as in case you spend your life as I hear she did, it will be the best preparation for dying the death of the Riteous, as I believe she did; and you may meet again in a state of purity and uninterupted happyness. And I rely on the Divine Providence for the well being of your young Children, and you know it is appointed for us all to die, which ought to be ever in remembrance. I am sensible that your case is piteous, and no doubt perilous, your best way to take [it] is, to set the Lord always before you, and to acknowledge him in all your ways, and he is faithfull, who has promised to care for you and yours and hold up your goings by directing your paths in the way of Riteousness and Peace and Happyness which is, and always shall be, my earnest desire while I continue in the this world. But being now advanced in the sixty sixth year of my age during which time I have gone through many troubles and nevertheless have experienced much of the goodness of the Divine Providence: and tho I shun not fatague, I find a weekness growing upon me, which are the symptoms of mortality. I therefore conclude, that the time of my departure is not far of. Happy, thrice happy are they who having the Sting of Death removed are arived in safety and happyness beyond the dangers and troubles of this present State. I would say more but you have and can have better help than I can give you which I hope you will not fail to have due recourse unto and so conclude

Dear Son your

affect father

Frans Joy.11

In spite of his forebodings Francis Joy had still many years before him – indeed he outlived both his sons. In the course of his long life much history had been enacted – Marlborough’s victories had resounded through Europe, two Jacobite risings had collapsed and the Hanoverian dynasty sat firmly on the English throne and, most significant of all, the American colonies had wrested independence from a domineering and unsympathetic British government. News would have reached him too, just before his death, of that other great movement for liberty – the Revolution in France.

In Ireland, the aim for which he had striven had, seemingly, been achieved. The Volunteers, so closely identified with his own family – as will be shown – had firstly guarded the shores of Ireland from invasion, and then by the pressure of their support had enabled Grattan to win in 1782 the independence of her parliament. One wonders if the old man, advocate to the end of constitutional reform, was ever troubled by the thought of where that armed force might lead. We do not know, and at any rate, even at ninety-three, there was still a public duty to perform. Parliamentary independence had been won, but parliamentary reform was urgen...