Series 20 - David Nagle/Luther Bradish letters

23pp

Kerby A. Miller created his transcripts of the Luther Bradish letters from the originals held in the Luther Bradish Papers at the New York Historical.

Materials pertaining to Irish emigrant David M. Nagle, a member of the Whig Party and father of American Fenian activist William Nagle, and his 1842-1852 correspondence with New York lieutenant governor Luther Bradish. Per Kerby A. Miller: ‘David Nagle, an Irish emigrant who claims he is a Whig, writes to Luther Bradish concerning his place of employment. Nagle feels that because he is an emigrant he is being paid less money to do the same job that others perform at the customs house. Luther Bradish writes Governor Seward in an effort to help Nagle.
The series includes:
-Kerby A. Miller’s transcript of an 1839 letter written to Bradish by Jacob Harvey of New York City, who lobbied ‘on behalf of the children of poor Irish labourers who work on the Canals & rail-roads - and that part of his Excellency's message which referred to their destitute mental condition & the necessity of applying a remedy, gave me the most heartfelt pleasure.’ Harvey believed that would help stir loyalty in the Irish American population towards the Whigs;
-Miller’s transcripts of the Nagle-Bradish-Seward correspondence;
-small amount of research correspondence regarding Nagle;
-Breandán Mac Suibhne’s book review of Lucy E. Salyer (2018), Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), in which Mac Suibhne discusses William Nagle’s 1867 involvement in the in the ill-fated Erin’s Hope expedition, a maritime gun-running mission designed to support the Fenian Rising in Ireland which resulted in his detainment by the British.