Series 5 - Thomas Reilly letters

143pp

Bruce D. Boling created the transcripts and photocopies of the Thomas Reilly letters from manuscripts held in the National Library of Ireland [call number MS 10511]. Boling later provided these materials to Kerby A. Miller.

Transcripts and reproductions of 8 letters written between 1846 and 1848 by Thomas Reilly (or Riley), along with associated research on the identity of the author. The letters document the period Reilly was most active in the Irish independence movement, including his 1848 emigration to upstate New York. Per genealogist Coreen P. Hallenbeck, it is impossible to determine precisely which man named Thomas Reilly is the correspondent as multiple men of that name and approximate age lived in the Albany/Saratoga area. In the attached research correspondence associated with the letters, there is some speculation that the letters may have been written by journalist and Young Irelander Patrick Devin Reilly (1824-1854). Of the correspondent's writing style, Kerby A. Miller writes: 'Reilly's writing generally marks him as a typical literary, romantic radical of 1848. He felt destined by the gods as a special man of destiny; along with the romanticism was a basic impracticality which showed itself in his basically flippant attitude toward the scheme of the American Irish Volunteers to invade Ireland. Men like this would become discouraged, and would drift out of Irish nationalism; practical men of experience like Doheny and O'Mahony would work to organize and persist. Another example, men like Reilly could write about the concurrent Famine, but they had to relate that disaster to their own emotions and tender sensibilities. They could not really relate to the awful actuality of the Famine for the Irish peasants.'