The United Irishmen, I'll be the first to admit, were far from my thoughts during root canal surgery in New York. Nor was 1798 on my mind during the days preceding the dreaded procedure, when I - perhaps subconsciously - prepared for the worst by slipping into a convenient confessional.
Spirits of 1798, I was later to discover, were present at both events. You can find the details in the Dictionary of American Biography, not to mention the avalanche of new books marking the bicentenary. It was Edward Hudson, you see, an exiled rebel dentist from Wexford, who pioneered the replacement of dental pulp with gold foil, and modernised primitive dental practices, in his adoptive American home. And it was William Sampson, the Protestant United Irish barrister from Derry, who secured the secrecy of the Catholic confessional in the U.S. with a landmark 1813 legal decision in New York.
Brain drain
While the rebellion sowed death and terror at home, its failure brought one of the richest bounties of immigrant talent ever to reach American shores. In almost every aspect of modern life, Americans still benefit - albeit unwittingly - from the skills and ideals of the 1798 exiles.
In fields ranging from architecture, botany and chemistry to journalism, law and mathematics, United Irishmen made their mark on the young republic. And within America's wide-open geographic and intellectual landscapes, many finally realised the goals that had eluded them on Ireland's narrower ground.
At colleges in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, the former United Irish colonel Robert Adrain established the study of advanced mathematics. A year before the great German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss first demonstrated the Exponential Law of Error, the Irishman had independently developed two proofs.
In Philadelphia, Bernard McMahon established himself as a seed merchant and became a renowned horticultural expert consulted by Thomas Jefferson and the explorers Lewis and Clark. A barberry was named Mahonia in his honour, and his almanac was a gardening standard for half a century.
The republican milieu of Jeffersonian Virginia provided comfort and work for many United Irishmen. John Neilson, banished from his Co Antrim home, was employed as a builder and architect by both Jefferson and James Madison.
The United Irish sympathiser John Daly Burk, who escaped from Dublin in 1796 disguised in petticoats, took refuge in Virginia after his bitingly partisan journalism brought a sedition indictment from Jefferson's rival John Adams. The flamboyant Burk, who had penned America's first national historical drama, Bunker Hill, on the ship bringing him to Boston, also wrote three volumes of Virginia state history before dying there in an 1808 duel.
Dreams fulfilled
In all, more than 2,000 United Irishmen eventually made their homes in the United States. New York attracted many of the surviving leaders, including the well-known State prisoners Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven.
Together with William Sampson, Emmet and MacNeven constituted a triumvirate of legal and medical talent that dominated New York's intellectual life and nascent Irish community in the decades before the Famine. In exile, their lives reveal, in microcosm, the thwarted potential of their movement.
Apart from public service to the larger community - Emmet as attorney general of New York State and executor to the radical philosopher Thomas Paine, MacNeven as professor of obstetrics, chemistry and materia medica at the city's College of Physicians and Surgeons - all contributed time and talents to the needs of less fortunate fellow Irish. In both professional and private lives, their families surmounted sectarian barriers by simply ignoring them.
A son of the Protestant Emmet married a stepdaughter of the Catholic MacNeven. The dentist Hudson, of Quaker descent, married a daughter of Patrick Byrne, a Catholic bookseller banished to Philadelphia.
Inevitably, a few sought new opportunities to refight old battles. A settlement named Pike Farm appeared in upstate New York. The schooner Pike, skippered by a 1798 veteran, engaged the British on Lake Ontario in the War of 1812.
In Louisiana, the former French general Jean Joseph Humbert found vicarious satisfaction for his 1798 defeat at Ballinamuck. In 1815, Humbert led an American cavalry charge when Andrew Jackson routed the English at the Battle of New Orleans. And in 1824, When New York Orangemen aroused the Catholic Irish Community of Greenwick Village with a provocative 12th of July parade, it was the Derryman Sampson who defended and won acquittal for the riotous Irish villagers.
1798 and 1848
For some, the lure of wealth overcame youthful idealism. The Wexfordman John Devereax, first settled in Baltimore as a merchant, raised an Irish Legion to fight for South America's liberty. While many recruits perished from disease in Venezuela, Devereax grew rich and retired to London.
As late as 1853, the octogenarian exile John Binns was still sprightly enough to present the recently-arrived Young Ireland leader Thomas F. Meagher to a Philadelphia audience. "Let an Irish rebel of 1798," said the white-haired veteran, "introduce an Irish rebel of 1848."
In law, literature and the sciences, key legacies of the United Irishmen survived. But even before Binns's death in 1860 - the last of the American exiles - the narrower political agendas of a new generation of Famine immigrants had replaced the broader visions of their United Irish predecessors.