David Fulton, the fourth and final mayor of the Town of Little Rock, Arkansas, before it is incorporated, is born in the Parish of Templemore, County Donegal on January 2, 1771. He serves as mayor from January 1835 through November 1835, his term cut short by the transition of Little Rock from town to city status. Once that occurs in November 1835, a new election has to be held.
Fulton is also proprietor of the Tan Yard, a tanning operation in Little Rock. He later serves as a judge and is appointed as Surveyor General of Public Lands in Arkansas by U.S. PresidentMartin Van Buren in 1838.
Fulton marries Elizabeth Savin in June 1795 in Maryland. She dies in November 1829, while they reside in Alabama. One of their children, William Savin Fulton (for whom Fulton County, Arkansas is named), serves as the fourth Territorial Governor of Arkansas in 1835 and 1836 and is one of Arkansas’ first United States Senators upon statehood in 1836. Fulton is serving as Mayor at the same time his son is Governor.
Fulton comes to Little Rock in 1833. His daughter, Jane Juliet Shall, and her four children come to Little Rock as well. The family makes the move to be nearer to the future governor. The Fultons and Shalls rent the Hinderliter House, now part of Historic Arkansas Museum, in 1834. One of his descendants, Louise Loughborough, is the person who saves the Hinderliter House from destruction and is founder of what is now Historic Arkansas Museum.
In addition to serving as Mayor, Fulton is president of the Anti-Gambling Society and a Pulaski CountyJustice of the Peace. From 1836 until 1838, he is County Judge of Pulaski County.
David Fulton dies in Little Rock on August 7, 1843 and is buried at Mount Holly Cemetery as are several other members of his family.
(From: “Little Rock Look Back: David Fulton, LR’s 4th Mayor” by Scott Whiteley Carter, Little Rock Culture Vulture blog, January 2, 2019)
Admitted to the Irish Bar, Sampson becomes Junior Counsel to John Philpot Curran and helps him provide legal defences for many members of the Society of United Irishmen. A member of the Church of Ireland, he is disturbed by anti-Catholic violence and contributes writings to the Society’s newspapers. He is arrested at the time of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, imprisoned, and compelled to leave Ireland for exile in Europe.
Shipwrecked at Pwllheli in Wales, Sampson makes his way to exile in Porto, Portugal, where he is again arrested, imprisoned in Lisbon, and then expelled. After living some years in France, and then Hamburg, he flees to England ahead of the approach of Napoleon‘s armies where he is re-arrested. After unsuccessfully petitioning for a return to Ireland, he arrives in New York City on July 4, 1806.
In the United States, Sampson successfully continues his career in the law, eventually sending for his family. He sets up a business publishing detailed accounts of the court proceedings in cases with popular appeal. In 1809 he reports on the case of a Navy Lieutenant Renshaw prosecuted for dueling. That same year he handles a case against Amos and Demis Broad, accused of brutally beating their slave, Betty, and her 3-year-old daughter where Sampson succeeded in having both slaves manumitted. The authorities in Ireland had disbarred Sampson, which causes him some bitter amusement, as it does not affect his work in the United States.
Sampson’s most important case in the United States is in 1813 and is referred to as “The Catholic Question in America.” Police investigating the misdemeanor of receiving stolen goods question the suspects’ priest, the Reverend Mr. Kohlman. He declines to give any information that he has heard in confession. The priest is called to testify at the trial in the Court of General Sessions in the City of New York. He again declines. The issue whether to compel the testimony is fully briefed and carefully argued on both sides, with a detailed examination of the common law. In the end, the confessional privilege is accepted for the first time in a court of the United States.
William Sampson dies on December 28, 1836, and is buried in the Riker Family graveyard on Long Island in what is now East Elmhurst, Queens, New York. He is later reinterred in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he is now buried in the same plot as Matilda Witherington Tone and William Theobald Wolfe Tone, the wife and son of the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, and his daughter Catherine, the wife of William Theobald Wolfe Tone.
Educated in England, Boucicault begins acting in 1837 and in 1840 submits his first play to Lucia Elizabeth Vestris at Covent Garden, however it is rejected. His second play, London Assurance (1841), which foreshadows the modern social drama, is a huge success and is frequently revived into the 20th century. Other notable early plays were Old Heads and Young Hearts (1844) and The Corsican Brothers (1852).
In 1853 Boucicault and his second wife, Agnes Robertson, arrive in New York City, where his plays and adaptations are long popular. He leads a movement of playwrights that produces in 1856 the first copyright law for drama in the United States. His play The Poor of New York, based on the panics of 1837 and 1857, has a long run at Wallack’s Theatre in 1857 and is presented elsewhere as, for example, The Poor of Liverpool. The Octoroon (1859) causes a sensation with its implied attack on slavery.
Boucicault and his actress wife join Laura Keene’s theatre in 1860 and begin a series of his popular Irish plays — The Colleen Bawn, or The Brides of Garryowen (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), The O’Dowd (1873), andThe Shaughraun (1874). Returning to London in 1862, he provides Joseph Jefferson with a successful adaptation of Rip Van Winkle (1865). In 1872 he returns to the United States, where he remains, except for a trip to Australia that results in his third marriage (for which he renounced the legitimacy of his second marriage). Among his associates in the 1870s is the young David Belasco. At the time of his death on September 18, 1890, in New York City, he is a poorly paid teacher of acting. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings, Westchester County, New York.
About 150 plays are credited to Boucicault, who, as both writer and actor, raises the stage Irishman from caricature to character. To the American drama he brings a careful construction and a keen observation and recording of detail. His concern with social themes prefigures the future development of drama in both Europe and America.
(Pictured: Dionysius Boucicault, taken 1890 or before. Photograph: Harvard Theatre Collection/Wikimedia Commons)
In 1861 Smyth enlists in the Union army in an Irish American three-months regiment, the 24th Pennsylvania, and is quickly made a captain. He is later commissioned as a major of the 1st Delaware Infantry, a three-years regiment. He serves at the battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, following which he is promoted to lieutenant colonel and then to colonel. During the Gettysburg campaign, he commands the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Division of the II Corps. During the Battle of Gettysburg, his men help defend Cemetery Ridge and advance to the area of the Bliss farm to oust enemy sharpshooters. He is wounded on the third day of the battle and relinquishes command briefly.
Smyth retains brigade command during the reorganization of II Corps before Ulysses S. Grant‘s Overland Campaign. He leads the second brigade of the first division from March 25 to May 17, 1864. When Colonel Samuel S. Carroll is wounded, Smyth is transferred to his command, the third brigade of second division, the Gibraltar Brigade. In October 1864, he is promoted to brigadier general during the Siege of Petersburg. He retains command of his brigade throughout the siege.
On March 18, 1867, PresidentAndrew Johnson nominates Smyth for posthumous appointment to the grade of brevet major general of volunteers to rank from April 7, 1865, the date he was mortally wounded, and the United States Senate confirms the appointment on March 26, 1867. He is the last Union general killed or mortally wounded during the war and is buried in Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery in Wilmington, Delaware.
The Articles of Confederation is approved, after much debate between July 1776 and November 1777, by the Second Continental Congress and sent to the states for ratification. The Articles come into force on March 1, 1781, after being ratified by all thirteen states. A guiding principle of the Articles is to preserve the independence and sovereignty of the states. The weak central government established by the Articles receives only those powers which the former colonies had recognized as belonging to king and parliament.
The document provides clearly written rules for how the states’ “league of friendship” is to be organized. During the ratification process, the Congress looks to the Articles for guidance as it conducts business, directs the war effort, conducts diplomacy with foreign nations, addresses territorial issues and deals with Native American relations. Little changes politically once the Articles of Confederation go into effect, as ratification does little more than legalize what the Continental Congress had already been doing. That body is renamed the Congress of the Confederation however most Americans continue to call it the Continental Congress, since its organization remains the same.
As the Confederation Congress attempts to govern the continually growing American states, delegates discover that the limitations placed upon the central government render it ineffective at doing so. As the government’s weaknesses become apparent, especially after Shays’ Rebellion, some prominent political thinkers in the fledgling nation begin asking for changes to the Articles. Their hope is to create a stronger national government.
Initially, some states meet to deal with their trade and economic problems. However, as more states become interested in meeting to change the Articles, a meeting is set in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787. This becomes the Constitutional Convention. It is quickly agreed that changes will not work, and instead the entire Articles needs to be replaced. On March 4, 1789, the government under the Articles is replaced with the federal government under the Constitution of the United States. The new Constitution provides for a much stronger federal government by establishing a chief executive (the President), courts, and taxing powers.
Hagan is born in County Tyrone on June 17, 1822. His family moves to a farm near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when he is still at an early age, and he is educated at Clermont Academy. He moves to Alabama in 1837. His prosperous uncle, John Hagen of New Orleans, Louisiana, takes him into the family business and sets him up in Mobile to manage the Hagan business there.
Hagan serves in John Coffee Hays‘s Texas Rangers, a cavalry unit in Major GeneralZachary Taylor‘s army during the Mexican–American War. He is recognized for his gallantry at the Battle of Monterrey. He is commissioned a captain in the 3rd U.S. Dragoons in 1848 and is discharged on July 31, 1848. After the war, he returns to Mobile where he purchases and subsequently manages a plantation rather than remaining in the family mercantile business. In 1854, he marries Bettie Oliver, daughter of Alabama’s attorney general.
At the beginning of the American Civil War, Hagan organizes and is elected captain of a cavalry company for the Alabama Militia, the “Mobile Dragoons,” which serves on guard duty along the Gulf Coast. At the rank of major he transfers to the 1st Mississippi Cavalry Regiment on October 26, 1861. The regiment fights at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6–7, 1862. He leads his men in a mounted charge at the Battle of Perryville, which is highly commended by his brigade commander, Brigadier GeneralJoseph Wheeler.
Hagan is promoted to colonel of a new regiment, the 3rd Alabama Cavalry Regiment, on July 1, 1862. The regiment fights in all of the campaigns of the Army of Tennessee. In July 1863, He is assigned to command Brigade 1 of Brigadier General William T. Martin‘s Division of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of Tennessee, which is Major General Joseph Wheeler’s old brigade. During the spring and summer of 1863, the brigade screens the left front of GeneralBraxton Bragg‘s army. Wheeler recommends that Hagan be promoted to brigadier general, but Bragg blocks the promotion because he says Hagan is in a state of “dissipation”, a reference to drunkenness or alcoholism. Hagan is wounded near Franklin, Tennessee in the winter of 1862 and again near Kingston, Tennessee in November 1863. In November 1863, he resigns and returns to Mobile to recover from his wounds and his disappointment from not being promoted.
Although Hagan is assigned as acting brigadier general in early 1865, he never receives an official appointment from Jefferson Davis or confirmation by the Confederate States Senate of an appointment as a general officer. Major General Wheeler later writes that he had been told unofficially by Confederate States War Department officials that brigadier general commissions had been issued for Hagan, Henry Marshall Ashby and Moses Wright Hannon near the end of the war, but no such commissions ever were delivered.
Hagan returns to Mobile after the war but is penniless since his fortune had been converted to Confederate money. He works as manager of a plantation on the Alabama River in the 1870s and early 1880s. President Grover Cleveland appoints him crier of the United States District Court in Alabama in 1885.
James Hagan dies on November 6, 1901, at Mobile, Alabama. He is buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile.
Margaret Brown (née Tobin), an American socialite and philanthropist posthumously known as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”, dies in New York City on October 26, 1932. She is best remembered for unsuccessfully encouraging the crew in Lifeboat No. 6 to return to the debris field of the 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic to look for survivors. During her lifetime, her friends called her “Maggie”, but even by her death, obituaries refer to her as the “Unsinkable Mrs. Brown.” The reference is further reinforced by a 1960 Broadway musical based on her life and its 1964 film adaptation which are both entitled The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Tobin is born in a hospital near the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, on what is now known as Denkler’s alley. Her parents are Irish Catholic immigrants. At age 18, she relocates to Leadville, Colorado, with her siblings Daniel Tobin, Mary Ann Collins Landrigan and Mary Ann’s husband John Landrigan. Margaret and her brother Daniel share a two-room log cabin and she finds a job in a department store.
In Leadville, she meets and marries James Joseph “J.J.” Brown (1854–1922), an enterprising, self-educated man, in Leadville’s Annunciation Church on September 1, 1886. They have two children.
The Brown family acquires great wealth when in 1893 J.J.’s mining engineering efforts prove instrumental in the production of a substantial ore seam at the Little Jonny Mine of his employers, Ibex Mining Company, and he is awarded 12,500 shares of stock and a seat on the board. In Leadville, Margaret helps by working in soup kitchens to assist miners’ families.
In 1894, the Browns purchase a $30,000 Victorian mansion in Denver and in 1897 they build a summer house, Avoca Lodge in Southwest Denver near Bear Creek, which gives the family more social opportunities. Margaret becomes a charter member of the Denver Woman’s Club, whose mission is the improvement of women’s lives by continuing education and philanthropy. After 23 years of marriage, Margaret and J.J. privately sign a separation agreement in 1909. Although they never reconcile, they continue to communicate and care for each other throughout their lives.
Brown spends the first months of 1912 traveling in Egypt as part of the John Jacob Astor IV party, until she receives word from Denver that her eldest grandchild, Lawrence Palmer Brown Jr., is seriously ill. She immediately books passage on the first available liner leaving for New York, the RMS Titanic. Originally her daughter Helen is supposed to accompany her, but she decides to stay on in Paris, where she is studying at the Sorbonne.
The RMS Titanic sinks in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg. Brown helps others board the lifeboats but is finally persuaded to leave the ship in Lifeboat No. 6. Brown is later called “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” by authors because she helps in the ship’s evacuation, taking an oar herself in her lifeboat and urging that the lifeboat go back and save more people. After several attempts to urge QuartermasterRobert Hichens to turn back, she threatens to throw him overboard. Sources vary as to whether the boat goes back and if they find anyone alive. Brown’s efforts seal her place in history, regardless.
Upon being rescued by the RMS Carpathia, Brown proceeds to organize a survivors’ committee with other first-class survivors. The committee works to secure basic necessities for the second- and third-class survivors and even provides informal counseling.
During the last years of her life, Brown is an actress. She dies in her sleep on October 26, 1932, at the Barbizon Hotel in New York City, New York. Subsequent autopsy reveals a brain tumor. She is buried on October 31 alongside her husband in the Cemetery of the Holy Rood in Westbury, New York, following a small ceremony attended only by family members. There is no eulogy.
Boyle is born to Alice (Lewis) and Francis Xavier Boyle. His paternal grandparents are Irish immigrants, and his mother is of mostly French and British Isles descent. He eventually moves to Philadelphia, where his father is a sought-after local TV personality and children’s show host. Following a solid Catholic upbringing, he is a sensitive youth and joins the Christian Brothers religious order at one point while attending La Salle University in Philadelphia. He leaves the monastery after only a few years when he “lost” his calling.
Bent on an acting career, Boyle initially studies with guru Uta Hagen in New York. The tall, hulking, prematurely bald actor wannabe struggles through a variety of odd jobs as a postal worker, waiter and bouncer while simultaneously building up his credits on stage and waiting for that first big break. Things start progressing for him after appearing in the national company of The Odd Couple in 1965 and landing TV commercials on the sly. In the late 1960s Boyle joins Chicago‘s The Second City improv group and makes his Broadway debut as a replacement for Peter Bonerz in Paul Sills’ Story Theatre (1971).
Boyle gains acclaim for his first starring role, playing the title character, a bigoted New York City factory worker, in the 1970 movie Joe, directed by John G. Avildsen. The film’s release is surrounded by controversy over its violence and language. The role leads to major notoriety, however, and some daunting supporting parts in T.R. Baskin (1971), Slither (1973) and as Robert Redford‘s calculating campaign manager in The Candidate (1972). During this time his political radicalism finds a visible platform after joining Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland on anti-war crusades, which also includes the anti-establishment picture Steelyard Blues (1973). This period also sees the forging of a strong friendship with former BeatleJohn Lennon.
Destined to be cast as monstrous undesirables throughout much of his career, Boyle plays a monster of another sort in his early film days, and thus avoids a complete stereotype as a film abhorrent. His hilarious, sexually potent Frankenstein’s Monster in the cult Mel Brooks spoof Young Frankenstein (1974) sees him in a sympathetic and certainly more humorous vein. His creature’s first public viewing, in which Boyle shares an adroit tap-dancing scene with “creator” Gene Wilder in full Fred Astaire regalia, is a show-stopping audience pleaser. Late 1970s filmgoers continue to witness him in seamy, urban settings with brutish roles in Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979). At the same time, he addresses several TV mini-movie roles with the same brilliant darkness such as his Senator Joe McCarthy in Tail Gunner Joe (1977), for which he receives an Emmy nomination, and his murderous, knife-wielding Fatso in the miniseries remake of From Here to Eternity (1979).
While the following decade finds Boyle in predominantly less noteworthy filming and a short-lived TV series lead as remote cop Joe Bash (1986), the 1990s bring him Emmy glory for a guest role in an episode of The X-Files (1993). Despite a blood clot-induced stroke in 1990 that impairs his speech for six months, he ventures on and caps his enviable career on TV wielding funny but crass one-liners in the “Archie Bunker” mold on the long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996). A major Emmy blunder has him earning seven nominations for his Frank Barone character without a win, the only prime player on the show unhonored. He survives a heart attack while on the set of Everybody Loves Raymond in 1999 but manages to return full time for the remainder of the series’ run through 2005.
Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson, motion picture actress best known as Greer Garson, is born on September 29, 1904, in Manor Park, London, England. Her classic beauty and screen persona of elegance, poise, and maternal virtue make her one of the most popular and admired Hollywood stars of the World War II era.
Garson often claims to have been born in County Down, Ireland, where her grandparents lived and which she happily visited as a child, but she is, in fact, born and raised in London. Although she wanted to study acting, she wins a scholarship to the University of London and her practical-minded family encourage her to pursue a teaching career. After graduating with honours, she works briefly for Encyclopædia Britannica and a London advertising firm but continually tries to get her foot into a backstage door.
After suffering through a discouraging first year in Hollywood, Garson returns to England to film the small role of Mrs. Chips in MGM’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). She receives her first Oscar nomination for the role but loses to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind. Her portrayal of the beloved schoolteacher’s charming wife endears her to the American public and sets her career in motion. It is the first in a series of roles in which she plays women of great loyalty, refinement, and wifely or motherly strength.
Garson’s other significant films of the period include Pride and Prejudice (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941), her first appearance with her frequent costar Walter Pidgeon, Random Harvest (1942), and Madame Curie (1943). The film that cements her reputation and image, however, is Mrs. Miniver (1942). Filmed during World War II and tailor-made for the times, Mrs. Miniver extolls the strength and spirit of the British home front and is one of the year’s biggest hits. Her grace-under-pressure portrayal of a courageous wife and mother, the personification of British fortitude, not only wins her an Academy Award but is credited with bolstering American support for the war.
Following the war Garson’s career falters. The public rejects her attempts to reforge her image to that of a more fun-loving, less noble heroine in such films as Adventure (1945) and Julia Misbehaves (1948). During the 1950s she appears in several unexceptional films and television dramas and stars on Broadway in Auntie Mame. Her remarkably convincing portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) is widely praised and earns her a seventh Oscar nomination, but she performs only occasionally thereafter, devoting most of her time to philanthropic causes, including the endowment of scholarships for theatre students at Southern Methodist University in University Park, Texas and the construction of a campus theatre.
Mike Donovan, middleweight boxer of the bare-knuckle era also known as Professor Mike Donovan and Mike O’Donovan, is born in Chicago, Illinois on September 27, 1847, to Irish-born parents. He later becomes one of the foremost teachers of the sport.
The first of many memorable events in Donovan’s life comes when he fights for the Union Army in the American Civil War, serving in William Tecumseh Sherman‘s army in its march through Georgia. After the war, he begins a boxing career that associates him with some of the best-known people of his age, in and out of the ring.
In 1868, Donovan defeats John Shanssey in a bout in Cheyenne, Wyoming, refereed by famous Western lawman Wyatt Earp. He wins the middleweight title in 1887 in San Francisco. He also fights the most famous Irish boxing champion in history, John L. Sullivan, fighting two four-round fights with him in 1880 and 1881.
After his active boxing career ends, Donovan becomes a boxing instructor at the New York Athletic Club and works with several famous Irish fighters. He is in Jake Kilrain‘s corner when he loses to John L. Sullivan in the last bare-knuckle heavyweight championship fight, and also helps James Corbett when he defeats Sullivan for the title in 1892.
Donovan spars with PresidentTheodore Roosevelt, who loves boxing, on several occasions. He earns the sobriquet “Professor” for his scientific approach to his own career and in his later teaching of the sport. The “Professor” leaves a legacy, as well. His son Arthur is a famous boxing referee in the 1930s and 1940s and is enshrined in the International Boxing Hall of Fame along with the “Professor,” the only father-son combination so honored. His grandson, also Art, plays for the Baltimore Colts in the National Football League and is enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
Donovan dies on March 24, 1918, at St. Francis Hospital in the Bronx, New York from complications from a bout with pneumonia he develops while teaching a boxing class. He is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and eight children, all who are at his bedside when he dies. After his death, his will indicates that his last name is actually O’Donovan.
