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7 1 Being an Emmet and a Sherwood Robert Emmet Sherwood was born into two illustrious families, the Emmets and the Sherwoods, both with long histories in the United States and with shared common values. First, they were patriotic, loved the nation they lived in, and supported their government’s positions in both domestic and foreign policies as long as they deemed them fair and honest. Second, they were committed to social justice—to standing up for individual freedoms and protecting civil liberties. Third, they valued the printed word, and several family members engaged in some sort of writing themselves. Fourth, they also loved the arts, especially literature, theater, painting, architecture, and music. While he was growing up, Robert E. Sherwood’s family (especially his mother, Posie) made him aware of his heritage and imbued in him the values that had driven generations of Emmets and Sherwoods into politics and the arts. The Emmets had by far the more dramatic family history.¹ As one descendant expressed it, the entire family from as far back as could be remembered suffered from “Emmetry,” the sense of being “Irish, proud, and romantic and thinking you’re just a bit better than anyone else.”² Certainly, as a young child Robert Sherwood heard stories about the fighting Emmets, especially his namesake Robert Emmet and his brother Thomas Addis, who left a legacy of rebellion against Britain’s tyrannical hold on Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³ Their story of heroism and martyrdom was one that any family would romanticize as it was handed down from one generation to the next. By the time it reached the ears of young Robert Sherwood, it was so huge that it became part of his personal identity. He was always quick to refer to his namesake whenever he had the chance and to imagine himself as emulating his strong values and valiant behavior. What he learned was this. The brothers (Thomas Addis, born on April 24, 1764, and Robert, born fourteen years later on March 4, 1778) were very close, so much so, in fact, that the actions of the elder sibling had a disastrous effect on the younger. A 1782 graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Thomas went on to study medicine and then law and was admitted to the bar in Dublin in 1790. Two years later, his story took a dramatic turn. Greatly affected by the success of the U.S. War of Independence, the ongoing French Revolution, 8 Act One and the abundance of literature that espoused liberal ideas about government , nature, and science (including works by John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Jean Jacques Rousseau), Thomas joined the crusade for Irish self-rule. He was a man who believed deeply that Ireland should be autonomous, for when he looked at the so-called Irish House of Commons, he saw hypocrisy. How could a parliament exist that banned Catholics from participating and barred them from voting? How could commoners have a voice when only sixty-four out of three hundred seats were determined by fair elections, the others remaining under the firm control of landowners and government leaders? Being Protestant did not prevent the Emmets and others from sympathizing with the Catholic population in the interests of justice and freedom. Nor did it prevent them from supporting the idea of the separation of church and state. As a result, on December 14, 1792, Thomas joined other Dublin Protestant and Catholic men in the Society of United Irishmen, whose purpose was to achieve parliamentary reform to ensure democratic representation in government and whose members embraced the concept of self-sacrifice as a national honor. Seventeen ninety-two, however, was not a good year in which to express one’s desire for national sovereignty. Having lost its American colonies, and fearing a revolution like the one in France, Great Britain did not want to hear any words of protest from the mouths of its Irish colonials. Therefore, the Irish colonial government set out to intimidate and disband the United Irishmen by planting spies and informers within the group’s membership. But the most drastic action occurred after the Irish Uprising of 1798, which consisted of many small skirmishes. In order to close down the organization permanently , the British arrested Thomas, now one of the group’s leaders, and a number of other members for expressing traitorous ideas. After being imprisoned in Dublin, the men were shipped to Fort George...

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