O'Callaghan, Edmund Bailey

O'CALLAGHAN, EDMUND BAILEY. - As a politician and historian, b. 28 Feb. 1797 at Mallow (County Cork, in Ireland), d. 29 May 1880 in New York. He emigrated in 1823 to Canada, to Québec, where he completed his medical studies, then to Montréal. He soon began to take part in Canadian political life and there organized the Society of the Friends of Ireland, giving speeches and writing political articles.

That was the moment in which the French part of the population, through fear of an excessive predominance of the English element, and thanks to the progressive growth of national consciousness due also to the European events of 1830-31, chafed at being governed by an almost exclusively English administration and demanded a more direct participation in the government of public affairs, with the right to subject the rulers to scrutiny. At the head of this movement was the president of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, Papineau, and among his followers, the so-called patriots, was also O'C. They demanded the institution of a legislative assembly, on the model of the one established in France after the Revolution, and a federal order similar to that of the United States. Their attitude was not, however, devoid of a certain anticlerical spirit, which alienated from them the sympathies of part of the Catholics. O'C. soon became, together with Papineau, one of the representative figures of this movement. Editor, in 1834, of the Vindicator, the patriots' newspaper, he was elected the following year as a deputy to the Assembly of Lower Canada. The clear refusal of the state authorities to grant any reform caused the crisis to break out. In Nov. 1837 the departure of O'C. and Papineau from Montréal was interpreted as a prelude to an insurrection, and arrest warrants were issued against them and other patriots. To escape the public authorities some patriots resorted to arms; there were skirmishes with no result; O'C. and Papineau, who had in vain opposed the resort to arms, had to seek asylum in the United States, where O'C. remained even after the amnesty was granted. He settled in Albany, in the State of New York, as a physician and journalist. He also began a notable activity in the field of historical studies and published several works: among them a history of New York under the Dutch (History of New Netherland, or New York under the Dutch, New York 1846). His Documentary History of the State of New York, in 4 vols., published from 1849 to 1851, constitutes the first true history of the State, which prompted the government to collect the relevant documents lying in archives, including foreign ones. O'C. was entrusted with the translation of the French and Dutch papers, as well as with the general supervision of the publication. There issued from it the eleven volumes of the Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany 1855-61). A practicing Catholic, O'C. was in New York a member of the local Catholic Union.

Silvio Furlani