Economic Research: A Sentence For Benevolent

Tuesday 1 January 2013

A Sentence For Benevolent

MURPHY, MICHAEL, cooper, tavern-keeper, and Fenian leader; b. in 1826 at Cork (Republic of Ireland); d. 11 April 1868 at Buffalo, N.Y. Michael Murphy came to York (Toronto), Upper Canada, from Ireland with his parents as a young boy. He received little formal education and was apprenticed to a cooper. Murphy eventually operated his own business for several years before purchasing a tavern in Toronto. The late 1850s were years when feelings between Irish Catholics and Protestant Orangemen often ran quite high in Toronto and celebrations on St Patrick’s Day (17 March) and on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne (12 July) were frequently accompanied by outbreaks of violence. The bloodiest of these “incidents,” the St Patrick’s Day riot of 1858 when one person was killed, prompted Michael Murphy and other prominent Irish Catholics in Toronto to create in that year the Hibernian Benevolent Society of Canada. Murphy became its first president. The society grew rapidly and branches were soon established in both Canada East and Canada West. It stressed its benevolent aims, “assisting . . . their distressed members, attending them in their sickness, and, in case of death, defraying their funeral expenses,” but when its constitution was made public in 1865 it indicated that the society had evolved along secret and paramilitary lines to meet the needs of self-defence. In January 1863 the society acquired its own organ in Toronto, theIrish Canadian, which proclaimed that its “printers, publishers, editors and stockholders are hibernians”; Murphy was a provisional director when the paper was established.