Background
James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, in Cowgate, an Irish slum in Edinburgh, Scotland.
military commander trade union leader
James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, in Cowgate, an Irish slum in Edinburgh, Scotland.
James Connolly's formal education consisted of four or five years of Catholic elementary school. Connolly raised money for The Workers' Republic at lectures and public meetings, edited and wrote most of the copy, set the type, and personally hand-cranked the letterpress to print it.
James Connolly served as secretary of both the Scottish Socialist Federation and the Central Edinburgh branch of the Independent Labour Party. While living in acute poverty in the Dublin slums, Connolly spent his periods of unemployment in the National Library reading the writings of Irish nationalists, including the Young Ireland leader James Fintan Lalor, whose previously neglected works Connolly helped popularize.
Self-educated, he became a socialist organizer in Belfast and Dublin, founding the Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896 and ‘the Workers’ Republic' 1898.
The ISRP never attracted more than a tiny following.
Together with the Irish nationalist and actress Maud Gonne, he led splashy demonstrations against the festivities that the Dublin authorities organized in 1897 in honor of the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's reign and also against subsequent visits by her and other members of the royal family to Ireland.
On his return to Ireland, Connolly found the ISRP in shambles.
Returning to Ireland in 1910, he organized the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union with James Larkin and led the strike following a lock-out in 1913.
Jailed himself, Connolly went on a hunger strike.
Police attacks on ITWU picket lines led Connolly to recruit a self-protection militia of ITWU members, the Citizen Army.
Connolly saw World War I as Ireland's last, best opportunity to achieve nationhood--while Great Britain was preoccupied with the war on the Continent.
Connolly was appointed military commander of the uprising, which aimed to establish an independent Republic of Ireland by force of arms.
He thus led the Easter Rising, which was begun on Easter Monday, Apr. 24, 1916, from its central command post in Dublin's General Post Office.
Along with most of the other leaders of the Easter Rising, Connolly was summarily sentenced to death by a British drumhead court-martial. He was the last of the rising's leaders to be executed. Unable to walk, he was carried out on a stretcher to the yard of Dublin's Kilmainham Jail, was propped up in a chair, and was shot by a British Army firing squad on May 12, 1916.
James Connolly organized dockworkers for James Larkin's Irish Transport Workers Union (ITWU), unionized women linen weavers, and combined Catholic and Protestant musicians into the Non-Sectarian Labour Band.