Background
William Erigena Robinson, son of Thomas and Mary (Sloss) Robinson, was born at Unagh, County Tyrone, Ireland.
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(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
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William Erigena Robinson, son of Thomas and Mary (Sloss) Robinson, was born at Unagh, County Tyrone, Ireland.
He received his early education in the village schools of Tubermore and Lipan, entered the classical school, Cookstown, at the age of twelve, and the Royal Academical Institution in Belfast in 1832. Enfeebled by typhus fever, he retired to his father's farm; there he remained until he emigrated to the United States in 1836. Arriving in New York City in August of that year, he resumed his classical studies and entered Yale College in 1837.
Poverty forced him to seek employment; while a junior in college he made over a hundred speeches in the successful presidential campaign of William H. Harrison. He also contributed poetry and prose to Horace Greeley's Log Cabin. He founded the Yale Banner and established a chapter of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity at Yale. During his college days he contributed much of the original matter in the New Haven Daily Herald. Following his graduation in 1841, he studied at the Yale Law School (1842 - 43).
In the political campaign of 1844 he spoke extensively for Henry Clay and became connected with the New York Tribune. To this paper he contributed, under the signature of "Richelieu, " the Washington dispatches from 1844 until 1848, with the exception of a brief period in 1846 when he was editor of the Buffalo Daily Express. He was active in Irish circles during the famine of 1847 and was an ardent supporter of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848. He collaborated in the foundation of The People (1849), a short-lived publication devoted to European politics. From 1850 to 1853 he was editor of the Newark Daily Mercury and, until 1853, weigher in the New York custom house. When these occupations failed him he turned to the law and was admitted to the New York bar in 1854. He occasionally dabbled in politics, running for office independently and unsuccessfully. In 1859 he visited Ireland and toured the Continent. He was appointed in 1862 by President Lincoln as assessor of internal revenue for the Third District of New York (Brooklyn); he served in this capacity until 1867, resigning to take his seat in Congress, to which he had been elected on the Democratic ticket. As a member of Congress he was chiefly responsible for the bill establishing the right to expatriation (Congressional Globe, 40 Cong. , 1 Sess. , p. 791; 3 Sess. , Appendix, p. 258). He was a member of the editorial board of the Irish World during 1871; during the following year he published the Shamrock, a Brooklyn weekly newspaper. He was returned to Congress in 1880 and 1882. Robinson's tall, bent figure and his shaggy white hair were a familiar sight in New York City, where he enjoyed a reputation for his extensive acquaintance with men in public life and for his intense hatred of England. He was a political changeling: originally a Whig, he became a Republican and later a Democrat. When he could find no place on any regular ticket he ran independently. The declining years of his life were spent in collecting materials for a treatise on the "Origin and Source of the American People, " intended to demonstrate the superiority and preponderance of the Irish in American life.
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
He was a political changeling: originally a Whig, he became a Republican and later a Democrat.
member of Congress
He was a prodigious egotist, a ready wit, and an animated and bombastic public speaker. His eloquence was chiefly effective before Irish patriotic societies, to which he presented many times during a half century a speech on Saint Patrick and the Irish that he had originally given at New Haven in 1842.
His wife, the former Helen Augusta Dougherty, whom he had married in 1853, died in 1875; they had four daughters and two sons.
