Background
Perry was born in County Down, Ireland to a Protestant family and lived a prosperous life at Inch near the Wexford/Wicklow border as a gentleman farmer. He enlisted in the local yeomanry corps as a second lieutenant responding to the Governments appeal to save the kingdom from radicalism during the height of anti-Jacobin paranoia in the mid-1790s. However, the atrocities he witnessed, and may even have participated in, disturbed him so much that he took the United Irish Oath in 1797 and was made a colonel.
As a United Irish colonel, Perry was responsible for the organisation and recruitment of the movement in north Wexford. A measure of this success was evident by the fact that the brutal coercion campaign unleashed by the Government 1797-98 did not identify Wexford as a United Irish stronghold until barely a month before the eventual outbreak.
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)