Archibald Hamilton Rowan - Treason and Exile

Treason and Exile

While imprisoned, Hamilton Rowan met The Reverend William Jackson, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman who was working as a spy for the French Committee of Public Safety. Jackson’s mission was to assess Ireland’s readiness for revolution and French invasion. Jackson, Tone, and others met in Hamilton Rowan's Newgate cell to discuss the state of Ireland and the population’s willingness to overthrow British rule. But Jackson was betrayed by a friend acting as a spy for the British Government, was arrested and charged with high treason. Immediately following Jackson's arrest, Hamilton Rowan fled in order to escape being tried for high treason. He convinced his jailer to allow him to visit his wife on the pretense of signing legal documents. While the jailer sat in the dining room of their home in Dublin, Hamilton Rowan excused himself to the bedroom, where he climbed down a rope made of knotted bed sheets to a waiting horse. Unwilling to be taken alive, he kept a razor blade in his sleeve and fled south to the coast. There he hired a boat to sail to France, and upon his arrival he was immediately arrested as a British spy. While in prison he was interrogated by Robespierre, who found him innocent of the charges raised against him and had Hamilton Rowan freed.

In Paris, Hamilton Rowan became close friends with Mary Wollstonecraft and kept a faithful correspondence with her for many years. Hamilton Rowan soon found himself in the middle of the Thermidor Revolution. He recalls:

In two days after the execution of Robespierre, the whole commune of Paris, consisting of about sixty persons, were guillotined in less than one hour and a half, in the Place de la Revolution; and though I was standing above a hundred paces from the place of execution, the blood of the victims streamed under my feet.

Deciding that France was too dangerous, Hamilton Rowan moved next to Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States. He reached Philadelphia on July 4, 1795, reuniting with fellow United Irishmen in exile. To his dismay, he discovered Philadelphia to be as full of backstabbing and partisanship as France (albeit of a less bloody nature). His more radical Irish friends were already inserting themselves into the dispute between Jefferson’s Republican faction against Adams’ Federalists. He chose to leave Philadelphia for the more peaceful and less expensive shores of the Brandywine River in Delaware.

After fleeing Ireland, Hamilton Rowan was unable to access his fortune and was reduced to supporting himself by his own labor. He was able to borrow money from William Poole, a prominent Quaker in Wilmington, and purchase a calico mill. In Wilmington, Hamilton Rowan led a very public life, enjoying the company of prominent Wilmingtonians such as Poole, John Dickinson, and Caesar A. Rodney, who later became Secretary of State for Jefferson. Living in constant fear of summary deportation under the Alien and Sedition Acts, Hamilton Rowan took pains to socialize with both Federalists and Republicans, and he studiously avoided American politics. On Christmas Day 1797 his cottage on the Brandywine burned to the ground killing his two dogs, destroying most of his library, and leaving him homeless. The next year his business partner refused to make up the accounts for the calico mill, so Hamilton Rowan was forced to pay the bills out of pocket, and take over the entire operation himself. But with little knowledge of the operations or business, the press was sold at a loss of $500. Hamilton Rowan then worked for the flour mills hauling grain and flour by wheelbarrow to and from Wilmington.

During his time in America, Hamilton Rowan began writing his Memoirs, fearing he would never return to Ireland. He begins with an address to his family,

My dear Children, Whilst residing at Wilmington on the Delaware, in the United States of America, not expecting to return to Europe, and unwilling to solicit my family to rejoin me there, I was anxious to leave you some memorial of a parent whom in all probability you would never know personally.

However, thanks to the persistence of his wife, in 1799 he received permission to travel to a neutral European country without being arrested and he moved from Wilmington to Hamburg, Germany, where he was reunited with his wife and children and lived until 1803. He continued to seek a pardon and was permitted to live in England from 1803. His father Gawen died in 1805 and he was allowed to return to Ireland in 1806.