Delvin native was controversial contributor to religious debate in 19th century America

HISTORY MATTERS, BY DR PAUL HUGHES

As stories of the Westmeath diaspora go, one of the most unusual is that of Nicholas Murray, a fierce, controversial and well known contributor to religious debate in 19th century America, and a Presbyterian minister who started life as the son of a Catholic farmer in rural Delvin.

Whether they made their names in business, politics, religious life, culture or public service, Catholic identity and communal solidarity were central to the outlook of those Irish who emigrated to the United States in the 1800s – but Murray (b. 1802) bucked that trend in more ways than one.

Only 30 years after his arrival in America as a “friendless, wandering” 16-year-old, Murray held the highest elected office in the Presbyterian Church of America – that of moderator of its general assembly.

While Presbyterianism had strong roots in the Irish midlands since the late 1600s – Mullingar historian Jason McKevitt, for example, has done substantial work on this – Murray was not born into its ranks or indeed those of any Protestant denomination.

Nicholas Murray came into the world on Christmas Day, 1802, at Ballynaskeagh, between Delvin and Raharney, the son of Nicholas and Judith (née Mangan) Murray. Murray’s biographer, Samuel Irenæus Prime, states that his parents were strong Catholics but speculated that their Christian names were “indicative of a different parentage”.

Nicholas Murray Snr was a propertied farmer who, according to Prime, “exerted considerable influence” in the civil life of Delvin. He died when the younger Nicholas was three, leaving his mother to rear their extensive family. Other biographical accounts suggest that Judith longed for her son to pursue the priesthood on coming of age, but he was “sadly and badly used by his employer” while working as a merchant’s clerk in Edgeworthstown during his teens; Prime suggests that for some unexplained reason, that experience coloured his views of the Catholic clergy and Catholicism generally. His mother’s hopes were dashed.

Murray resolved to emigrate to the “New World” and so relinquished any claim he had to an inheritance in Delvin in exchange for his brother’s help with his passage to America. He arrived in New York in 1818, at a time when, in stark contrast to later decades, Catholics were still a small minority on America’s east coast. With $12 (around $300 in today’s money) in his pocket, Murray sought and found a job with a printing press, took up lodgings with a Protestant family and within a couple of years converted to Presbyterianism.

Moving in the right circles, Murray secured a place at Williams College in Massachusetts and later studied at the theological seminary at Princeton. In 1833, he was ordained a Presbyterian minister at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where he preached for the rest of his life. According to Prime, Judith Murray had Masses said in Delvin for the repose of her son’s soul, believing him to be effectively dead after forsaking the Catholic faith.

In subsequent years, aside from his local ministry and his academic pursuits as an antiquarian, historian and statistician, Murray became well known in American public debates as a firebrand who railed against Rome and Catholic doctrine. He was a prolific letter-writer to prominent newspapers such as the New York Observer, and under the pseudonym ‘Kirwan’ – an allusion to another Irish convert to Protestantism, Walter Blake Kirwan – he maintained an acrimonious but visible public debate with the Catholic archbishop of New York, John Joseph Hughes, on various doctrinal and social matters. The latter published a collection of letters entitled ‘Kirwan Unmasked’.

Murray was at his most influential as a public figure in 1849 when he served a year in the most senior position in the American Presbyterian church. Much of his rhetoric inveighed against Catholic – mainly Irish and Italian – immigration into the United States, though many of his countrymen were, at the time, escaping famine in Ireland.

He encouraged nativist – that is, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – suspicions of Catholic immigrants who, he insisted, would profess loyalty to Rome at the expense of America, precipitating its ruin. That was at a time when the US became gripped by frequent anti-Catholic riots, most notably in Philadelphia in 1844.

Though he sympathised with the plight of the starving Irish, and while much of his writings point to what he and many others saw as the evils of the system of landlordism, Murray identified the “deep-rooted superstition of the Irish papist” as the most nefarious cause of poverty and moral turpitude in his native land.

Excursions to Ireland

By the Famine years, Murray, nicknamed ‘the Presbyterian pope’ had developed a considerable reputation as a public intellectual that commanded attention on both sides of the Atlantic; his views were well known in both Britain and the Protestant kingdoms of Central Europe. In 1851 and 1860, he embarked on tours of Europe, including two return visits to his native Westmeath.

Prime’s biography draws heavily on Murray’s diaries, which include an account of his arrival in Ballynaskeagh. With the area scarred by the recent famine, Murray found the landscape and community changed. Even his ancestral home had been knocked and a new one built. “If dropped from the skies upon the spot, I would not have known where I was,” Murray noted. “Not a trace existed of entire families.”

After visiting his brother in Castlepollard, Murray became violently ill but, beyond that, his memories of the return to Westmeath were generally positive. There was plenty of local curiosity at this colourful visitor from America. Of his final day in Delvin, 23 July 1851, he recalled:

“Rode with my brothers to the old homestead – met many of the children of old neighbours, who came some distance to see me. About four o’clock, rode to the grave-yard at Castletown, Delvin, and there, over the graves of my parents, preached Christ to my two brothers, and pointed out to them the way of life, and the terrible delusion of Romanism. They rode with me toward Athboy, and there, in a secluded part of the road, I bid them good-by, probably forever. My riding through Castletown made quite a sensation, as somehow or other the fame of me got among the people of the village, and they gazed on me as the representative of the New World.”

That, indeed, appears to have been the Rev Dr Nicholas Murray’s final farewell to Delvin. He returned to Westmeath on his second tour in 1860, that time to Athlone, remarking on the “effects of popery, manifest in the filth, poverty, ignorance, and vice of the unevangelized districts” to the west of the town.

Murray returned to the US and in February 1861, not yet 59, died suddenly after an attack of neuralgia of the heart. His grandson, Nicholas Murray Butler, became even more famous than his eponymous grandfather. An influential, outspoken and often controversial president of New York’s Columbia University, Butler was William Howard Taft’s Republican running mate in the 1912 US presidential election, which Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson.

In another world, had Taft beaten Wilson in 1912, it would have meant that the grandson of a Delvin man would have been vice-president of the United States during the First World War.