A Cosmopolitan Nationalist: James J. O’Kelly in America

Abstract

In April 1873 the American Ambassador to Spain, General Dan Sickles, met the Spanish Foreign Minister, Emelio Castelar, in Madrid. At Secretary of State Hamilton Fish’s urging, Sickles did ‘all he could’ to encourage the Spanish government to spare the life of Fenian organizer James J. O’Kelly, the colorful foreign correspondent of the New York Herald, arrested some two weeks earlier after returning from behind insurrecto lines while reporting on the Cuban revolution.¹ The anxious Fish, pressured along with President Grant by a barrage of headlines from the yellow journalists at the enormously popular Herald, had just endured a forced public meeting between the President and O’Kelly’s brother Stephen.² There, the Secretary of State and the President vowed, awkwardly, to secure freedom for the British subject, although the exasperated Fish was heard to wonder if Spanish authorities might not be induced to arrest all of the Herald’s trouble-making correspondents.³