Mary Ann McCracken (8 July 1770 – 26 July 1866) was a social activist and campaigner in Belfast, Ireland, whose extensive correspondence is cited as an important chronicle of her times. Born to a prominent liberal Presbyterian family, she combined entrepreneurship in Belfast's growing textile industry with support for the democratic programme of the United Irishmen; advocacy for women; the organising of relief and education for the poor; and, in a town that was heavily engaged in trans-Atlantic trade, a lifelong commitment to the abolition of slavery. On International Women's Day (8 March ) 2024, a statue of Mary Ann McCracken was unveiled in the grounds of Belfast City Hall.
Early years and influences
McCracken was born in Belfast on 8 July 1770. Her father, Captain John McCracken, a devout Presbyterian of Scottish descent, was a prominent shipowner and a partner in the building in 1784 of the town's first cotton mill. Her mother Ann Joy, came from a French Huguenot family, which made its money in the linen trade and founded the Belfast News Letter. Unusually, before her marriage she had run her own milliner's shop and subsequently managed a small business manufacturing muslin. From the publication of Common Sense (1776), Ann Joy was an ardent admirer of Thomas Paine and remained so until, in 1796, with The Age of Reason he turned his invective from aristocracy to religion (her daughter, Mary Ann, accounted the "infidel publication" a "pity").
Along with children of other enlightened Presbyterian families, Mary Ann and her elder brother Henry Joy ("Harry") attended David Manson's progressive "play school" in Donegall Street. In classrooms from which he sought to banish "drudgery and the fear of the rod", Manson offered "young ladies" the "same extensive education as the young gentlemen". Mary Ann developed a love of mathematics and of literature.
In 1788, brother and sister attempted a school of their own: a Sunday morning reading and writing class for the poor. It has been suggested they followed the example of Robert Raike's Sunday School movement in England But unlike Raike who insisted on church attendance and catechism, the McCrackens made no concessions to sabbatarian or sectarian sentiment. As a result, they were not long in session before the town's Anglican rector (and Lord Donegall's factotum), William Bristow, appeared at the door of their Market House schoolroom and, with several stick-wielding ladies, put "the humble pioneers" to flight.
The McCrackens were a political household in a town agitated by the American Revolution and by the low-level tenant insurgency of the surrounding countryside (in the year of Mary Ann's birth, the Hearts of Steel had entered the town, besieged the barracks, burned the house of the wealthy merchant and land speculator, Waddell Cunningham, and sprung one of their number from prison). The family's minister at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, Sinclair Kelburn was a strong supporter of the Volunteer movement. On the pretext of securing the Kingdom against the French in the American War, the volunteer militia or National Guard as it was later styled, allowed Presbyterians to arm, drill and convene independently of the Anglican Ascendancy. Kelburn preached in his uniform with his musket leaning against the pulpit door, and at Volunteer conventions urged the case for Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform. Unable to "approve of hereditary legislators, because wisdom is not hereditary", Kelburn did not disguise his democratic and republican sympathies.
McCracken's niece, Anna McCleery relates that "reared among such influences," Mary Ann was "from her early years intensely interested in politics, and various political incidents, in which some of her relatives were concerned, became indelibly imprinted on her memory".McCleery, Anna (1896), "The Life of Mary Ann McCracken, the Sister of Henry Joy McCracken", in Robert Magill Young, Historical Notices of Old Belfast and its Vicinity, Belfast: Marcus Ward & Co., p. 180
Businesswoman and employer In the 1790s, following their mother's example, McCracken and her sister Margaret started a small business that pioneered the production of patterned and checked muslin.Gender in the Economy: Female Merchants and Family Businesses in the British Isles, 1600-1850, Pamela Sharpe p.22 Initially a small scale operation employing workers in their own homes, by 1809 having gathered and taught a number of young women to work at the tambour frame it had moved into factory production.
In 1815, amidst the post-war collapse in demand, they were obliged to close. But during earlier downturns in trade, the sisters had distinguished themselves as employers by refusing to cuts costs at the expense of their employees, among them young female embroiderers and apprentices.McNeill (1960), p. 246 Mary Ann "could not think of dismissing our workers, because nobody would give them employment". The "sphere of woman's industry", she complained, "is so confined, and so few roads open to her, and those so thorny".
In the textile industry, McCracken witnessed the development that was beginning to distinguish Belfast and its hinterland from the rest of Ireland: the accelerating application of machinery which expanded industry while holding down labour costs.O'Neill (1960), p. 133 When in the early 1790s linen and cotton weavers began to unionise in protest against stagnant wages and rising prices, in his News Letter her uncle, Henry Joy, objected that in competition with England, lower labour costs were Ireland's only "rational hope". On pages of the Northern Star her friends were divided. While Samuel Neilson (who had pledged his woollen business to establish the paper) proposed that Volunteers assist in enforcing the laws against combination; Thomas Russell urged labourers and cottiers to follow the weavers' example.
For her own part, McCracken was fascinated by the possibilities of mechanical substitutes for labour. Would it not be possible, she asked her brother, "to contrive some useful machinery to supply the use of horses and servants" and as a visitor to the Poorhouse, she was to press the guardians to see whether the washerwomen might be relieved by "any new constructed washing machines, or any for wringing". McCracken hoped for a future in which, by reducing drudgery and increasing output, mechanisation would afford workers the energy and the time for greater education and leisure.McNeill (1960), pp. 284, 132
Irish music and language enthusiast From 1784, the musician and collector Edward (Atty) Bunting was thirty years a member of the McCracken household. Mary Ann and Harry attended the Harpist Festival Bunting staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society (and arranged to coincide with the town's Bastille Day celebrations) in July 1792. In 1808, with her Gaeilgeoir friends, the poet Mary Balfour and the brothers Samuel and Andrew Bryson,Courtnay (2013), p. 53 Mary Ann became a founding member of the Belfast Harp Society. For its short life-span to 1813, when a second festival was staged, Bunting was its musical director and Arthur O'Neill (under the patronage of his former pupil, Dr James MacDonnell) its resident master harpist. McCracken acted as Bunting's unofficial secretary and contributed anonymously to the second volume of his work The Ancient Music of Ireland in 1809.
The Belfast "renaissance of Irish music" has been seen as "the precursor by a century of the Irish Gaelic Revival". Advertised as an appeal to those "wishing to preserve from oblivion the few fragments which have been permitted to remain, as monuments to the refined taste and genius of their ancestors", Bunting's patriotic festival may have been more antiquarian than revivalist. But there was an interest in the command of the language: Irish classes were offered at the Harp Society. Mary Ann is known to have studied from Charles Vallency's Irish grammar.Gray (2020), p. 22
United Irishwoman
It is almost certain that Mary Ann McCracken took the United Irish pledge to "form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", and "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland". She may have done so with her brothers (Harry, William and Francis were all United men), but in any case not later than March 1797. She wrote then to Harry of her hopes that the good example of their school friend, the botanist John Templeton in taking the "test" would soon be followed by the Templeton sisters. McCracken's biographer, Mary McNeill, notes, it would have been "out of keeping with her character" for McCracken "to expect others to undertake responsibilities which she would not shoulder herself".McNeill (1960), pp. 126, 129-130 This was at a time when, with the King at war with revolutionary France and with the Viceroy, Lord Camden, rigid in his opposition to Catholic emancipation and reform, the thinking in the democratic party was turning increasingly to the prospect of a French-assisted insurrection.
McCracken assured her brother that she did not shrink from the prospect of political violence: she accepted that "the complete Union of Ireland" might "demand the blood of some of her best Patriots to cement”.Mary Ann McCracken of Belfast to Henry Joy McCracken in Kilmainham Jail. 26 March 1797McWilliam (2021), p. 304 Neither was she averse to deceiving the authorities and concealing guns. Her sole reservation was in opposing political assassination and the killing of informers: "what is morally wrong can never be politically right".Letter to Henry Joy McCracken 2 June 1797. McNeill (1960), p. 142. McWilliams (2021), p. 132 Meanwhile, she seemed confident of the French, noting that "almost everybody in Belfast" was learning the language.Gray (2020), pp. 11-12
When her brother was committed to Newgate in 1796 and there fell out with his fellow prisoner Samuel Neilson, McCracken wrote urging him to make up as their "example of disunion" was "injurious to the cause".Letter Henry Joy McCracken, October 1797. TCD: MS873/136. McWilliams (2021), p. 385
In the absence of a French landing, the movement's northern leaders hesitated when on 23 May 1798 the call came from the United Irish directory in Dublin for a nationwide insurrection. Her brother, only just released from Kilmainham after a year and a half's detention, seized the initiative taking county command in Antrim. Henry Joy McCracken's proclamation on 6 June of the First Year of Liberty triggered widespread local musters. But before they could coordinate, the issue had been decided. Commanding a body of four to six thousand rebels, her brother failed, with heavy losses, to seize Antrim Town.
Brother's execution
In the weeks that followed, McCracken assisted her brother and other fugitives with money, food, and clothing. She was arranging for a ship to take him to the United States when, on 7 July 1798, Harry was recognised and seized in Carrickfergus. With great difficulty she managed to obtain an interview with him the same evening and the following morning, through his cell window, to take from his hand a ring that had “a green shamrock on the outside and the words, ‘Remember Orr’ on the inside.” William Orr was the celebrated United Irish martyr hanged in Carrickfergus the year before.