William Putnam McCabe (1776–1821) was an emissary and organiser in Ireland for the insurrectionary Society of United Irishmen. Facing multiple indictments for treason as a result of his role in fomenting the 1798 rebellion, he effected a number of daring escapes but was ultimately forced by his government pursuers into exile in France. With the favour of Napoleon, he established a cotton factory at Rouen while remaining active as a member of a new United Irish Directory. He worked to assist Robert Emmett in coordinating a new rising in Ireland in 1803, and later had contact with the Spencean circle in London implicated in both the Spa Field riots and the Cato Street Conspiracy.
In 1814, having ventured to Ireland, he was arrested and deported to Portugal. He returned again in 1817 and was imprisoned for eighteen months. McCabe died in Paris on 6 January 1821, age 46.
Radical family
McCabe was the youngest of the three sons of Thomas McCabe, a watchmaker and cotton-mill pioneer in Belfast, and his first wife Jean (née Woolsey). The family were members of the First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary marked by a latitudinarian "New Light" teaching conducive to the enthusiasm for the American Revolution, and subsequently for the French Revolution, that animated the Volunteer movement in the town. McCabe's middle name was in honour of the American hero of Bunker Hill, Israel Putnam.
His father was renowned for having rallied members of the church and others in town in 1786 to oppose and defeat a proposal by the wealthy merchants and West-Indian slaveholders Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg to commission vessels in the port for the Middle Passage.
In October 1791, Thomas McCabe and other prominent friends of reform in Belfast, met with Wolf Tone to inaugurate the Society of United Irishmen. The Society, which quickly spread to Belfast's Presbyterian hinterlands, to Dublin and across the Catholic Midlands, resolved to secure for Ireland a national government accountable to a parliament in which "all the people", Catholic and Protestant, should have "equal representation".
United Irishman
Shortly after his father's business premises in Belfast had been ransacked by soldiers in February 1793, the young McCabe returned from a textile apprenticeship in Manchester, in his own words "imbued, not merely with the political, but, unfortunately also, with the religious opinions, of Paine". He joined his father in the Society of United Irishmen, working first with Samuel Neilson on the movement's paper, the Northern Star. Thomas Russell recorded an interview with McCabe and Neilson in April 1793 from which he understood that the people in the north were "burning with indignation" against the government (the British-Crown appointed executive in Dublin) and that they "have gone to the greatest lengths to hold out their hands [to] the nation [the Protestant Ascendancy who were alone represented in the Irish Parliament] to join them in reform but they have refused". With the French declaration of war against Britain in February 1793, the United Irishmen began to think in terms of a French assisted insurrection, and to organise accordingly.
With Russell and with Jemmy Hope, McCabe became a roving organiser for the Society across Ulster where in 1796 government reports identify him as the Society's provincial secretary. He made regular use of the contacts, and of the hospitality, offered by his fellow Freemasons. But for a northern Protestant McCabe also had the unusual ability to move throughout the south. In his travels in the textile trade across the British Isles, McCabe had acquired a command of local accents and a talent for mimicry that made him a master of disguise. Among other roles, he assumed that of an itinerant preacher (changing halfway through his sermon to a discourse on the politics of the day), a mendicant, a farmer, a pedlar, and a British army recruiter (under which guise he persuaded a judge in Roscommon to release Richard Dry and other Catholic Defenders to his custody).
On his arrival at his destination, McCabe would organise supporters in groups of twelve and in order to help the country people to understand the organisation of the United Irishmen he would draw up plans so that "even persons of little education could understand how they were to act from a single society up to a Provincial Meeting".