Alexander O’Reilly

Yep.

Okay, Laura, may we, may we grab the listener by the throat and discuss the man named Alejandro O'Reilly, AKA Bloody O'Reilly?

Absolutely.

I usually start my lectures that the Irish entered Louisiana history with a very loud bang with Alejandro O'Reilly.

It's also a great starting point to see how the New Orleans experience for Irish immigrants and the Irish coming here to this, to New Orleans, to Louisiana, was very different than the Irish going to the Atlantic seaboard, to the 13 colonies at the same time, and he embodies a lot of that.

So by way of background, Alejandro O'Reilly was born in County Meath, Ireland, but when he was about age 10, his family moved to Spain, and this was not unusual at the time in the 18th century, in the 1700s, in that due to the penal laws that were enacted from 1691 up to 1769, that to be Irish and to be Catholic and living in Ireland meant many things.

You couldn't own land, you couldn't vote, you couldn't hold a profession, you couldn't educate your child, you couldn't practice your religion.

You couldn't own a horse worth more than five pounds, which just kind of shows you how obscure and strange some of these laws went on, and they were evolving and being passed by multiple parliaments under multiple monarchs in the UK.

And for a year or so, happy days.

Until 1769, Spain sent another governor, Alejandro O'Reilly, and a lot of firepower.

He immediately got to work doing something about this whole rebellion, rounding up five ringleaders of the whole thing and throwing them in prison.

For the longest time, O'Reilly had this reputation of being this brutal executioner, this guy who was referred to as Bloody O'Reilly.

But the fact is that all of these rebels were given a fair trial in accordance with Spanish law at the time.

After two months of court proceedings, all of them were found guilty of sedition, so plotting or talking people into rebellion, and also treason, knowingly betraying the state by going against what both the French and Spanish kings had explicitly worked out amongst themselves.

Alejandro O'Reilly handed down the death sentence to all five, and they were executed on the 26th of October 1769.

I know, Claire, that doesn't sound very heartwarming to me.