Arthur Griffith

Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin, led the delegation that signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and died of exhaustion eight months later while the state he had negotiated was fighting a civil war over it. He was born in Dublin in 1871, the son of a printer, and followed the trade himself, which is where his politics came from: he spent two years in the Transvaal in the late 1890s setting type and watching the Boers, and came home in 1899 to found a weekly, the United Irishman, that he wrote most of. Its argument, set out at length in The Resurrection of Hungary in 1904, was that Ireland should do what Hungary had done in 1867 - withdraw its members from the imperial parliament, set up its own assembly, and force a dual monarchy on London by refusing to cooperate. That policy, abstention and self-reliance, was what Sinn Féin meant when he founded it in 1905, and for a decade it was a small party of journalists and shopkeepers. He took no part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and disapproved of it, and was interned anyway, because the British press had already decided to call the rebels Sinn Féiners. The name stuck to a movement that was not his, and in 1917 he handed its presidency to de Valera without a fight. He was elected in the sweep of December 1918, sat in the first Dáil, and ran the underground government as acting president while de Valera was in America and then in prison. In October 1921 de Valera sent him to London to negotiate and stayed home. Griffith signed on 6 December, having given Lloyd George a private undertaking on the boundary question that he considered binding on himself, and he defended the Treaty in the Dáil as the freedom to achieve freedom - the flag, the evacuation of British troops after seven centuries, an Irish army. The Dáil approved it by seven votes, de Valera resigned, and Griffith was elected president of the Dáil in his place in January 1922. He held the office for seven months of drift into civil war, with Collins running the Provisional Government beside him, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 August 1922, at fifty-one, ten days before Collins was shot.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history