Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Ford, Patrick
FORD, PATRICK (1837-1913), Irish-American journalist and politician, desscribed by Michael Davitt as ‘for a generation the most powerful support on the American continent of the struggle in Ireland’, was born in Galway city 12 April 1837, the son of Edward Ford, by his wife, Anne, née Ford. In 1841, when he was four, Ford’s parents emigrated to the United States. They settled in Boston, and he was educated at the public schools and the Latin School, and afterwards served his apprenticeship in the printing-office of William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston. He began to write for newspapers in 1855, and was editor and publisher of the Boston Sunday Times, which proved unsuccessful, from 1859 to 1860, and of the Charleston (S.C.) Gazette from 1864 to 1866. He served during the Civil War in the 9th Massachusetts regiment of the Northern army. He married in 1863 Miss Odele McDonald.
The real work of Ford’s life began with the founding of the Irish World (1870), a weekly paper published in New York as a means of communication between Irishmen in the United States. It soon became the chief organ of the Irish, and promoted the organization throughout the United States of two thousand five hundred branches of the Irish Land League founded in 1879. Ford’s articles on the Irish land question led to the frequent prohibition of his paper in Ireland by the British government, notably during the chief secretaryship (1880-1882) of Mr. W. E. Forster. In the forty-five years during which he conducted it, the Irish World collected and sent to Ireland a steady stream of subscriptions—amounting it is said to half a million dollars—in support of successive Irish movements. In the early ’eighties, while Forster was carrying out in Ireland a policy of repression, Ford was accused of advocating dynamite and assassination as political weapons, and association with him was one of the charges brought before The Times special commission (1888-1889) against the Irish constitutional leaders, Parnell, Dillon, and Davitt, all of whom on their visits to America had been welcomed by Ford. It was contended by Davitt in defence that Ford was never a member of any secret society.
In later years Ford unreservedly supported the constitutional movement, his object being ‘the establishment of an Irish parliament dealing exclusively with Irish affairs, leaving all other matters to the imperial parliament’. He supported John Redmond [q.v.] in accepting the Home Rule Bill of 1912, and on his death Redmond described him as ‘one of the purest patriots and best men he had ever known’. Ford’s death, which took place at Brooklyn 23 September 1913, provoked from numerous Irish municipal bodies and political organizations resolutions of admiration and gratitude. In private life he was a man of quiet and unassuming manners, and was a strict Roman Catholic in religion. He was the author of two books, The Criminal History of the British Empire (1881) and The Irish Question and American Statesmen (1885).
[New York Daily Tribune, 24 September 1913; New York Herald, 24, 25 September 1913; Literary Digest, New York, 18 October 1913; Irish World, 4, 11, 18 October 1913.]