James Napper Tandy

James Napper Tandy (born c. 1737, Dublin, Ire.—died Aug. 24, 1803, Bordeaux, France) was an Irish politician, ineffectual revolutionary, and popular hero memorialized in the Irish ballad “The Wearing of the Green”:

I met with Napper Tandy,

and he took me by the hand,

And he said “How’s poor old Ireland,

and how does she stand?”

In the early 1780s Tandy was an artillery commander in the Irish Volunteers, and in 1791 he helped to form a Dublin branch of the radical Society of United Irishmen. Forced into exile in 1793, he made his way to Philadelphia in 1795 and to Paris in 1798, when the French government made him a general and sent him back to Ireland to raise an army against the British. On Sept. 16, 1798, he landed at Rutland Island, off the Donegal coast, but abandoned the venture the same day. While returning circuitously to France, he was captured in Hamburg (November 1798), turned over to the British (September 1799), and, at a trial in Ireland, was sentenced to death (April 1800). He was released unconditionally, however, at the demand of Napoleon Bonaparte, and went (March 1802) to Bordeaux to live.