Hercules Mulligan, the 18th-century tailor, spy and US revolutionary, is soon to become a Northern Ireland tourist attraction.
The emigrant who helped clinch America’s independence by spying on British officers and reputedly saving the life of George Washington has been honoured in his native land.
The Causeway Coast and Glens borough council has decided to recognise Mulligan in heritage trails, a rather modest tribute but one that reflects renewed fascination with his exploits two centuries ago.
Mulligan, was born in Coleraine, County Derry, in 1740 and as a boy moved with his family to New York. In the 1770s he sided with those resisting British rule and used his job as a tailor to gather intelligence from British officers who discussed military operations while being fitted for uniforms.
Some historians credit Mulligan with twice saving Washington from capture and execution and with helping the rebel forces to defeat the troops of King George III.
Mulligan is said to have toppled a statue of the king that was melted down to make 40,000 bullets. He was also a mentor to Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States.
“It wasn’t reluctance to acknowledge his role in defeating the British in the war of independence that prevented Hercules Mulligan being honoured before now, but the fact that few people on this side of the Atlantic had ever heard of him,” said the Belfast Telegraph.
Mulligan was largely forgotten until the AMC period drama series Turn: Washington’s Spies, and the musical Hamilton, in which he was played by the actor Okieriete Onaodowan.
Alan McClarty, the son of the late independent unionist MLA David McClarty, suggested to Yvonne Boyle, an Alliance party councillor with the Causeway Coast and Glens borough council, that the council celebrate Mulligan.
A plaque would have cost £1,200 and taken at least two years so the council’s leisure and development committee voted to recognise the local son in future heritage trails. “Although we are in a pandemic, arts and heritage are still important so we have something to look forward to,” said Boyle.
Not everyone is thrilled. Mulligan supported the abolition of slavery but census data suggests he owned a slave. “Maybe the Broadway show … has clouded people’s minds to the real Mulligan,” Stephen McCracken, a member of the history group Limavady Area Ancestry, told the news site Derry Now.
