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His contingent fought well. For a whole day a mere handful of his "battalion" prevented 2,000 Sherwood Foresters from crossing Mount Street Bridge and thus proceeding to the centre of the rebellion in the General Post Office in "Sackville Street." Some 300 Britons were wounded or killed trying to force the bridgehead. Moreover, when the fight was over he was the last commander to surrender, and then only on the written orders of his superior. "If the people had only risen, even with knives and forks—" he bitterly complained as he gave in.
A month later, General Sir John Maxwell, British commander at Dublin, announced that the youthful professor, like the other battalion officers, had been condemned to death, and that unlike the others, his sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life in a British prison. The reason for this clemency could only be guessed, but the fact that this young rebel was born in the U. S. of a Spanish father and an Irish mother and might technically even be considered a U. S. citizen, was an important argument for a Great Britain just then anxious for U. S. aid in the War. This U. S.-born Spanish-Irishman was christened in New York's St. Agnes' Church as Edward. In Ireland where he lived from the age of 2½, he adopted the Gaelic equivalent, Eamon. His full name was Eamon de Valera.
Released from his English jail by a general amnesty in 1917, Eamon de Valera returned to Ireland to become an idol. Though it meant being beaten up, arrested and even imprisoned, thousands of Irishmen persisted in wearing publicly little badges bearing his picture. A million homes had his portrait hung in the place of honor. Irish Republicans inconsistently sang a song with the refrain, "We'll crown de Valera King of Ireland."
In no time he became head of Sinn Fein (which means "ourselves alone"), a political party which, until dominated by de Valera and his Republican cohorts, had worked for no Republic but only a separate Irish Parliament under the British monarchy. That was much too tame a program for the new, determined leader. Before long he was elected an M.P., fully entitled to sit in the British House of Commons — a privilege he never enjoyed, since he refused at that time to take an oath of allegiance to the British King. In the 1918 general election de Valera & Party swept the Irish polls with the slogans "Up the Rebels!" and "Up de Valera ! " Instead of taking their seats at Westminster, where they would be in a permanent minority, the newly elected M.P.s met at Dublin as Dail Eireann (Assembly of Ireland) and called them selves T.D.'s or Teachta Dala (Assembly Deputy).