“A Kindred and Congenial Element”: Irish-American Nationalism’s Embrace of Republican Rhetoric

Abstract

“A Kindred and Congenial Element”: Irish-American Nationalism’s Embrace of Republican Rhetoric Timothy G. Lynch Scholars often point to the Catholic Church, the Democratic party, and labor activism as the primary vehicles for Irish assimilation and acculturation in the nineteenth-century United States, while the role of Irish-American nationalism is often underestimated or overlooked. But nationalism wedded demands for Irish sovereignty with republican rhetoric and offered a powerful opportunity for identity formation outside traditional assimilation routes. Moreover, Irish-American nationalism was inextricably linked to important concepts of republicanism. Concepts that were dangerous on one side of the Atlantic were embraced on the other, and the Fenians’ espousal of such rhetoric made important claims about Irish-American ethnicity and identity. Republicanism —with its rejection of inherited political power, a central role for rights and liberty, and an expectation of political agency as exercised by its citizen adherents—was a key component of Irish and Irish-American nationalist sentiment. Several historical treatments comment on the centrality of republicanism to the American identity in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, some regard republicanism as the transcendent theme of nineteenth-century America.1 Yet, none has linked Irish-American nationalism to this theme. Specifically, the Fenian Brotherhood and similar mid-nineteenth century Irish groups hoped to find acceptability and respectability by utilizing republicanism. The failure of earlier scholars to identify the link between republicanism and assimilation might be due to the fractured nature of that ideology on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish republicanism included Whiggish and radical versions, alongside romantic, cultural, and socialist versions. In the United States, republican rhetoric included bourgeois, working class, Northern (based on free labor) and Southern slaveholding varieties. The implications of republicanism were so prevalent that emphases on that theme can be seen to play a central role in the formation of mid-nineteenth century Irish-American identity. [End Page 77] Attempts to explain Irish-American nationalism have been varied, and range from ridicule to respect. Little consensus exists among scholars concerning the motives and motivations of diasporic Irish nationalist organizations. In Emigrants and Exiles (1985), Kerby Miller sees the movement as a product of the Great Famine and the psychological scars associated with emigration as experienced by the Irish in America. Born in the Irish ghettoes of the Eastern seaboard, immigrant nationalism reminded its adherents of the suffering that led to emigration in the first place, and the movement found easy recruits among these combustible masses living in combustible quarters. According to Miller, Irish-American nationalism is deeply rooted in an Anglophobic sense of collective exile. Irishmen joined these organizations for the opportunity to avenge the horrors of the Famine.2 One can also interpret support for antebellum Irish-American nationalism as an attempt to gain acceptance in the host society. With the horrors of An Gorta Mor fresh in their minds, many Irish immigrants saw in their low status another consequence of British misrule. Thomas N. Brown likewise proposes that Irish-American nationalism developed in the crucible of the expatriate enclave experience. Poverty and discrimination fostered a profound desire to boost collective Irish social stature in the United States. Middle-class Irish Americans embraced these movements so as to prove themselves a coherent community. By supporting efforts in the homeland to end centuries of British subjugation, individuals assumed that Know-Nothings and other nativists would realize Irish Americans were not brutish “sub-humans” who threatened Protestant social and economic livelihood.3 For Brown, the overriding emotions of the immigrant ghetto belie a sense of inferiority, a heightened sensitivity to criticism, and an unquenchable yearning for respectability. He envisions the movement as one of psychosocial compensation for pain and status anxiety generated by immigration and exclusion. Irish Americans who harbored middle-class aspirations for respectability thus supported nationalism in the hope that such activity would facilitate social ascension in the waning years of the nineteenth century. To them, Irish independence appeared both a means to middle-class ascension and as a blow to Old World aristocracy. [End Page 78] Both Irish-American personal accounts and the journalistic record support the conclusion that immigrants with middle-class aspirations attributed their harsh reception to the fact that they...