Angela F. Murphy . American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal . (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 286. $45.00.

Abstract

This book is a welcome intervention into studies of mid-nineteenth-century Irish American transatlantic politics, examining the transnational movement for repeal of the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament in Dublin and instituted direct rule from Westminster. Specifically, it questions the effects of Irish and Irish American engagement with perhaps the most significant of nineteenth-century reform movements, antislavery, on the political standing, efficacy, moral authority, and sustainability of the repeal movement in the period up until the death of Daniel O'Connell in 1847. The book steers a course different from those discussions of Irish America stressing nineteenth-century patterns of labor, migration, and racial formation in the United States that have emerged in the years since the publication of David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991). Rather than adopting the cultural emphasis at the heart of many of these studies, Angela F. Murphy's work is tightly focused on the ways in which the complicated politics of the transatlantic public sphere were negotiated in print media and public forums. She systematically seeks out instances in which questions of slavery and abolition required the Irish repeal movement to produce variable, nuanced responses that addressed the needs of specific repeal cohorts throughout the United States and in Ireland. The wealth of evidence from newspaper articles, accounts of meetings, speeches, and private correspondence allows Murphy to reposition repeal as one of a number of heterogeneous movements emerging from the transatlantic political culture of the mid-nineteenth century.