Parallel Struggles: Irish Republicanism in the American South, 1798–1876

Abstract

PARALLEL STRUGGLES: IRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876* DAVID T. GLEESON What is that in your hand? It is a branch. Of what? Of the Tree of Liberty. Where did it first grow? In America. Where does it bloom? In France. Where did the seeds fall? In Ireland.1 as this often cited password of the United Irishmen suggests, Ireland’s first republicans believed that there was a connection between their own revolutionary struggle and those taking place in other countries. Similarly, the efforts of later generations to break the connection between Britain and Ireland also seemed to depend upon extraterritorial aid, particularly from the United States. The sheer number of Irish immigrants in nineteenth -century America and their growing prosperity were vital to republican plans. Historians have recently begun to examine the impact that Irish republicanism had upon America, but they have not examined the subject in a regional context to any great degree. Just as we are learning that IrishIRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876 97 * Research for this article was partially funded by grants from the O’Shaughnessy Irish Research Fund of the Irish American Cultural Institute and the Snellgrove Fund of the Department of History at Mississippi State University. 1 Quoted in Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 57. American economic and political life varied in regional terms, so too did Irish republicanism.2 In particular, the Irish in the antebellum American South did not seem to fit the traditional stereotype that historians have constructed of Irish republicans generally in America.3 While many of them embraced republicanism because they wished for revenge against British misrule in Ireland, a far greater number embraced it because it helped them to integrate more easily into southern society. I United Irish exiles in Jeffersonian America had an immediate affinity with their fellow republicans. Their belief in the universal tenets of republicanism helped them to adapt rapidly to the tumult of American politics. The political views that they espoused allowed them to maintain an interest in removing Britain’s dominance of Ireland without any fear of being considered “un-American.”4 However, what might be called “classical” Irish republicanism declined sharply after 1798, and in its place there arose a more Anglophobic nationalism that made it increasingly difficult for Irish refugees to assimilate. The millions who immigrated to America between 1815 and the beginning of the Civil War, and especially those who arrived in the wake of the great famine of the late 1840s, carried with them a “psychological legacy” of British oppression. To all intents and purposes they became cultural “exiles” in the United States, exiles who leaned heavily upon that familiar crutch of the republican faith: the desire to sepIRISH REPUBLICANISM IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1798–1876 98 2 David N. Doyle, “The Regional Bibliography of Irish America, 1830–1930: A Review and Addendum,” Irish Historical Studies 23 (May 1983), 254–83; Dennis Clark, Hibernia America : The Irish and Regional Cultures (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 3 In this paper the South is defined as the eleven states that officially joined the Confederacy in 1861. “Republican” is used here not just for immigrants who were active in the various republican movements but also for those who harbored similar views. Therefore, many Irish southerners, although they supported constitutional movements, could be justifiably defined as republican. 4 Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 282, states: “Early Irish republicanism bore little resemblance to its later separatist reincarnations” and “cannot be dismissed simply as separatist and anti-English.” Whelan also recognizes the uniquely eighteenth-century Enlightenment characteristics of the United Irishmen. David A. Wilson’s United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 177, sees more of a continuity between the various incarnations of Irish republicanism in America but believes that United Irishmen assimilated well into American politics and were able “to bolster the country’s sense of mission, its belief that it was the political, social...