Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism: The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45

Abstract

Repeal, Revolution, Abolitionism:The Formation of Irish American Identity, 1840–45 Robert O'Sullivan (bio) For James Hoban of Washington, DC, a speaker at the National Repeal Convention for the Friends of Ireland in Philadelphia, Daniel O'Connell's campaign to repeal the British-Irish union of 1801 was the preeminent cause of the nineteenth century. It was also the most deserving of American humanitarian assistance in his judgment. Hoban clearly indicated that "our sympathies may be with Ireland as they were with Greece, with South America, and with the suffering Poles." Hoban expressed the hope that Ireland could become the object of the "heart throbbing which made America send a voice of encouragement to Greece [and] to South America when they were struggling to snap the bonds" that had so long confined their limbs.1 For Irish Americans in the 1840s this comparative framework was integral to the manner in which they advocated for Repeal. Comparisons with and references to the nation-building in Spanish America, Greece, and Poland were a common and even crucial component of Repeal speeches. Irish American Repealers depicted their movement as part and parcel of the global developments that had followed the post-Napoleonic Vienna settlement of 1815.2 Between 1808, with Napoleon's conquest of Spain, and the late 1820s the Spanish Empire in Latin America collapsed in the [End Page 141] face of the revolution led by the "liberator" Simón Bolívar that resulted in the emergence of numerous republics across the continent.3 From 1821 to 1829 Greece waged a protracted war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, with its independent borders finalized in 1832.4 And from 1830 to 1831 Polish nationalists initiated a failed revolution against Russian Tsardom.5 Organs of the American popular press also dedicated extensive coverage to the collapse of Spanish imperialism in Latin America. They found resonances with the story of their own republic and believed themselves to be a central inspiration for Bolívar and his followers.6 Likewise, the Greek and Polish causes gripped the popular imagination, largely though extensive coverage of these causes in these same newspapers.7 From 1840 to 1845, when O'Connell's campaign became a transatlantic phenomenon, Irish American Catholics took advantage of American interest in and remembrance of these causes. American Repealers directly compared their own movement with these momentous global events. These comparisons constituted an inventive rhetorical strategy for pressuring non-Catholic Americans into supporting Repeal. Irish Catholic Repealers sought to connect Repeal with a coherent transnational narrative of oppressed revolutionaries pushing toward national self-government and to situate Repeal at the apex of these post-Napoleonic popular-nationalist movements. Repeal speeches across the United States repeatedly drew on romanticized depictions of the virtuous revolutionary causes of Greece, Poland, and Spanish America. In holding up these heroized and celebrated visions of recent world history, Repealers could explicitly compare [End Page 142] their own cause with the others and could argue that they were worthy of association with romantic heroes like Bolivar, and that Repeal was a key feature of this new age. Repealers drew on these examples to expose the hypocrisy of Americans who had donated liberally to previous humanitarian causes, but who were too timid to do the same when it involved challenging British imperial power in Ireland and elsewhere. Repealers derided the foolishness of those who accepted the logic of British liberals who spoke of a progressive, civilizing imperialism, but who did nothing for those eight millions in the most destitute component of the Union; and they exposed the baseless paranoia of those who played into Britain's hands by raising the alarm that Repeal constituted a foreign, popish conspiracy to entrench papal rule in Ireland, strengthen global Catholicism, and undermine an Anglo-Saxon Protestant vanguard. Irish Americans, it was said, could "discern through these contemptible vaporings the power of British influence, even on the free soil of America."8 Repealers attempted to exploit emerging currents of American national identification as the global center of a new humanitarianism that would expand American values, republicanism, and antimonarchical ideals into the heartlands of the European imperial world.9 According to Repeal rhetoric...