Ulster Presbyterians Research Articles

Ulster in Steinbeck: Steinbeck in Ulster

Abstract Steinbeck’s work often articulates a deep familiarity with Presbyterian assumptions and values. While this is often expressed in terms of contempt or a rejection of America’s Calvinist strain, a consideration of Steinbeck’s family heritage offers a helpful lens for reading his work. Steinbeck’s Ulster Presbyterian family history shares much in common with America’s own story, and Steinbeck’s work, in particular East of Eden, might be read as an extended meditation on Presbyterianism. Far from simply rejecting that heritage, his writing reproduces its values in fascinating ways.

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

‘Not the Same God’: Alexander Carson (1776-1844) and the Ulster Trinitarian Controversy

Abstract The impact of the Salters’ Hall Synod went beyond its immediate context in England and spread throughout the British Isles and into Ireland. Ulster Presbyterianism was wracked with debate over confessional subscriptionism and Unitarianism. Two key interlocutors in this debate were the Unitarian theologian William Hamilton Drummond and his orthodox counterpart, Alexander Carson. This essay traces the debate with a particular emphasis on their use of Scottish Common Sense philosophy as a way into or out of heterodox views of the Trinity.

The Real Thing? The Irish Immigrant Ethnic Hierarchy, S. S. McClure, and Henry James

Henry James shared a Scots-Irish (Ulster Presbyterian) background with S.S. McClure, proprietor of the Associated Literary Press, and greater attention to ethnic solidarity among Scots-Irish Americans would illuminate "The Real Thing," the James story that McClure syndicated in 1892. The differentiating coinage "Scots/Scotch-Irish" gained currency after the 1840s influx of poor, predominantly Catholic Famine refugees, and in the ensuing ethnic hierarchy, the established Irish cohort ranked above the recent. Indeed, the story that McClure syndicated, which features an Italian immigrant, is concerned with this hierarchy, since Italians, like the post-Famine Irish, were only conditionally "white" in the era of publication.

Andrew Jackson and the Protestant Irish of Philadelphia: Early Nineteenth-Century Sectarianism

ABSTRACT Andrew Jackson has long been represented as the archetype of Scots Irish immigrants. However, by the election of 1832, Ulster Presbyterians in Philadelphia, once champions of Jacksonianism, turned against the president and his politics. Catholic Irish immigrants also began to flock to the United States around this time. In Philadelphia Andrew Jackson became the focal point of Irish sectarian differences, some of which became violent. The Irish community became divided over religion and Jacksonian political culture. Ironically, Jackson, whom some historians have identified as the archetype of the Ulster Presbyterians in America, appealed to Irish Catholics but helped spur Irish Protestants into his opponents' camps.

National identity, religion, and Irish unionism: the rhetoric of Irish Presbyterian opposition to Home Rule in 1912

ABSTRACTThis article examines Irish Presbyterian rhetoric surrounding the opposition to Home Rule in 1912. The article demonstrates that religion provided a significant factor in mobilising Presbyterian unionists. Religious rhetoric included two distinct but intertwining strands within unionism. Presbyterians at times utilised liberal discourse, framing their opposition as an attempt to preserve religious and civil liberties, and they justified the Union because of its perceived benefits. They also drew, however, upon a religiously inspired mentality viewing themselves as a divinely chosen people with the right to occupy Ireland. The relationship between these two aspects of religious rhetoric was complex; each strand manifested more strongly at different periods, in response to contemporary events. Focusing on three separate Presbyterian events, the Presbyterian Anti-Home Rule Convention, the General Assembly, and Ulster Day, this article traces the development of Presbyterian rhetoric and the relationship between these two rhetorical strands, showing that the ‘chosen people’ religious mentality gained strength as tensions surrounding Home Rule heightened. It will close with an examination of the theoretical implications of these findings, arguing that the context of Ulster Presbyterians supports aspects of the ethno-symbolist approach to the intersection of religion and national identity.

‘Do not forget your bit wife’: love, marriage and the negotiation of patriarchy in Irish Presbyterian marriages, c. 1780–1850

ABSTRACTDrawing on the marital correspondence of Isabella Marshall and William John Campbell Allen, an Ulster Presbyterian couple, alongside a number of other Presbyterian families, this article explores how patriarchy was negotiated within Irish Presbyterian marriages, c. 1780–1850. It begins by framing the Campbell Allens as a case-study, and examines how the couple negotiated three elements of the patriarchal marriage ideal: love, obedience and the control of economic resources. Next, it uses the family papers and personal correspondence of two other Presbyterian couples, and considers how typical their examples are of love, marriage and patriarchy. This article argues that patriarchy was not a fixed principle in marriage. Rather, it was subject to a constant process of negotiation and refinement during the course of marriage. The roles played by women and men in marriage were also fluid and elastic.

The 1859 revival and its enemies: opposition to religious revivalism within Ulster Presbyterianism

AbstractThe evangelical revival of 1859 remains a pivotal event in the religious culture of Ulster Protestants owing to its legacy of widespread conversion, church renewal, and its role in shaping the pan-Protestantism of Ulster society that later opposed Irish home rule. Being part of a wider transatlantic movement of religious awakening, the 1859 revival was seen as the culmination of thirty years of evangelical renewal within Irish Presbyterianism. What has often been overlooked, however, is the fact that many aspects of the revival were deeply troubling to orthodox Presbyterians. Although most Ulster Presbyterians were largely supportive of the movement, an intellectually significant minority dissented from what they saw as its spectacular, doctrinal, liturgical, ecclesiological, and moral aberrations. Given 1859’s mythological status among Ulster evangelicals, it is normally assumed that all who opposed the revival were either religious formalists or those of heterodox doctrinal opinions. It will be argued that such an assumption is deeply misguided, and that the Presbyterian opponents of 1859 were motivated by zeal for confessional Reformed theology and Presbyterian church-order. By focusing on theologically conservative opposition to an ostensible evangelical and Calvinistic awakening, this article represents a significant contribution to the existing historiography of not only the Ulster revival but of religious revivalism more generally. It also helps us to understand the long-term evolution of Ulster Presbyterian belief and practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

War, religion and anti-slavery ideology: Isaac Nelson's radical abolitionist examination of the American civil war

Isaac Nelson's response to the civil war represented the fruit of twenty years’ reflection on the issues of slavery and emancipation. Perhaps surprisingly, he did not support the Federal government's efforts to restore the Union, even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Nelson's analysis of the struggle helpfully illuminates the complexity of radical abolitionist responses to the civil war, while it also serves to correct hasty generalizations concerning British and Irish evangelical support for the Federal government. Thus, by means of a biographical case study of Ulster Presbyterianism's most zealous abolitionist, a wide number of thematic issues can be freshly examined.

The emergence of a Presbyterian evangelical: a religious and social history of Isaac Nelson's pastorate at First Comber Presbyterian Church, 1838–42

The Revd Isaac Nelson was one of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century Ulster Presbyterianism, who achieved transatlantic recognition for his involvement with anti-slavery and later became notorious for his advocacy of Irish Home Rule. Owing to his opposition to the 1859 revival, Nelson has been castigated by both fundamentalists and moderate evangelicals as the enemy of vital religion. This view has been disseminated in popular mythologies of the Ulster awakening, especially in the works of Ian Paisley and John T. Carson. An objective examination of Nelson's public career, however, does not support this conclusion. This essay seeks to substantiate the claim that Nelson was an evangelical by considering his early experience as minister of First Comber Presbyterian Church. By means of a micro-history case study, it also usefully illuminates our understanding as to how the dominance of evangelicalism within Ulster Presbyterianism was experienced at a local level. Accordingly, the essay also considers Nelson's role in disputes with Episcopalians and Unitarians during this early part of his career as well as his early involvement in ecclesiastical politics.

Review of 'Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750-1764'

Review of 'Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750-1764'

Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 Matthieu Billings Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830, edited by Warren R. Hofstra, pp. 263. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. $45. As historians increasingly find themselves defending their profession, they may take solace that their role as "myth-buster" remains secure. During the past decade, a number of American politicians have found it beneficial to advance an uncomplicated historical narrative of one of America's earliest ethnic groups— the Scots-Irish. Ireland's Presbyterian immigrants, so the story goes, isolated themselves culturally, embraced a warlike ethos, fought the establishment, and embodied the individualism quintessential to conservative memories of the American Revolution. With a refreshing degree of coherence, Ulster to America takes aim at such monolithic, racialized depictions. The Scots-Irish identity was not "determined, diffusionist, and immutable," argues the book's editor Warren R. Hofstra, but rather, "conditioned and conditional." Moreover, in contrast to their reputation as backcountry people, these immigrants created a more cosmopolitan America. From seaports to frontier outposts, they engaged in transcontinental networks of commercial, intellectual, and cultural exchange. The Scots-Irish were, in Hofstra's words, "receptive to and reflexive of the main currents of historical change throughout the Atlantic world," With attentiveness to time and place, the historians collected in this volume demythologize popular conceptions of an isolated, individualistic, "frontier" people born to fight. For example, where Richard K. MacMaster concedes that the Scotch-Irish of early eighteenth-century Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, emphasized individualism in their search for religious "order," he finds later generations in nearby Carlisle valuing community amidst an "expanding consumer revolution." Similarly, Hofstra's analysis of mid-eighteenth-century shop inventories from the isolated region of Opequon, Virginia, demonstrates how a people with limited access to money traded surpluses at a "dispersed general store," thereby creating a community of economic interdependency. Hofstra also [End Page 147] challenges the notion of an inherent warlike predisposition by reminding his readers that gents of the British Empire encouraged both Scots-Irish and German Protestants to settle this region in order to hinder French Catholic expansion. In the afterword, Robert M. Calhoon argues that the Scots-Irish negotiated conflict based upon a culture of "historic moderation." Compellingly, he finds examples of this "framework for survival and equanimity in the midst of intense social strife and political conflict" within many essays of this volume. Ulster to America contributes to the recent dialogue over "identity" constructs and the "Scotch-Irish." Through the 1990s, such historians as Grady McWhiney (Cracker Culture) and David Hackett Fischer (Albion's Seed) emphasized what they saw as enduring folkways of the "Scotch-Irish" migration. Recently, however, Patrick Griffin challenged this premise in The People with No Name (2001) by rejecting a static concept of identity and arguing that movement characterized the "nameless" Presbyterian migrants of Ulster. While the essayists of this compilation accept Griffin's basic argument, they debate a more precise nomenclature in the footnotes. MacMaster and Michael Montgomery, for instance, employ the term "Scotch-Irish," due to its "purely American" origins and relatively "common usage" in the eighteenth century. Hofstra adopts the term "Scots-Irish" precisely because it "has no tradition of historical usage" and therefore "evades partisan association or affiliation." Peter Gilmore and Kerby A. Miller emphasize the historicity of the word "Irish," as it was "the term most commonly employed to designate Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish Protestants) on both sides of the ocean." Patrick Griffin continues to stress the ambiguity of the term—utilizing "Irish" for the historical experience and "Scotch-Irish" when discussing identity. The disputes over terminology underscore the inadequacy of any simple, triumphalist account of the group's experience; these disagreements bolster rather than detract from the book's overarching argument. Ulster to America is structured chronologically and by migratory order. Each chapter title depicts the Scots-Irish experience as a "search" for something— in most cases reflecting key historiographical debates in Atlantic history. In "Searching for a New World," David W. Miller eschews cultural transference by arguing that Presbyterianism, "the most identifiable surviving baggage of the Scots-Irish immigrations," was not a "precious family heirloom," and that...

<em>Ulster Liberalism, 1778–1876: The Middle Path</em>, by Gerald R. Hall

Reviewed by: Ulster Liberalism, 1778–1876: The Middle Path Nancy J. Curtin (bio) Ulster Liberalism, 1778–1876: The Middle Path, by Gerald R. Hall; pp. 272. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2011, £50.00, $74.50. Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once famously remarked that all politics are local. Gerald R. Hall takes the aphorism to heart in this study of the rise and fall of liberalism in Ulster from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While Hall suggests in the introduction that he will consider political language in the manner of J. G. A. Pocock, he does not. Rather he traces the attitude and activity of opposition through a series of local political contests. Explicitly pursuing a revisionist agenda, Hall seeks to rescue Ulster’s largely Presbyterian liberals from posterity’s condescension. Solidly in the camp of radical reform or even revolution, they were the Volunteers and United Irishmen of late-eighteenth- century Ulster. By the 1880s they were to be found just as solidly in the Unionist camp, albeit chafing under the leadership of a despised landed elite. The explanations [End Page 723] for this defection to the enemy’s camp have much to do with the rise of Catholic nationalism and growing sectarian conflict in the province. Historians of Ulster Unionism and politics such as David Miller, A. T. Q. Stewart, Brian Walker, and most recently Frank Wright have expertly told this story in its varied nuances. Hall’s worthy contribution is to take a close look at liberalism in action at the most local level as it was forged, defined, and energized through a series of rather heroic municipal confrontations with entrenched oligarchic interests. “The struggles were schools for politics that allowed Ulster liberals to organize,” he claims (178). Liberalism in Ulster is not herein defined but situational. Hall attributes its origins to the Volunteers and the United Irishmen, evolving from civic republicanism and the Scottish Enlightenment. The first chapter addresses this genealogy in a not very clear or helpful manner. The essential point seems to be a simple, uncontested one: that liberalism expressed the attitude of those, such as William Drennan, who after the failure of the 1798 rebellion had discarded revolutionary change for the peaceful, constitutional variety. Hall pays some attention to political language, noting the persistence of the idiom of civic republicanism and virtue in Drennan’s writings well into the first decades of the nineteenth century. He would have been well advised, however, to consider the work of Gordon Wood on the transformation of a civic humanist vocabulary into a liberal one in the early American republic. When dealing with political language, Hall acknowledges the varied British idiom of Whigs, radicals, reformers, and patriots but keeps his focus on Ulster, and mostly on Presbyterians, so there is no engagement with national, British, or international texts that undoubtedly influenced Ulster liberalism. The chapters that follow are far more rewarding. Taken together they identify three recurring themes in the history of Ulster liberalism from the 1820s to the 1870s. First, there are the internecine conflicts within Ulster Presbyterianism, originating in the eighteenth century between New Light (rational, heterodox, and liberal) and Old Light (evangelical, orthodox, and conservative) adherents and culminating in the famous confrontation between Reverend Henry Montgomery and Reverend Henry Cooke, their respective champions. The triumph of Cooke’s evangelical wing was not, however, a triumph for political conservatism, as Cooke failed to shepherd even his own followers into Tory meadows. Many evangelical Presbyterians managed to reconcile liberal politics and conservative theology, though it was a fragile rationalization tested unsuccessfully when Rome Rule in the form of Home Rule threatened Ulster. Theologically liberal Presbyterians were reliable soldiers in liberal campaigns, until the “middle path” they occupied became impossibly narrow in the 1870s. A second recurring theme is also confessionally based: the political alliance with Ulster Catholics necessitated by Ulster’s political arithmetic. Only together could liberal Presbyterians and Catholics hope to challenge landed oligarchies in town and county. Liberals tended to support Catholic Emancipation, but repeal was a stickier issue. In rejecting their revolutionary past Presbyterian liberals embraced the...

The Forgotten Nationalist: John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity

The Forgotten Nationalist:John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity David T. Gleeson (bio) Bryan P. McGovern . John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. xviii + 293 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. Bryan McGovern has provided a long-overdue modern biography of the Irish nationalist John Mitchel. Mitchel, the son of a Unitarian minister from County Derry, became the premier propagandist of Irish nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. His life and his polemic influenced both the Irish in Ireland and in the United States. In the U.S., he, in a sense, set the tone of Irish American nationalism for generations. Long after his death, Mitchel was feted in Irish nationalist circles for his virulent anti-British propaganda. Admirers wrote a number of biographies and kept his books in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Mitchel the man, if not his rhetoric, fell into disfavor. One can put this disconnect between Mitchel and his work down to his strong support for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War and for its "cornerstone," slavery. He thus became something of an embarrassment to more progressive revolutionary nationalists of the later twentieth century even as they continued to use his propaganda in their anti-British campaigns during the latter-day "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. McGovern's scholarly effort here is to be welcomed—especially as there is no major collection of John Mitchel papers, only some scattered letters. As his subtitle suggests, McGovern pays a lot of attention to the most neglected aspect of Mitchel's life, the time he spent in America, particularly in the South. He begins, however, with good coverage of Mitchel's early life in Ireland and his rise to prominence there. The first issue dealt with ably is how the Protestant Mitchel could have such interest in and appeal to Irish Catholics when sectarianism in Ireland was on the rise. Mitchel's father, fitting his embrace of Unitarianism within the Ulster Presbyterian tradition, had a very liberal attitude toward Catholics. The young Mitchel was imbued with this tolerance and would retain it throughout his life, even to the point of accepting the [End Page 658] conversion of his daughters to the Roman Catholic faith and of one of them entering the Catholic sisterhood. McGovern believes that Mitchel always held an ecumenical dream that Irish people would bury their denominational differences and focus more on national unity. The other big influence on Mitchel's early life was Thomas Davis, a fellow Protestant and the spiritual father of Irish cultural nationalism in the 1840s. Mitchel supported Davis' view that a "Young Ireland" could resurrect a dormant Celtic and Irish national identity. After Davis' death in 1845, Mitchel became more radical in his nationalism. Part of his radicalism, somewhat ironically, came from his admiration for the Scottish conservative writer and scourge of the liberal industrial age, Thomas Carlyle. Mitchel overcame Carlyle's anti-Irish writings to endorse his critique of the modern era (Carlyle came to admire Mitchel, too, despite the younger man's strong Irish nationalism). McGovern pays good attention to this relationship but also recognizes that Mitchel moved beyond Carlyle's mere reactionism. Mitchel came to recognize that the whole system of landholding in Ireland (where a tiny Anglican elite owned the vast majority of land) needed to be overthrown and that violent rebellion against British rule in Ireland was the only way to achieve this. The massive death and dislocation of the Great Famine, which began in 1845, pushed Mitchel in this direction. He began to see even his former colleagues in Young Ireland, who did not disavow violence but did not advocate it either, as hopelessly misguided moderates. He split from them in early 1848 and founded his own weekly newspaper, The United Irishman, named for the purveyors of the last major rebellion against British rule back in 1798 (The Society of United Irishmen). Inspired by the February revolution in Paris, Mitchel called publically for armed rebellion. The authorities moved quickly and preemptively arrested him, charged him with treason, and sentenced him to death. This...

Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration David Gleeson Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration by Kerby A. Miller, pp. 411. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. $35.00. Field Day has given Kerby Miller the opportunity to compile his most important articles and essays in one volume, with which he says he hopes to pay tribute "to the Whiteboys, the Steelboys, and others," who "strove with gods against their world's destruction." Established scholars and students alike will be glad [End Page 145] that Miller's work has been gathered in such a way. No longer will they have to search out the scattered and diverse sources, although reading his seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), remains compulsory for anyone interested in Irish emigration. Miller introduces the book by stating that he hopes it not only outlines the story but also provides an "understanding" of Ireland and Irish America. Miller divides his fifteen chapters into three sections, and he adds a substantial epilogue, the latter being the most original element of the book. Section one is titled "Culture, Class, and Emigration in Irish Society."Here, he reiterates the thesis outlined so forcefully in Emigrants and Exiles, that the Irish migration experience was in general a very harsh one. The poorer Catholic Irish retained communal premodern values, which emigration destroyed. In Ireland and America these Irish were uncomfortable with the individualism of modern capitalism, and expressed their unease in everything from their correspondence to their language. Miller continues to emphasize that "passivity and fate" dominated migrant lives. Where some sections of the Irish in America displayed cohesion and accommodation with bustling America, such as in their organized supports of Irish nationalism, these merely reflected the hegemonic efforts of the prefamine Irish-American bourgeoisie to establish and "maintain their authority over the Catholic masses." Miller regrets that these poorer and, according to him, often radical masses consented to being co-opted into America and American values in order to achieve the struggle to end British rule in Ireland. These opening chapters are a strong restatement of what Donald Akenson has archly described as the "Celtic-Catholic Handicap thesis." Miller still believes that Irish Catholics justifiably—if not for their stated reasons—felt like exiles in the United States. In his revising for this section, Miller does not address Akenson specifically (indeed, he is never cited), but it is undoubtedly a counter blast to those, like the Canada-based scholar, who criticize his view of prefamine and famine Ireland as well as his description of Irish life in America. Unfortunately, Miller does not answer the charges directly. Section two, "Irish Protestants in Ireland and America," reflects Miller's later career and ongoing research into the story of Irish Protestants and emigration. Influenced by his work with Bruce Boling, Arthur Schrier, and David Doyle for the collection of letters, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003), Miller came to revise some of his earlier views on Irish Protestants. Originally, Miller saw Protestants as "more energetic, industrious, innovative, thrifty, and individualistic—more capitalist-minded, in other words—than their Catholic countrymen." The five chapters included in this section indicate that the Protestant experience was more complicated than originally thought. His 1993 [End Page 146] essay "'Scotch-Irish,' 'Black Irish,' and 'Real Irish': Emigrants and Identities in the Old South," while somewhat overstated, remains thought-provoking. The other chapters are stronger and innovative. He provides a provocative account of the development of an Irish identity among Ulster Presbyterian immigrants in America in "'Scotch-Irish' Ethnicity in Early America: Its Regional and Political Origins," which appeared in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. His chapters on "Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster" and "The Famine's Scars" explore the growing sense of alienation among Ulster Protestants—particularly Presbyterian—from the British political system in Ireland. He correctly highlights how the recent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland have not been immutable since the Plantation of Ulster, but have ebbed and flowed through the varying political atmospheres. Here, Miller indicates clearly how the experience of Irish emigrants...

PRESBYTERIAN RELIGION, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND ULSTER SCOTS IDENTITY, c. 1800 TO 1914

ABSTRACTThe links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. Ideas about the Scottish identity of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church, and were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

“Heirs of Freedom” or “Slaves to England”? Protestant Society and Unionist Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Ulster

Based on Ulster Presbyterian immigrant correspondence and recent research in Irish religious demography, this essay argues that Unionist cultural and political hegemony over northern Irish Protestants was constructed largely because of the massive emigrations (mostly to the United States) of Ulster Presbyterians, between the 1790s and the 1850s, who would or could not accommodate themselves to the political and socioeconomic regime fastened on the north of Ireland after the United Irishmen's failed rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union in 1800. Hence this essay directly challenges revisionist scholars who argue that Ulster Presbyterians' post-1798 embrace of the Union and the Orange Order was rapid, inevitable, and natural.

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 Sean Farrell Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006, by Paul Bew, 632 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. $75.00 Burke is back. One of the hallmarks of recent scholarship on late eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Ireland has been a renewed appreciation for the subtlety and significance of Edmund Burke’s thought. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paul Bew’s important and thoughtful new study of modern Irish politics. Bew’s overarching argument centers on Burke’s notion that Anglo-Irish relations would only work if there were a real and substantive union between Britain and Ireland, and specifically, one that featured Catholic emancipation and political integration. While Bew details a wide and often surprising range of advocates for such an approach—the portrayals of Castlereagh and Pitt are particularly memorable—it is the consistent failure to act along Burkean lines that dominates British governance in Ireland across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Henry Grattan famously argued, this was a legislative union rather than the true identification of two nations, a point made most clearly by British policy failures during the horrors of the Great Famine. Bew is at his caustic best when describing the yawning gap between British and Irish sentiment: “For Trevelyan, contemplating his role in feeding of hundreds of thousands, this could only be a benign development; Ireland now knew how much England cared. For many in Ireland, however, that was precisely the problem.” Although Bew’s narrative starts with this searching critique of the British political class’s lack of generosity and creativity, Irish nationalism does not escape unscathed. For all of the rhetorical celebration of Tone and Davis, Bew finds that Irish nationalism has rarely risen above its essentially sectarian core. Throughout the book Bew’s argument underlines nationalists’ and Unionists’ trenchant consistency in failing to construct a workable via media. Among many poignant examples, Daniel O’Connell’s remarkable inability to make even the smallest gestures of inclusivity to William Sharman Crawford and potentially sympathetic Ulster Presbyterian reformers remains the most illustrative of this failure of imagination. There is nothing particularly novel about writing an historical narrative around the British failure to construct humane and generous relationships with Ireland and the Irish failure to bridge sectarian enmities; in lesser hands, this challenging book would have run the risk of caricature. That it does not do so testifies to Bew’s skill as an historian and his unrivaled knowledge of this complex terrain. He weaves together portraits of well-known leaders (among whom Parnell, predictably, stands out) with unheralded figures like Cooke Taylor and [End Page 145] William Cusack Smith. Moreover, Bew manages to acknowledge sectarianism’s central place in modern Irish history without sacrificing the nuance and complexity that the best modern scholarship has infused into our understanding of the modern Irish experience. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws. It is much stronger on the nineteenth century than on the twentieth, particularly after 1914. In part this is a simple matter of space; Bew’s book devotes seven-and-a-half chapters to the nineteenth century and a mere three-and-a-half to the twentieth. Given Bew’s expertise on the latter century, one wonders whether this was a decision made in the offices of the publisher. If so, it does real damage: much of the richness and nuance that marks Bew’s handling of nineteenth-century material is simply not there in later chapters. Given the recent work on de Valéra, his treatment here seems particularly undeveloped. But the problem is not just brevity. The Burkean framework that gives the nineteenth-century material power and coherence does not work as well for the twentieth century, except in Bew’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where it gives rise to some creative and provocative comparisons. And the abbreviated focus on political enmity gives short shrift to such crucial developments as the Republic’s entry into the European Community. But it would be wrong to end on such a negative note. This is significant and humane work, a “must read” for anyone interested in modern...

Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World: Religion, Politics and Identity

Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World: Religion, Politics and Identity

Andrew R. Holmes.The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840.:The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840

Andrew R. Holmes.<i>The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840</i>.:The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840