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  • In Defense of Civil SocietyIrish Radicals in Philadelphia during the 1790s
  • Margaret H. Mcaleer

In December 1799 Irishman Daniel Clark announced in several Philadelphia newspapers a meeting of the "sections" of the American Society of United Irishmen. His notice promised provocatively that the meeting would disclose "certain affairs of considerable interest." Yet, in keeping with the organization's quasi-secret nature, Clark withheld the meeting's location. After receiving a ticket of "civism," presumably as an admission card, members would be told where to convene.1

Exiled United Irishmen had founded the American society two years earlier in part to recreate the organization they were forced to abandon in Ireland. In so doing, they broadened its mission. While reaffirming their commitment to an independent Irish republic, the émigrés further pledged themselves to the "attainment of LIBERTY, and EQUALITY, to mankind, in whatever nation [they] may reside."2 Federalists shuddered. Vigilantly guarding against imported radicalism, Federalist editors William Cobbett and John Ward Fenno had been keeping the American society under surveillance and routinely printed lurid speculations about its true purpose. Cobbett asked his [End Page 176] readers "whether this infernal combination can possibly have any other object in view than an insurrection against the government of America?"3 Fenno's question was more chilling: evoking the horror of thousands of Protestants slaughtered in Paris in 1572, he asked Philadelphians, "Think you, the victims of St. Bartholomew's day imagined, an hour before their fate, the terrible stroke which awaited them?"4

A copy of a Philadelphia newspaper containing Clark's notice found its way to Kinderhook, New York, and into the hands of Federalist Peter Van Schaak. Undoubtedly primed by the writings of Cobbett and Fenno, Van Schaak gasped with horror at the announced meeting. "Is Philadelphia to be sectioned, à la mode de Paris?" he demanded of Theodore Sedgwick. Trying to grasp the meaning of "tickets of civism," he inquired "Is there to be a new standard of citizenship?"5 At its very essence, citizenship imparts "membership in a political community" along with a host of related prerogatives. By the mid 1790s, debate over these prerogatives focused less on a traditional concern for real property rights and increasingly on the right to participate in the political process.6 At worse, Van Schaak argued, members of the American Society of United Irishmen were rebels who betrayed their own government; at the very least they were unnaturalized immigrants who, as such, possessed none of the rights they dedicated themselves to defend. Five years earlier, Sedgwick warned his congressional colleagues not to "hold the benefits of American citizenship so cheap." Early education and participation in the American Revolution, he argued, had made native-born Americans "more wise and virtuous than any other people on earth" and therefore "better qualified to administer and support a Republican Government" than immigrants born under other regimes.7

This essay takes up the question of citizenship and in so doing seeks to understand what drove a group of exiled Irish radicals, fresh from an intense national struggle at home, to embroil themselves in the politics of another nation within months or even weeks of leaving Ireland. The answer lies in part [End Page 177] in an understanding of citizenship so elastic that it both launched a campaign for an independent Irish republic at home and legitimized the émigrés' involvement in the politics of the nation that hosted them as immigrants. It drew on a Lockean natural rights liberalism that envisioned rights as inalienable and, as Rosemarie Zagarri has written, "possessed by virtue of one's personhood" rather than parentage, property, or formal citizenship status.8 The implications of natural rights liberalism led radicals in Ireland to defend what was indeed radical—the political rights of Roman Catholics and the propertyless. As émigrés, they claimed these inalienable, and therefore portable, rights for immigrants.

In addition to employing a transhistoric political language, Irish radicals waged their political battles in the transgeographic context of civil society. Even more than the nation, which Benedict Anderson argues must be imagined since it can never be fully experienced, civil society with no geographic, historic, or linguistic boundaries to delineate it required...

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