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Chapter6 A Search for Order The Decline of the Irish Question in American Diplomacy The history of the relationship between the Irish question and U.S. diplomacy during the 1880s is,in a sense,the history of a paradox.The use of dynamite augured a new era of spectacular violence,but this coexisted with the prosaic parliamentarianism of Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party. Scenes of explosive urban terrorism—legitimizing a narrative of guerilla activity that stretched through the twentieth century—came during the period of greatest progress toward Irish national self-determination since, at least, the days of O’Connell.1 There were tensions between the “democratic ” mode of warfare that dynamiting represented, free from the central direction inherent to the Fenian and Irish Republican Brotherhoods, and the strict hierarchical model of the home rule campaign Parnell and his associates built. Two separate dynamite campaigns were launched during the early 1880s. One was under the direction of Fenian exile Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa; the other was organized by a revolutionary directory attached to Clan na Gael.Both caused loss of life,extensive injury,and damage to property in British cities, provoking alarm in the press and in Parliament.The response of Chester A.Arthur’s administration may have been sluggish, but the systematic use of dynamite weakened any existing bonds of sympathy 154 Chapter 6 between Irish nationalists and the American public.This was exactly what a number of Irish American nationalists—including some who advocated the use of force—had anticipated and feared. The election of 1884 saw the most purposeful injection of the Irish question into U.S. electioneering since the 1860s. In particular, James Blaine’s presidential campaign made a conscious attempt to reach out to Irish nationalist voters, though with limited success. Ironically, this very direct interposition of Anglo-Irish relations into electoral politics was followed by a sharp diminution in the engagement of U.S. statesmen with the Irish question.The incoming administration of Grover Cleveland—the first Democratic president since James Buchanan left office in 1861—had reasons grounded in both principle and good politics to keep the Irish question at arm’s length in its conduct of domestic and international affairs . From 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897, the conservative Cleveland and his administrations acted in favor of building international legal structures that would shelter transatlantic relations from the intrusion of the Irish question. The absence of diplomatic correspondence on the subject of Ireland and Irish governance during this period suggests that the Irish question was of becoming less salient to the course of American statecraft. Put simply , following the tapering off of the dynamite campaign in the mid-1880s, the Irish question largely drops out of sight in the papers of statesmen and diplomats (though Democratic secretary of state Thomas Bayard, for one, continued to worry about a fifth column of Irishmen who voted for Blaine and were bent on undermining his attempts to improve the tone of AngloAmerican relations).This is not to suggest that Americans ceased to be interested in the Irish question or that Irish nationalist sentiment disappeared in the 1890s.2 Rather,during the mid- to late 1880s,the constitutional status of Ireland was simply not contested in a way that entangled U.S. diplomacy. An Explosive Contest The problem of IrishAmerican dynamite missions was more spectacular and potentially more threatening to the stability of Anglo-American relations than the arrest of naturalized Irish Americans.Alfred Nobel’s development of nitroglycerine, a stable and transportable explosive, in 1867 inadvertently opened the way to more mobile forms of political violence that were less dependent on centralized planning.3 Its revolutionary potential was A Search for Order 155 well exemplified by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. Zealous individuals, emancipated from the hierarchical structures that were necessary to organize filibuster expeditions or sustain gun-running operations , could arm themselves at relatively low cost and travel without detection across national borders.At least seventeen dynamite missions were carried out from 1881 to 1885: bombs were detonated at Salford Barracks in Manchester, a gas works in Glasgow, the House of Commons, and various other urban targets.4 The principals involved were Clan na Gael and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, although, as historian Owen Dudley Edwards notes, the latter was rather less involved than contemporaries asserted and Rossa himself implied.5 Nonetheless, it was Rossa who launched the first dynamite attacks on British targets in 1881...

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