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1. Challenging the Union: American Repeal and U.S. Diplomacy
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Chapter1 Challenging the Union American Repeal and U.S. Diplomacy In the 1840s,Daniel O’Connell headed a transatlantic campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland. That campaign received significantAmerican support and had an important impact on U.S. domestic politics in the early years of the decade. Mutual suspicion shaped Anglo-American relations, a result of a series of geopolitical confrontations , not least concerning the United States’ annexation of the Republic ofTexas. British statesmen were alarmed by what they perceived as the unnecessarily aggressive expansionism of the United States, and many Americans feared that British foreign policy was driven by antislavery zealots who wished to see the end of the peculiar institution in the United States. In this interpretation of global competition, Britain, jealous of the threat to her own power that the United States represented, sought to promote abolition as a means of fracturing the American Union. Even those who did not subscribe to this reading of Anglo-American competition framed their interpretations of Irish agitation with the conflict between an abolitionist empire and a slaveholding republic in mind. For the more cynical, Britain’s efforts to promote American disunion might be met by stirring disunion in her own backyard via the Irish question. 12 Chapter 1 How did this transatlantic competition complicate Irish American politics ? Historians have rightly focused on the entangled stories of Irish politics and transatlantic abolitionism, though in explaining the ultimate collapse of the repeal movement they have generally placed too much emphasis on Daniel O’Connell’s antislavery politics and too little on his professions of loyalty to the British throne.Through 1843 and 1844,reports from England suggested to U.S. statesmen that Irish discontent limited British freedom of action.At the same time,the prospect of further Anglo-American tension— perhaps even conflict—encouraged many proponents of repeal to dwell on the benefits that might accrue to Ireland.Yet Daniel O’Connell’s apparent emergence as an agent of British abolitionist imperialism in the New World undermined this possibility and embarrassed his followers in both the United States and Ireland, shattering the transnational network. Despite this eventual foundering, repeal agitation was a significant feature of the American political landscape during the mid-1840s. Indeed, we cannot fully understand Anglo-American relations without it.Although Irish independence was never an official desideratum of U.S.foreign policy, the repeal movement spoke to important continuing debates about transatlantic abolition,American disunionism, and the threat of British imperial power. Daniel O’Connell and the Progress of the Repeal Movement In the decade after Catholic emancipation, Daniel O’Connell spent much of his parliamentary career acting in loose concert with the British Whigs. Though pressed by others to bring forward a motion for a repeal of the Act of Union in 1834, he was generally reluctant to push the issue of Irish home rule because of the benefits that flowed from continued Whig governance . More responsive to Irish grievances than their Tory counterparts, Whigs, particularly under Prime Minister Melbourne, opened up increasing numbers of Irish offices to Catholics and turned to O’Connell and his followers for advice on legislation and appointments.1 However, with the Tories appearing likely to return to power in 1840, O’Connell again took up the question of repeal.2 The first branch of the Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA)— its name a testament to constitutional ambiguities—was established by O’Connell and his followers in Dublin in August 1840.They placed great Challenging the Union 13 faith in the power of moral suasion and employed the tactics that had proved successful in effecting Catholic emancipation in the 1820s. Repealers sought to build a cohesive, self-disciplined body that would present the Irish people’s demand for self-governance to the British Parliament. Local associations corresponded with the central organization in Dublin, forwarding accounts of activities and (most important) funds to sustain the agitation.Associations held public demonstrations and parades to generate and sustain mass interest and to present British authorities with the spectacle of organized national sentiment. As with later formulations of Irish home rule,“repeal” was left a protean term. It could, in theory, capture the aspirations of a coalition of nationalists—moderate and advanced, Catholic and Protestant—and both critics and supporters of Ireland’s socioeconomic order.Broad in audience,it was also ambiguous in aspiration:the cry of“repeal ” represented as much “an invitation to treat” extended to the British...