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Chapter3 Filibusters and Fenians ContestingNeut rality The years from the late 1840s to the early 1870s—from the onset of the Great Famine migration to an emergentAnglo-American rapprochement— constitute a distinct period in the relationship between the United States (and U.S. statesmen) and Irish American nationalism. Considering U.S. foreign policy during the Civil War era through the lens of Irish nationalism enriches our understanding of the North Atlantic world, particularly in relation to the ambiguities of transatlantic neutrality and immigrant citizenship. Moreover, the tensions generated by Irish filibustering in the United States and questions of expatriation and naturalization in these years highlight the important role of nonstate actors who sought to challenge and shape U.S. foreign policy and, conversely, how those in official positions sought to manipulate Irish nationalism to forward their own diplomatic ends. Viewing the evolution of Irish American nationalism in the context of American foreign policy highlights both the seductive dream of linking the power of the U.S. government to the goals of Irish nationalism and the Faustian dimensions of such a connection.Lacking the capacity for autonomous action to secure an Ireland free of British rule, Irish Americans understood that they needed support from elsewhere, and allying themselves 70 Chapter 3 with a sympathetic U.S. government seemed essential.Yet this connection rendered distinctively Irish goals vulnerable to cooptation.As long as U.S. grievances with Great Britain remained, manipulating the Irish question seemed like an attractive option. However, growing Anglo-American conciliation in the early 1870s—partly prompted by the disruptions of transatlantic Irish nationalism—left Irish American nationalists marginalized in the larger currents of global diplomacy. Irish American nationalism was not static.As numerous historians attest, the migration of the late 1840s and early 1850s profoundly reshaped how nationalists thought about the Anglo-Irish connection. In particular, exiled Young Ireland leaders such as John Mitchel, Michael Doheny, and Thomas D’Arcy McGee played a significant role in forging a nationalist narrative of the famine as a deliberate project on the part of the British government. In doing so, they sought to make vengeful anti-British feeling central to Irish American nationalism. This intellectual evolution had practical consequences.In 1856,a group of Irish Americans in Cincinnati were charged with violating the U.S.neutrality law by attempting to set in motion a filibustering expedition to Ireland .1 Those who were arrested, like their more well-known counterparts in the postwar Fenian Brotherhood, attempted to exploit what they saw as U.S. ambivalence about enforcing its neutrality legislation. Both groups sought to carve out the necessary geopolitical space for what they saw as the noble goal of Irish liberation. This space increased markedly as the United States pressed its grievances about British conduct during the Civil War. In this process, the Fenian Brotherhood proved a valuable diplomatic tool for American statesmen . But paradoxically, as Irish American nationalists exploited the unsettled postbellum environment, they provided a compelling argument for compromise that proved useful to statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Remaking Irish American Nationalism Militant Irish American nationalism predated the great waves of famine migration in the early 1850s.ThoughWilliam Smith O’Brien,leader of the July 1848 uprising, issued a “curiously ambivalent appeal for Irish American support,” the Irish Confederation sent agents to the United States to encourage U.S. residents to provide material support for their cause, and both native- and Irish-born Americans organized to promote republican Filibusters and Fenians 71 insurrection in Ireland,“moral force [having] been tried and tried in vain.”2 Even in the context of a broad public appetite for news about the 1848 European revolutions and a growing enthusiasm in some quarters for overseas filibustering, interest in Ireland was striking.3 The Irish Republican Union in NewYork City, the Irish League and the Emmet Club in New Orleans, and a similar group known as the “Boston Confederation” issued calls for men and munitions with the intention of forming an Irish brigade that might aid republican insurrection in Ireland.4 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune; Roman Catholic Bishop John Hughes; and the ubiquitous Robert Tyler all involved themselves in a financial or an organizational capacity, as did William Seward, the former governor of New York State.5 And, as they had done in during the War of 1812 and would do again in the 1860s, U.S.-based Irish nationalists talked loosely about the possibility of marching on Canada as...

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