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9 the “american eagle” and the decline of repeal While the american repeal movement dealt with nativist criticisms of its connections to O’Connell, across the Atlantic O’Connell suffered under accusations that he was disloyal to Great Britain due to his ties with repealers in the United States. American support for O’Connell’s repeal movement played a prominent role in the trials of the repeal “conspirators” in early 1844. O’Connell had continuously nurtured that support but at the same time he had been careful to emphasize that Irish repealers had no formal connection with those in the United States. Still, he found himself on the defensive as British prosecutors accused him and his colleagues of conspiring with a foreign nation against the British government. Despite O’Connell’s protestations that members of the Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA) always avowed their loyalty to the crown, the jury found the Irish leader and his colleagues guilty of sedition and sentenced each of them to one year in prison. Within months, however, the House of Lords overturned the verdict, and O’Connell and his fellow repealers returned to their regular lives in the fall of 1844. Even so, the arrest and imprisonment changed the Irish leader, and O’Connell became more conciliatory toward the British government after his release from prison. In his attempts to appease Great Britain O’Connell would severely damage his cause. American repealers objected to O’Connell’s expressions of loyalty to the crown should an Anglo-American war take place, and in Ireland, a faction within his movement arose that advocated a less conciliatory approach toward the British government. In the three years between O’Connell’s release from prison and his death in 1847, dissent among the repealers would result in the devastation of the transatlantic repeal movement. Historians who have discussed the progression of repeal in the United States the “american eagle” and the decline of repeal 193 have tended to highlight the pressure that O’Connell’s abolitionist entreaties put on anti-abolitionist Irish Americans in the movement and connect the decline of American repeal to the transatlantic disagreement on slavery and abolition. Following the waves of controversy that moved through the American repeal network each time O’Connell criticized American slavery, they suggest that each wave weakened the movement and that it was O’Connell’s continued assault on American slavery through 1845 that brought about its decline. The crisis that arose among American repealers in that year, however, was only indirectly connected to the issue of slavery. At the center of the decline of repeal in the United States was the often expressed desire of American repealers to show loyalty to the United States. This desire, along with crises in Ireland that damaged repeal across the Atlantic, were what ended the widespread American agitation for repeal.1 In the United States, the particularities of Anglo-American foreign policy set the stage for the decline of repeal. By 1845, relations between the United States and Great Britain had degenerated to such a point that citizens on both sides of the Atlantic feared war. The situation was heightened when the newly elected American president, James K. Polk, gave his inaugural address. In it, he made bold statements about the Oregon territory that angered the British government. Having run on an expansionist platform, Polk interpreted his election as a mandate for adding new territory to the United States. In his inaugural, therefore, he proposed an end to British and American joint occupation of the Oregon territory and asserted the “clear and unquestionable title” of the United States to the area. Polk’s reference to Oregon in the speech garnered little comment in the American press, but across the Atlantic British newspapers reacted with outrage and the British government interpreted Polk’s declarations as a threat. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel responded with an address to Parliament claiming Great Britain’s own “clear and unquestionable” rights in Oregon and vowed to defend them if no “amicable adjustment” could be found with the United States concerning the territory. Peel’s speech then set off a counter-reaction in the United States, and the press and citizenry of both countries clamored for a defense of their own nation’s claims in Oregon as a matter of honor.2 Making matters worse, Polk’s inaugural statements concerning Oregon followed his notice of the joint congressional resolution approving the annexation of Texas to the United States. The...

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