American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal

Introduction: Repeal, Abolition, and Irish America

introduction repeal, abolition, and irish america Since the colonial period, the continuing flow of immigrants from the Old World to the New has bound Ireland and America together. In the Revolutionary era, regard for republican ideology strengthened the links between the two countries as both struggled against the hegemony of Great Britain. During the first half of the 1840s, two transatlantic reform movements, abolitionism and Irish nationalism, built on these early connections and knit Ireland and the United States even closer together. Both of the movements centered on Enlightenment ideals of liberty, one personal and the other political, and both hinged their transatlantic connection in part on the Irish in America. This work investigates the way that these two transatlantic reform movements became intertwined and acted on Irish Americans who were involved in the first Irish American nationalist movement—Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Irish repeal. Daniel O’Connell initiated the repeal movement in 1840 to gather Irish support for ending the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland. With this organization, he launched the first Irish mass nationalist movement, which quickly took on a transatlantic dimension as it spread to North America, gaining support from Irish Americans and other Americans sympathetic to Ireland. In the first years of the 1840s, numerous repeal associations emerged throughout the United States, but from its beginnings, the antislavery issue complicated American efforts on behalf of repeal. As the repeal movement gained momentum, Irish and American abolitionists urged repeal leader Daniel O’Connell, long an outspoken advocate of antislavery, to appeal to his Irish American colleagues on the slavery issue, and O’Connell responded with a number of antislavery addresses to Irish American repealers. For the most part, however, Irish American supporters of O’Connell’s movement took an anti-abolitionist stance. From 1840, when the first American societies surfaced, 2 american slavery, irish freedom until the decline of the repeal movement in 1845 and 1846, the American repeal associations repeatedly rebuffed the Irish leader’s calls to join the antislavery effort in the United States. Why were Irish American repealers so hostile to the antislavery movement? This is the question that I set out to answer in my study of the Irish repeal associations of the United States. In my investigation, however, I found an even larger story, for out of my examination of how the question of slavery became intertwined with that of Irish nationalism emerged several more profound narratives. The story of antislavery and repeal reveals the difficulties faced by transatlantic reformers in harnessing the liberalism of the era to promote a broad-based reform agenda. Specific interests, ideas, and circumstances limited visions of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic, as various groups translated ideals of liberty in ways narrowly suited to their own agendas and worldviews. The story also reveals much about both the Irish American community and the society in which its members lived during the early 1840s. As abolitionists and repealers sought the support of this community, Irish Americans were faced with significant questions about their own position in the United States. The conflicts that emerged as both groups vied for Irish American support reveal the difficulties one of the country’s first large immigrant groups faced in defining themselves and gaining acceptance as American citizens during a time in which Americans themselves were unclear on the values of the American republic. During the eighteenth century, Western thinkers began to challenge the traditional hierarchical view of society that governed most parts of the world at the time. Rejecting the concepts of the divine right of kings, aristocratic privilege, and church authority over the state, Enlightenment philosophers promoted the notion that all men had certain basic natural rights. By the end of that century, republican ideology had spread and helped to usher in a revolutionary age, as men in both the Old World and the New attempted to reorder their societies on the ideas of liberty and the rights of man. In North America, colonists rejected British colonial authority and created a new nation based on republican ideals. Revolutionary thought took hold in the Old World as well, most powerfully in the manifestation of the French Revolution, but it also had a profound impact on other European nations, including Ireland. In 1798, the United Irish uprising challenged the British-dominated Protestant Ascendancy that had controlled affairs among the Irish for more than repeal, abolition, and...