Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South

2. New Irish, Old South: Revolution and Its Discontents

39 2 new irish, old south Revolution and Its Discontents Such were the sensations experienced by the hero, and heroine, of this tale, that their transition [to America] was rapturous; and these two noble [Irish] minds, which were so well suited for each other, found that in Columbia alone there was true liberty, except in one instance, which it is true was a disgraceful one—that a part of the human species are held in bondage, and that of the most ignominious description, merely in consequence of their differing in color from their own fellow creatures, and being much less refined than they who pretend to Christianity, but still vindicate the base doctrine of slavery. —adam douglass, The Irish Emigrant I should say it (now at least), with the strongest self-reproach—but à marveille, it is impossible for me to get up even a respectable counterfeit of penitence, while I confess that the name of rebel has no terrors whatever for me. —a. m. keiley, In Vinculis Cruel, bloody war! Li"le did they know who wished for this! —john dooley, in his war journal T he very first Irish American novel was published in the American South, and it was the product of a failed revolution. It issued not from the crowded, ink-stained chambers of some gri"y center of northern manufactures but from—of all places—Winchester, Virginia. The Irish Emigrant , An Historical Tale Founded on Fact, published in 1817, was signed by an unnamed “Hibernian,” who has subsequently been identified as one Adam Douglass (1790–1847). It was Douglass who registered the book with the Virginia state clerk in Winchester, a town at the throat of the established pathway of Scots-Irish immigration that trickled down the Shenandoah Valley.1 Douglass’s father, William (1746–1832), was born in Killinchy, County Down, the son of a Sco"ish immigrant to northern Ireland. He served as a 40 Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South “Captain of the Irish Rebellion of 1799 under Theobald Wolfe Tone.”2 His son Adam is said to have come to America in the company of his uncle, also named Adam Douglass. The young revolutionary would return to Ireland in 1812, where, sharing his father’s revolutionary ardor, he joined the Irish regiment and was twice wounded at the Ba"le of Waterloo. He then returned to America and se"led at New Market, Virginia, where he worked as “a school master and surveyor.”3 On 27 April 1819, he married Nancy Pennebaker, from Pine Forge, just a few miles south of New Market. His bride was the sister of a state senator from Virginia and the granddaughter of Captain Dirk Pennebaker, who fought in the Revolutionary War.4 With a new bride, a new book, and new connections, Douglass had good reason to savor what his protagonist called the “sweets of freedom” in his new country. It was indeed a fresh beginning, a place where he might luxuriate “on the bank of the majestic Potomack” and permit the “degradation” of “Irish bondage” to fade into memory.5 Douglass came to his new country prepared to measure it against Revolutionary tumult, action, and rhetoric. Li"le wonder that he could say, as did the Confederate partisan A. M. Keiley in later years, that “the name of rebel has no terrors whatever for me.” Like many of the Ulster Irish who immigrated during his time and shortly before, including many of the families who produced the Confederate leadership—Davis, Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Polk—Douglass was a nervous, almost tentative undersignatory to the social contract, ready to exit at the first sign of despotism and equally ready to take up arms. As it happened, Douglass found the first breach in American acceptance of slavery. Others of his countrymen would come to see slavery as a necessary evil, or else to view the Irish experience in terms akin to that of the American slave. The moral hazard was that the Irish, who did not emplace the American system , might join the Irish-born Charleston bishop John England in viewing slavery as an evil “which Britain has superinduced.” And they might even be willing to subject others to shackles from which they had only recently escaped . James Henry Hammond’s famous mudsill speech evoked the Irish factory “operative” as the prime exhibit in the industrial hall of shame. Could this be preferable to slavery? he demanded.6 From the skeletons...