The Irish in the Atlantic World

Mathewite Temperance in Atlantic Perspective

Mathewite Temperance in Atlantic Perspective Paul Townend Outside his native Ireland, Father Theobald Mathew would rank high on any list of the forgotten famous of the last two centuries. Yet in his own day, Mathew, along with Daniel O’Connell, was indisputably the most popular man in Ireland, and over the course of the nineteenth century, halls, statues, and towers were erected in his honor all over Ireland, Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States. For more than a decade, beginning in 1838, the charismatic Capuchin friar led history’s most successful temperance movement. Mathew’s crusade transformed Ireland and then swept through the Irish diaspora communities in Britain and North America, converting millions of hard-drinking Irish men and women to the strict practice of total abstinence. In hundreds of emotional open-air meetings, Mathew affected an astonishing if ultimately shortlived cultural transformation. Massive crowds of tens of thousands of enthusiastic postulants waited as Mathew met with countless “batches” of dozens or hundreds , who made the sign of the cross and took a short pledge to abstain from alcohol for life. After pledging, Mathew’s disciples formed a vast, international network of vigorous local temperance societies, complete with meeting halls, reading rooms, burial societies, and bands. The scale of Mathew’s success amazed observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Mathew and his movement were much discussed in his day and captured the imagination of better remembered contemporaries such as William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. His cause’s success intrigued popes, monarchs, and presidents . Designated a “Commissary Apostolic” in 1841 by Pope Gregory XVI, Mathew was honored with a pension by Queen Victoria in 1847 and, on a visit to Washington in 1849, dined with President Zachary Taylor, becoming the first man since Lafayette to receive the privilege of honorary seats in both the U.S. House and Senate. Millions of his medals and cards were carried with pride, and 20 | Paul Townend his mass-produced smiling portraits graced countless cottage and tenement walls a century and a half ago.1 Mathew’s fame, and his successful career as a social reformer, intertwined with the practical reality of the mature Atlantic system of which Ireland was an integral part. His remarkable movement was inspired, spread, nurtured, and sustained by patterns of commerce, communication, and migration. Whatever its lasting significance to Irish history, his campaign stands dramatic witness to the significant ability of the Atlantic social and economic system established by the middle of the eighteenth century to transmit change and transform lives. Indeed, one of the most tangible evidences of its maturing power, and its distinctiveness from other regional global trading networks Europeans participated in, was the striking succession of transatlantic social movements that emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historical sociologists have noted that these emergent movements were radically different in structure, scale, and objectives from earlier forms of popular agitation, and that they were “modular” in the sense that they consciously adopted and exchanged rhetoric, organization, and tactics across regional and national boundaries.2 Dependent on shared notions of acceptable public action and organization, informally and formally protected liberal notions of free speech, and voluntary association, as well as networks of trust and communication across a range of civil societies, these campaigns were most noticeable in, but were by no means confined to, the anglophonic Atlantic World. The international antislavery crusade is often identified as the first fully developed example of the phenomena. That cause, however, clearly derived from the social energy, and webs of personal and professional connections, fostered by burgeoning trade, the rapid emergence of an Atlantic World “language of liberty,” and, perhaps most vital, the inspirational and practical example of the Great Awakening of the mid–eighteenth century.3 The next great social movement of the era, the cluster of temperance campaigns of the middle quarter of the nineteenth century of which Mathew’s Cork Total Abstinence Society (CTAS) was a part, was by practically any measure a much more broadly based and practically culturally transformative cause. Unlike the antislavery crusade, however, which has been studied in comparative and transatlantic terms, the temperance movement has almost always been seen through the lens of national history. This despite the fact that it was in many cases clearly seeded through port towns by captains and crews of “temperance” ships sailing under the auspices of distinctive “Marine Temperance Societies.”4 Such scholarly myopia surely re...