Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism

Two “disunionist” movements began in the early 1840s, one on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. In Ireland, the Repeal movement, led by Catholic statesman Daniel O’Connell, demanded an end to the political Union between Ireland and England. Irish nationalists had long blamed the Union for a variety of problems, ranging from the impoverishment of Ireland’s working classes to the subordination of Catholics within the United Kingdom. But a concerted movement for disunion did not peak until 1842 and 1843, when O’Connell’s Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA) staged numerous “monster meetings” advocating “repeal of the Union.” Meanwhile, in those same years, abolitionists in the United States began advocating repeal of another union—the Union between northern freedom and southern slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Boston Liberator, first demanded disunion in 1842. Soon he was joined by a vocal abolitionist minority—including Wendell Phillips, Maria Weston Chapman, Henry Clarke Wright, and Edmund Quincy—who agreed, as Wright told the Liberator, that “we ought to have laid before the slaveholders, long ago, this alternative. You must abolish slavery, or we shall dissolve the Union.”¹

Irish Repeal and Garrisonian disunionism may seem to share little in common. But Garrisonians believed they were analogous. Garrison referred to disunionism as the “great question of a repeal of the Union,” deliberately evoking O’Connell’s movement. In 1842 he proposed that the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) should make “the REPEAL OF THE UNION . . . [its] grand rallying point.” Beginning in May, his editorial masthead demanded “A REPEAL OF THE UNION BETWEEN NORTHERN LIBERTY AND SOUTHERN SLAVERY.” When the AASS made “No Union with Slaveholders” its official slogan in 1844, Garrison praised its decision to “hoist the banner of ‘Repeal.’ “ Even one critic called disunionism the “doctrine of ‘Repeal.’ “ But Garrisonian allusions went beyond euphemisms to extended comparisons. Garrison claimed to support “the repeal of the union between England and Ireland . . . on the same ground, and for the same reason” that he supported “the repeal of the union between the North and the South.” In 1843, Quincy wrote in the Liberator that Repeal was “precisely analogous” to abolitionists’ “line of policy.” For Garrisonians, disunionism and Repeal were not only contemporaneous but also comparable.²

Garrisonians drew analogies with Repeal partly because by 1842 they belonged to vibrant transatlantic networks with British abolitionists. In 1840, Garrisonian delegates had attended a “World’s Convention” on antislavery in London, where Americans like Phillips and Garrison met an Irish delegation that included O’Connell, whom Garrison already knew from an earlier 1833 meeting. The Convention strengthened existing ties between Garrisonians and English abolitionists like George Thompson and Elizabeth Pease, while also inaugurating new friendships with Irish abolitionists like Richard D. Webb, James Haughton, and Richard Allen, leaders of Dublin’s Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society who were also involved in other reform movements for temperance and peace. Several Garrisonian delegates traveled to Dublin and lodged with the Hibernians, who corresponded regularly and intimately with Garrisonians after 1840. Letters and newspapers sent by this circle of Irish abolitionists and reformers were often published in the American antislavery press, keeping Garrisonians abreast of British reforms and their potential usefulness to abolitionists.³

In Ireland Garrisonians made many fast friends, but at home they were besieged by critics both inside and outside the antislavery movement. Most American abolitionists believed that calls for disunion were counterproductive, a charge Garrisonians hoped to answer by comparing themselves with Repealers. Garrisonians also believed such analogies might attract Irish Americans to their ranks. In early 1842, while urging disunion for the first time, Garrisonians were publicizing the “Irish Address,” an antislavery petition from O’Connell to the growing number of Irish immigrants to the United States. Abolitionists promoted the Address by citing friendships with Irish reformers and by claiming, as fellow disunionists, to support Repeal. Garrison declared in a letter about the Address that he was “both an Irish Repealer and an American Repealer. I go for the repeal of the union between England and Ireland, and for...