Continued Presbyterian Resistance in the Aftermath of the Rebellion of 1798 in Antrim and Down

Historians have traditionally considered the nonsectarian republicanism of the United Irish movement in the north of Ireland to have died a sudden death in the wake of the crushing defeat of the rebel armies of Antrim and Down in June 1798. This traditional view also holds that the Presbyterians of these two counties, who had been at the heart of the movement from its inception seven years earlier, made a rapid transition from rebel to loyalist, often embracing the Orange Order in the process. Completing this model is the reemergence of Defenderism which, with equal speed, reverted to its Catholic sectarian roots. ¹ The untimely demise of northern republicanism is attributed to several factors, including increasing distrust of the methods and motives of the United Irishmen’s French allies and the impact of government sanctioned repression. Yet these factors are seen to have been of secondary, or even tertiary, importance, the pivotal rôle having been played by the fear engendered by the denominational violence that is perceived to have dominated the risings of the southern counties, particularly Wexford. Ultimately then, the middle-class Presbyterian merchants and farmers of the North are seen as abandoning their radical political principles when faced with the prospect of losing their property, and possibly their lives, to a Catholic peasant jacquerie; and the temporary alliance between Presbyterian United Irishmen and Catholic Defenders thus collapsed under the weight of religious animosity. ²

Although there are slight historiographical variations, the small number of historians who have addressed the period immediately following the rebellion concur on the major points of interpretation. Thomas Pakenham believes that by the eve of the rebellion, the Presbyterians of Belfast had, to a large extent, become loyalists (p. 223). The surviving United Irishmen had either been intimidated into inactivity by the strong military presence in the city or had “dropped their flirtation with the revolution” as a result of the Belfast newspaper accounts of the atrocities committed by Catholic “mobs” during the rising in the South. The excesses of the “religious war in Kildare and Wexford” drove “men of property” to “support the constitution.” When Antrim and Down rose in June, General Nugent, the regional military commander, appealed to this “property instinct,” which Pakenham holds was strongest in the wealthy counties of east Ulster; and Nugent offered amnesty to those who would lay down their arms and return home, while threatening to forfeit the life and property of those who continued to resist (p. 224). Pakenham concludes that Wolfe Tone lived to see the collapse of the nonsectarian ideals of the United Irishmen (p. 346). Thus, in Pakenham’s mind, sectarianism had triumphed before the “year of liberty” had ended.

R. F. Foster agrees with Pakenham that news of the sectarian outrages in the South drove a large number of Presbyterians to loyalism, claiming that “when the Wexford pattern was known in Ulster, many insurgents defected or even became Yeomen” (p. 279). Like the other traditionalists, the ultimate legacy of the rebellion for Foster was sectarianism. As proof that “the sectarian rational had triumphed,” he cites a Defender toast from 1799 that expressed the desire to mutilate Orangemen and contends that loyalism had become synonymous with Protestantism (p. 285).

In her ground-breaking study Partners in Revolution, Marianne Elliott argues that by 1799 the inactivity of the remaining United leadership had allowed popular disaffection to flow “into pervasive Defenderism” (p. 244). Elliott uses the example of William Caulfield, a Ballymoney flax-dresser, to demonstrate the process by which Catholic Defenders who had joined the United Irishmen during the mid-1790s reverted to Defenderism in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. She sees the low social status of Caulfield’s recruits as an indication of their alienation from the middle-class leadership of the United Irishmen, holding that this “pattern of class polarization” was repeated throughout the province. In Elliott’s opinion, oaths from the post-‘98 period show that the republican goals of “aiding the French” and “overturning the constitution” had indeed been adopted by the Defenders. On the other hand...