Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815

This handsomely produced and highly readable volume on Irish immigration to America can best be understood and read as two complementary books, one an exposition of the experiences of Irish immigrants to the (future) United States and the Caribbean and the other a more argument-based work about the identity politics of 'the confusing but creative possibilities of eigh-teenth-century Irish-American ethnicity' (p. 627). The value of this volume is more readily appreciated when its two personalities are disentangled.

The sixty-eight chapters that form the bulk of the book--over six hundred pages of it--are case studies sorted into seven sections: the causes of Irish emigration; the processes of Irish emigration; farmers and planters; craftsmen, labourers and servants; merchants, shopkeepers and peddlers; clergymen and schoolmasters (only three chapters, but more are to be found in other sections); and Irish immigrants in politics and war. The first section makes good use of documents from residents of Ireland who considered emigration, but did not follow through, in order to shed further light on the situations that so many others left behind. Historians of Atlantic travel will find the most material in Section II, which includes letters and memoirs regarding voyages, while historians of trade will correspondingly look to Section V. Social historians of the period will find it almost universally interesting.

Each chapter studies an individual or group and begins with the context of their circumstances before presenting one or more edited texts--most often letters--and then ending with information on the subsequent history of the person(s) involved. The prologue and epilogue to each primary text are often the fruit of research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic and include thoughtful analysis of persons, texts and contexts. The edited texts themselves, which make up perhaps one quarter of the book, are thoroughly footnoted so as to aid understanding on two levels: the literal meaning of obsolete or dialectal words and constructions, and what can be inferred from linguistic clues about the writer's cultural background, including in some cases what sort of background the writer wishes the recipient to infer. Occasionally, linguistic discussion in the footnotes digresses into, for instance, quotes from Shakespeare reflecting similar usage; many readers may find this superfluous, but it can readily be ignored. Useful information on language for those with an interest is given in an appendix by Boling.

Because this volume is a textually-based social history of a period without universal literacy, the authors were necessarily faced with the problem that some groups, particularly women and the poor, are underrepresented in the documentary record. By casting their net wider than letters and diaries, they have redressed this imbalance as far as possible. For instance, they have found petitions from Irish-born Americans in court records from Chester County, Pennsylvania and used published confessions by three Irish-born thieves being hanged in New Jersey, some of which were clearly written by amanuenses. The interpretive difficulties of dictated (and therefore possibly altered) texts are addressed appropriately, in keeping with the careful and illuminating analysis typical of this book.

The discussions of changing identity politics among 'Irish' (broadly defined) on both sides of the Atlantic are far too complex to relate in detail here, but can be summarised as follows. The late eighteenth century saw the rise of the ecumenical nationalist United Irishmen and emigré sympathisers who gave the term 'Irish' a broad and positive connotation, though many of those so defined, such as Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, and indeed some Catholics and Presbyterians, distanced themselves from these anti-royalist republicans. Likewise, self-consciously 'respectable' Protestant Irish in America were often tarred with the same brush as their Catholic compatriots, despite the former being an overwhelming majority in the Americas; Irish-American Protestants, therefore, including some of no Scottish ancestry, began to distinguish themselves in early nineteenth-century America with the positively-construed term 'Scotch-Irish'. In the revolutionary and post-revolutionary United States, bitter divisions between loyalists and revolutionaries, radical egalitarians and aristocratic parties, and city and backcountry further subdivided most groups, including at the parochial level, often parallel to similar divisions in Ireland. On both sides of the Atlantic, the temporary ecumenicity of Irishness dissolved under these and other social pressures. The results are still with us today, a point the authors make but do not labour.

The authors' arguments regarding the evolution of these identities appear in the introduction but then lie mostly dormant, if latent, in much of the subsequent material. They come to the fore only in Section VII, on politics and war, where they are finally explicated at greater length and given documentary substantiation. Many readers, not knowing that this awaits them, may be frustrated to find in the intervening four hundred pages that they are expected to accept on faith these arguments that form important context for much of what they read. Reading Section VII after Section I or II will almost certainly give greater satisfaction.

The breadth and importance of this volume will appeal to scholars working in a variety of fields on both sides of the Atlantic. It is also quite well resourced for reading by the interested layman, and even considering it as a collection of edited texts alone it would be worthy of its space on the shelves of many libraries, both academic and public.