A Union Forever: The Irish Question and US Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age by David Sim (review)

The growing interest in the history of Ireland’s international relations is gratifying, stimulated in part by the studies undertaken by the Royal Irish Academy over the past forty years and by the recent publication of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. The work of historians such as Bernadette Whelan, Jérôme aan de Wiel, and Alan J. Ward focused on Ireland’s international role long before the country was independent. Of course study of the great Irish diaspora has included an element of international relations when examining Irish-American or Irish-Canadian or Irish-Australian history. However, these studies have typically focused on the immigrant experience and may indeed fall into the category of ethnic studies. David Sim has attempted in A Union Forever to examine the extent to which Ireland was a factor in United States foreign relations in the nineteenth century — or to put it another way, the extent to which Ireland influenced British-American diplomatic relations. In so doing Sim has argued that Irish circumstances were generally more complicated when examined on the international stage than when considered exclusively in Irish terms.

Sim begins with an analysis of the impact of Daniel O’Connell’s repeal movement in the 1840s, at a time when public opinion in the United States anticipated a worldwide movement toward revolution and republican institutions. However, both anti-Catholic sentiment and O’Connell’s anti-slavery statements tempered support in America. Even among Irish groups in the United States O’Connell’s constitutionalism and monarchism dampened enthusiasm. Moreover, the fiasco of the 1848 rebellion discouraged and alienated those who might have supported a republican movement in Ireland. “Ireland is … no longer a nation,” lamented the Irish-born Illinois Senator, James Shields (p. 66). Nevertheless, the Great Famine stimulated substantial American relief efforts, including President James K. Polk’s willingness to allow two naval vessels to ship relief supplies to Ireland. Sim also considers the impact of the Fenian movement in the context of the American Civil War, a subject that has been much examined. He does not break new ground in the way of documentary evidence about the Fenians, but his conclusions are worth considering. He speculates that had the Fenians mounted invasions of Canada or Ireland in 1865, when resentment over British actions during the Civil War was still high, the United States government might have been more supportive. However, by 1866, 1867, and 1870 it was too late; the government was in the process of negotiating a settlement of its grievances with the British — the Alabama claims — and did not want to jeopardize those talks. Indeed, the comprehensive Anglo-American Treaty of Washington of 1871, and the subsequent Geneva Tribunal of 1872, settled major difficulties between Britain and the United States and Canada and the United States, and set an impressive international standard for the use of arbitration to determine conflict situations.

Although United States government support for the Fenian movement did not materialize, the return to Ireland of naturalized Irish-Americans, Fenians or not, created problems because the British government did not acknowledge that a subject of the Crown could alienate his allegiance — an issue that went back to the era of the War of 1812. Sim provides an excellent account of the work of the US Ministers and Consuls attempting to look after the interests of citizens in Ireland — native born or naturalized. This ongoing controversy led eventually to British legislation in 1870 recognizing that a British subject could become an American citizen.

Crop failures in Ireland, the renewed threat of famine, the agitation of the Land League, and the rise of the home rule movement under Charles Stewart Parnell, captured public attention in the United States during the last decades of the century, Sim argues, but did not stir government policy or halt the...