The Army in Ireland and the Eighteenth-Century Press: Antimilitary Sentiment in an Atlantic Context

Introduction

In assessing Protestant public opinion in Ireland and its relationship to the large standing army resident in the country, it is tempting to conclude that the military was seen by this religious community as an invaluable bulwark against Catholic threat before approximately 1750, and as a menace to personal and financial liberty afterward. This, of course, is a little too convenient. It is worth noting that although in economic terms the army was the most sizeable element of public expenditure in eighteenth-century Ireland,¹ MPs were almost always happy to vote such cost outlays through. And while there is a consistency throughout the century in soldier testimonials revealing that the Dublin garrison knew that its personal safety was in danger if it was performing certain tasks, such as guarding Newgate prison or escorting recruits,² Toby Barnard has astutely described the key role that the military played in society throughout Ireland. Army officers were a vital component of club life, and any connection with an intrusive overseas military did not seem to bar them from memberships in dining clubs, hunt clubs, or the freemasons.³ Nevertheless, anti-military sentiment was a salient aspect of life in eighteenth-century Ireland that often played out in print. The part-time apothecary and full-time demagogue Charles Lucas was one of the first Irish Protestants to use public opinion against the army, utilizing newspapers and pamphlets to express his anger after the military riots of the summer of 1765 and a controversial court-martial.⁴ The Freeman’s Journal, cofounded by Lucas, published toasts by a group of citizens that urged “that the military may never be able to prevail over civil power,” and lauded a putative Irish militia in favor of the army.⁵ Another Dublin MP, Sir Edward Newenham, followed in Lucas’s footsteps. Both used concerns over the military to argue against army augmentation, and both saw the newspaper as a key weapon in the propaganda war.⁶

This essay will focus on the continuation of antimilitary sentiment in two newspapers run by the printer Mathew Carey, first in Dublin and then in Philadelphia—the Volunteers Journal and the Pennsylvania Evening Herald.⁷ Notwithstanding Carey’s relatively brief career as a newspaper proprietor—his real fame was to be found in book publishing—his involvement in the fourth estate in the early 1780s was arguably of critical importance to the development of newspapers in an Atlantic context. Most important was his advocacy of pro-Catholic sensibilities in Ireland in an era when even patriotic Protestant journals, because of a deeply imbedded strain of whiggism, tended to stick to anti-Catholic tenets. When married to antigovernment rhetoric, such perspectives made the Volunteers Journal a much more threatening newspaper than, say, the Hibernian Journal or the Dublin Evening Post.⁸ This criticism of British policy-making and tolerance toward Catholicism crossed with Carey to America, where it influenced the content of the Pennsylvania Evening Herald. The Herald under Carey was not long-lived, but it played a role in cementing a certain image of this publisher in Philadelphia society, entangling him in nativist politicking and the forging of a new constitution. An Atlantic approach is vital here even beyond any need to trace Carey’s movements, as what we see through his career is a microcosm of major changes affecting the newspaper in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Eighteenth-century newspapers were by their nature composite affairs consisting of content taken from other publications and a diverse mixture of the views of the printer, comments from readers, and whatever news had found its way from the latest packet to the print shop. But the 1780s in particular were central to the development of newspapers with “personality”—personalities that frequently reflected the political proclivities of their editors or proprietors. Henry Bate-Dudley’s success with the Morning Herald in London ensured that he was as well known as his best-selling newspaper, and arguably Mathew Carey’s success placed him in a similar...