Political Exiles and Ministerial Migrants: Rethinking the Origins of Irish America

The recent publication of two studies of distinctively different (and yet overlapping) movements of Irish immigrants is a useful reminder that the migration of some seven million people from Ireland to North America over the course of nearly four centuries was large enough and sufficiently meaningful for continued investigation. To understand this substantial population movement requires close study of the impact on both the home country and the receiving country, and of the transatlantic movement of ideas, values, and organizations. These books by David Brundage and Rankin Sherling not only equip us to understand these topics, but they also require us to reevaluate assumptions about migration and identity.

David Brundage investigates Irish nationalism as mediated by immigration, developing Lord Acton's axiom that "exile is the nursery of nationalism." But he wisely cautions against static or stereotypical interpretations that privilege ideas of an essential Irish identity. Instead, he proposes that nationalism was "throughout its history an ongoing work of political imagination and discursive invention" (p. 4).

Strategies for national independence were created—and implemented—through transatlantic networks arising from the experience of migration. Brundage analyzes nationalism from 1798 to 1998, delineating and explaining its sometimes parallel and usually hostile strands: physical-force republicanism and constitutional separatism. Most often the two waxed and waned in turn, affected by (and affecting) conditions in the United States and in Ireland. He also helpfully assesses nationalists' attitudes and actions with respect to gender, race, and class.

Irish Nationalism in America is not a study of migration as such. But to explain the politics of exile, Brundage builds successfully on a generation of scholarship—including, but by no means limited to, Kerby A. Miller's magisterial Emigrants and Exiles (1985) and other productions—to create a motion picture of migration and diaspora in construction. Brundage portrays embittered exiles longing for Ireland, joined with immigrants and their children in a nationalist project with sometimes-unforeseen impacts on original and host nations.

Appropriately, Brundage begins his study with the turbulent 1790s and the emergence of a revolutionary republican nationalism. The central and emblematic figure in the opening chapter is Theobald Wolfe Tone, a founder and leader of the Society of United Irishmen. The Protestant romantic metamorphosed "from failed lawyer and aspiring Whig politician to dedicated propagandist for a nonsectarian Irish nationalism"—and then to determined republican separatist (p. 12). Like many other Irish radicals before and after the failed 1798 Rebellion, Tone sought refuge (albeit briefly) in the United States. Anticipating revolutionary nationalists of succeeding generations, Tone intensely disliked the reality of U.S. politics and life. "Tone's time in America, marked by a deep sense of displacement and longing," writes Brundage, "intensified his embrace of a specifically Irish national identity and of Irish nationalism. As an exile, he could never be at home" (p. 23). After five months, Tone re-crossed the Atlantic to France, eventually returning to Ireland and his death.

From 1783 to 1819, when immigration from Ireland more than doubled that from England, Scotland, and Wales combined, exiled revolutionaries figured prominently among the nearly 200,000 Irish immigrants. The transatlantic movement of radicals significantly affected U.S. politics, as the United Irishmen and their sympathizers firmly aligned themselves with the Democratic-Republican Party. The Adams administration, predictably, sought to block the arrival of those Secretary of State William Pickering condemned as "United Irish Desperadoes."

Here Brundage admirably expands on the work of David A. Wilson's United Irishmen, United States (1998), Michael Durey's Transatlantic Radicals and the Early Republic (1997), and Richard J. Twomey's Jacobins and Jeffersonians (1989), among others, making good use of primary sources to convey a sense of the extensive networks and political currents among the exiles.

The early nineteenth...