Ulster Liberalism, 1778–1876: The Middle Path (review)

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once famously remarked that all politics are local. Gerald R. Hall takes the aphorism to heart in this study of the rise and fall of liberalism in Ulster from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While Hall suggests in the introduction that he will consider political language in the manner of J. G. A. Pocock, he does not. Rather he traces the attitude and activity of opposition through a series of local political contests.

Explicitly pursuing a revisionist agenda, Hall seeks to rescue Ulster’s largely Presbyterian liberals from posterity’s condescension. Solidly in the camp of radical reform or even revolution, they were the Volunteers and United Irishmen of late-eighteenth- century Ulster. By the 1880s they were to be found just as solidly in the Unionist camp, albeit chafing under the leadership of a despised landed elite. The explanations for this defection to the enemy’s camp have much to do with the rise of Catholic nationalism and growing sectarian conflict in the province. Historians of Ulster Unionism and politics such as David Miller, A. T. Q. Stewart, Brian Walker, and most recently Frank Wright have expertly told this story in its varied nuances. Hall’s worthy contribution is to take a close look at liberalism in action at the most local level as it was forged, defined, and energized through a series of rather heroic municipal confrontations with entrenched oligarchic interests. “The struggles were schools for politics that allowed Ulster liberals to organize,” he claims (178).

Liberalism in Ulster is not herein defined but situational. Hall attributes its origins to the Volunteers and the United Irishmen, evolving from civic republicanism and the Scottish Enlightenment. The first chapter addresses this genealogy in a not very clear or helpful manner. The essential point seems to be a simple, uncontested one: that liberalism expressed the attitude of those, such as William Drennan, who after the failure of the 1798 rebellion had discarded revolutionary change for the peaceful, constitutional variety. Hall pays some attention to political language, noting the persistence of the idiom of civic republicanism and virtue in Drennan’s writings well into the first decades of the nineteenth century. He would have been well advised, however, to consider the work of Gordon Wood on the transformation of a civic humanist vocabulary into a liberal one in the early American republic. When dealing with political language, Hall acknowledges the varied British idiom of Whigs, radicals, reformers, and patriots but keeps his focus on Ulster, and mostly on Presbyterians, so there is no engagement with national, British, or international texts that undoubtedly influenced Ulster liberalism.

The chapters that follow are far more rewarding. Taken together they identify three recurring themes in the history of Ulster liberalism from the 1820s to the 1870s. First, there are the internecine conflicts within Ulster Presbyterianism, originating in the eighteenth century between New Light (rational, heterodox, and liberal) and Old Light (evangelical, orthodox, and conservative) adherents and culminating in the famous confrontation between Reverend Henry Montgomery and Reverend Henry Cooke, their respective champions. The triumph of Cooke’s evangelical wing was not, however, a triumph for political conservatism, as Cooke failed to shepherd even his own followers into Tory meadows. Many evangelical Presbyterians managed to reconcile liberal politics and conservative theology, though it was a fragile rationalization tested unsuccessfully when Rome Rule in the form of Home Rule threatened Ulster. Theologically liberal Presbyterians were reliable soldiers in liberal campaigns, until the “middle path” they occupied became impossibly narrow in the 1870s.

A second recurring theme is also confessionally based: the political alliance with Ulster Catholics necessitated by Ulster’s political arithmetic. Only together could liberal Presbyterians and Catholics hope to challenge landed oligarchies in town and county. Liberals tended to support Catholic Emancipation, but repeal was a stickier issue. In rejecting their revolutionary past Presbyterian liberals embraced the...