The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity

Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880

Cian T. McMahon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469620107
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620114
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Though Ireland is a relatively small island on the northeastern fringe of the Atlantic, 70 million people worldwide — including some 45 million in the United States — claim it as their ancestral home. In this wide-ranging, ambitious book, Cian T. McMahon explores the nineteenth-century roots of this transnational identity. Between 1840 and 1880, 4.5 million people left Ireland to start new lives abroad. Using primary sources from Ireland, Australia, and the United States, McMahon demonstrates how this exodus shaped a distinctive sense of nationalism. By doggedly remaining loyal to both their old and new homes, he argues, the Irish helped broaden the modern parameters of citizenship and identity.

From insurrection in Ireland to exile in Australia to military service during the American Civil War, McMahon’s narrative revolves around a group of rebels known as Young Ireland. They and their fellow Irish used weekly newspapers to construct and express an international identity tailored to the fluctuating world in which they found themselves. Understanding their experience sheds light on our contemporary debates over immigration, race, and globalization.

CHAPTER ONE

L’Esprit et les Lois

Celts and Saxons in Ireland, 1840–1848

One afternoon in the summer of 1842, three young journalists went for a walk through Dublin. Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon, and Charles Gavan Duffy rendezvoused at Trinity College before ambling down to the Liffey and west along the quays, all the way to Phoenix Park. As they walked, they bemoaned the state of Irish nationalism. The eighteenth-century Patriotism of Grattan, Charlemont, and Flood was gone. The United Irishmen of 1798 were dead or in exile. Their successor, Daniel O’Connell’s Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA), was popular, but its argument that Irish prosperity had declined since Ireland joined the United Kingdom in 1801 was too materialistic. “Passions and imagination have won victories which reason and self-interest have attempted in vain,” figured Duffy. It was these “lessons of profounder influence over the human breast” that he and his friends believed in. What Irish nationalism needed was a vibrant new voice that would, regardless of religion or class, unite the people behind repeal of the union with Britain by emphasizing the historical, philological, and cultural differences between Ireland and England. Sitting on a bench beneath an elm tree overlooking an entrance to Phoenix Park, the three agreed that this new voice should be manifested in a weekly newspaper named after their ultimate objective: the Nation. Its motto was “To create and to foster public opinion in Ireland—to make it racy of the soil.” In time, an English newspaper would nickname Duffy and the Nation’s staff “Young Ireland.”1

This chapter investigates the form and function of Irish racial discourse during the 1840s. Embedded in an international network of weekly periodicals sympathetic to Ireland’s cause, the Dublin Nation played a critical role in developing the language of Celts and Saxons. While portrayed as a coherent philosophy, the Celt/Saxon dichotomy was in fact a flexible, practical instrument riddled with ambivalence and contradiction. On the one hand, Irish nationalists used it to buttress their claim for legislative independence from Britain by situating the Celts in a timeless struggle for freedom from their oppressive Saxon neighbors. England’s laws, they argued, could never suit the Irish temperament. On the other hand, this racial rhetoric simultaneously undermined the Young Ireland national project by deepening the sense of difference within Ireland between Catholics (Celts) and Protestants (Saxons). In the short run, their Celtic discourse, which effectively portrayed the English as the eternal enemy, was equally fatal to the Young Irelanders’ dream of unifying Irish Catholics and Protestants. In the long run, however, this flexible language of race and nation proved useful to the Irish when famine and exile scattered them overseas.

Race and Nation in Pre-Famine Ireland

The steady expansion of capitalism throughout the nineteenth century shaped how Europeans thought about race and nation. As tens of millions of laborers and managers circulated around the earth, national identities morphed and shifted. Pre-Famine Irish society was deeply affected by these changes. The Irish population exploded from about 2.3 million in the middle of the eighteenth century to 7.2 million in 1821 and 8.4 million in 1841. In 1834, 80 percent of the population (6,428,000) were Catholic, just over 10 percent (852,000) were Church of Ireland (Anglican), about 8 percent (642,000) were Presbyterian, and a tiny fraction (22,000) were other dissenters, including Methodists and Quakers. The rapid increase in population had been stoked, in part, by the success of Irish commerce. Stimulated by Britain’s sprawling urbanization and aggressive militarism, the value of Irish annual exports trebled between 1750 and 1810, and continued to increase even with the collapse of wartime inflation after Waterloo. At the same time, the main means of production in Ireland—land—remained in the hands of a tiny (mostly Protestant) minority, and since the Act of Union had incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1801, legislative power remained in London. This strengthening of the state and commerce brought with it the increased use of English as the language of law, business, and politics during the 1830s and 1840s. This process eroded remaining vestiges of Gaelic society, but it also handed Irish nationalists a tool for uniting their constituents. In touch with the intellectual currents then circulating throughout Europe, the Young Irelanders used racial discourse to make sense of this fluctuating world.2

European racialism in the 1840s was a hodgepodge of various concepts and methodologies rather than a hard science in the modern sense of the term. Its three basic building blocks were German linguistic philology, French physiology, and English pro-Saxonism, but as Robert J. C. Young has shown, it borrowed indiscriminately from a wide variety of disciplines, “providing a common source of cultural capital that writers of all kinds were able to draw on.” This popular science held that there were, fundamentally, two races in Europe: the Celts and the Saxons, distinguished by cultural differences ingrained in physiological incongruence. Primarily produced by English and Lowland Scottish ethnologists like Thomas Arnold, John Mitchell Kemble, Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Knox, this reading of the races of humankind described Anglo-Saxons as rational, freedom-loving, self-reliant people—nineteenth-century avatars of the stout, sylvan Germans described by Tacitus. By contrast, the Celts were imaginative, slavish boors dependent on leaders for direction. The two races were irreconcilable. Writing in 1820, the influential French historian Augustin Thierry believed that recent studies in physiology had shown that “the physical and moral constitution of nations depends far more on their descent from certain primitive ancestors than on the influence of climate.” Almost three decades later, the London Times agreed. “For three hundred years there has been a continued succession of attempts to infuse the Anglo-Saxon spirit into these miserable [Celtic] imbeciles,” it editorialized. “So far it is all in vain.” Many agreed with Thierry that the main dynamic of human history was “the conflict of different races.”3

The Celtic Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also shaped European racialism. Beginning around 1750, a burst of popular interest in all things Celtic encouraged men of letters to deepen contemporary literature with the myths, histories, and legends of their forebears. The most famous works to emerge from this genre included James MacPherson’s fraudulent Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), which, despite his vehement claims to the contrary, actually consisted of modern compositions by MacPherson himself. What was most remarkable about MacPherson’s work was not its alleged antiquity but rather the public interest it sparked in rediscovering Celtic languages and traditions. In response, men like William Stukeley, Thomas Gray, and Lewis Morris produced extensive tracts on the superstitions, laws, and literatures of northwestern Europe’s earliest inhabitants. At root, the Celtic Revival was an auxiliary of the broader romantic movement, which sought to replace classical mythology with a renewed emphasis on the mysteries of nature. By the 1840s, it had built a massive body of scholarly literature, some of which was dedicated to outlining the perceived racial differences between Celts and Saxons. In an era of what Eric Hobsbawm has termed “invented traditions,” racialism offered the basis for national histories that could legitimate or challenge the contemporary political map. If the goal of the modern nation-state was to find the perfect balance between what Montesquieu had called l’esprit et les lois of any given country, racialism could define both.4

Ironically, while many Europeans were busy drawing national borders around races, international migration lay at the heart of their origin myths. Since the sixteenth century, English nationalism had rested on the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon myth, which held that the English people’s ancestral roots were brought north from Germany when Hengist and Horsa landed in Kent in 449 CE. Similarly, the Celts’ roots were believed to lie in central Europe, where, by 600 BCE, the Greeks were referring to them as Keltoi (although many Irish Celts traced their ancestors to the Milesian migration from Spain several centuries BCE). In the ever-changing context of the industrial revolution, it is no surprise that Europeans described themselves in terms of people moving over a border-free earth. Folks like Carlyle and Knox took the Hengist and Horsa legend as historical evidence that God had put them in that time and place to cement Saxon hegemony. Those who identified as the descendants of Celts, by contrast, believed that the Milesian story confirmed native sovereignty over the island of Ireland. In later years, these stories of their migratory ancestors provided the Famine-era Irish with evidence that their exodus was only the latest in a grand tradition of great tribes roaming the earth.5

In the decades after the French Revolution, Irish nationalists sought to balance l’esprit et les lois of Ireland. During the 1790s, the United Irishmen tried to smash the Anglican monopoly and bring Catholics and Presbyterian dissenters into the polity. In their minds, a handful of privileged, corrupt Anglicans, propped up by the British government, misruled Ireland. Breaking the connection with England would topple this oligarchy and open the way for a new parliament representative of all segments and sects of the Irish population. Yet their original hopes for political reform devolved into violence. After their bloody rebellion was put down in 1798, the Act of Union (1801) drew Ireland into the United Kingdom by abolishing the parliament in Dublin and giving the Irish seats in Westminster. Popular interest in Irish independence, which waned in the early 1800s, was reinvigorated by Daniel O’Connell’s brand of constitutional nationalism. The scion of a wealthy landowning Catholic family in County Kerry, O’Connell grew to become one of early nineteenth-century Britain’s leading legal minds. Convinced that Ireland’s political woes were attributable to Catholic exclusion from the polity, he successfully mobilized the masses behind a campaign for Catholic Emancipation, which he achieved in 1829. A decade later, he regathered the people into a new political instrument called the Loyal National Repeal Association, which was designed to repeal the Act of Union and replace it with a form of—purposefully ill-defined—self-government. For O’Connell, as for the United Irishmen, political health demanded that the spirit of the people be reflected in the laws of the nation-state.6

If a healthy body politic depended on harmony between the laws of the land and the soul of the people, it was critical to define that community’s esprit. Early Irish nationalists found themselves caught between antithetical definitions based on ethnic solidarity and civic pluralism. The universalist roots of the United Irishmen were reflected in their desire for “a cordial union among ALL PEOPLE OF IRELAND, to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties.” Catholics, Presbyterians, and Anglicans alike must unite in a representative parliament. At the same time, sectarian violence in the countryside encouraged armed bands of Catholics to join the United Irishmen in the hope that revolution would undo the seventeenth-century conquest, which had transferred the land into Protestant hands. Years later, under O’Connell, this tension between ethnic and civic nationalism remained. Steeped in the rationalist liberalism of the Enlightenment, he shared a commitment to diversity. Yet O’Connellism was also characterized by what Kevin Whelan has described as “an embryonic cultural nationalism,” which equated confessional allegiance and national identity. In 1843, for example, O’Connell published an account of Irish history entitled A Memoir on Ireland, Native and Saxon, whose title page quoted a couplet from Thomas Moore: “On our side is Virtue and Erin, On theirs is Saxon and Guilt.” Irish nationalists seeking to define the Irish esprit in the early nineteenth century were, therefore, locked in a dialectical struggle between ethnic solidarity and civic pluralism. The Young Irelanders would wrestle with the same quandary.7

Though they often spoke wistfully of pikes and swords, the most effective weapon in the armory of nineteenth-century Irish nationalists was the printed word. Through a fluid but reliable network of communication and exchange, national identity and political unity were exported from urban centers to the countryside through newspapers, pamphlets, song-sheets, posters, and handbills. Theobald Wolfe Tone’s widely circulated pamphlet An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791) galvanized the Society of United Irishmen, which subsequently founded a semiweekly newspaper in Belfast entitled the Northern Star. Though its readership was largely limited to the island’s eastern littoral, it soon became one of the country’s most widely diffused periodicals. Through a potent mixture of domestic satire, news from France, and radical opinion from England, the Northern Star successfully contributed to the democratization of Irish political culture by expanding the limits of its imagined community. Daniel O’Connell also employed print culture in his campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal by using sympathetic Dublin weeklies such as the Freeman’s Journal and Pilot as semi-official mouthpieces. Through these newspapers, O’Connell advertised meetings, raised cash, and disseminated ideas. For early nineteenth-century Irish nationalists, the printed word was the most effective medium for spreading their message. It was in this context that Duffy and his associates founded the Dublin Nation.8

The Dublin Nation

The Young Irelanders came from a variety of backgrounds. Duffy was a Catholic from the northern province of Ulster who had grown up experiencing Protestant bigotry. Largely self-educated until the age of eighteen, Duffy met Dillon (and through him, Davis) when he took terms at the King’s Inns law school in Dublin. His financial capital and editorial experience with a previous newspaper, the Belfast Vindicator, provided the new organ with stability. John Blake Dillon was a Catholic farmer’s son from Ballaghaderreen in the poor western province of Connaught. His background kept the newspaper in touch with the country folk whose numbers it was trying to harness. Thomas Osborne Davis, by contrast, was an Anglican from Munster, in the south, where he had enjoyed a more affluent upbringing than his colleagues. Protected from the hardscrabble experiences of Duffy and Dillon, Davis, with his unabashed idealism and wide reading in history and literature, imbued the Nation with intellectual authenticity. Selling itself as physically “the LARGEST WEEKLY PAPER IN IRELAND,” the Nation boasted an impressive list of contributors, including members of the LNRA’s top leadership. Yet it was a handpicked coterie of close colleagues who contributed the most to the Nation. John Cornelius O’Callaghan was a historian whose The Green Book had recently enjoyed widespread popularity. James Clarence Mangan was an eccentric, highly talented, starving poet. Fellow students from Trinity College made important contributions as well. Over the next few years, its staff hardened into a dedicated band of intellectuals that rival Dublin editor Dicky Barrett cynically referred to as the “Clique.” In time, the Young Irelanders went from followers to critics to enemies of O’Connell and the LNRA.9

The Nation’s first number met with instant success when it appear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• Chapter One: L’Esprit et les Lois: Celts and Saxons in Ireland, 1840–1848
• Chapter Two: “A Lone, Lone Spot in the Far Southern Seas”: The Irish Race in Australia, 1848–1855
• Chapter Three: Battling the Anglo-Saxon Myth: Irish Identity in the Antebellum United States, 1848–1861
• Chapter Four: “Scarce a Battlefield from the North Pole to the South”: Irish Celts in the American Civil War, 1861–1865
• Chapter Five: “American by Nationality yet Irish by Race”: Citizenship in the Wake of the Civil War, 1865–1880
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index