Irish History: Brendan Ó Cathaoir reviews Helen F. Mulvey's Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study, Vincent Morley's Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783 and a new work on Irish immigrants in America from 1675-1815.
Thomas Davis and Ireland: A Biographical Study. By Helen F. Mulvey, Catholic University of America Press, 278pp, €64
Thomas Davis is an icon for the new Ireland. His inclusive nationality embraced the Irish person "of a hundred generations and the stranger who is within our gates". With what Pearse called his genius for noble life and thought, Davis would welcome today's immigrants.
He continues to attract biographers. John Molony's enthusiastic work, A Soul Came Into Ireland, marked the 150th anniversary of Davis's death in 1995. Athol Books (Belfast) reprinted Charles Gavan Duffy's valuable, if eulogistic, biography in 2000. And now Helen Mulvey's long-awaited book has been published in Washington DC.
Prof Mulvey concentrates on "Davis's inner world and the vision he had for his country's future". She writes elegantly about his intellectual and political milieu.
Correcting Duffy's Young Ireland perspective, this study emphasises how much Davis and O'Connell had in common. Although both patriots were men of great heart and mind, O'Connell was untouched by the Romantic movement. Furthermore, the nation called into being by the Liberator was essentially Catholic. Our Tricolour symbolises the nation envisaged by Davis.
Mulvey provides an upbeat account of pre-Famine Ireland. Administrative reforms included laying the foundations of "the famous Royal Irish Constabulary". Davis himself believed Ireland was ruled as a military province rather than as part of the United Kingdom. Be that as it may, history highlights terminal events. The biggest social catastrophe in Irish history took place within the jurisdiction of the greatest power on earth at the time.
Standing at the grave of Davis in Mount Jerome Cemetery, one reflects that James McGeever - an indefatigable letter-writer to this newspaper - is right. Physical force, or the threat of it, inhibits "internal union". For the Davis-conceived nation to carry the day, two things are required: sectarianism must wither, and the republican movement has to remove the militaristic mote from its own eye. Reconciliation should precede reunion.
Davis, for whom political freedom and moral regeneration went hand in hand, died a month before his 31st birthday. Remembered as the chief inspirer of the Nation journal, he sought to fuse the orange and green traditions. When Ireland achieves mature nationhood, in the beautiful lines of Samuel Ferguson, "then, under God, to Thomas Davis/ Let the greater praise belong".
Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783. By Vincent Morley, Cambridge University Press, 366pp, €71.10
One of the merits of the original study, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783, by Vincent Morley, is the inclusion of Gaelic manuscripts in its impressive array of sources. Dr Morley challenges the Anglocentric view of 18th- century Ireland and redefines colonial nationalism as Anglo-Irish patriotism.
He traces the evolving attitudes of the Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian communities towards the American War of Independence (1775-83). The outbreak of hostilities in North America was deplored by Irish Protestants, many of whom feared that taxation of the colonies might be invoked as a precedent in Ireland. Opposition to the war was strongest among Presbyterians, reflecting personal ties with the colonists.
The conclusion of an alliance between the Continental Congress and France, Britain's traditional enemy, further eroded support for the American cause. The mood of the Anglo-Irish community fluctuated during the four years between the surrender of Gen Burgoyne at Saratoga and that of Lord Cornwallis in Yorktown.
Morley also sheds light on Catholic political consciousness. Although some aislingí (vision-poems) provide evidence of popular admiration for American military commanders - misplaced in the case of the traitor, Benedict Arnold - the Catholic masses were still imbued with a Jacobite world-view. For the remaining Catholic landowners, however, the Franco-American alliance represented a dilemma. To support the crown in its efforts to suppress a rebellion that could be viewed as a recrudescence of anti-monarchical and anti-Catholic Puritanism required a minor adjustment in outlook (all the American colonial assemblies, in emulation of the Irish and British parliaments, had passed legislation that denied Catholics rights); to back Britain in a war against France was a different matter. But the Catholic élite showed few signs of wavering in its pragmatic acceptance of the constitutional status quo.
By the end of the war the willingness of Anglo-Irish patriots to countenance Catholic relief made the policy of looking to the executive for concessions untenable. At the same time the increasingly prominent part taken by Dissenters and Catholics in extra-parliamentary politics provoked a Protestant Ascendancy backlash. While Jacobite sentiment persisted among the Catholic masses until the death of Prince Charles Edward in 1788, the American Revolution prepared the ground for Irish republicanism.
Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from
Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. Written and edited by Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling and David N. Doyle, Oxford University Press, 788pp, €33.97.
Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan brilliantly contextualises Morley's study. Early transatlantic migration had profound consequences in both Ireland and North America. Approximately 400,000 emigrants from Ireland settled in North America between the late 17th century and the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. About two-thirds of these were Presbyterians, mostly from Ulster. Many of Britain's colonists in Ireland migrated to a more promising "land of Canaan" in America.
Although small in comparison with the millions who left Ireland in the 19th century, these migrations were enormous in proportion to the contemporary populations. Around 1760, the Ulster Presbyterian community numbered less than half a million; all of Ireland had about 2.4 million inhabitants; and no more than 1.5 million whites and blacks lived in Britain's North American colonies. Thirty years later, the Irish population was four million, while the US had merely 3.23 million white inhabitants.
In Ireland, mass departures by Ulster Presbyterians and southern Anglicans altered the ethno-religious configuration of 17th-century plantations. On the other side of the Atlantic, Irish migrants dominated frontier settlement, and played major roles in the political tumults, economic developments, social conflicts and religious revivals which shaped the new American nation.
Inspired by the American and French revolutions, an Irish identity flowered among Protestant and Catholic radicals in the 1790s. The editors of this book observe that the areas of Ireland most prone to political upheaval were also those that had experienced the greatest outflow of Protestant emigrants to the New World. Not only were the people in those regions most exposed to American influences, they may also have felt that only major political change could alleviate the economic conditions which caused mass emigration.
In the late 18th century, as Irish and American political movements converged, "Irish" became - both in Ireland and the US - a more inclusive appellation than ever before or since. It was associated with those forces of democracy and national liberation that seemed about to triumph over the dead weights of aristocracy, deference and colonialism. But the United Irish ideal was nearly extinguished in the bloodshed of 1798.
By the 1820s, religious and political conflicts were rife in Ireland and America. Once again "Irish" became virtually synonymous with Catholicism - and among most Protestants, the term designated a group laden with negative stereotypes. Memories of earlier liberating and unifying possibilities of "Irishness" were repressed.
Many of the documents in this treasure-trove enable an exploration of why the inclusive implications of late 18th-century "Irishness" emerged, flourished briefly and were then submerged in Ireland and America alike. Incidentally, this monumental work draws attention to the roots of neo-conservatism in the US today.
Brendan Ó Cathaoir is an Irish Times journalist. His new book, Young Irelander Abroad: The Diary of Charles Hart, has just been published by Cork University Press