“WHO FEARS TO SPEAK OF NINETY-EIGHT?”: THE UNITED IRISHMEN AND THE LEGACY OF REVOLUTION IN IRISH AMERICA

Abstract

The United Irishmen – a coalition of Irish Protestants and Catholic reformers exiled to the United States – actively engaged in partisan politics to shape the collective memories of the American Revolution and their Uprising of 1798. Tying these two movements together, the United Irishmen argued both revolts were committed to expanding civic and religious liberty and emphasized the global influence of the American Revolution. As a result, they successfully advanced a vision of American identity rooted in republicanism which allowed immigrants like themselves to claim to be American even before naturalizing, so long as they embraced representative governance and rejected aristocratic tyranny. Throughout the 1790s, the United Irishmen had pushed for, first, parliamentary reform and, eventually, an independent secular Irish republic. Most of the members had politically come of age during the American Revolution and radicalized during the early years of the French Revolution, prompting the society to proudly situate itself within the republican currents of the revolutionary Atlantic World. With Irish history too marred by sectarian conflict to unify the public, the United Irish presented these recent revolutions as a new (and usable) past for Ireland. While the United Irishmen’s revolutionary internationalism and resistance to British rule attracted them friends in the Democratic-Republican Party, it also raised the suspicions of many Federalists, who worried that these transatlantic radicals would endanger the American republic. In response to this rising nativism, newly arrived United Irishmen and their partisan allies reimagined the movement as almost exclusively modelled on the American Revolution and intertwined the memories of the two movements. By actively situating the United Irish uprisings within the legacy of the American Revolution, the United Irishmen claimed that American and Irish identities were fundamentally republican and complimentary. However, these transatlantic radicals didn’t just create useful, usable narratives for themselves, they imbued stories of republican revolts like the American Revolution and the Uprising of 1798 with emotional and moral weight – which ultimately contributed towards the growth of American exceptionalism.