Ideological Origins of the Irish Revolution

Ideological Origins of the Irish Revolution steve pincus N March 16, 1780 General George Washington annou- O nced that on the following day “all fatigue and working parties cease” in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, a day held “in particular regard by the people” of Ireland. Washington issued this order to celebrate the achievements “of the Parliament of Ireland and of the inhabitants of that country” that were “calculated to remove those heavy and tyrannical oppressions on their trade” and also “to restore to a brave and generous people their ancient rights and freedom,” thereby promoting “the cause of America.”1 Washington’s order was premature.2 Only after two more years of bitter ideological controversy, political maneuvering, and armed agitation by the thousands of Irish Volunteers would force George III to sign the Repeal Act in June 1782, paving the way for Irish legislative and judicial independence. The Viceroy of Ireland, the Earl Temple, proclaimed that “the King and Parliament of Ireland are the only power to make laws to bind the people of that realm in all causes whatsoever” and “all Irish causes ought of right to be decided in their courts.”3 This news set off wild celebrations 1General Orders, March 16, 1780, Founders Online, Washington Papers, Na- tional Archives, last modified November 26, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/?q =%20Dates-From%3A1780-03-01%20Dates-To%3A1780-03-31General%20Orders&s =1111311111&r=30 (accessed December 9, 2017). 2Washington’s analysis of Irish affairs at the time was remarkably similar to that of Benjamin Franklin: Benjamin Franklin (Passy) to James Lovell, March 16, 1780, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Barbara B. Oberg et al., 32:122, http://franklinpapers.org /franklin//framedVolumes.jsp;jsessionid=BD778F6F19FAEEF8CA0CC42EC63D677B (accessed December 6, 2017). 3George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, Earl Temple (Dublin Castle) to Thomas Town- shend, January 2, 1783, ST 17/2, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (here- after HEH). The New England Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 1 (March 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ_a_00668. 240 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 241 throughout the kingdom. From Dublin to Belfast, from Derry to Cork, the Irish took to the streets in parades, illuminated their houses, and raised subscriptions to erect monuments celebrating the kingdom’s newfound “independence” and the reassertion of their “rights.”4 John Adams, who like many Americans eagerly followed these developments in the Ameri- can, British, and European press, proclaimed in the summer of 1782 that Ireland was “almost ripe to follow the example of the United States of America in throwing off all her connections” with Great Britain.5 The Irish revolutionary achievements of 1782 raise impor- tant and related questions. First, why did the Irish come to demand legislative and judicial independence, as well as grants of free trade, from Britain? That is, what were the ideas that shaped their claims? In addition, why did the Irish remain satisfied with these achievements and not go further? Whydid they stop short of a clean break from the British Empire as the Americans had done in 1776? These vital questions have not often been asked or answered by historians. This is, in part, because they have been seduced by the exciting events of the later 1790s to focus their attention on the rise and fall of the United Irishmen.6 Unsurprisingly, 4Finn’s Leinster Journal, May 22, 1782 and May 25, 1782; Pennsylvania Journal, July 31, 1782; Massachusetts Gazette, July 23, 1782. 5John Adams, A Memorial to the Sovereigns of Europe, ca. July 5-8 1782, Pa- pers of John Adams, May-October 1782, ed. Sara Martin (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008-2017), 13:160-61. See the similar comments from Alexander Hamilton: Second Letter from Phocion, April 1784, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton Digital Edition, ed. Harold C. Syrett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Ro- tunda, 2011), 3:552, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/ARHN-01-03-02-0347 (accessed December 7, 2017). 6See, among others, Gerard O’Brien, Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987), 11; Vincent Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vii. For scholarship on 1798: Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); David Dickson, et al., eds., The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion (Dublin: the Lil- liput Press, 1993); Thomas Bartlett, Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dundalk: Historical Asso- ciation of Ireland, 1997); Nancy J. Curtin, United Irishmen, Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791-1798 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998); Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 2009), 406-33. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 242 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY given that focus, most scholars have found that there was little to explain about the Revolution of 1782. Most scholars, reasoning from the urgent and radical demands of the United Irishmen a decade later, have claimed that patriots of 1782 achieved very little. In Peter Marshall’s view “the 1782 ‘revolution’ by the Irish parliament made little difference to Anglo-Irish relations.” Roy Foster concurs, in his magisterial Modern Ireland 1660–1972, that the Revolution of 1782 was “largely cosmetic.” The prolific American historian Alan Taylor summarily dismisses the Irish achievement of 1782 as “hollow.”7 Further, most scholars deny that what little did happen in 1782 had any ideological origins. The “hollow” and “symbolic” achievements of 1782 owed more to fortuitous circumstances and parliamentary maneuvering rather than the force of ide- ology. Whereas the “international conjuncture which restricted the ability of the British government to oppose Irish demands” undoubtedly “facilitated” the gains, such as they were, of 1782, these gains argues Vincent Morley “were not inspired by American thought.”8 Indeed, in the view of many scholars, there is no reason to compare the Irish and American Revolutions: they simply had divergent agendas. The Irish had no interest in real independence. This view is defended both by scholars who advance a class-based interpretation of Irish developments and those who focus on high politics. “There is scarcely a vestige of reliable evidence to support the theory that any segment of the Vol- unteers or an influential or responsible Irish leaders seriously meditated either violence or separation from England,” insists 7P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 153; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1660-1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 251; Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 298; Alan Taylor adds that “Ireland’s Catholic majority still lacked political rights”: American Revolutions (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016), 305. 8Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 331-32; O’Brien, Anglo-Irish Politics, 168-70. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 243 Maurice O’Connell in his classic social account of Irish politics in the period.9 Inspired by the occasion to reconsider Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, I question these views. In the robust political discussions from the 1770s and 1780s, the Irish developed a political vocabulary remarkably similar to that which emerged in British North America. They too focused on British corruption, the abandonment of the principles of liberty, and the need to restore political virtue. They, too, placed their struggle to restore their rights in the context of the international retreat from liberty. Just as the Americans preferred imperial reform to independence, so did the Irish. Just as the Americans moved from political economic concerns and non-importation agreements to fundamental constitutional issues, so did the Irish. Just as the American discussion became ever more widespread, ever more popular, so did the Irish. But whereas American demands for imperial reform were stymied by an entrenched, powerful, and conservative government under the leadership of Lord North, the Irish made huge gains after North’s government fell and was replaced by governments that shared much of the ideological outlook of the Patriots. That the Irish gains proved to be limited and unsatisfactory in the long term had everything to do with the failure, after valiant efforts, to reconfigure the empire in confederal terms. Just as the Articles of Confederation had provided an unstable and unsatisfying constitutional solution in North America, so the Anglo-Irish constitutional experiment of 1782 foundered because its institutional basis was too weak. I The acute, eloquent, and often acerbic British political ob- server Horace Walpole noted in 1779 that “Ireland has much 9Maurice O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 396; Marshall, Re- making the

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