Ideological Origins of the Irish Revolution

Home , British rule in Ireland, Dublin Castle, Francis Dobbs, Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, Irish House of Commons

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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 (hereafter HEH).

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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 important 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 observer 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 British Atlantic, 138.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 244 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the air of Americanizing.”10 Walpole knew full well of what he spoke. He knew that the ideological temperature in Ireland had been steadily rising since George Viscount Townshend had arrived as Lord Lieutenant in August 1767. He knew that the arguments against perceived British oppression were so similar that he could think of no “distinction” by which “the cause of the one and the other can be discriminated.”11 Walpole’s well- informed views echoed those of the Irish MP John Forbes who predicted, in December 1779, that if things did not change quickly “we shall have probably armed insurrections in this country of an alarming nature.”12 Two sets of publications radically altered the ideological terrain in Ireland in 1779. “At this period,” recalled one Irish patriot, “a number of well-written and spirited writings filled the newspapers, and drew the attention of the people to their situation: Guatimozin’s and Owen Roe O’Nial’s Letters, de- servedly caught the public eye and patriotism began to diffuse itself through every breast.”13 These wildly popular and oft reprinted collections of essays were no tame affairs. They explicitly broached the subject of complete separation from the British Empire. Joseph Pollock, Irish barrister and author of the Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, asked “whether in the present posture of affairs it is probably whether Ireland might recover her independence? And secondly, is independence worth contending for?”14 Pollock answered both questions in the affirmative, citing the Dutch and Swiss heroic strug- gles for independence, as well as the contemporary events

10Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill) to Horace Mann, May 9, 1779, The Yale Edi- tion of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-1983), 24:473. 11Horace Walpole to Francis Ingram Seymour Conway 2nd Marquess of Hertford, October 30, 1782, Walpole’s Correspondence, 39:394–95. 12John Forbes (House of Commons, Dublin) to William Petty 2nd Earl of Shel- burne, December 2, 1779, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 9, British Library, London. 13Francis Dobbs, A History of Irish Affairs (Dublin: M. Mills, 1782), 11; Charles Henry Wilson, A Compleat Collection of the Resolutions of the Volunteers (Dublin: Joseph Hill, 1782), 1:cxxxviii-cxxxix. 14[Joseph Pollock], Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial (Ireland, 1779), 6. Pollock later played a central role in drawing up the Dungannon Resolutions of 1782: Dobbs, His- tory, 52.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 245 in North America, as models for Ireland.15 In the Letters of Guatimozin, the popular master of Dublin’s Rotunda Lying-in Hospital, Frederick Jebb, openly contemplated the possibility that the powers of Europe, including France, would assist in “setting Ireland free.”16 No wonder Francis Dobbs, younger brother of the former Governor of North Carolina, prominent Irish Volunteer and author of the play The Irish Chief or Patriot King, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, warned the Prime Minister Lord North that while the Irish “are attached to England, and seek a connection to her in preference to the rest of mankind,” their “first attachment is to freedom, and every other is a secondary consideration.”17 Clearly the most influential writers of 1779 could imagine separation from England.18 The “patriotism” that “began to diffuse itself in every breast” in Ireland in the later 1770s and 1780s was remarkably similar to the ideological nexus carefully described by Bernard Bailyn in Ideological Origins. The scope and quality of the literary output of the Irish Revolution—here defined as cov- ering the period 1778–1783—was similar coming from the publishing houses in North America. In Ireland, too, newspapers proliferated, broadsides poured forth, and satirical prints circulated in large numbers. American presses produced “more than 400” pamphlets “bearing on the Anglo-American controversy” between 1750 and 1776. For their part, Irish presses produced more than 300 discussing the Anglo-Irish dispute between 1778 and 1783.19

15Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 17-21. 16Frederick Jebb, The Letters of Guatimozin (Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1779), 18. Thomas Birch heard talk of just such an option in Down in 1782: Thomas Birch (Down) to William Petty 2nd Earl of Shelburne, 19 July 1782, Add MS 88906/3/2, f. 110r, BL. 17Francis Dobbs, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord North (London: S. Bladon, 1780), 11. The Irish Chief was first performed in Dublin in 1773 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1777: The Irish Chief or Patriot King (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1777). 18Danny Mansergh has noted the “extremism” of Pollock and Jebb in 1779: Grat- tan’s Failure: Parliamentary Opposition and the People in Ireland 1779-1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 41. 19The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8. My calculation of the Irish output comes from an analysis of the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database, the Making of the Modern World database, and the collections held in Yale University Libraries. About

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 246 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Irish pamphleteers shared much of the intellectual vocabulary of their American brethren. They too knew their classical sources and used them instrumentally to argue for the superiority of free states.20 They too deployed the arguments of “enlightenment rationalism.”21 The Irish polemicists, like the American ones, made frequent reference to English Common Law. In Ireland William Blackstone, in particular, often came in for abuse because of his insistence that Britain could bind Ireland “in all cases whatsoever.” Blackstone, sneered the Irish Patriot Charles O’Hara, was “too fatally ignorant of Ireland.”22 For the Irish as for the Americans, this wide range of intellectual referents and sources were full of “incongruities and contradistinctions.” All sides in the Irish debate deployed classical texts, enlightenment treatises, and common law principles.23 In Ireland, as in North America, “the radical social and political thought” of the English writers of the seventeenth century as refracted and reinterpreted by eighteenth-century writers provided much of the repertoire of revolution. Un- surprisingly the Irish read and drew heavily on the works of John Trenchard, an alumnus of Trinity College and on contemporary Patriots such as Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and John Cartwright. But among the Irish, the writings of the

10% of the pamphlets I analyzed appeared only in the Beinecke Library. Many satirical prints occurred uniquely in the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library. 20Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 23-26. These themes are ubiquitous. See Andrew Alexander, The Advantage of a General Knowledge of the Use of Arms. Preached before the Strabane, Finwater and Urney Volunteers and the Strabane Rangers. 10 October 1779 (Strabane: James Blyth, 1779), 12-14; Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 10- 11; Jebb, The Letters of Guatimozin, 19; Times: Addressed to the Virtuous and Spirited Freemen of Ireland (Dublin: William Hallhead, 1780), [5]. The Irish also used classical examples to show that free states made the worst imperial masters. 21Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 26; Jebb, Letters of Guatimozin, title page, 8-9; Wil- son, A Compleat Collection, 1:clx-clxiii; On the Irish enlightenment, see Michael Brown, Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 22Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 30; Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 21-22; Jebb, The Letters of Guatimozin, 47-48; Charles Francis Sheridan, Observations on the Doc- trine laid down by Sir William Blackstone (Dublin: Company of Booksellers, 1779); Charles O’Hara Sr. (Dublin) to Charles O’Hara Jr., 25 January 1766, MS 20,393, Na- tional Library of Ireland, Dublin (hereafter NLI). 23Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 33.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 247 late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish radical, William Molyneux, loomed particularly large.24 In Ireland, as in North America, the Patriot critics empha- sized the loss of liberty. They, too, praised the English/British for having promulgated a free constitution. They, too, lamented that in recent history that constitution was in the process of being destroyed through the corruption of ministers and the deployment of standing armies. They, too, identified a powerful conspiracy against that liberty.25 Irish Patriots, like patriots all across the British Empire knew they were living through the decline of the British Empire. “The state of the British Empire,” Samuel Barber preached to the Castlewellan Rangers and Rathfriland Volunteers, “hath declined greatly in the present reign.” The cause was not far to seek. “When venality and corruption, luxury and universal dissolution of manners pervade all orders and ranks of men, such a wicked state, though left to itself will fall to pieces.”26 “The legislative power of England has become more corrupt than the executive,” wrote Joseph Pollock following Mon- tesquieu, “through that corruption the executive commands the legislative, and in effect they are one.”27 “For series of years preceding our present distress,” James Crombie lectured in the Dissenting Meeting House in Belfast, “a very general dissolution of manners prevailed.” The result, he said, was “a generous apostasy from patriotic principles, and virtuous manners” beginning in the seat of the Empire.28 Irish Patriots believed that “venality and corruption” had become politically more manifest

24Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 34–45; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959: repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 130–71; Patrick Kelly, “William Molyneux and the Spirit of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 3 (1988): 133–48. Molyneux’s writing also deeply influenced the thinking of Benjamin Franklin: Carla J. Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 236-40. 25Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 45-54, 61-63, 86-93, 144-59. 26Samuel Barber, A Sermon Delivered at the Meeting House of Rathfriland (Newry: Joseph Gordon, 1779), 3. 27Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 33. 28James Crombie, The Expedience and Utility of Volunteer Associations (Belfast: James Magee, 1779), 9, 12.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 248 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in Ireland in recent times. While the Irish Patriots knew well that successive viceroys had governed Ireland through political undertakers, those undertakers had at least expressed the views of a segment of Irish society. All this had changed after George Viscount Townshend, Charles Townshend’s elder brother, became Lord Lieutenant. Under his role, in the words of the wildly popular authors of Baratariana, “every mystery of corruption” was deployed in order to wage “war against power, abilities and integrity.”29 Joseph Pollock agreed. Observing the widening tendrils of the British government in Ireland, he declared that “corruption in a dependent nation is the very malignity of corruption. In passing through a multitude, and through the servants of servants, instead of being filtered, it acquires successive contamination.”30 The British government in Ireland ruled through “a scandalous system of corruption,” the Irish Patriot Henry Flood crisply concluded.31 In Ireland, as in America, patriots lamented the influence that standing armies had on their polity and their manners. Under Townshend’s government, the Patriot authors of Baratariana lamented, successful moves were made to limit the possibilities of an Irish militia and augment the numbers of the standing army in Ireland. “We were treated like a ravaged country,” they complained, “where contributions are levied, to maintain the very force that oppresses us.”32 This was why patriots right across Ireland greeted the emergence of the Vol- unteers in the later 1770s with such enthusiasm. “To arms, to

29Baratariana: A Select Collection of Fugitive Political Pieces (Dublin, 1772), 240. The “political letters” gathered together in Baratariana were thought to be “replete with wit and humor, inferior perhaps to nothing of the kind except the letters of Ju- nius”: Thomas Campbell, A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (Dublin: W. Whitestone et. al, 1778), 59. Even before Townshend deployed his arts, John Dickin- son perceived that British rule in Ireland in the 1760s offered a model of government by corruption: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: David Hall and William Sellers, 1768), 50-54. The Irish particularly commented on the corrupt practices of North’s minions in Ireland: George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, Earl Temple (Dublin Castle) to Thomas Townshend, October 8, 1782, ST 17/2, 17, HEH. 30Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 34. 31[Henry Flood], Letter to the People of Ireland (Dublin: Isaac Colles, 1779), 22. 32Baratariana, 33; Henry Grattan, Observations on the Mutiny Bill (London: J. Stockdale, 1781), 6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 249 arms, liberty or death,” was the universal cry. “The free states of ancient times owed their greatness to their native citizens in arms,” explained James Crombie to the United Companies of Belfast Volunteers. “The same causes will in every age produce similar effects.”33 The Irish, therefore dated British corruption and hence British imperial decline to the recent past. They, like the British Americans, looked fondly back to a past when British rule was associated with liberty. It was Charles II who “mon- strously built” the edifice of British parliamentary usurpation, argued Frederick Jebb. “The age of our tyranny does not greatly exceed a century,” he reasoned. “Your fathers were slaves and lost their liberties to the legislature of England,” Henry Grattan lectures the Irish House of Commons, “men of overgrown fortunes became the very jobbers of corruption.” Most Irish Patriots, however, increasingly came to date the magnification of corruption and the onset of a nefarious plot to impose tyranny with the accession of George III. “From the very zenith of national prosperity, within something less than twenty years, we are reduced to a situation that pours dismay into our souls,” preached James Crombie in 1779, “we have fallen with a rapidity almost unexampled in the history of the world.” There had been, Crombie explained, “a generous apostasy from patriotic principles.”34 Patriots across the empire placed the loss of liberty in a broad imperial context. “I have never varied in my principles, and I have lived to have the satisfaction of seeing those principles triumphant,” wrote Horace Walpole optimistically after the fall of North’s government in 1782. “Ireland by having adopted them will become a great and flourishing country; and nothing but the revival ofthem

33Samuel Butler (Curate of St. Michan, Dublin), A Sermon, Goldsmiths’ Company of Volunteers in Dublin. 17 October 1779 (Dublin: M. Mills, 1779), 22; Alexander, The Advantage of a General Knowledge of the Use of Arms, 7-8, 11, 21; Crombie, The Expedience and Utility of Volunteer Associations, 31-32. 34Jebb, Letters of Guatimozin, 14; Henry Grattan, April 19, 1780, Debates in the House of Commons of Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1780), v; and Crombie, The Expedience and Utility of Volunteer Associations, 8, 12.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 250 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY here can restore this island to any part of the splendor which it had acquired” during the age of William Pitt the Elder.35 The Irish, like their American counterparts, placed their struggle for liberty in a broad international context. In their view, the forces of corruption and tyranny were threatening freedom throughout the world.36 Irish commentators and their British Patriot allies lamented the loss of liberty in Corsica and Sweden. They worried about the disastrous British attacks on freedom in India and North America. The members of the Yankee Club of County Tyrone lamented the “direful principle of despotic sway pervading al courts and countries of the world.” But above all they celebrated Ireland’s poten- tial to become a new beacon for liberty. “Turn,” said Henry Grattan, “to the rest of Europe, you will find the ancient spirit everywhere expired. Sweden has lost her liberty; England is expiring.” Ireland was the exception. “You are the only people who have recovered your constitution—who have recovered it by steady virtue. Ye not only excel Modern Europe, but ye excel whatever she can boast of old.”37 Irish Patriots shared a political vocabulary, a political analysis, and a political prescription with their North American fellows. Both groups drew upon a patriot political arsenal developed in the seventeenth century and honed in the early eighteenth century and believed deeply that Britain, once the beacon of liberty, had descended in recent times into a quagmire of corruption with disastrous consequences for its imperial subjects. Contemporaries, unlike modern scholars, highlighted the deep ideological connections between the American revolutionaries and their Irish counterparts. British government officials, for example, sought to uncover the illicit passages through which pernicious American ideas traveled to Ireland. The North Ministry believed, with some reason, that “the

35Horace Walpole, to Francis Ingram-Seymour Conway 2nd Marquess of Hertford, October 30, 1782, Walpole’s Correspondence, 39:395-96. 36Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 64-66. 37Pa. Jour., July 24, 1782, Pollock, Letters of Owen Roe O’Nial, 7; [John Almon], The Revolution in 1782 Considered, 3rd ed. (London: J. Debrett, 1782), 13-14, 26.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 251 wicked machinations of Dr. Franklin” had strengthened ties “between the Rebel Congress and the people of Ireland.” North himself believed that “some emissaries of France and America” had “set Ireland in a flame.”38 The Earl Temple, who was much more sympathetic to the patriot cause, also believed that “the connection of the Northern Volunteers with America has spread those opinions so fatal to Great Britain infinitely more in this country than I could have imagined.”39 Both Irish Patriots and their ministerial opponents could not help but notice the deep structural and ideological connections between the Irish and American situations. The anonymous author of the first letter in the Baratariana collection, dated to January 1768, warned Americans that “the same arts which may be capable of destroying our liberties, must certainly operate more strongly against yours.” The Irish, the author believed, were the first victims of “ministerial tyranny,” but because “your circumstances and ours being exactly the same” the Americans would surely be next.40 A decade later, Irish Patriots were convinced that the British had targeted America first. The Irish and Americans were “sharers in one common calamity,” thought Francis Dobbs, “if Great Britain succeeded in establishing British supremacy over the colonies, Ireland would be included.”41 “Matters as they now stand between England and Ireland,” maintained one pro-ministerial pam- phleteer, “though not exactly parallel, yet in some instances are extremely similar to those between England and the colonies at the commencement of the present unfortunate contest.”42

38Thomas Digges (Stepney) to Benjamin Franklin, December 3, 1779, vol. 39. Franklin had in fact toured Ireland in the 1770s and met “with the principal Patriots there”: Benjamin Franklin (London) to Thomas Cushing, January 13, 1772, Franklin Papers, vol. 19, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//framedVolumes.jsp (accessed De- cember 7, 2017). Frederick North Lord North (Bushy Park) to John Hobart 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, November 14, 1779, PE 249, HEH. 39George Nugent-Temple-Grenville Earl Temple (Dublin Castle) to Thomas Town- shend, October 1, 1782, 17/2, 13, HEH. 40Baratariana, 2. 41Dobbs, History of Irish Affairs, 8-9. 42A Candid Display of the Reciprocal Conduct of Great Britain and Her Colonies (Dublin: P. Highly, [1780]), 30.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 252 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY From 1779 these observers drew sharp political conclusions from the obvious parallels. The Anglo-Irish nobleman Robert Nugent warned the British Parliament that just as their commercial policies had lost them their American colonies they need to beware that by restrictions on trade “did not lose Ireland next by separation or invasion.”43 The English patriot James Luttrell thought that “the loss of Ireland might probably follow that of America.”44 “The miscarriages of British tyranny beyond the Atlantic,” observed Joseph Pollock, “has taught Irishmen the practicability of their own emancipation from the authority of an usurping English government.”45 Because North’s administration had acted in Ireland as “they have acted in almost every other” business including that of America, Horace Walpole fumed, “Ireland is little less estranged than America.”46 Noting the Irish “spirit is in a train towards independency,” the Virginian Arthur Lee who was a close observer of Irish developments and Irish discourse, concluded in 1779 that “Ireland is nearly in the state we were in six years ago.”47 Ireland had developed the ideological tools for revolution in the 1770s and 1780s. Irish writers of that period, though lacking the panache, the flamboyance, or the biting sarcasm of earlier Irish contributors to the patriot tradition, developed an increasingly sharp critique of the injustice of British imperial rule. While the Irish may or may not have been directly influenced by American incendiaries, they certainly learned from the American experience and drew upon many of the same ideological inspirations. Indeed, it is fair to say that the Irish formed part of a transatlantic patriot ideological nexus, along with the Americans and their sympathizers in England, Scotland, and the West Indies.

43Robert Nugent Lord Nugent, January 19, 1779, Parliamentary Register (London: J. Almon, 1775-1780), 11:219. 44James Luttrell, May 26, 1779, Parl. Reg., 13:151. 45Pollock, Letters of Own Roe O’Nial, 24. 46To Sir Horace Mann, April 7, 1782, Walpole’s Correspondence, 25:267. 47Arthur Lee (Paris) to Committee of Foreign Affairs, May 21, 1779, The Revo- lutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889), 3:172 (hereafter Rev. Dipl. Corres.).

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Why did this corpus of ideas, this vocabulary of dissent in Ireland, transform itself into the language of revolution? Why were Irish patriots able suddenly, in the late 1770s and early 1780s, to transform widespread discontent into a potent social movement that demanded and ultimately achieved profound changes in the governance of Ireland? After an explosion of debate and agitation provoked by Ireland’s severe economic downturn in 1778–1779, the re- luctant administration of Fredrick Lord North had conceded limited free trade to the Irish. The Irish associators and their political allies in the Irish Parliament had apparently achieved their aims in the Winter of 1779–1780. They had persuaded first the Irish Parliament to demand free trade and thenthe British Parliament to grant concrete measures for economic relief. Why did that not put an end to Irish parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition to Lord North’s government? Initially wide swaths of the Irish population were delighted with the British commercial concessions. “Every person I met endeavored to exceed his neighbor in expressions of unbound gratitude to Lord Hillsborough” and “extravagant panegyrics on Lord North,” John Forbes reported on his return to Ire- land from England in early 1780. Initially, Francis Dobbs was forced to admit, the British concessions on free trade “gave pretty general satisfaction.”48 Nevertheless, many in Ireland began to claim that coerced concessions were insecure concessions; that something more was needed to guarantee the future prosperity and liberty of the kingdom. Just as Lord North found it expedient to grant commercial concessions to Ireland, warned Francis Dobbs, “it may hereafter be deemed expedient to revoke the very indulgencies you now find it expedient to grant.”49 “I do not

48John Forbes (Dublin) to William Petty 2nd Earl of Shelburne, February 4, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 13v, BL. Dobbs, A Letter to the Right Honourable Lord North (London: S. Bladen, 1780), 5-6. 49Dobbs, A Letter to Lord North, 9. The former Irish Secretary and supporter of Lord North, William Eden, later made an identical point in the British Parliament,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 254 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY think enough has been done,” agreed the Anglo-Irishman Lord Beauchamp, “I wish to remove if possible the grounds of future discontents.”50 “I do acknowledge the grant of a free trade was a very great favor,” averred the Wexford MP George Ogle, “but will any man pretend to say that an English Act may not repeal this free trade.”51 “The most enlightened part” of the Irish nation, concluded John Adams after reading the latest issue of the Leyden Gazette, thought free trade was “purely precarious as long as the British legislature shall have the right to make laws for Ireland.”52 On April 19, 1780 the Patriot member for Charlemont, Henry Grattan, rose to his feet in the Irish House of Com- mons to call for just such an Irish Bill of Rights. He called for Britain to “restore your political as she has your commercial freedom.” He rehearsed the now well-worn argument that “your trade is in the power of England whenever she may think it proper to take it away. We are allowed a moment of satisfaction but not a relief from slavery.” He thundered, in language not dissimilar to that deployed in North America, against “the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy.” “Three millions of people” in Ireland, Grattan proclaimed, demanded “a present and explicit bill of rights.” “Eighteen counties,” he assured his auditors, “have petitioned for this redemption,” “the public mind will never be at ease until the shackles are removed.”53 Grattan’s call for an Irish Bill of Rights was a turning point, not because he persuaded the majority of his fellow MPs, but because he failed miserably to do so.54 The overwhelming

arguing that instead of showing “gratitude for the blessing which had just been extended them, began to be jealous”: April 8, 1782, Parl. Reg., 7:2–3. 50Francis Ingram Seymour Conway Lord Beauchamp (London) to Edmund Sexton Pery, December 15, 1779, PE 308, HEH. 51George Ogle and Richard Martin both on April 19, 1780, Debates in the Irish Commons, 7, 3. 52John Adams (Paris) to President of Congress, April 25, 1780, Rev. Dipl. Corres., 3:631. 53April 19, 1780, Debates in the Irish Commons, ii-vi. 54Mansergh, Grattan’s Failure, 46–47. Grattan’s motion was defeated by an adjourn- ment motion, 136 to 97: James Kelly, Henry Grattan (Dublin: Historical Association of Ireland, 1993), 14.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 255 defeat of his call for a Bill of Rights convinced many throughout Ireland that Parliament could no longer be a force for reform. The Irish Parliament, as they long had reason to sus- pect was corrupt and too much under the thumb of the British lord lieutenant and the ministry. Instead the Irish turned to extra-parliamentary sources of authority. The American War had forced the Irish to erect just such an extra-parliamentary authority in 1778 and 1779. In order to fight both an imperial civil war and a global war against the French, the British government had withdrawn the troops normally stationed in Ireland. As rumors of a French invasion proliferated, “the people of Ireland resolved to defend themselves” and created corps of volunteers throughout the width and breadth of the kingdom.55 Volunteer corps spread like wildfire. By the end of 1779, most people thought there were at least 15,000 Irishmen in arms.56 By the following year that number had at least tripled. And by 1782 some thought, based on the returns of the corps commanders, there were at least 100,000 Irishmen in arms.57 By late summer 1780 the Patriot lawyer the Earl of Camden could write confidently

55Irish defense was deemed to be “critical” by January: Clotworthy Upton Baron Templetown (Castle Upton) to John Hobart 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, January 5 1779, SP 63/464, f. 19r, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, London; John Hobart 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire (Dublin Castle) to Edmund Sexton Pery, July 3, 1779, PE 196, HEH. On the need for volunteers: Wilson, Compleat Collection, 1:cxlviii; Alexander, The Advantage of a General Knowledge of the Use of Arms, October 10, 1779, 21; Crombie, The Expedience and Utility of Volunteer Associations, August 1, 1779, 8; Dobbs, History of Irish Affairs, 9; Flood, Letter to the People of Ireland, 16; George Sackville Germain (Pall Mall) to Edmund Sexton Pery, July 15, 1779, PE 114, HEH. 56Dobbs, History of Irish Affairs, 9-10; Arthur Lee (Paris) to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, November 6, 1779, Rev. Dipl. Corres., 3:402–403. Horace Walpole claimed there were 40,000: to Lady Ailesbury, October 28, 1779, Walpole’s Correspon- dence, 39:342. 57John Forbes (Dublin) to Shelburne, 2 December 1779, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 10v, BL; Edmund Jenings (Brussels) to John Adams, March 5, 1780, The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. Sara Martin (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008-2017), 9:15. https://www.masshist.org/publications/apde2/view?id=PJA09d015 (accessed December 7, 2017); John Adams (Paris) to President of Congress, March 26, 1780, and John Adams (Paris) to President of Congress, 25 April 1780, Rev. Dipl. Corres., 3:576, 629-30; Thomas Birch (Down) to Shelburne, 19 July 1782, Add MS 88906/3/2, f. 110r, BL; Independent Ledger and American Advertiser, December 23, 1782; Connecticut Journal, June 6, 1782; Mansergh, Grattan’s Failure, 75.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 256 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY from County Down that “I do not believe there is a village in the whole kingdom without a corps” of volunteers.58 While the volunteers came into being to defend the country against a French invasion they quickly became much more than that. The Volunteer Corps soon moved from conduct- ing military drills to holding political debates. “The people were accustomed to associate in arms, and sensible of their importance, conferred began to speak and think with more freedom of that state of subjection in which they had too long been held,” reported Charles Wilson of the Volunteer Corps. “The cry of liberty spread through their different associations,” Wilson remembered, “their union served to strengthen and diffuse the flame.” “The Volunteer Corps are daily increasing and are equally vigilant and spirited,” agreed John Forbes, “they seemed to determined not to rest on their arms and not to quit the field till their constitution is restored to them.”59 The Volunteers were not a loose set of like-minded people who occasionally gathered together. They quickly adopted rules and practices both for their military exercises and for their lively debates.60 Like the American revolutionaries in the early 1770s, they soon established committees of correspondence to coordinate their activities and call general meetings.61 The

58Charles Pratt 1st Earl of Camden (Saintfield, County Down) to Shelburne, September 2, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/4, f. 137r, BL. 59Wilson, A Compleat Collection, 1:cl; John Forbes (Dublin) to Shelburne, February 4, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/10, f 17, BL; Conway, British Isles and the War of American Independence, 211. 60Their formal rules can be followed in: Minute Book of the Men of Mourne Volunteer Corps, T1317/1, Minute Book of the Newry First Volunteer Company, T3202/1A, and Minutes of the 1st and 2nd Companies of Newtownards Volunteers, in the Castlereagh Papres, D3030/R, which are in the Public Record Office of North- ern Ireland. The Minute Book of the Ennis Volunteers, MS 828 and the Minute Book of the Doneraile Rangers, MS 12155, NLI. I am grateful to Catherine Tourangeau for these references. 61John Adams (Paris) to President of Congress, June 1, 1780, Rev. Dipl. Corres., 3:747-49. Edmund Jenings noted the similarity between the new Committees of Cor- respondence and the Massachusetts Committees: Jenings (Brussels) to John Adams, March 5, 1780, Adams Papers Digital Edition, 9:16. Contemporaries placed rather more emphasis on the importance institutions than later scholars: Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 122–23 emphasizes “the loose, informal relations of sharers in a common body of beliefs” as against a notion of “revolutionary cells.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 257 Volunteer Corps became an alternative government in the kingdom of Ireland. They became, in short, a powerful institution. Nor were the Volunteers, as some have argued, an exclusively Protestant group.62 When in 1779 “in consequence of the late alarm of a French invasion,” Volunteers assembled to protect the country in Cork and Tipperary: “the Roman Catholic gen- tlemen voluntarily offered to incorporate themselves with their fellow subjects and assist in the defense of their country.”63 The Presbyterian minister Samuel Barber, preaching before Castlewellan Rangers and Rathfriland Volunteers, called on Ro- man Catholics to “join with them in a common cause.”64 “The law has made the Roman Catholic our fellow citizen,” averred Henry Flood of the Volunteers, “the association will give him the opportunity of signing himself a fellow citizen.”65 This was not merely an ideal. The Protestant speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Edmund Sexton Pery, worked with the Roman Catholic merchants of Limerick “to raise a considerable number of men” for the defense of the kingdom. In 1782 the Culloden Volunteers specifically invited “respectable persons of every religious denomination” to join their number.66 The emergence of the Volunteer Corps transformed the nature of Irish politics. Prior to their emergence there had been widespread discontent in Ireland. Prior to their emergence there had been an articulate group of writers who had offered increasingly pointed criticisms of the British governance of Ireland and an increasingly vocal Patriot opposition in the Irish Parliament. But discontent ebbed and flowed. Writers were answered by pro-government pamphleteers or bought off by the Castle government. And the Patriot opposition not only

62For the standard view, see Conway, British Isles and the War of American Inde- pendence, 20, 175; Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 323. 63Freeman’s Journal, June 15, 1779, 16, no. 128:511. 64Barber, Sermon Delivered a . . . Rathfriland, 9. 65Flood, Letter to the People of Ireland, 53. 66Edmund Sexton Pery to John Hobart 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, July 17, 1779, PE 279, HEH. These men may have been asked to serve either in the remaining army regiments or among the Volunteers. In 1782 the City of Limerick formally invited Ro- man Catholics to join their Volunteer Corps: Wilson, Compleat Collection, 204, 261; Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, 99.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 258 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY was susceptible to the lure of public office, but that opposition was also only called into being when the lord lieutenant chose to summon a Parliament. The Volunteers brought with them a new political paradigm in Ireland. Just as in North America, the transformation in Ireland involved reformulating political ideas.67 In Ireland and above all in the Volunteer Corps, new concepts of representation, the constitution, and sovereignty emerged. In Ireland, most came to reject notions that they were fully represented in either the corrupt Irish or British Parliament. In Ireland, too, patriots yearned for a constitution that was a set of principles as well as a set of institutions. And, in Ireland, the Patriots rejected the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and strove to come up with more complex notions. Above all, in Ireland, the new political paradigm involved an appeal to the public.68 Contemporaries widely commented on the transformation of Irish politics. “A great change in a short time has been wrought in the public mind,” thought Henry Grattan, “an alteration has followed in the national condition.” Grattan believed that the emergence of the Volunteers and the consequent spread of public debate provided a necessary check on the corruption of the traditional institutions. “Nor have we only a right to dis- cuss political questions,” he insisted, “but debate and condemn such as have received the approbation of Parliament; otherwise corruption prevailing in the senate would silence the nation.”69 “There are moments big with the fate of nations: 1779 appears to be peculiarly so with respect to Ireland,” agreed Charles Wil- son who praised Grattan in particular for his role. It was from that moment, Wilson claimed, that “the re-illumined mind rec- ognized her lost liberties, and determined to reclaim them.”70 After attending the reviews of the Volunteers in Belfast and Downpatrick, the Earl of Camden concluded that the

67Here I draw inspiration from Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 160–229. 68This appeal to the public, “appealing to public opinion rather than to rulers and their ministers,” was characteristic of the Enlightenment: John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9, 35-37. 69Grattan, Observations on the Mutiny Bill, 4, 6. 70Wilson, Compleat Collection, 1:cxxxviii–cxxxix.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 259 Volunteers had “done more to reform the manners of Ireland than all the preaching since the days of St. Patrick.”71 The Irish “constitution is now reduced to a state in which no public ben- efit can be obtained but by the collective body of the people,” Henry Flood averred in 1779. Because “the majority of those who composed the legislature” could be corrupted, he warned, there could be “no security, but the interposition of the people.”72 “The people of this country have no sort of confidence in this present Parliament,” Francis Dobbs succinctly put it.73 John Adams, always a keen and well-informed observer of Irish affairs proclaimed that “a new epocha is formed in the politics of Ireland.” “Hitherto they had left the supreme direction of affairs in the hands of Parliament,” he elaborated, “the people have now taken it into their own hands.”74 In the early 1780s, political power in Ireland had shifted away from the British Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle, away from the members of the Irish Parliament, and into the hands of the people in the form of the Volunteers. The Earl of Carlisle, who succeeded the Earl of Buckinghamshire as North’s viceroy in Ireland, tried to deploy all the arts and techniques of patronage and persuasion to tame the popular clamor for an Irish Bill of Rights. In the end, Carlisle had to confess that he was “not able to silence the people.”75 “A Patriotic frenzy seems to have seized upon almost everybody,” reported Francis Matthew from Cashel.76 This was not merely the paranoia of supporters of the North Ministry. Upon his ar- rival in Ireland as lord lieutenant, the Patriot duke of Portland,

71Camden (Newtown) to Shelburne, July 30, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/4, ff. 132-133, BL. 72Flood, Letter to the People of Ireland, 47–48. 73Dobbs (Dublin) to Shelburne, August 17, 1782, Add MS 88906/3/8, f. 3r, BL. 74John Adams (Paris) to President of Congress, June 1, 1780, Rev. Dipl. Corres., 3:749. 75Fredrick Howard 5th earl of Carlisle (Dublin Castle) to Wills Hill Earl of Hills- borough, March 26, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 3, Carlisle (Dublin Castle) to Hillsborough, March 28, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 19r, and Lord Muskerry (Springfield) to William Eden, March 23, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 27, TNA. 76Francis Matthew (Thomastown, Cashel) to William Eden (?), March 19, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 5v, TNA.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 260 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY marveled at “the power of the Volunteers” and “the absolute submission which is paid them by every rank and order of men.”77 Portland’s successor, the Earl Temple, agreed that “the sword of the Volunteers has made them masters of the country.”78 Portland was under no doubt that Irish politics had been transformed. “It is no longer the Parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to,” he explained to his friend Shelburne, “it is the whole of this country. It is the Church, the Law, the Army, I fear, when I consider how it is composed, the merchant, the tradesman, the manufacturer, the farmer, the laborer, the Catholic, the Dissenter, the Protestant.”79 Between 1780 and 1782, Volunteers and Patriots debated what should be done to restore the liberty of Ireland. They discussed the principles upon which to base the Irish constitution. They argued about how to establish the contours of sovereignty. In January 1782, every volunteer corps in Ulster was sum- moned to meet at Dungannon in County Tyrone for a Con- vention. At the event 242 delegates representing 143 corps of volunteers attended the meeting in February. They debated and ultimately adopted a series of resolutions in part drafted by the radical Francis Dobbs.80 These resolutions, in large part, recast and reframed Henry Grattan’s call for an Irish Bill of Rights. The Ulster Volunteers insisted that the current constitutional arrangements in Ireland were unacceptable.81 “The powers ex- ercised by the Privy Council of both kingdoms under, or under color of the Law of Poyning’s [sic],” the Volunteers declared, “are unconstitutional and a grievance.” Poynings’ Law, a 1494

77William Henry Cavendish Bentinck 3rd duke of Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shel- burne, April 16, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 78r, TNA. 78Temple (Dublin Castle) to Thomas Townshend, September 21, 1782, , ST 17/2, 8, HEH. 79Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, April 24, 1782, HO 100/1, ff. 135–136, TNA. 80Henry Grattan Jr., Memoirs of the Life and Times of Henry Grattan (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 2:206. Memoirs of Francis Dobbs. (Dublin: J. Jones, 1800), 8. The best account of the Dungannon Convention is Mansergh, Grattan’s Failure, 57–67. 81Circulated in America, the Dungannon Resolutions were printed in the Salem Gazette, July 25, 1782 and were discussed in Pa. Jour., July 24, 1782.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 261 statute that required the Privy Councils of both kingdoms to approve the legislative agenda of the Irish Parliament prior to its meeting. The Volunteers demanded Irish legislative independence and, in the case of the Ulster Volunteers included a call for judicial independence. They “resolved unanimously” that “the independence of judges is equally essential to the impartial administration of justice in Ireland as in England.” No longer did the Volunteers think that court cases should be appealed to the English Court of King’s Bench for final adju- dication. No longer should the British House of Lords be the court of final appeal for Ireland. The Volunteers also insisted on an unencumbered right of the Irish to make their own commercial policy. They “resolved unanimously that the ports of this country are, by right, open to all foreign countries, not at war with the king, and that any burden thereupon or obstruction thereto, save only by the Parliament of Ireland, are unconstitutional, illegal and a grievance.” Finally, the Ulster Volunteers committed themselves to religious toleration and improving the plight of Ireland’s Roman Catholic majority. Only two out of the over 240 delegates dissented from the resolution “that we hold the right of private judgment in matters of religion to be equally sacred in others as in ourselves.” The Volunteers committed themselves to much more than merely liberty of conscience. They also resolved “that as men and as Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants, we rejoice at the relaxation of the penal laws against our Roman Catholics fellow subjects, and that we conceive the measure to be fraught with the happi- est consequences to the union and prosperity to the people of Ireland.”82 Irish people from a wide variety of social backgrounds reg- istered their approval of the Dungannon Resolutions with a remarkable outpouring of public support. Over 150 different groups and associations from across the width and breadth of the country affirmed their support for the entire menu of

82Dungannon Resolutions, February 15, 1782, Wilson, Compleat Collection, 1-3. On Poynings’ Law, see James Kelly, Poynings’ Law and the Making of Law in Ireland 1660–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 262 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the resolutions. The County of Louth Regiment, the Munster Volunteers, the Limerick Independents, the First Irish Vol- unteers of County Wexford, and the First Donegal Regiment all expressed their support. So did the Arran Phalanx, the Kinsale Volunteers, the Hanover Society of Cloughnakilty, the Down Volunteers, the Tipperary Light Dragoons, and Tipper- ary Infantry, and the Muskerry True Blue Light Dragoons. In 1782, a virtual national referendum on the Dungannon Resolutions passed with overwhelming support. The Irish, tens of thousands of them in arms, demanded legislative and judicial independence, unconditional free trade, and relief for the Catholic majority. The British leading minister, Lord North, was not in a con- ciliatory mood. He had long maintained that there must be “no constitutional discussions” with respect to Ireland.83 After the free trade concessions of 1779–1780, the North administration was “alarmed” respecting “constitutional points.”84 North despised the Volunteers. While admitting that most of the Volunteers were loyal—excepting “some disaffected associations”—he insisted that it was “one of the most important and essential principles of the British constitution” that “every armed body in the country” be under “the authority of the Crown and called on “the principal persons in Ireland” to “check by every prudent means the furious spirit which has been raised in Ireland.”85 North’s newfound political ally, John Hely-Hutchinson who became a supporter of the North Administration after the concessions on free trade, denounced the illegality of the Volunteers, claiming that “having 40,000 men in arms not subject to any military law, nor amenable to any magistrate, is a matter of great consequence.”86 North threatened that “repeated menaces and insults” from the

83Thomas Dawson Viscount Cremorne (London) to Edmund Sexton Pery, Septem- ber 22, 1777, PE 70, HEH. 84William Mayne Lord Newhaven (London) to Edmund Sexton Pery, February 28, 1780, PE 239, HEH. 85Frederick Lord North (Bushy Park) Buckinghamshire, August 3, 1779, and November 14, 1779, PE 251, 249, HEH. 86John Hely-Hutchinson, April 19, 1780, Debates in the Irish Commons, 18.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 263 Irish would be met with retribution.87 On this point, North disagreed profoundly with his British patriot opponents.88 As a result of North’s profound antipathy to the Volunteers, no conciliation was in the air. “Our Ministers,” thought Lord Camden, “will have things as they are.” North’s cabinet made it clear that after 1780 they intended to “make no further concessions” to Ireland. “The line is drawn,” thought Lord Newhaven in language reminiscent of North’s position with respect to North America, “let the event be what it may.”89 By the Spring of 1782 Ireland was in a revolutionary situation. The Volunteers and their allies throughout the kingdom had almost unanimously endorsed the Dungannon Resolu- tions. The ministry under North’s guidance not only refused to budge on the constitutional issues in question, they denied the legality of the Volunteers. No wonder the earl of Camden thought “the two islands will at last be involved in a civil war.”90

III

In 1782, the Irish seemed to be in a situation closely analo- gous to that of the Americans in the mid-1770s. In both cases, patriots had developed a sharp ideological critique of British imperial rule. In both cases, pamphleteers and newspaper essayists had generated widespread popular activity. In both cases, political economic concerns proved to be insoluble without a rethinking of constitutional arrangements. And in

87Frederick Lord North (Bushy Park) to Buckinghamshire, November 14, 1779. 88Shelburne was “a professed admirer of the spirit and plan of our independent companies”: Freeman’s Journal, June 8, 1779, 16, no. 125:497; John Forbes (Dublin) to Shelburne, February 4, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 13r, 18v, BL; Richmond: Charles Lennox 3rd Duke of Richmond, November 28, 1781. Parl. Reg, 8:16. Bishop of Derry: Frederick Augustus Hervey 4th Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry (London) to Shel- burne, May 29, 1782, Add MS 88906/3/3, f. 72r, BL. Camden: Camden (Saintfield) to Shelburne, September 2, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/4, f. 137r, BL. 89Camden (Newtown) to Shelburne, July 30, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/4, f. 133r, BL;Newhaven (London) to Edmund Sexton Pery, February 28, 1780, PE 239, HEH. 90Camden (Saintfield) to Shelburne, September 2, 1780, Add MS 88906/3/4, f.137r, BL. Lord George Gordon, who knew something of insurrection, informed Shelburne in 1783 that the Volunteers had been prepared to use force in defense of their claims: Gordon (London) to Shelburne, February 4, 1783, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 130r, BL.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 264 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY both cases, debates about the constitution had shifted from a focus on institutional arrangements to an enunciation of rights and a rethinking of concepts of sovereignty. Why then was there no Irish Declaration of Independence in 1782? Why did the Irish place limits on their radicalism? Why did the Irish remain within the British Empire while the Americans did not? It is true, of course, that many of the Irish volunteer associations, and indeed Henry Grattan himself, voiced their admiration for and, wish to remain tied to, the British Em- pire. But, then, most British Americans—even most of those who supported calling the First Continental Congress in 1774—wished to remain within the empire. Both the Irish and Americans hoped for radical imperial reform in the first instance. It was the actions of North’s government in response to the First Continental Congress that played a key role in pushing the Americans and British towards imperial civil war. Many scholars have suspected or implied that Ireland could not and did not follow in the path of the American Revolution- aries because religious tensions in Ireland made a break from Britain impossible. Protestant Irish needed the threat of a British army to keep the Irish Catholic majority in subjugation. This argument has been stated recently, in its most sophisticated form, by the historian of the Irish Enlightenment, Michael Brown. For Brown, the volunteer movement involved two inevitably conflicting sets of ideas: there was “a conceptual chasm” between those who deployed “an empirical language” and appealed to history and those “who adhered to a rationalist methodology in approaching political issues.” The incompat- ibility between the two sets of ideas were already becoming manifest by 1784 when William Drennan, in arguing for the continuation of the volunteer movement, rejected the earlier call for Catholic rights and defended a “static rendition of Irish Catholic History—locked in a lower stage of history than their Protestant counterparts.” The result was the inevitable “reassertion of confessional divisions.”91

91Brown, Irish Enlightenment, 387-94.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 265 In fact, 1782 was one of those moments in Irish history where confessional accommodation, if not reconciliation, might well have been possible. Tensions there were aplenty within the Irish Volunteer and Patriot movements. Similar tensions existed within the American patriot movement. In both cases, British political intransigence had united wide swaths of people behind a popular movement calling for radical reform. In Ireland, in particular, patriot politicians and volunteer associations all agitated for Catholic relief.92 In the late 1770s, large and important segments of Irish Protestant opinion began arguing powerfully for Catholic relief as part and parcel of a program for Irish national improvement. The Church of Ireland cleric Thomas Campbell was hardly alone in thinking that Ireland’s harsh laws against Roman Catholics were out of date. They had been made when Protes- tants had every reason to fear a Catholic Jacobite restoration. “All hopes of a popish revolution being removed from the mind of every rational papist,” Campbell argued, “all fears should be removed from every rational protestant.” Now the laws against Roman Catholics only served to prevent the improvement of Ireland. “No great improvement of this country can be ratio- nally expected,” Campbell maintained at the beginning of the free trade controversy, “when the body of the people derive no advantage from that improvement, and when the penal statutes amount not only to a discouragement, but a prohibition of in- dustry.”93 Campbell’s views were shared by some of the most influential Bishops in the Church of Ireland. The Bishop of Derry maintained that the King needed to support both the Dissenting and Roman Catholic clergy. “Until the King is patron of the Popish and Presbyterian clergy,” he opined, “he

92Many Patriot and Volunteer leaders subsequently voiced opposition to Catholic relief: see Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Ques- tion 1690–1830 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992), 105–106. Even the Protestant apocalyptic Francis Dobbs celebrated “that glorious and liberal resolution towards our brethren the Roman Catholics” in 1782: History of Irish Affairs, 52. 93Campbell, Philosophical Survey, 250–51.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 266 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY is not King of Ireland.”94 Richard Woodward, the Bishop of Cloyne, who later argued against Catholic relief, maintained in 1782 that because “the first maxim of the Christian Church is toleration” it was essential to give “relief to the Catholics from the severities of the laws passed against them.”95 The volunteers not only embraced the Dungannon Con- vention’s call for Catholic relief, many of the corps elaborated further on their desire for legislation in favor of their fellow subjects. The Wexford Independents felt that “we hold the right of private judgment in matters of religion to be equally sacred in others as ourselves.” “As friends to humanity” as well as “to civil and religious liberty,” the Royal Tralee Volunteers, “earnestly” hoped that the bill pending “for the relief of our Ro- man Catholic fellow subjects” would pass. The “restraints” on Roman Catholics were “no longer necessary,” claimed the men of Birr Meeting in County Offaly. Eliminating them would “be attended with the most beneficial consequences to this country,” they opined, because “nothing can contribute so much to increase the prosperity and secure the independency of this kingdom, as a cordial union among its inhabitants of every religious denomination.” The Grand Jury of County Limerick held “the right of private opinions in religious matters to be inher- ent to all mankind,” and therefore thought the “relaxation of the penal laws” “must ensure union and harmony among us.”96 There was good reason to believe in the 1780s that Ireland was poised to overcome its deep religious tensions. Charles Wilson, who worked closely with Roman Catholic scholar Charles O’Conor, believed that by 1779 the Irish were “a people no longer divided by religious prejudices and factious an- imosity, but endeared to each other by the firmest ties of gratitude and affection.”97 When Henry Grattan rose to propose

94Bishop of Derry (Ickworth Park) to Shelburne, November 10, 1782, Add MS 88906/3/3, ff. 83-85, BL; Bishop of Derry (Rome) to Edmund Sexton Pery, May 15, 1778, PE 186, HEH. 95Pennsylvania Packet, 27 July 1782, p. [1]. 96Wilson, Compleat Collection, 40, 56, 88, 138. 97Wilson, Compleat Collection, ii, cxlvii.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 267 the repeal of the Declaratory Act in the Irish Parliament in 1782, he praised the Irish for now living in “a united land” in which Catholics were no longer “groaning under oppression.”98 In fact in 1778 and again in 1782, the Irish Parliament passed two significant Catholic Relief Acts. “I cannot help wishing the right of voting be extended to papists of property, in common with protestants,” wrote a contributor to the Volunteers Jour- nal, “it is unjust to deprive any man of his rights on account of his religion.” Indeed, this author concluded, “the danger from papists is perhaps more produced by the penal laws against them, than by their religion.”99 Far from dividing the people in the 1780s, the issue of Roman Catholic relief formed part and parcel of the Patriot and Volunteer program.100 If the Irish were not hopelessly divided by insuperable religious divisions, why did they not follow the American example and break away from the British Empire in 1782? Why did they not prove Arthur Lee right and declare independence six years after the Declaration of the Second Continental Congress? The answer is that in March 1782 the British imperial administration led by North fell in what John Almon soon called the “revolution in 1782.” Although it had responded to the American complaints with increasingly repressive and punitive measures, North’s government, after initially conceding limited trade liberalization to the Irish because it had been “expedient,” refused any further concessions. The administration, in short, had drawn a firm line in Ireland, as it had donein America, that seemed to likely to lead to similar results. But on March 20, 1782, North was compelled to resign after a vote of no confidence regarding his administration’s conduct of the American War. “The Revolution in the government of Great Britain,” John Almon immediately proclaimed, was “one of the most splendid epochs in the history of these islands.” The “revolution” was so profound precisely because it involved much more than

98Pa. Jour., July 24, 1782. 99Volunteers Journal, June 7, 1784, no. 103. 100Bartlett, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 82-102.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 268 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY just the changing of the guard at the highest echelons of government. It involved the most extensive change in British officeholders since the Hanoverian succession. This waswhy Almon felt himself justified in using the word revolution. “There is no other word in our language,” he noted, “which so fully and properly expresses the force and extent of the late total defeat of corruption and usurpation.” The Revolution in 1782 was “not less a Revolution of system of government than that of 1688.”101 The new British government of the 2nd Marquess of Rock- ingham quickly transformed the situation in Ireland. The volunteers immediately celebrated “the defeat of an Admin- istration held in universal detestation and contempt in this country.”102 They had even more reason to toast the new viceroy, the 3rd duke of Portland. As soon as Portland arrived in Dublin, he made it clear to all with whom he met that there would be radical transformation of British attitudes towards Ireland. Over and over again, he advised politicians in London that “justice” as well as “policy” required the repeal of the Declaratory Act, the modification of Poynings’ Law, the elimination of judicial appeals to Britain, and the concession of commercial autonomy.103 Portland not only supported the demands of the Patriots and the Volunteers, he immediately demanded the restoration of Irish Privy Councilors who had been dismissed for opposing Townshend’s government.104 Portland embraced the former opposition MPs in the Irish Parliament. He recommended the celebrated Patriots Walter Hussey Burgh, Charles Francis Sheridan, Barry Yelverton, and

101[John Almon], The Revolution in 1782 Considered, 3rd ed. (London: J. Debrett 1782), 5–6; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 189), 557–58. 102John Forbes (Drogheda) to Shelburne, April 9, 1782, Add MS 88906/3/10, f. 21r, BL. 103Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, April 24, 1782, HO 100/1, ff. 137-139, Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, April 27, 1782, HO 100/1, ff. 155-156, Port- land (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, May 6, 1782, HO 100/1, ff. 178-182, and Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, May 18, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 266, TNA. 104Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, April 27, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 155r, TNA.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 269 John Forbes be appointed to crown offices.105 Suddenly dozens of long-term critics of the policies of North’s lord lieutenants embraced their new viceroy and his transformative attitudes.106 The Volunteers and their supporters were determined to take advantage of the new political situation. In April 1782, Volunteers descended on Dublin for the general Leinster meeting. On April 16, not only was “the capital filled with Volunteers,” but “the streets were thronged and the galleries of the House were crowded with people at an early hour.” With Parliament, Dublin, and all Ireland anxiously awaiting the moment, Henry Grattan rose to his feet and delivered a speech that one observer said “would reflect honor on the Ciceros and Demosthenes of those ancient states whose memory is still, and ever will be, the admiration of rising generations.”107 Grattan announced that “I am now to address a free people.” “I found Ireland on her knees,” Grattan remembered, “I watched over her with an eternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!” Grattan proceeded to proclaim that “the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown,” and therefore that “the kingdom of Ireland is a distinct kingdom with a Parliament of her own, the sole legislature thereof.” He demanded the repeal of the Declaratory Act that had been written for “better securing the dependency of Ireland” and called for a modification of Poyn- ings’ Law, insisting that “the practice of suppressing our bills in the Council of Ireland, or altering the same anywhere, to be another just cause of discontent and jealousy.” He declared the recently passed Mutiny Act that provided accommodation for the British army in Ireland for an “unlimited” time “another just cause of discontent and jealousy.” When Grattan finished, the Irish House of Commons immediately and unanimously

105Portland (Dublin castle) to Shelburne, May 22, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 283, TNA; George Nugent Grenville-Temple, earl Temple, Notes on Members of Parliament, Ire- land, 1782, ST 73/2, 28, HEH. 106Temple, Notes on Members, 1782, ST 73/2, pp. 26, 31, 36, 62, 74, 81, 87, 90, 94, 100, 111, 112, 129, 155, 161, HEH. 107Pa. Jour., July 24, 1782, and July 31, 1782; Mass. Gaz., July 23, 1782.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 270 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY supported the address. The following day the gathered Vol- unteers of Leinster voted unanimously to support Grattan’s address supporting the “rights of Ireland.”108 Such was ”the general zeal and ardor” of the Irish that it was clear to the new lord lieutenant the Duke of Portland that nothing less than “a modification of Poynings’ Law,” repeal of the Declaratory Act, and “alteration of the present Mutiny Act,” in short, making Ireland “independent of the legislature of Great Britain” would satisfy this people in arms.109 Far from refusing to consider constitutional innovations, as North’s administration would have done, the new Rockingham administration immediately took up the demands of Ireland. After castigating the North administration for its “total inat- tention to the affairs of” Ireland, the Rockinghamite Patriot Charles James Fox insisted that it was “unjust and tyrannical to attempt to hold a country in subjection and to govern against the will and opinion of the people.”110 The “scandalous neglect” of Ireland by the North administration needed to be reme- died, agreed the Anglo-Irish playwright and the Patriot Richard Brinsley Sheridan.111 The following month, Fox was able to relay to the British Parliament the Irish demands contained in Henry Grattan’s now famous address.112 Fox’s recommen- dation that Parliament agree to those demands was offered a sophisticated defense by the Patriots in the Lords: “Now that Ireland was united, religious disputes all composed, growing in wealth and strength and fast improving in all the arts of peace,” argued the Earl of Shelburne, “it was impolitic, it would be unjust” and ultimately “impossible to resist [their] claim.” While the Irish had once been “unacquainted with the law of England,” thought the Patriot lawyer the Earl of Camden, this was no longer the case, therefore there was no good reason

108Grattan, Memoirs of the Life and Times, 2:232-39; Duke of Portland (Dubln Cas- tle) to Shelburne, April 16, 1782, HO 100/1, ff. 74-79, TNA. 109Portland (Dublin Castle) to Shelburne, April 16, 1782, HO 100/1, f. 79v, TNA. 110Charles James Fox, April 8, 1782, Parl. Reg., 7:12. 111Richard Brinsley Sheridan, April 8, 1782, Parl. Reg., 7:23. 112Charles James Fox, May 17, 1782, Parl. Reg., 7:166-67.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 271 that the Irish could not make their own laws or have their own judicature. Poynings’ Law only allowed the Privy Council to “mangle” bills.113 In the end both Houses adopted resolutions “in a very few hours” that granted “the absolute independence of Ireland.”114 These resolutions were given legislative teeth that summer when Parliament repealed the Declaratory Act (June 21), passed Yelverton’s Act modifying Poynings’ Law (July 27), and ultimately insisted that the Irish House of Lords was the final court of appeal for Irish court cases. When the news of the British Parliamentary resolutions arrived, the Irish immediately took to the streets. They knew that a revolutionary transformation had occurred. On the 22nd of May “there was a general parade of the Volunteers” in Dublin because they now knew it was “the real intention of the present Ministry” to grant “the emancipation of the legislature of this long-injured country.” Not only had “thousands of our volunteers” taken to the streets, but “every house from the ground story to the roof” was illuminated around St. Stephen’s Green. “Everything,” it was said, “displayed a perfect blaze of joy.”115 Ireland was on the brink of revolution in early 1782. The Volunteers had voiced their demands at Dungannon in Febru- ary, and the Irish people, in the form of hundreds of addresses, had affirmed their support. North and his government had remained intransigent, but in March 1782, the government fell and was replaced by a Patriot government both in Britain and Ireland. That government quickly accepted the justice of Henry Grattan’s demands for legislative and judicial independence. Had North’s government granted the Americans free trade, the legislative autonomy of colonial assemblies, and the absolute sovereignty of colonial courts in the early 1770s, a break from the British Empire in 1775–1776 would have been much less likely. Similarly, after the Revolution of 1782, the

113Shelburne, May 17, 1782, and Camden, May 17, 1782, Parl. Reg., 8:299–300, 309. 114Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, May 18, 1782, Walpole’s Correspondence, 25:279–80. 115Finn’s Leinster Journal, May 22, 1782, and May 25, 1782, vol. 16, nos. 41 and 42.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 272 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Irish could imagine their rights guaranteed and their interests protected within the framework of the British Empire.

The Irish Revolution of 1782 fundamentally transformed Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire. Both the Irish Vol- unteers and their Patriot allies in Britain now understood that Ireland and Britain formed some kind of imperial confederation. Both groups began describing the empire itself less in terms of a hierarchical relationship between Britain and its colonies and more in terms of an imperial confederation. Indeed, the administrations of the Marquess of Rockingham and the Earl of Shelburne tried to work not only with the lord lieutenants of Ireland but also with Irish Patriot leaders to establish the terms of this new confederal arrangement. Unfortunately for both groups, the Shelburne government fell from power before a new constitutional arrangement could be secured. Subsequent British administrations exploited the indeterminacy of the new arrangement to reassert supremacy over Irish politics and to stoke confessional divisions among the Volunteers and Irish Patriots.116 The Anglo-Irish failure to design and implement a confederation in 1782-1783, then, made possible the activities of later British governments that provoked the United Irishmen and led to the uprising of 1798. What has been gained by tracing the ideological origins of the Irish Revolution? What have we learned by tracing the extraordinary Irish literary and political output of 1778–1783? First, it becomes clear that the remarkable American publications described and analyzed by Bernard Bailyn were not exceptional. The American publications, as remarkable as they were, formed part of a larger set of Patriot publications in the second half of the eighteenth century. Provoked by increasingly aggressive and restrictive measures, British imperial subjects in Ireland as well as North America responded with creative criticisms and transformative actions.

116On this point, see Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, 107–11.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 THE IRISH REVOLUTION 273 Second, the starkly different outcomes in the Irish and North American cases forces scholars to confront the causes of their divergence. In both cases a population of roughly three million people discovered in the 1760s and 1770s that British imperial policies, understood in both Ireland and North America as the consequence of corruption, had deprived British subjects of their rights and their means of livelihood. In both cases the intensity of argument and the intransigence of the British government led participants to imagine new and increasingly effective arguments and forms of organization. In both cases committees of correspondence had emerged to coordinate efforts and circulate ideas across a wide geographic and social expanse. But in North America the result, ultimately, was a Declaration of Independence and complete separation from the empire. In Ireland, by contrast, the Volunteers persuaded the British government to implement a series of radical imperial reforms—reforms that had they been put in place in North America in the early 1770s might well have preserved the empire. Why the divergence? The explanation, it turns out, had everything to do with British partisan politics. Lord North’s government was determined to make no constitutional concessions to the Irish. The Irish Volunteers were just as determined to accept nothing less than an Irish Bill of Rights. Civil War was only prevented by the fall of North’s government in March 1782 and its replacement by a Patriot government. This suggests that those interested in explaining why British North America had a revolution and other areas of the Empire did not must pay attention to the nature of British partisan politics in ways they have not done for several generations. Finally, this analysis of the ideological origins of the Irish Revolution of 1782 highlights the value of comparative history. Comparative history, in this formulation, is not opposed to “entangled history” as some scholars have recently suggested. It does not “accept national boundaries as fixed” or “take the distinctiveness of their subjects as given.”117 Instead, this

117Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 764–86.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00668 by guest on 26 September 2021 274 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY comparison precisely puts the emergence of national boundaries as contingent and highlights the interconnectedness of the discursive and institutional fields occupied by British North Americans and Irish Patriots. By insisting that the British Empire established the context for comparison in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, this analysis takes seriously the centrality of empire to the age of revolutions in ways that most scholars do not. In making these points, in insisting that comparative history and connected history are not alternatives but complimentary tools, in insisting that nation states are not the fundamental units of comparison, I am merely following in the footsteps of the brilliant articulation of the comparative method developed by Marc Bloch.118

118Bloch’s foundational 1925 essay is available in English translation in Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, trans. J. E. Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). See also William H. Sewell Jr., “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory, 6:208–18.

Steve Pincus is Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University, and is the author of numerous books and essays dealing broadly with the history of the British Empire and early America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. His two most recent books are 1688: The First Modern Revolu- tion and The Heart of the Declaration both published by Yale University Press.

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