Irish Liberty, Black Slavery, and the Green Atlantic
The Racial Ideology of the United Irishmen, 1791–1830
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Muiris MacGiollabhuí in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article explores the relationship that the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s, had with slavery during the Revolutionary Period. The United Irishmen were exiled by the British Government as a result of a failed rebellion in 1798 and were exile throughout the Atlantic World. For the exiled United Irishmen, the United States became a primary destination for their exile, and here, slavery became an important source of disunity. In Ireland, resistance to slavery was assumed across the entire membership of the United Irishmen, but in exile, this unity diminished. In conversation with past histories, this scholarship focuses on the limitations of Jacobinism as a political ideology and the prominence of rhetoric in revolutionary ideologies of the period.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Akenson, Donald Harman. If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997).
-
Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race, Volume One. (New York City: Verso, 1994).
-
Bartlett, Thomas, David Dickson, Daire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds. 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).
-
Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
-
Bric, Maurice J. “Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the “Empire for Liberty” in America.” Early American Studies 11 (3) (2013): 403–430.
-
Brundage, David. Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
-
Burin, Eric. Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).
-
Caretta, Vincent. Equiano, The African: Biography of. A Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
-
Carter, Edward C. “A ‘Wild Irishman’ under Every Federalist’s Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789–1806.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (2) (1989): 178–189.
-
Clegg, Andrew. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
-
Cohen, William B. The French Encounter with Africans: White response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
-
Connolly, S.J. Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
-
Curtin, Nancy. The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
-
Curtin, Nancy. “The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a Mass-Based Revolutionary Organisation, 1794–1796.” Irish Historical Studies 24 (96) (1985): 463–492.
-
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
-
Dawson, Kenneth, L. The Belfast Jacobin: Samuel Neilson and the United Irishmen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2017).
-
Dickson, David, Daire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds. United Irishmen: Rebellion, Radicalism and Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993).
-
Donnell, Alison, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan, eds. Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2015).
-
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
-
Durey, Michael. “Irish Deism and Jefferson’s Republic: Denis Driscol in Ireland and America, 1793–1810.” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 25 (4) (1990): 56–76.
-
Durey, Michael. “White slaves: Irish rebel prisoners and the British Army in the West Indies 1799–1804.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 80 (324) (2002): 296–312.
-
Durey, Michael. Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
-
Elliott, Marianne. Partner in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
-
Featherstone, David. “‘We Will Have Equality and Liberty in Ireland’: The Contested Geographies of Irish Democratic Political Cultures in the 1790s.” Historical Geography 41 (2013): 120–136.
-
Featherstone, David. Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Global Counter-Networks (London: Routledge, 2016).
-
Gibbons, Luke. “Radical memory.” Index on Censorship 27 (5) (1998): 141–143.
-
Gilmore, Peter E. “Refracted Republicanism: Plowden’s History, Paddy’s Resource, and Irish Jacobins in Western Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 83 (3) (2016): 394–417.
-
Gordon-Reed, Annette. “Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father.” The William and Mary Quarterly 57 (1) (2000): 171–182.
-
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
-
Grabbe, Hans-Jürgen. “European Immigration to the United States in the Early National Period, 1783–1820.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (2) (1989): 190–214.
-
Green, James N. Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985).
-
Harvey, David Allen. The French Enlightenment and its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
-
Hill, Myrtle. “Watchmen in Zion: Millennial Expectancy in Eighteenth-Century Ulster” in Protestant Millennialism, Evangelicalism, and Irish Society, 1790–2005, eds., Crawford Gribben and Andrew R. Holmes (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 31–51.
-
Kinealy, Christine. Black Abolitionists in Ireland (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2020).
-
Landy, Craig A. “Society of United Irishmen Revolutionary and New-York Manumission Society Lawyer: Thomas Addis Emmet and the Irish Contributions to the Antislavery Movement in New York.” New York History 95 (2) (2014): 193–222.
-
Lay, Edward K. The Architecture of Jefferson Country: Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
-
Lloyd, David and Peter D. O’Neill, eds. The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
-
Looney, J. Jefferson. ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series. 8 (1 October 1814 to 31 August 1815) (Princeton: Princeton University, 2011).
-
Lovejoy, Paul E. “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African.” Slavery and Abolition 27 (3) (2006): 317–347.
-
Lynch, Niamh. “Defining Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel.” Éire-Ireland 42 (1) (2007): 82–107.
-
Malouf, Michael. Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
-
McGovern, Bryan. John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009).
-
McMillin, James A. The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
-
Mitchell, Arthur. The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina 1799–1981 (Self-published, 1982).
-
Moore, Sean D. “Introduction: Ireland and the Enlightenment.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (3) “Ireland and the Enlightenment” (Spring, 2012): 345–354.
-
Murphy, Angela F. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition: Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
-
Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2012).
-
O’Neill, Peter D. “Memory and John Mitchel’s appropriation of the slave narrative.” Atlantic Studies 11 (3) (2014): 321–343.
-
O’Neill, Peter D. Famine Irish and the American Racial State (London: Routledge, 2017).
-
Rice, James D. Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
-
Riley, Padraig. Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
-
Roberts, Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
-
Rodgers, Nini. “Equiano in Belfast: A Study of the Anti-slavery Ethos in a Northern Town,” Slavery & Abolition 18 (2) (1997): 73–89.
-
Rodgers, Nini. Equiano and Anti-Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Belfast (Belfast, UK: Ulster Historical Society, 2000).
-
Rodgers, Nini. “Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century,” Irish Historical Studies, 32 (126) (Nov. 2000): 174–192.
-
Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1645–1865 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
-
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
-
Rolston, Bill. “‘Ireland of the Welcomes’? Racism and Anti-Racism in Nineteenth Century Ireland.” Patterns of Prejudice 38 (4) (2004): 358–359.
-
Sala-Molins, Louis. Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
-
Shankman, Andrew. “Neither Infinite Wretchedness nor Positive Good: Mathew Carey and Henry Clay on Political Economy and Slavery during the long 1820s.” In Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, eds., John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 247–266.
-
Smyth, Jim. “Wolfe Tone’s Library: The United Irishmen and ‘Enlightenment,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (3) (2012): 423–435.
-
Sweeney, Fionnghuala. Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
-
Sweeney, Fionnghuala, Fionnuala Dillane, and Maria Stuart, eds. Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery and Empire (London: Routledge, 2019).
-
Taylor, Alan. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
-
Thuente, Mary Helen. The Harp Re-strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
-
Twomey, Richard J. Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo-American Radicalism in the United States, 1790–1820 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).
-
Tyler-McGraw, Marie. An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
-
Whelan, Kevin. “The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the long Eighteenth Century.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, ed., Kathleen Brown (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 216–239.
-
Wilson, David. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrants Radicals in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
-
Wittke, Carl. The Irish in America. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956).
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 126 | 126 | 13 |
| Full Text Views | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 88 | 88 | 13 |
Irish Liberty, Black Slavery, and the Green Atlantic
The Racial Ideology of the United Irishmen, 1791–1830
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Muiris MacGiollabhuí in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article explores the relationship that the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s, had with slavery during the Revolutionary Period. The United Irishmen were exiled by the British Government as a result of a failed rebellion in 1798 and were exile throughout the Atlantic World. For the exiled United Irishmen, the United States became a primary destination for their exile, and here, slavery became an important source of disunity. In Ireland, resistance to slavery was assumed across the entire membership of the United Irishmen, but in exile, this unity diminished. In conversation with past histories, this scholarship focuses on the limitations of Jacobinism as a political ideology and the prominence of rhetoric in revolutionary ideologies of the period.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 126 | 126 | 13 |
| Full Text Views | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 88 | 88 | 13 |