“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, a commentator who is generally approving of this new status quo, in 2021. But the past weeks and months have proven that the “old” country has very different ideas about this extra-terrestrial political order. After Ireland rejected two liberal amendments to the constitution, tabled and sponsored by their government, civic disturbances on a scale not seen for generations continue. They even wear the aesthetic of an older Ireland, with youths on horseback leading a recent protest against a new asylum centre in Dublin.
Though the referendums in question were largely symbolic and had little substantial effect on everyday life, scepticism of immigration is now widespread. Recent polling suggests that three-quarters of Irish people think the country is taking too many refugees, a statistic that rises to 80% among Sinn Féin supporters. The modern, secular and multicultural face that Ireland’s government showed to the world for decades has been revealed as a mere patina. And yet, this should not be considered just a spasm from within an otherwise innately progressive Irish character. In many ways, this is the kind of Irishness historically seen abroad; the Irish-American diaspora diverged well to the Right of its mother country long ago — and those values are now travelling back across the Atlantic.
In 1841, 60,000 Irish people signed a petition calling for their compatriots in America to throw their support behind the anti-slavery abolition movement. The petition was organised by Daniel “the Liberator” O’Connell, whose opposition was long-held and steadfast. When O’Connell was first elected to parliament 11 years earlier, a member with an interest in the Caribbean sugar plantations had approached him and offered the support of the 27 pro-slavery members on Irish issues in exchange for his neutrality on the question. O’Connell responded that though “God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees”, he was not willing to “forget the negro one single hour” in order to save Ireland. In his public speeches O’Connell attacked American hypocrisy on this issue: “America in the fullness of her pride… wave[s] on high her banner of freedom and its blazing stars” while ignoring “the negro children screaming for their mother from whose bosom they have been torn”.
O’Connell pledged that he would never visit America while slavery continued in that country, and US abolitionists encouraged him to do more to persuade the Irish in America to adopt his stance. One argued that if O’Connell were able to change these opinions, it could be decisive, as “your countrymen among us hold the balance of power”, yet as it stood “three fourths of them at least are Democrats” and opposed slavery abolition. But the Irish in America did not respond as O’Connell hoped. Not only did the majority support the continuation of slavery, but in many cases they were the perpetrators of some of the worst incidences of mob violence against African Americans, such as when an Irish crowd attacked a black temperance parade in Philadelphia in August 1842. And in 1854, it was Irish militia companies who were called on to return runaway slave Anthony Burns from Boston to Virginia, after the native-born companies refused to do so.
Bishop John Hughes of New York, at that time probably the most influential Irish American leader, said it was “the duty of every naturalized Irishman to resist and repudiate” O’Connell’s implorations “with indignation”. And this vehemence was partially defensive, a product of Hughes’s concern with the successful integration of the Irish into the broader American population — no easy task given the hostility they faced. Leading Irish figures feared that any question of divided loyalties would fatally undermine this process. But another motive was that abolitionism was associated with the British, who had ended their trade in 1807 and emancipated the slaves in their colonies in 1834.
Given the intense opposition to anything associated with Britain, many Irish were opposed to abolition on those grounds alone. It also didn’t help that many abolitionists, drawn as they often were from New England Nonconformist backgrounds, hated Catholics intensely. But, as the historian Noel Ignatiev argued, Irish-American support for the continuation of slavery was necessary as it “eased their assimilation as whites, and more than any other institution, taught them the meaning of whiteness”. For Ignatiev, the Irish were deeply concerned with maintaining their favoured position over those whom they regarded as the principal threat — the free black people of the North — and abolition would have magnified that threat.
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