HISTORY:IN THE 1790s, as today, American conservatives fretted and raged over the dangers immigrants allegedly posed to the new nation's social stability, cultural purity, and political integrity, writes Kerby A Miller
Then the supposed threat came from what Federalist politicians and journalists, who supported Britain's war on the French Revolution, called "hordes of wild Irishmen".
The great majority of these, whom Federalists denounced as "God-provoking Democrats", were not the Catholics who would dominate 19th-century Irish migration to the US. Rather, they were Protestants, mostly Presbyterians from Ulster. Many were exiled United Irishmen, fugitives from Orange pogroms and from the shambles of the 1798 Rebellion.
This long-awaited book by Maurice J Bric, a senior lecturer in history at UCD, recounts the experiences of Ireland's late-18th-century emigrants, especially those who settled in Philadelphia, the capital of colonial Pennsylvania and later of the United States. Bric presents a wealth of information about Irish migration's causes, its magnitude and processes, and about the migrants' social and political activities in Pennsylvania from the 1760s to the end of the century. His major focus, however, is the "new Irish" who arrived after American independence, in the 1780s and '90s, and their vital role in what he calls the "re-invention of America".
According to Bric, in Philadelphia the new Irish, led by exiles such as brothers Mathew and James Carey, created a novel political force and journalistic style that were at once "ethno-cultural" in their concern for the immigrants' equal rights and opportunities, and "universal" in their allegiance to what Tom Paine called "the rights of man" on both sides of the Atlantic.
Spearheading the Democratic-Republican opposition to the governing Federalists' domestic and foreign policies, the new Irish not only helped create the first American political party system but, more profoundly, forced a transition from the older, elitist notion of "a single-interest and harmonious polity" to a politics of pluralism, of competing interest groups, that more accurately reflected the new nation's dynamism and diversity.
Despite Federalist efforts to proscribe their opponents, as in the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Democratic-Republicans and their Irish-American supporters eventually triumphed, first in Pennsylvania in 1799, and then nationally with Thomas Jefferson's election as president in 1800.
One important result of that victory, as historian David N Doyle of UCD has written, was that later, in the 1800s and 1900s, Irish Catholics and others could avail of the social opportunities and political rights that their largely Protestant Irish predecessors had forced open, effectively, for all future immigrants. Significantly, neither the late-18th-century immigrants nor at first their Federalist critics made much effort to distinguish among the "Irish" by religion or otherwise, condemning them all as "wild Irish" for their "Jacobin" sympathies. Irish Presbyterians, Catholics, and Anglicans, for example, banded together in inter-denominational social and charitable associations, such as Philadelphia's St Patrick's and Hibernian societies. And the city's exiled United Irishmen espoused an "Irish" identity that was ecumenical, political, and, by late-18th-century standards, quite radical.
Indeed, it was precisely that fleeting identity between "Irishness" and republicanism that inspired the Federalists, first, to conflate the two in an attempt to denigrate both, and then later, as I have argued elsewhere, to revive and elevate an old term, "Scotch-Irish", as an exclusively Protestant and hence divisive ethno-cultural and political antidote - analogous to the "Ulster Scots" label employed by some Unionists in Northern Ireland today.
Anyone interested in early Irish emigration to America will find Bric's book a profitable study. Some readers may be astonished, even amused by the vitriolic character of late-18th-century US politics, but in truth there may be more similarities than differences between the strategies and polemics adopted by Federalists in the 1790s and by Republicans recently. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove could scarcely improve on the Federalists' demonisation of their opponents as "outlaws, assassins, [and] traitors", or on the Federalists' reliance on vote-suppression, a reactionary judiciary, and on wholesale violations of constitutional liberties, allegedly to protect "homeland security" against foreign "terrorists" and domestic "subversives".
Current Republican efforts to consolidate permanent power may fail, as did the Federalists', but sadly, Irish-America's role in today's struggles between militant plutocracy and endangered democracy is much more ambiguous than it was 200-plus years ago.
Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 1760-1800 By Maurice J Bric Four Courts Press, 363pp. €55
Kerby A Miller is Curators' Professor of History at the University of Missouri. His most recent book, Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class and Transatlantic Migration, will be published this summer by Field Day