“This is a brilliant history of British imperial white racism and Irish resistance to it–and cooperation with it–in Ireland and the United States. From Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell in the nineteenth century to Marcus Garvey and Liam Mellows in the twentieth, we are given here a pathbreaking account of a still unfinished struggle.”–Seamus Deane, Keough Emeritus Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame

“This fine work of scholarship makes a valuable contribution to the literature on Irish nationalism and the history of nationalism generally. Nelson offers a cogent critique of those Irish nationalists who were so caught up in their own narrow nationalistic grievances that any sympathetic engagement with other reform movements was ruled out.”–Cormac O Grada, author of Famine: A Short History

“This fine and learned study is based on prodigious reading, presented in a compelling manner, and overall is a most impressive performance. I have immense admiration for it.”–J. Joseph Lee, New York University

Bruce Nelson is professor emeritus of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton) and Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s.

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

By Bruce Nelson

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15312-4

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….xiPrologue: Arguing about (the Irish) Race……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3Chapter 1. “The blood of an Irishman”: The English Construction of the Irish Race, 1534–1801………………………………………………………………..17Chapter 2. Celts, Hottentots, and “white chimpanzees”: The Racialization of the Irish in the Nineteenth Century…………………………………………………….30Chapter 3. “Come out of such a land, you Irishmen”: Daniel O’Connell, American Slavery, and the Making of the Irish Race…………………………………………….57Chapter 4. “The Black O’Connell of the United States”: Frederick Douglass and Ireland……………………………………………………………………………86Chapter 5. “From the Cabins of Connemara to the Kraals of Kaffirland”: Irish Nationalists, the British Empire, and the “Boer Fight for Freedom”………………………..121Chapter 6. “Because we are white men”: Erskine Childers, Jan Christian Smuts, and the Irish Quest for Self-Government, 1899–1922………………………………..148Chapter 7. Negro Sinn Féiners and Black Fenians: “Heroic Ireland” and the Black Nationalist Imagination……………………………………………………….181Chapter 8. “The Irish are for freedom everywhere”: Eamon de Valera, the Irish Patriotic Strike, and the “last white nation … deprived of its liberty”…………………212Epilogue: The Ordeal of the Irish Republic………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….242Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..259Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..323

Chapter One

“The blood of an Irishman”

THE ENGLISH CONSTRUCTION OF THE IRISH RACE, 1534–1801

From the later sixteenth century, when Edmund Spenser walked the plantations of Munster, the English have presented themselves to the world as controlled, refined and rooted; and so it suited them to find the Irish hotheaded, rude and nomadic, the perfect foil to set off their own virtues. —Declan Kiberd, 1995

In recent years scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have noted that for the architects of empire, the process of identity formation seems to require the creation, and demonization, of a colonized Other whose vices serve to highlight the virtues of the colonizer. Apparently, no matter what our station in life, we need to imagine the Other in order to envision ourselves not only as literal, flesh-and-blood creatures but also as bearers of a set of characteristics—above all, a set of virtues—that define the collective entity we call the nation and the race. In Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd has identified a process that many have called the racialization of the Irish—the reduction of a culturally and biologically diverse people to a monolithic whole and the designation of their racial or national characteristics as the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon virtue. Kiberd locates this process in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but its roots go back much further, at least to the twelfth century, when the Paris-trained cleric Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) reported to the English king Henry II that the Irish were

a people living off beasts and like beasts; a people that yet adheres to the most primitive way of pastoral living. For as humanity progresses from the forests to the arable fields, and thence towards village life and civil society, this people, spurning agricultural exertions, having all too little regard for material comfort and a positive dislike of the rules and legalities of civil intercourse, has been able neither to give up nor abandon the life of forests and pastures which it has hitherto been living.

Cambrensis had ventured across the Irish Sea as a servant of the English Crown, and, increasingly, the purpose of his treatises was to justify English conquest. Thus it became necessary to present the native inhabitants of Ireland in the worst possible light. In his Topographia Hibernica, he characterized the Irish as incorrigibly savage and barbaric. “This people,” he concluded, “is a … truly barbarous one, … being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner…. Indeed, all their habits are barbarisms.” Cambrensis also gave voice to what became an indelible impression of the Irish as fundamentally devious and untrustworthy in their relations with the Norman adventurers who had come to civilize them. He concluded that “one must fear their craftiness far more than their warfare; their quietude more than their fieriness; their sweet talk more than their invective; malice rather than pugnacity; treason more than open war; hypocritical friendliness rather than contemptible enmity.”

Over the centuries there was also a quite different tendency—to exoticize the Irish and give expression to a kind of premodern primitivism that saw in the lifestyle and folkways of the Gael an attractive, even compelling, alternative to the way of life that prevailed in England and within the Anglicized Pale of Settlement in Ireland itself. Whereas Cambrensis had condemned Irishmen for “suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner,” others found the self-presentation of the Gael alluring, symbolizing a state of noble savagery. It was evident not only in men’s dress and hairstyles, but also in the frank and seemingly reflexive sensuality that was said to characterize Irishwomen. Indeed, it could extend even to as controversial a figure as the Gaelic chieftain Shane O’Neill, one of the most ruthless and effective adversaries of the English military in Ireland, who was denounced by a late nineteenth-century biographer as “a glutton, a drunkard, a coward, a bully, an adulterer, and a murderer.” In 1562 O’Neill was granted an audience at the court of Queen Elizabeth, where his presence created quite a stir. Unlike his father, who had submitted to Henry VIII in 1542 wearing English clothes and accompanied by English noblemen, Shane came dressed in native garb, surrounded by a retinue of Scots mercenaries, all of them displaying “bare heads, ash-coloured hanging curls, golden saffron undershirts, … loose sleeves, short tunics, and shaggy lace.” According to a seventeenth-century chronicler, “The English nobility followed [all of this] with as much wonderment as if they had come from China or America.”

A fascination with the more exotic dimensions of “Irishness” would remain a secondary countercurrent of the English discourse on Ireland and the Irish for centuries. It was most likely to surface during periods of relative calm in the relations between colony and metropole, and it found a distinctive outlet in the celebration of the “grandeur” and “sublimity” of the Irish landscape that flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the most part, however, when the English needed to extend their authority, control more territory, and lay claim to more arable land, then the barbarism and savagery, even the alleged paganism, of the Irish became a justification for policies of brutal suppression.

A pivotal moment in this process of development was the sixteenth century, especially after 1534, when the Tudor monarch Henry VIII broke with Rome and created a Protestant kingdom that was increasingly at odds with the Catholic powers on the European continent. Henry and his successors feared England’s vulnerability to attack by France and Spain and saw Ireland not only as a stepping-stone to the English heartland but as a nation whose stubbornly Catholic population might be willing, even eager, to collude with England’s enemies. Ultimately, perceiving a land and a people in desperate need of reformation, they decided to bring all of Ireland under English control.

In simplest terms, the government’s goal was to extend the reach of the Pale, the region around Dublin where the English language, English common law, and English land-use patterns had long prevailed. In the longer term, the hope was that all of Ireland could be brought from “a state of savagery to a state of civilisation.” Undeniably, many English observers experienced culture shock when they encountered the native, or Gaelic, Irish in areas characterized by traditional ways of living. It seemed to these observers that the Irish “live[d] brutishly … more like beasts than men”; that they were “licentious” and “given to idleness”; that some of them were “half naked for want of clothes to cover them,” and others wore loose-fitting garments and allowed their hair to cover their eyes in order to conceal their devious designs. As Cambrensis had noted in the twelfth century, they continued to follow their cattle and obstinately refused “to descend to husbandry … or to learn any mechanical art or science.” Insofar as they had a system of law, it appeared to be a form of lawlessness, for it was decentralized, seemingly arbitrary, and administered by men (brehons) who, in English eyes, were “unlearned and barbarous.” Worst of all, perhaps, Irishwomen demonstrated a freedom from constraint that was dangerous to the maintenance of civil society and civilization itself. Because divorce was readily accessible under brehon law, the Irish could move easily from one partner to the next—hence the frequent charge of “incest” in Irish sexual relations. At best, then, the Irish appeared to be “a people altogether stubborn and untamed”; at worst, they were “wild, barbarous and treacherous.”

The goal of re-forming the Irish led to policies that alternated between conciliation and coercion—or, in Jane Ohlmeyer’s more provocative phrasing, between “assimilation” and “annihilation.” Insofar as the latter is concerned, some historians have charged that the Irish themselves, above all the Gaelic lords and chieftains who ruled the lands beyond the Pale, were prone to gruesome acts of violence, and that the instability created by their constant fratricidal warfare played a vital role in drawing the Tudor monarchy into Ireland in the first place. According to Kenneth Nicholls, however, “The crown’s commitment to military intervention helped to change Ireland from a country suffering from an excess of violence into one utterly devoured by it.” The devastation that accompanied the government’s scorched-earth campaigns in southwest Munster and in Ulster became especially notorious, thanks in large measure to the chilling but unapologetic testimony offered by English chroniclers such as Edmund Spenser and Fynes Moryson. In southwest Munster, from 1569 to 1573 and again from 1579 to 1583, the “systematic burning of the people’s corn, the spoiling of their harvests and the killing and driving of their cattle” created famine conditions that—over a six-month period in 1582 alone—may have taken more than thirty thousand lives. According to Spenser, the “Prince of Poets in his tyme” and the author of A View of the Present State of Ireland, “in short space … a most populous country suddenly [was] left void of man or beast.”

A similar policy of conquest was applied in Ulster, where the forces of the Crown set out to subdue the Gaelic lords, above all the O’Neills, the preeminent symbol of the power and culture of Gaeldom. Actually, Hugh O’Neill, England’s most charismatic and effective adversary in the Elizabethan era, had tried to “remain loyal to the crown for as long as possible and … was amenable to aspects of royal policy in Ulster.” But O’Neill’s determination to keep his lordship intact, and to enjoy the political and military power that flowed from it, brought him into irreconcilable conflict with the government. During the latter stages of the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), the government again pursued a draconian policy that involved the burning of crops, the killing of cattle, and the starving of the population in order to undermine the base that sustained O’Neill’s resistance. When peace finally came, it was, in David B. Quinn’s memorable words, “the peace of death and exhaustion.” Although no accurate estimate of the loss of human life is possible, Ulster was, to a significant extent, depopulated.

For many Englishmen, the Catholicism of the Irish became definitive proof of their inferiority as a nation and a race. But others were not convinced that the Irish even qualified as Catholic. Their worship and devotional life seemed to embody more primitive forms of religious practice—something much closer to paganism than to any variant of Christianity. This accusation derived in large measure from the fact that Irish religious observance, especially in the rural areas beyond the English Pale of Settlement, incorporated many pre-Christian practices and continued to reflect the intertwining of a folk religion attuned to the rhythms and wonders of the natural world with normative Catholicism. “They are all Papists, by their profession,” Spenser acknowledged, “but … so blindly and brutishly informed for the most part … that you would rather think them atheists or infidels.” The English military commander Sir Arthur Chichester agreed, calling the Irish “the most treacherous infidels in the world,” while his superior officer, Lord Deputy Mountjoy, expressed the opinion that “even the very best of the Irish people were in their nature little better than devils.” These characterizations were way stations on a slippery slope that led to the very depths of degradation. After comparing Shane O’Neill to “Huns and Turks,” one English official went even further and called him “that cannibal.” Others repeated Cambrensis’s characterization of the Irish as “a people living off beasts and like beasts.” If indeed they were “little better than devils,” and even “like beasts,” then the moral precepts that placed limits on indiscriminate killing did not apply to them. Thus Chichester could report from County Tyrone in 1601, “We have burned and destroyed along … Lough [Neagh] even within four miles of Dungannon where we killed man, woman, child, horse, beast and whatever we found.”

If the sixteenth century was a time of “incomplete conquest,” in the next century the process was completed. By the 1690s the English had constructed the foundations of an enduring and multifaceted Protestant Ascendancy. The seventeenth century was marked by two major—and appallingly destructive—wars, one of them lasting more than a decade. It was also marked by successive waves of dispossession, which ultimately meant that almost all Catholics east of the River Shannon ceased to be landowners. Increasingly, it appeared that Ireland was a nation defined by a fundamental antagonism between Irish Catholics and English (and Irish) Protestants. The events that played the key role in consolidating this perception were the Catholic rebellion of 1641 and the Cromwellian invasion of 1649. The rebellion, which began in Ulster, occurred after several decades of relative calm, during which the “plantation” of much of that province appeared to have won the acquiescence, if not the enthusiastic support, of the native Irish population. The suddenness of the rising, and the fury that accompanied it, served only to reinforce Protestant perceptions of the Catholic Irish as treacherous and innately savage. On the other side of the religious divide, Oliver Cromwell became a byword for English cruelty and injustice, and the “curse of Cromwell” assumed a prominent place in Irish legend.

The uprising of 1641 actually began as a limited engagement, initiated by eminent Catholic landowners, notably Hugh O’Neill’s grandson Sir Phelim O’Neill, whose objectives were also limited—mainly, to secure their property and win greater freedom to practice their religion. But O’Neill and his associates quickly lost control of the rebellion, as much of the Catholic population rose up and turned on Protestant settlers, who, in many cases, had displaced and exploited them. A lively pamphlet literature developed immediately after the first reports of atrocities reached London, and in 1646 Sir John Temple published The Irish Rebellion, which soon took on iconic status and was reprinted regularly over the centuries whenever Protestant rule in Ireland appeared to be in jeopardy. Temple and other chroniclers of the rebellion claimed that as many as three hundred thousand Protestants were murdered, even though in 1641 the Protestant population of Ulster probably did not exceed thirty-four thousand. According to Temple, “Jesuits, friars, and priests told the Irish that the Protestants were heretics and were ‘not to be suffered any longer to live among them: that it was no more a sin to kill an English-man, than to kill a dog.'”

For more than a decade, war ravaged much of Ireland. It reached a crescendo with the Cromwellian invasion in August 1649. Oliver Cromwell spent forty weeks on Irish soil, and during that time he and his forces captured twenty-five fortified towns and castles. But he became most famous—or infamous—for the siege of Drogheda (and to a lesser extent the siege of Wexford), which resulted in thousands of deaths and enduring images of cruelty and barbarism. John Morrill estimates that at least thirty-five hundred people were killed by Cromwell’s forces at Drogheda, including large numbers of civilians. In perhaps the most infamous act of the siege, the governor and three hundred of his soldiers were executed in cold blood soon after they had surrendered with assurances that their lives would be spared. The governor, an English Royalist, “had his ‘brains beat out’ with his own wooden leg.” According to Morrill, Drogheda “was a massacre … without … parallel in seventeenth-century British and Irish history…. There was nothing which matched it in scale or in the range of its brutalities.”

(Continues…)

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