Introduction
Ireland, poor Ireland.
Fate did not shine brightly on her in the 19th century.
Her great national awakening, which had erupted like sunlight after a drenching summer rain, faded into darkness after a series of courageous, but futile uprisings between 1798 and 1803.
By the turn of the century, the national vision of a republican Ireland entirely separated from England had been almost thoroughly discredited and would remain, for the foreseeable future, the dream of only a pitifully small circle of zealots.
Wretched and prostrate, her revolutionaries smoldering in graves or exiled to distant lands, Ireland seemed destined for national and cultural dispossession and oblivion.
It was a prospect that suited many in Ireland just fine, especially the Anglo-Irish, the wealthy land-owning descendants of Protestant English colonizers, who feared an independent Ireland would imperil the political power they had wielded for centuries. Determined to squelch Irish separatist sentiment once and for all, they successfully colluded with their British overlords to dissolve the Dublin Parliament, which theoretically enjoyed full legislative sovereignty under the crown, and turn all responsibility for the island’s governance to the British Parliament at Westminster.
Ireland’s fate — or so it seemed at the time — had been effectively sealed. Safely within Albion‘s grasp, the gentry reasoned, she would begin her slow, but inexorable transformation from an aspirant nation into a backwater province of Britain.
Grattan’s Prophesy
Yet, even in Ireland‘s darkest hours, a few Irish patriots understood that this strategy of political and cultural dispossession would fail utterly in the end. It always had.
“The Constitution (of 1782 establishing the independent Irish Parliament) may, for a time, be lost — the character of the country cannot be so lost,” proclaimed the Henry Grattan, the father of the Irish Parliament, in a statement that would prove eerily prophetic little more than a century later.
Ireland, after all, had absorbed all previous interlopers — the Vikings and the Normans, most notably — and if history provided any measure of what was to follow, the privileged Anglo-Irish would be no exception. Indeed, the process was already well under way: Grattan himself was a Protestant, and so were Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Robert Emmett, three of the principal Irish national martyrs of the era.
Yes, Irish character would prevail again, patriots reasoned, but how and when? At the time, things looked desperately grim. With Republican separatism thoroughly discredited after 1803, many believed Ireland needed a new kind of national hero with an entirely new vision better suited to the bitter realities of the times — someone who could give vent to Irish national grievances and restore a measure of Irish national identity and honor, while adapting to the radically changed social and political climate of post-revolutionary Ireland.
The Rise of Daniel O’Connell
Ireland eventually found her new hero: Daniel O’Connell, an Irish Catholic barrister and political activist descended from some of the oldest Gaelic stock in Ireland. His efforts enabled Irish nationalism to recover and sally forth after what was widely presumed to be permanent defeat in 1803. Some would even credit O‘Connell, more than any other Irishman of the 19th century, with placing his country firmly on the road to national independence that was finally completed in 1921 with the establishment of the Irish Free State.
O’Connell’s stellar achievements were rooted in his character and heritage. He was, by every measure, a resourceful man born into a resourceful Catholic family from Kerry County that had used a variety of means to preserve their large landholdings in an age when Catholic proprietorship was not sanctioned by law.
Throughout his life, perhaps partly as a result of the degradations his own family had endured, O’Connell remained a liberal-minded reformer. He abhorred slavery, argued for the full rights of Jews in Britain and supported policies to curtail aristocratic excesses in Ireland. Yet, he was far from radical.
Like most prominent Catholic Irishmen, O’Connell was sent to France to complete his education and had the opportunity to witness first-hand the ferment of revolutionary France. He left France on the day of King Louis XVI’s execution permanently sickened by the horror and suffering that occurs when reform is accompanied by fanatical zeal.
The Catholic Emancipation Movement
O’Connell is most often remembered for his first major political undertaking: organizing a mass struggle to secure full Catholic citizenship that evolved into one of the most successful political and cultural movements in Irish history. The overwhelming public support for Catholic Emancipation generated by O’Connell’s Catholic Association forced the British government to pass the Emancipation Act of 1829 with the grudging assent of the Crown. O’Connell topped it off by becoming the first Catholic in more than 140 years to be elected to a seat in the British Parliament.
In the course of his parliamentary career, O’Connell became a major figure in Parliament, striving for prison and law reform, free trade, the abolition of slavery and Jewish emancipation. British radicals, so taken with his political successes in Ireland, eventually adapted his methods of organizing and employing the power of mass public opinion to conditions in England and Scotland.
The Repeal Movement
The lessons O’Connell gained organizing and leading the Catholic Emancipation movement and serving in Parliament would prove invaluable as he embarked on his next big undertaking: emancipating Ireland.
One key to his success was the way in which he approached the whole issue of nationalism: step-by-step, first by dealing with issues of immediate, emotional interest to the Irish.
Unlike the earlier separatists who demanded full-blown separation from Britain, O’Connell sought nothing more, or less, that the repeal of the Union of 1803 and the return of Ireland to the position she had occupied “when I was born.” Endowed once again with its own sovereign Parliament, O’Connell contended, Ireland would no longer be a “subordinate province” but a “a limb of the empire“ — a “distinct country, subject to the same King.”
As political visions go, it was ingeniously simple and straightforward — a bit too simple and straightforward for the wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners who watched helplessly as O’Connell began garnering a huge following for his approach.
First, he stressed loyalty to the British Crown — to “Sovereign Queen Victoria and her heirs and successors forever.”
Second, he disavowed any approach aimed at securing Irish sovereignty by physical force.
In essence, what O’Connell sought was a vision of dual loyalty — loyalty both to a sovereign monarch and to a sovereign Ireland.
Predictably, many wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners feared even this would constitute a slippery slope that ultimately would lead to a complete break with the British Crown and the formation of a wholly separate Ireland along the lines envisioned by Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Emmett and the other republican separatists.
O’Connell was determined to put these fears to rest.
“I want you,” he said at a repeal meeting at Trim in 1843, “I want you not to violate your allegiance to the lovely and beautiful being that fills the throne — our gracious Queen, long life to her (great cheers). I want you to preserve your allegiance unbroken to her as I do mine, but I want you, at the same time, to remember that you have another allegiance equally dear and higher in its quality, though not so binding in law, but equally binding in an Irish heart, and that is the allegiance to your country (cheers). I call on you to be loyal men — loyal to the Queen and loyal to your country.”
O’Connell earned the undying enmity of diehard republican separatists who viewed this dual loyalty as a contradiction in terms, if not an outright betrayal of the republican vision of self-determination.
Yet, not once during his long political career did O’Connell ever question the British connection or the Crown‘s authority in Ireland. Late in life he even vowed that he would end his political struggle if it ever threatened Ireland’s historic connection to the British Empire or allegiance to the Crown.
O’Connell, simply knew better than to challenge British authority in Ireland. From his standpoint, breaking the historic connection was a nonnegotiable issue.
O’Connell’s Political Realism
Granted, O’Connell’s repeated affirmations of loyalty did not stem from any sense of mystical loyalty to the British connection. His was a fealty motivated entirely by political realism. Previous separatist attempts to break the connection had brought dreadful suffering to the Irish people — tragedies that O’Connell was determined not to repeat. Moreover, these uprisings, rather than increasing the desire for Irish liberation, had produced entirely the opposite effect. No, he believed, the Irish “were not sufficiently enlightened to hear the sun of freedom” — not yet, at least.
Repeal and the restoration of a sovereign Irish Parliament was the most any reasonable Irishman could hope for in the early 19th century, O‘Connell believed, and he was determined to stick to this course despite the unremitting criticism of radical separatists or the veiled threats of the British authorities.
Using the same highly successful strategy he had employed with Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell eventually built the Repeal Movement into what historian Robert Kee has described as “the first real, effective organization of Irish mass opinion since the days of James II.”
The movement was organized around the National Repeal Association, established in 1840 and symbolically headed by an old Protestant Volunteer from the 1782 era (when Ireland gained parliamentary sovereignty.) In the following year, however, it was reorganized and renamed the Loyal National Repeal Association, underscoring the loyalty to the British connection. Like the old Catholic Association on which the Emancipation Movement was built, the Repeal Association required only a penny-a-month subscription for associate membership — a practice that was later nicknamed the “repeal rent,” underscoring the exorbitant land rents the tenants paid to landlords.
Throughout his political career, O’Connell strove to connect the Repeal movement with the rent issue and other social concerns of vital interest to the Irish masses, although he was careful not to spell out in too much detail how he intended to address these issues when Irish sovereignty was finally secured.
Mass Appeal
In time, the emotive appeal of O’Connell’s message forged a mystical bond between the Irish masses and the Repeal movement.
By foreswearing republican separatism and accepting the reality of the British connection, O’Connell won the support of the Catholic priesthood and many bishops who had viewed republican separatism with profound skepticism, fearing it would degenerate into the same sort of anti-clericalism that had characterized post-Revolutionary Republican France.
O’Connell also openly embraced individuals who supported more modest visions of Irish autonomy. As the Repeal movement began gaining steam and winning over large sectors of the Irish population, some members of the Anglo-Irish gentry attempted to craft a strategy for meeting O’Connell halfway. This middle way, known as Federalism, envisioned an independent domestic legislature concerned with internal Irish issues, while the Parliament of Westminster would still be entrusted with wider imperial issues.
Some Repeal advocates dismissed Federalism as nothing more than a half-measure designed to stave off full-blown repeal. O’Connell, on the other hand, viewed Federalism as an important first step, and welcomed Federalists into Repeal Association ranks. Since establishing even a domestic legislature would require the repeal of the hated Union Act of 1801, Federalists were, in effect, Repealers, O’Connell reasoned — a good enough reason to include them within his growing ranks.
“We will not require him (the Federalist) to go the full length with us in every particular — we will go that that length ourselves and never give it up,” O’Connell asserted. “But we will take the assistance of every man that is for a domestic legislature of any kind in Ireland.”
Even so, the Repeal Movement, never garnered more than a modest following among Protestant Irish. Still, O’Connell was determined not to construct high ideological and ethnic barriers. The return of Irish sovereignty, he assured Protestants, would be accompanied by the restoration of an Irish House of Lords comprised almost exclusively of wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners, and this would provide a permanent safeguard against any threat to the Protestant privileges within Ireland.
Young Ireland
While O’Connell never succeeded in making steep inroads into Protestant or Dissenter ranks, he did attract a circle of gifted, middle-class young men, half of them Protestant, whose corporate talents advanced Ireland even farther down the road toward national independence. Eventually known as “Young Ireland,” this talented circle of intellectuals complemented O’Connell’s work in a variety of ways, especially by appealing to a broader cross-section of the population. They also enabled O’Connell to responded to charges that the Repeal Association was little more than a stalking horse for Catholic hegemony in Ireland.
“We must sink the distinctions of blood as well as sect,” wrote Young Irelander Thomas Davis. “The Milesian, the Dane, the Norman, the Welshman, the Scotsman and the Saxon, naturalized here, must combine regardless of their blood — the Strong-bownian must sit with the Ulster Scot and him whose ancestor came from Tyre or Spain must confide in an work with the Cromwellian and the Williamite… If a union of all Irish-born men ever be accomplished Ireland will have the greatest and most varied materials for an illustrious nationality and for a tolerant and flexible character in literature, manners, religion and life of any nation on earth.”
The writing of Young Ireland intellectuals, featured in The Nation, the official publication of movement, sparked a passion for Irish literature and folkways and won over a generation of writers, poets, playwrights and activists to the cause of Irish independence. Many of these individuals were descended from prominent Anglo-Irish families, including Jane Francesca Elgee, John Mitchell and, later, Maude Gonne and William Butler Yeats.
Monster Meetings and the Arrest of O’Connell
No one could have ever predicted the phenomenal success of the Repeal Movement. By January 1, 1843, the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who had turned out for a series of repeal rallies, later dubbed “Monster Meetings,” convinced O’Connell that he could achieve repeal by the end of the year. Either support repeal, he warned British authorities, or face civil war.
This veiled threat was too much for British Prime Minister Robert Peel, who subsequently banned a public meeting scheduled for Clontarf and arrested O’Connell for sedition, even though O’Connell had urged his fellow Irishmen to obey the ban.
After being found guilty and serving a year in prison, O’Connell was released after the Law Lords reversed the decision. As is often the case, O’Connell’s time in prison only increased his stature as a nationalist and a defender of civil liberties.
By working with Liberals in Parliament on other reform measures and winning their trust, O’Connell ultimately hoped to win enough of them over to carry through with repeal. On the issue of Irish sovereignty, however, the vast majority of Liberals remained steadfastly opposed.
The Break With Young Ireland
Other factors hampered the Repeal Movement as well, especially, the tragic potato famine, which brought untold suffering to hundreds of thousands of Irish tenant farmers and resulted in the widespread de-population of the island during the 1840’s. A series of policy disagreements also ensued between O’Connell and Young Ireland, which, as a largely secular group, had always viewed the predominantly Catholic Repeal Movement with a degree of suspicion.
This dispute was complicated by O’Connell’s steadfast determination to seek “peaceful and legal means alone” to secure sovereignty — an appeal that increasingly fell on deaf ears among the Young Irelanders who were appalled at the British government’s unwillingness to alleviate the horrific suffering stemming from the famine.
Young Ireland, opposed to any measures that involved any cooperation with either of the two British political parties, increasingly adopted a far more strident tone.
The final break with Young Ireland occurred at a Repeal Association meeting on July 13, 1846, when O’Connell stated that he would not accept “the service of any man who does not agree with me on both in theory and practice.” On the subject of peaceful and legal means, O’Connell remained intractable.
The dye was cast. And the long-dreaded break with Young Ireland finally occurred.
O’Connell’s health deteriorated rapidly after the break with Young Ireland. His last public appearance was in the British House of Commons, the scene of so many triumphs, when he rose and issued a final appeal to his colleagues to adopt famine relief measures on behalf of his starving countrymen.
“Ireland,” he stated in a barely audible voice, “is in your hands. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself.”
Watching from the Tory benches, Benjamin Disraeli found the whole spectacle tiring — “a feeble old man muttering from a table,” he recalled.
Shortly thereafter, O’Connell died on a pilgrimage to Rome. At his request, his heart was buried in Rome and his body in Ireland.
Without O’Connell at the helm, the Repeal movement quickly declined to irrelevancy. Yet, viewing O’Connell’s struggle as a only minor digression in Irish history would be extremely short-sighted.
In truth, O’Connell breathed life into the corpse of Irish nationalism. His vision of a sovereign Ireland, firmly anchored in the British empire and claiming the Crown of Britain as it own, remained the model for Irish nationalism for the rest of the 19th century.
Republican separatism, on the other hand, languished as “only a small minority movement,” argues Robert Kee, “and remained so until the final moment of its surprise success in the 19th century.”
What We Can Lean From Daniel O’Connell
O’Connell had much to teach the Irish, and he has much to teach us.
To be sure, the challenges we face as Southern regionalists are far more daunting than those of O‘Connell. For, unlike the destitute masses of Ireland of the 19th century, our people enjoy a standard of living surpassing that of the wealthiest Irish landlord. Among many contemporary Southerners, there is no sense of urgency for restoring a regional identity.
Yes, conservative Southerners, like most right-leaning Americans, are fed up with political correctness and the assault on traditional culture. Many are alarmed by the insidious judicial encroachment on property and Second Amendment rights — rights that were viewed as sacrosanct only a generation ago.
Even so, the vast majority of Southerners do not feel oppressed in the sense that the average 19th century Irish tenant farmer felt oppressed. Most, in fact, would argue that the United States, despite its many social and cultural challenges, is still, by far, the best country in the world.
This, I believe, is all the more reason why we should follow another one of Daniel O’Connell precepts and focus closely on issues of immediate interest to Southerners. In this post-constitutional age, most Southerners simply cannot relate to abstract appeals to states rights and regional solidarity alone.
Nevertheless, as recent history has proven, Southerners can be reached with other messages, such as calls for better education for their children, tax reform and more efficient and responsive government — a whole host of issues relating to their everyday needs. O’Connell deftly used issues such as emancipation and land rent reform to underscore the need for enhanced Irish identity and sovereignty.
Perhaps most important of all, we should emulate O’Connell by refusing to build high ideological and ethnic barriers.
One of the most disturbing trends within the Southern movement of late has been the formation of a small, vocal circle of zealots who seem determined to pass judgment on anyone who deviates one iota from what is perceived to be the correct interpretation of Southern regionalism.
Most of this zealotry has focused on the “correct” definition of Southern regionalism and identity. It is behavior befitting the most rigid forms of Marxist-Leninism, and it has no place in any Southern movement. As someone responding to an earlier edition of this piece observed, “censorious and propagandist thinking” is fatal to the vitality of any movement.
O’Connell obviously understood this, and that is why he welcomed a variety of dissenting opinions into his ranks. Indeed, the open discussion that ensued within his movement imbued Irish nationalism with a vibrancy and relevancy that endured long after the passing of the Repeal Movement.
O’Connell also took pains to reach beyond his own Catholic constituency to connect with other sectors of the population, including liberal-minded Anglo-Irish landowners and middle-class and working-class Dissenters in Ulster. He knew that without the support of at least a fraction of these groups, the Repeal Movement was doomed from the start.
Likewise, Southern activists must come to terms with the fact that the struggle to reformulate Southern regional identity simply cannot be a “white thing” or a “neo-Confederate thing,” but a Southern thing — a struggle that encompasses most, if not all, sectors of the population, moderate, liberal and conservative. Granted, I’m under no illusion that black Southerners – or, for that matter, many liberals – will ever support a Southern identity movement in large numbers. Yet, the fact remains that in order for us to become a viable movement, we must reach out to other Southerners who are not commonly associated with regionalist sentiment.
The same goes for women. Otherwise, we will be laboring in political obscurity for a very long time — longer, perhaps, than the Irish republicans.
Oddly, some elements within the Southern movement assume they can merrily go about their business and ignore these sectors of the population entirely.
Finally, Southern activists must also face up to the complexity of Southern regional identity.
Eamon DeValera, the first president of the Irish Republic, viewed Irish nationalism in what Kee describes as the “classical language of Irish separatism.” Writing to a friend in 1918, DeVelara likened the plight of Ireland to that of Belgium under Wilhemite Germany. Yet, this concept of nationalism, while quaint and endearing to many, was not entirely accurate.
Many an Irish Catholic tenant farmer in the 19th century would have had difficulty distinguishing between his love of Ireland and his loyalty to the British Crown (which, after all, had been the Crown of Ireland for more than six centuries).
As liberal-minded as O’Connell was, he was at least conservative enough to realize such patterns of loyalty would not be reversed in a year, a decade or even a century.
This is another fact of life that should not be lost on Southern activists. For while the average Southerner undoubtedly takes pride in the South, he would have a difficult time distinguishing between being a Southerner and being an American. In the view of most Southerners, the two are inextricably linked.
Even so, as I have stressed before, this fact of life, bitter as it is to some, should not dissuade us from building a post-Confederate, post-civil rights, post-racial 21st century Southern identity movement aimed at restoring Southern pride and regionalism — no more than it dissuaded O’Connell from following his chosen path.
[I wrote this piece many years ago, shortly before I became thoroughly disillusioned with the nascent Southern movement. While I no longer consider myself as doctrinaire a conservative, I remain every bit a Southern regionalist and still believe that Daniel O’Connell provides the best inspiration for any 21st century Southern identity movement. Note: the article has been significantly revised to reflect the passage of time as well as my reformulated views.]
Musings of an American Red Tory 