Over the course of the nineteenth century, use of the Irish language declined from approximately half to just 5 per cent of the Irish population. Celebrated Irish painters and English-language writers in London purposively adopted the role of representatives of a historic culture that could be romanticised only because it was now past.78 Notoriously, in the recent past, Scottish writer James MacPherson had made the ancient Irish Fianna sagas the basis of his own original English-language verse that was translated into several European languages and was celebrated by artists and politicians in both Europe and America. However, when it was discovered that he had misrepresented his own original writings as being direct translations from an ancient text by a non-existent Scottish Gaelic poet ‘Ossian’ (a name derived from the legendary Irish Fianna, or ‘Fenian’, Oisín), many people abroad assumed thereafter that the notion that an Irish culture and language had ever existed, let alone thrived, was purely a fiction.79 ‘Ossianic’ societies soon acquired British royal patronage, while Charles Villiers Stanford, a Dublin-born founder of the music school of the University of Cambridge, composed a Lament for the Sons of Ossian to equate all Irish nationalists with being ignorant believers in a historical fiction. This prompted W.B. Yeats, an Irish cultural nationalist poet, to purposively entitle his first collection The Wanderings of Oisin.80 These debates about Irish life altered around the end of the nineteenth century. The Catholic Church, which had been legalised within the United Kingdom in 1850, encouraged an Irish language revival as part of a cultural nationalist movement that essentially defined itself against two notions of an Anglophone world. First, it labelled the equation of modernity with secularism as an Anglophone delusion. Second, it labelled cosmopolitan cultures and commercialism as an anti-intellectual force. If Britain had been, in Napoleon Bonaparte’s words, a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, Irish cultural nationalists were now encouraged to believe that Ireland’s destiny was to be a nation of schoolteachers.81
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To enable British industrialisation, Ireland’s role in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom economy was to be a provider of agricultural produce and additional labour. A process of involuntary emigration coincided with a traumatic Great Famine (1845–51) that cost a million lives and led a further million to attempt to emigrate.82 The British government’s response was controversial because it refused to interfere with the continued exportation of Irish food. It also ordered that the starving should be made to do more manual labour in order to be deserving of receiving charitable assistance.83 A precedent was also set. Britain refused to allow poverty relief aid from outside legal jurisdictions to reach Ireland, and this would become a source of controversy later that century when, during a period of mass evictions and fears of renewed famine in Ireland, recipients of American aid were prosecuted.84 Assisted emigration schemes to the British colonies continued unabated. American opposition to state-aid for denominational education encouraged the Catholic Church to promote this trend because religious education could receive more overt political backing in the British colonies, including Canada.85 This indirectly affected the experience of Irish emigrants to America. As a result of emigration, more Irish-born soldiers fought in the American civil war (1861–5) than in any other war in modern times,86 but the Catholic Church’s ongoing resistance to state-education programmes meant that the experience of Irish migrants to America continued to be characterised by a sense of social insecurity or isolation.87
A contrary trend stemmed from the British government’s expulsion from Ireland of nationalist rebels who had attempted to emulate the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Realising that the American government ‘hailed the European revolutions of 1848 as extensions of their own’,88 these expatriate Irishmen enthusiastically embraced an American republican patriotism by combining anti-British expressions of American foreign policy with fierce critiques of British rule in Ireland.89 The United States itself ‘remained properly cautious … in terms of promoting republican principles abroad’ because direct intervention could promote harmful retaliation. During the 1850s, American expansionist ambitions to fulfil their nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ (a term coined by John O’Sullivan, an influential American diplomat of Irish descent) found an alternative outlet in filibuster campaigns, which were privately organised military expeditions in foreign territories that enjoyed unofficial state backing. This development originated with America’s desire to capitalise upon the chaotic situation facing many European colonies in Latin America, not least through utilising secret freemason networks.90 Previously, Irish adventurers like Daniel Florence O’Leary acquired fame in South American campaigns led by Simon Bolivar and made this a prelude to entering the British diplomatic service.91 Now, however, Irish filibusters were inclined to offer their services to the American government instead. The creation of the American Fenian Brotherhood among Irish emigrants, several of whom were veterans of previous filibuster campaigns (American or otherwise),92 was a direct manifestation of this trend.93 At their public national conventions, the American Fenians, while calling for an independent Ireland, expressed their total identification with the American principle that only republican governments effectively championed liberty.94
Junior American consuls, first created in Ireland during 1790, remained in place under the Union and continued to report on trading possibilities. American ships had traded directly with a dozen different Irish port towns, but by the 1830s this situation had changed to being just an occasional importer of Ulster linens via Liverpool.95 The Americans responded by introducing a direct trading line with Galway town, which was deemed to be without rival as an Irish port and was expected in New York to become ‘one of the most flourishing cities in Ireland’. Between 1858 and 1863, sixteen American steamers operated direct trade between Galway and New York before a combination of competition from a new British government-backed enterprise in Liverpool and the oubreak of the American civil war led to their sudden demise.96 Irish nationalist journalists from Galway and the west of Ireland thereafter left for the United States, where they formed what were effectively ‘pro-Irish’ American newspapers that the British government frequently seized whenever they were imported into Ireland because of their critiques of British foreign policy.97
This tradition of Fenian journalism embodied a paradox. American foreign policy was based on drawing a stark contrast between American republican liberties and the supposedly morally corrupt values of European monarchical governments, including an allegedly arrogant British government. To a significant extent, however, this American national identity was only an expression of a fear that the European powers (with which the United States still did most of its trade) might use their influence on any of the American continents in order to destroy the young American republic.98 Boosting overseas trade and an expansionist impulse were always the central dynamics of American foreign policy.
