O'Connell and Slavery

Patrick Geoghegan’s article on Daniel O’Connell’s denunciations of slavery and refusal to accept support from American slaveholders is an useful reminder of the extent to which O’Connell’s belief in liberty went beyond Irish particularism.  It is possible to expand on it in a few points.
  First of all, O’Connell’s commitment to the anti-slavery cause led him into contact with British evangelical Protestants who on many issues were fiercely opposed to him.  Such contact aroused controversy on both sides – the Evangelical writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, expressing her outrage at O’Connell’s appearance at a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society (from which she promptly resigned) describes O’Connell as if he were Milton’s Satan.  (O’Connell’s willingness to co-operate with Evangelicals where he believed justice was at stake went beyond the slavery issue.  He even attended an 1843 public meeting called by Evangelicals to protest against restrictions imposed on the religious observances of Jews in the Papal States, and promised to make representations to the Papal government on behalf of the Jews – cf William D. & Hilary L. Rubinstein Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews (London, 1999) pp10, 14, 120, 145 which contrasts O’Connell’s stance with later Irish Catholic support for the Papal government over the forcible conversion of the child Edgardo Mortara in 1858-9.)
  Secondly, the annoyance of the Young Irelanders at O’Connell’s refusal to play down the slavery issue in the interests of American support for Repeal should be seen in the context of Anglo-American diplomatic tensions in the 1830s and 1840s, which roused hopes in some quarters that Irish nationalism might gain from an Anglo-American conflict.   The twentieth-century alliances and the cultural and linguistic relationships between the USA and Britain have tended to overshadow the extent to which in the nineteenth century many Americans saw Britain as the traditional enemy, whose monarchic and aristocratic institutions contrasted sharply with American egalitarianism and republicanism, and whose continued presence in Canada represented an obstacle to American expansion across the continent.   (The American pro-Repeal meeting satirised by Dickens is described as primarily motivated by hostility to Britain – “not by any means that they loved Ireland much; being horribly jealous and distrustful of its people always, and only tolerating them because of their working hard, which made them very useful”.)   The Anglo-American War of 1812-15 was fought in part over the possible annexation of Canada, and periodically throughout the nineteenth century it was believed that that war would be re-run, with an American army marching into Ontario in the hope of overrunning Canadian resistance before British reinforcements could come from Europe, while British fleets sailed along the eastern US seaboard bombarding coastal cities and landing raiding parties (such as that under Sir John Ross of Bladensburg which occupied Washington and burned the White House in August 1814.  Canadian visitors to Northern Ireland, who regard the 1812-15 War as securing their independence from the US, appreciate being directed to the Ross memorial obelisk at Rostrevor, Co. Down.)  The Fenian invasions of Canada in the late 1860s, for example, appear much more irrational than they actually were unless such expectations are taken into account.
  The late 1830s and early 1840s were one period when such expectations were aroused.   In 1837-8 insurrections took place in Canada against the colonial government (in which the executive was not responsible to the legislature – elected on a limited franchise).   These rapidly collapsed, though for some time Canadian rebels and American sympathisers carried out desultory raids into Canada.   The presidency of John Tyler (1841-45) was marked by boundary disputes between Maine and New Brunswick and between the “Oregon territory” (a much larger area than the present state of Oregon) and what later became the Canadian province of British Columbia in the West.
    Tyler’s domestic position was complicated by the fact that he was the first Vice-President to succeed to the office without an election (after William Henry Harrison died of a chill contracted at his inauguration).  Moreover, although Harrison and Tyler had been nominated by the Whig Party (composed of the opponents of the populist Democrat President Andrew Jackson (1829-37) and his successor Martin Van Buren (1837-41), Tyler had originally been a Democrat and disagreed with many of the policies favoured by the Whig Congressional leader Henry Clay (a former and future presidential candidate).   This rapidly led to the new President’s expulsion from the Whig party, and much of his term was dominated by attempts to construct a political base for himself independent of the Whig and Democrat parties.
   As part of this endeavour, Tyler tried to appeal for Irish support, and the prominent position of his favourite son Robert Tyler as chairman of the Philadelphia Repeal Association should probably be seen in this light.   A recent biographer mentions that when in June 1843 Tyler visited New York to drum up support for his administration, his procession was accompanied by Irishmen carrying signs proclaiming “Honest John Tyler” and “Justice for Ireland”. 9Gary May John Tyler (New York, 2008).    In 1853, when Tyler was living in retirement on his Virginia slave plantation, his wife Julia responded to an appeal to the women of America to oppose slavery signed by Harriet Duchess of Sutherland and other British aristocrats, with an open letter remarking that the slaves were not starving to death in hundreds of thousands like the Irish tenants of some of the signatories.  (Edward P. Crapol John Tyler: The Accidental President (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2006)).
  The Tylers’ slaveholding, however, made them a particular object of O’Connell’s scorn, and his repudiation of Robert Tyler by name aroused particularly vehement criticism from the Young Irelanders.   It is unlikely, however, that a different approach would have produced much more in the way of American support.   Whatever might be the attraction of rhetorically twisting the lion’s tail, British naval strength made the prospect of war over Canada uninviting.   The Maine-New Brunswick boundary dispute was settled by treaty in 1842, and although the Oregon boundary was not resolved until 1845 under Tyler’s Democrat successor James Knox Polk (1845-49) the Tyler and Polk administrations found the annexation of Texas and the northern territories of Mexico a more inviting prospect.
   These annexations, by raising the prospect of larger territories being opened to slavery, helped to intensify the conflict between free-soil and slave states and ultimately to precipitate the American Civil War (in which Tyler was a member of the Confederate Congress and his plantation was sacked by Union troops.)  In the shorter term, O’Connell’s annoyance at this expansion of slavery led him on 30 March 1845 to make a speech in Dublin in which, after once again denouncing American slavery, he proclaimed that if repeal were granted Ireland would fight for Britain against America: “Let them but give us the Parliament in College Green, and Oregon shall be theirs, and Texas shall be harmless... and the American eagle in its highest point of flight, be brought down”.   In an excellent article in the Journal of American Ethnic History (winter 2007, pp3-27) Angela Murphy has charted how the widespread expression of American outrage at the “American Eagle” speech, and nativist accusations that Irish-Americans were loyal to O’Connell rather than repeal, precipitated the final collapse of the Repeal movement in the United States.  Not for the last time, Irish-American and Irish political imperatives came into collision.
           
The link below is to a contemporary cartoon by a supporter of Henry Clay, which ridicules both O’Connell’s abolitionism and the attempt of the Tylers to secure Irish support.