Emerald Atlantic: Motivations in Irish-American Diasporic Violence
By Winslow MacDonald, Columbia University
War in the Diaspora
Civil wars and emigration are closely related concepts; wars force relocation, while refugee populations beyond a state’s borders can influence a conflict within its original borders. As Idean Salehyan writes in his “Rebels without Borders: State Boundaries, Transnational Opposition, and Civil Conflict,” from Sikhs in Pakistan to Contras in Costa Rica, “modern insurgencies are not limited to the geographic area of the state.”[1] Safe beyond the reach of their government enemy, “diaspora communities often provide funding and resources to opposition parties within their origin state, including violent factions.”[2] Scholars have examined the consequences of diasporic support for civil wars, arguing, like Salehyan, that “rebellions are more likely to emerge and endure”[3] according to the capacity and proximity of rebel organizations beyond the state’s territory.
Examining the variance in motivation and activity of Irish-American diasporic groups participating in the Anglo-Irish conflict offers an appropriate example to understand the factors impelling violence within the diaspora. Over nearly two centuries, Irish-Americans have organized to provide political and military support to the cause of Irish nationalism within the U.S. In identifying the commonalities and distinctions between Irish-American nationalist groups, the nature of a group’s domestic agenda emerges as a salient determinant for its likelihood to use violence in an adopted country. Before the onset of mass Irish immigration in the 1840s, the Irish fought the British alongside other powers as mercenaries and as immigrants in adopted countries; this pattern changed as Irish immigrant populations reached a critical mass. The likelihood of Irish immigrants to commit violent nationalistic acts outside of the homeland is a function of said violence’s reconcilability with political circumstances within the diaspora, rather than a product of traditional factors of war onset: economic shocks, poverty, or ethnic grievances. Military experience and material capacity, while capable of affecting the nature of violence, have little effect on a diasporic organization’s decision to use violence or not.
Origins of Irish Discontent
Since the Tudor Conquest of Ireland and the establishment of settler-colonialism in the north of the island, such as the Plantation of Ulster in 1609,[4] Irish separatist fervor has fomented and, several times, erupted. Irish armed rebellion against English rule has occurred multiple times: the Nine Years’ War of 1594, failed Rebellions in 1641, 1798, and 1848, and the 1921 Irish War of Independence, which resulted in mixed success, including the partition of North Ireland and the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War.[5] The persistence of conflict between Ireland and Great Britain, Irish solicitation of foreign support for their cause, and oppressive British Penal Laws (including the expulsion of Catholic soldiers from the island and countless other oppressive, anti-Catholic measures),[6] established a rich tradition of Irish service in the militaries of foreign governments preceding the Irish Diaspora.
Dubbed the “Flight of the Wild Geese,” ethnically Irish regiments began the tradition of foreign military service beginning with the Army of Flanders under a Catholic Spanish King in the Eighty Years’ War. In 1607, fearing “a period of rigorous repression and savagery based on religious bigotry,”[7] Irish Earls who had fled to continental Europe organized Irish regiments in Spain, the Netherlands, and France, with the intention “to return one day to take their own country back from the English invaders.”[8] As the English and Spanish continued to fight over the following centuries, various units of Irish ‘Wild Geese,’ including the Spanish Hibernia, Ultonia, and Irlanda Regiments or Pope Pius IX’s Irish Battalion of St. Patrick,[9] fought with distinction. In the late eighteenth century, Irish units fighting under the Spanish and French flags fought against the British during the American War of Independence; 600 men of the Hibernia Regiment assaulted the British installation at Pensacola, Florida in 1780.[10] As mercenaries motivated by economic factors and the opportunity to take up arms against the British (Catholics were barred firearm ownership under the Penal Laws),[11] the Flight of the Wild Geese stands as a stark historic example of Irishmen using internationalist methods to combat British oppression.
It is crucial to distinguish between the internationalist methods of the Wild Geese before the 1840s and cross-diasporic, Irish-American support for Irish separatism. As Hennessy argues in his The Wild Geese: The Irish Soldier in Exile, though the Irish mercenaries had noble political and religious separatist motivations and won glories on the battlefield, “the irrefutable but frequently forgotten fact remains: they started to tread the path of glory while they were still the minions of a dethroned British sovereign.”[12] While the Wild Geese and descendant Irish-American groups both endorsed violence for achieving Irish independence, they differed in meaningful ways. The Wild Geese fighting in France were not fleeing Ireland permanently, indeed, they left behind their wives and children.[13] Conversely, violent separatist groups in the nineteenth-century U.S., such as the Fenian Brotherhood, had unique Irish-American diasporic identities. While the Wild Geese fought the British within the context of international European conflict (i.e. involving the Spanish and French), Irish diasporic organizations in the U.S. engaged in and materially supported Irish violence as Irish-Americans within the diaspora. Contrasting the ideological and methodological developments and commitments of Irish-American ethnic organizations offers a compelling lens through which to understand Irish-American nationalism and willingness to commit international violence in the name of their ancestral homeland. In a comparison of the Fenian Brother’s motivations and those of the American faction of the Irish National Land League, domestic political agendas, and to a lesser extent military capacity and experience, determine the likelihood of organizational violence. Departing from traditional understandings of civil war onset, diasporic violence is not the result of economic and social grievances, nor the cohesiveness of ethnic consciousness.
"The Fenian Brotherhood." by Villanova University Digital Library
The Fenian Brotherhood & Violent Diasporic Action
The Fenian Raids are the best example of militant Irish-American support for Irish separatism. From its establishment in 1858, the Fenian Brotherhood consolidated Irish-American resources to be used in various revolutionary schemes, with the ultimate objective of achieving an independent Irish Republic. Two events, the Irish Potato Famine and the Irish Rebellion of 1848, were of tremendous bearing on the Brotherhood’s conception. The 1845 famine and inadequate British mitigation efforts exacerbated preexisting Irish separatist fervor to incite the ineffectual Irish Rebellion.[14] Furthermore, the Famine opened the floodgates for diasporic emigration from Ireland outside of Europe, massively increasing a practice that had begun with the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in the 1810s.[15] Whereas previous Irish immigrants to the U.S. had been primarily male and majority-Protestant Ulster, the famine displaced entire families of Catholics. In the U.S., Irish immigrants experienced church burnings, labor discrimination, and worse.[16]
Invoking linguistic, cultural, and religious distinctions, nativist Protestant Americans perpetuated the notion of an ethnic distinction between Irish immigrants and Americans. In a wartime context, Nativist discrimination eroded the infantile national bond between immigrants and their adopted country. Hundreds of Irish-born U.S.troops defected to the “San Patricio” Brigade during the Mexican-American War: pushed by mistreatment at the hands of Protestant officers, lack of Roman Catholic chaplains, and alleged “compulsoryProtestant church parades”[17] and attracted by the prospect of at last living under a “Catholic power” or enticing offers of 320 acres in Mexico to those who deserted.[18] The fascinating history of the San Patricios exhibits several relevant themes about economic and ethnoreligious factors in rebellion prevalent in the scholarship of Collier and Hoeffler, especially the nuanced interconnectedness of ethnic, religious, and economic grievances in instigating rebellion.[19] Further, it reflects the work of Cederman et al. in demonstrating how social exclusion, recent ethnic violence, a non-ethnically-neutral state actor, and a demographic’s mobilizing capacity influence the cost-benefit analysis of defection.[20] Irish immigrants were socially and economically subordinated to white Protestant Americans while the U.S. military, a state apparatus, was an agent for anti-Catholic religious exclusion. When the U.S. eventually captured 80 of the San Patricios, 54 were hanged for treason and 26 (who had luckily deserted before the American Declaration of War) were flogged and branded with a D, for “deserter.”[21] According to Fenian scholar Hereward Senior, the state’s punishment “aroused much resentment among Irish-Americans,” who “were beginning to acquire grievances against American society.”[22] Although the San Patricios’ defection was not explicitly Irish-nationalist, their history illuminates factors impelling later Irish immigrants to make a cost-benefit analysis regarding committing transnational violence. Despite the high likelihood of U.S. triumph over Mexico, and indeed the high price to be paid for defection (proved by the 54 hangings), the San Patricios elected to crystallize around ethnic homogeneity if it meant a chance to ameliorate their religious, social, and economic deprivation.
The American Fenian Brotherhood, emerging in the context of failed Irish ‘insular’ separatism in Europe, continued social and religious discrimination in the U.S., and perpetual poverty, expressed political recalcitrance in their call to invade British Canada. The Fenians hoped to rally diasporic support, coordinating with Fenians in Ireland to translate an invasion of Canada into “the liberation of Ireland.”[23] Canada was still a British dominion and Irish soldiers fought in Canadian militias, but as the Fenians expected Irish emigrant support from Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians in their raids, and as the raids violated both Canadian sovereignty and American neutrality,[24] I define the Fenians as diasporic actors committing interstate and domestic violence.
After decades of fundraising and organizational challenges, the American Fenians raided the Canadian border multiple times from 1866 to 1871. Tasked with avoiding American agents before combating Canadian militias, the Fenians were able to launch several large-scale assaults on various Canadian locations, incurring significant casualties without retaining territory. In April 1866, nearly a thousand heavily-armed Fenian militants threatened Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, from the Maine border. The attack was stymied by the warnings of U.S. General George Meade and the intervention of a British warship; though the Fenians failed, their energy was not spent. On June 1, 1866, 1,500 Fenians crossed the Niagara River.[25] The day after, they engaged Canadian militiamen and British regulars at Ridgeway (near Fort Erie, Canada West, now Ontario, Canada). The Fenians won several mini-victories and inflicted more casualties (10 killed, 37 wounded) in the Battle than they sustained (7 wounded, 2 killed) but, with the threat of American gunboats preventing reinforcement and mass congregation of thousands of Canadian militiamen, the Fenians again retreated to the U.S.[26] Fenian attacks in Canada East several days later, on June 7, again resulted in temporary Fenian victories followed by the surrender of outnumbered Fenians. Similar ill-fated Fenian raids in Quebec and Manitoba between 1870-1871 resulted in fewer casualties on both sides and again prompted Fenian surrender, as well as the arrest of their leaders by U.S. troops for violation of U.S. neutrality.[27] Ultimately political and military failures, the Fenian Raids represent the only significant extra-imperial violence between Irish separatists and British military forces.
Cover image from: A Greater Ireland The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America Ely M. Janis
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5338.htm
Non-Violent Diasporic Action
American support for the Irish National Land League represented Irish-American non-violent support for Irish nationalism. The Land League emerged in Ireland in 1879, in the wake of the 1848 Rebellion and concurrent with international labor movements. The League hoped to address weaknesses in the structure of the Irish agricultural economy: “too many smallholdings” and “insecurity of tenure,”[28] as well as a catastrophic decline in potato production in 1879. Tenants in Ireland organized for agrarian reform, inciting anti-landlord sentiment and then, crucially, an “Appeal to the Irish Race for the Sustainment of the Irish National Land Movement,” bringing the issue to the U.S.[29] Suggesting that American immigrants were themselves victims of the Irish land system, the League’s leader Charles Parnell traveled to the U.S. with the avowed mission “to solicit money from the Irish in America and to mobilize American public opinion against British rule in Ireland.”[30] American support for the Land League extended to famine relief and political agitation but did not entail violence within the diaspora or Ireland.[31] As espoused by Parnell’s deputy Michael Davitt, armed revolution against Britain, whether occurring on the Canadian frontier or Ireland itself, was ultimately a futile endeavor. Davitt asserted that the League wanted to “unite the people of Ireland in a peaceful mass agitation for their right to the land,” arguing that “our appeals to arms, our desires to gratify revenge, and exiting of the impulses and sentiments were vain and useless.”[32] Ultimately, the Land League sought to establish first “peasant proprietorship in Ireland”[33] and then national independence.
By 1881, the Land League enjoyed significant success in the U.S., with the establishment of over 792 American branches and successful fundraising efforts.[34] In marrying industrial labor and nationalist movements, the League established a broad-based coalition of conservative and liberal Irish-American interests, ultimately contributing to the League’s short American lifespan. In Ireland, the League divided on the question of land nationalization, but the greatest blow to the organization’s future in the U.S. was dealt when members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood assassinated the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Cavendish, and his undersecretary Thomas Burke. Irish-Americans in Boston offered a $5,000 reward for the capture of the assassins, and liberal nationalists in the U.S. widely condemned the murders and led to a “conservative backlash against radicalism.”[35] As the Land League began to falter in the U.S., the question of land nationalization became more divisive. Davitt, arriving in the U.S. to compete with Parnell and advocate for broader land reform, further exacerbated fissures among Irish-American nationalists. These divisions, expanded on later, proved the death knell of the organization in the U.S. Beginning in 1882, the number of active Land League branches in the U.S. plummeted, with radical and conservative nationalists “disenchanted by its shifts away”[36] from its original principles of international social reconstruction defecting from the League. In April 1883 in Philadelphia, the American Land League formally disbanded.[37]
Following its organization’s demise in 1883, the Land League splintered into more ideologically homogeneous groups. Some Americans continued to support the Irish National League and nationalism “shorn of its social element,”[38] while most continued their activism in the industrial and labor movements. It would take until the 1916 Easter Rising for Irish-Americans to once again demonstrate their support of Irish nationalism with vivacity.
Poverty Alone ≠ Violence
While it is tempting to consider economic factors in the disparate use of violence by the Fenians and American Land League, especially because of the latter’s preeminent focus on labor and industrial issues, the economic compositions of the two organizations’ respective memberships were rather similar. Furthermore, the existence of violent pro-labor, pro-Irish nationalism organizations, such as the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania anthracite region, suggests that adherence to a pro-labor, anti-industrial ideology alone cannot stimulate violent diasporic support. Economic conditions may have impelled the emergence and intensity of Irish-American diasporic organizations like the Fenians or Land League, but cannot singularly determine an organization’s likelihood to resort to violence. As Meagher argues, the low economic status of Irish immigrants across the U.S. in the nineteenth century “may have reinforced their attachments to their ethnic group,” as “limited possibilities for individual [economic] advancement….rested largely in the advancement of their entire group.”[39] Though poor economic conditions may explain a resurgence in Irish-American ethnic consciousness in connection with support for the Land League’s objectives, the same pattern is reflected in decades-earlier Fenian recruitment, rendering the possibility of poor economic conditions facilitating violent cross-diasporic support unlikely. Further examination of the socio-economic composition of the Fenians and LandLeague reaffirms this principle.
Both the Fenians and American Land League gained their largest popular support from economically disadvantaged Irish-American immigrants. The Fenians “recruited very heavily among the Famine migrants” as well as “urban tradesmen and laborers.”[40] David Brundage claims in his Irish Nationalists in America that with as many as 50,000 “mainly working-class members” and over 200,000 supporters, the Fenians constitute not only the “first mass-based Irish nationalist movement in American history.”[41] Similarly, radical Irish nationalists supporting international social reforms in the 1880s and 1890s enjoyed support in “small mill towns and mining communities”[42] in the U.S. The Irish Land-Leaguer Michael Davitt explicitly bound the cause of Irish land reform with extant or potential Irish-American economic decline, declaring to an audience in Leadville, Colorado, that “you have no aristocracy yet….but rich Americans may desire to perpetuate their families and introduce the doctrine of primogeniture on American soil.”[43] The Land League emerged and prospered in both Ireland and the U.S. because of its mission to elevate the economic status of the poverty-mired and economically-repressed Irish race, just as the Fenians had asserted decades earlier in their mission for the “establishment of a thoroughly democratic Irish republic….even more sweeping program of social and economic reform.”[44] Ultimately then, as the Fenians and the American Land League both recruited from and enjoyed massive popular support from the working class through invoking economic reform and Irish social elevation in the U.S. and abroad, the socio-economic conditions of the organizations cannot explain why the Fenians resorted to violence, while the Land League explicitly rejected militance.
The Island of Ethnic-Consciousness
Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment remained pervasive throughout the lifespans of both the Fenian Brotherhood and the LandLeague. From the Know-Nothings to the American Protective Association, Protestant Americans sustained organizational prejudice throughout the 19th century that existed “independent of [the Irish] historic quarrel with Great Britain.[45] In the following examinations of Irish-American ethnic identification shifts in the latter half of the 19th century, nativist anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment is constant. In his 1985 study of ethnic consciousness among Irish-Americans in Worcester, MA over time, Timothy Meagher argues that ethnic consciousness is a function of a group’s socio-political environment; ethnic identity is instrumentalized when politically and economically advantageous and does not necessarily subside over generations. As Meagher’s study is transgenerational, accounting for confounding variables, its application to understanding the function of ethnic consciousness in the Fenian Brotherhood and Land League is appropriate.
Meagher charts Worcester’s Irish population’s relative ethnic isolation over time, finding that American-born Irish consistently maintained cultural practices (e.g. marrying late, producing more children than Irish-born immigrants or American Yankees, devotion to Catholicism despite prejudice)[46] regardless of external factors, though“environmental conditions” influenced ethnic insularity. From Irish-born immigrants to their U.S.-born descendants, Irish-Americans shifted between an “eagerness to prove themselves good Americans and reconcile their differences with their native stock Protestant Yankee neighbors” and “sullen and belligerent ethnocentric isolation.”[47] This bipolar ethnic consciousness, Meagher argues, was the product of political coalitions and their cooperation, or lack thereof: when the Yankees and Irish relied on one another for political election and/or patronage, Irish nationalism and ethnic distinction were minimized.
Conversely, as Swedes and French Canadians entered Worcester in the late 1880s and competed for Irish jobs and political control, the Yankee-Irish coalition faltered.[48] For a period, Worcester’s Irish population lingered in ethnic isolation and political reclusion. Across the U.S. and in Worcester, the Irish-American population by the 1880s was mostly second-generation immigrants. They expressed their political ideology through ethnic mouthpieces, advocating for specifically Irish-American objectives. Through established immigrant self-help organizations, namely the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, Worcester’s Irish called for Irish representation on the school board, parochial education, and Irish history in the curriculum, rather than Irish independence. As Worcester’s Irish-American population faced political exclusion and resurgent anti-Catholic, nativist prejudice in the 1890s, “heightened ethnic consciousness” became an object in “the Irish drive for political recognition.”[49] Meagher continues to argue that Worcester’s Irish ethnic revival dissolved “when changing political and social circumstances altered the conditions which had inspired it in the first place.”[50] Unable to achieve desired political recognition while ethnically isolated, Worcester’s Irish jettisoned ethnic consciousness, opting instead to ally with French-Canadian immigrants on the principles of American patriotism and mutual Catholicism.[51]
As Timothy Meagher reveals in his examination of Worcester’s transgenerational Irish immigrant populations, ethnic consciousness and isolationism served political functions. He demonstrates how “environmental conditions” in Worcester, such as the politically disruptive arrival of new ethnic groups, “were far more important than generation or class differences in explaining variations in the intensity of Irish ethnic consciousness.”[52] American Fenians and supporters of the Land League both doubtlessly strongly identified with their Irish heritage. Applying Meagher’s analysis that ethnic consciousness is epiphenomenal of environmental conditions or political ambitions to the Fenians and Land League allows us to eliminate the existence or magnitude of Irish-American ethnic consciousness as a determinant of violent diasporic support.
Military Experience and Capacity
The Fenians were able to execute violence and partially surmount the collective action problem through their military organizational and material capacities, as well as the recent military experience of their members. Fenian leaders had often solicited military aid from foreign governments to catalyze an Irish Revolution since before the American Civil War. For example, Irishmen colluded with the Russians to land 2,000 expatriates and 10,000 guns in Ireland during the Crimean War, a plan that petered out when the war ended.[53] As Senior argues, while “many of the Fenian rank and file must have belonged to agrarian secret societies and been involved in quasi-guerilla actions against Irish landlords,”[54] the American Civil War was a crucial development in the creation of a “formidable force of trained men.”[55] In the period between its conception in 1858 until the 1861 outbreak of the Civil War, Irish immigrants organized Irish militias, some under overt nationalist control, including the O’Mahony Guards, the Phoenix Brigade, and Corcoran’s Brigade.[56] In the American Civil War, some of these militias were converted into ‘ethnic regiments’ that identified with their home country and promoted nationalism, including the 69th Volunteer Infantry.[57] Thomas Meagher, of the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 was exiled to Tasmania before his escape to the U.S., led the Irish Brigade during the conflict. If ideological or geographic division caused the Irish to organize along ethnic lines for both the Union and Confederate armies and “at first dissolved the Fenian military organization into the forces of the contending armies,”[58] the American Civil War was only a temporary inhibition. After the conflict’s close in 1865, Fenians from across the United States (including the formerly Confederate or ‘neutral’ states Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky) formed ranks with men from New York, Michigan, and New England as battle-hardened units under the command of experienced officers.[59]
While in Ireland, the Land League commonly resorted to agrarian violence, a tactic that some historians have linked to the ultimate disintegration of the organization in both Ireland and the U.S., since the American Land League explicitly rejected violence.[60] As a consequence, identifying how military experience may have influenced members of the American Land League and their perceptions of violence is a more difficult task. Some of the League’s non-violence may be ideological, as emblematized by Davitt’s references to the “vain and useless” militance of the past. The notion that reform should not come via violence is difficult to reconcile with the Land League’s use of violence in Ireland. Why did the American Land League condemn the violence of Irish nationalists in the U.S. and Ireland, while their Irish affiliates waged agrarian warfare, and, just decades earlier, Irish-Americans had enthusiastically supported the Fenians? Emerging decades after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, 1848 Rebellion, and U.S.Civil War, a lack of military experience, leadership, and mobilization capacity could explain in part why the American Land League rejected violence. The all-out, traditional warfare waged by the Fenians reflected the American Civil War’s Napoleonic stratagem, rather than the guerilla tactics of later violent nationalists in the U.S., speaks to the influence of the American Civil War on the Fenians’ repertoire of violence. The existence of contemporary Irish-American organizations to the Fenians, the Molly Maguires or Clan na Gael, that committed more clandestine violence (e.g. assassinations) and lacked the Fenians’ military experience and capacity, suggests that these factors cannot alone determine why diasporic groups elect for violence, but can influence the nature/repertoire of their violence. Ultimately, one must examine the relationship between domestic (i.e. American) and international agendas of Irish-American groups to understand why some opted for violence, and others not.
Domestic Agendas
The foremost factor in determining whether Irish-American nationalists opted for violence or non-violence is the nature of the organization’s domestic agenda. In the case of the Fenians, tense Anglo-American relations and the spirit of international republicanism permitted a greater degree of violent activity domestically. With improved Anglo-American relations and a burgeoning international and labor movement, the Land League subordinated radical violent Irish nationalism to the achievement of domestic objectives, namely the amelioration of industrial conditions. While the Land League facilitated cooperation between Irish-Americans and native Irish, the incompatibility of radical, militant Irish nationalism and the American liberal labor movement precluded Irish-Americans from supporting violent action that could jeopardize their domestic condition. In comparing the domestic and international objectives of the Fenians and Land League, it is clear that Irish-Americans executed violence only when they conceived of their ambitions as reconcilable with the Anglo-American dynamic and contemporary internationalist movements.
The aftermath of the Trent Affair of 1861 and consequential threats of Anglo-American War or U.S. annexation of Canada increased the perceived utility of violent action, as expressed at the Fenian Convention.[61] While American military forces did intervene against the Fenians multiple times, for example, in sending warships to Campobello and arresting Fenian militants for violation of American neutrality, U.S. government officials also declined or postponed apprehension of the Fenians on multiple occasions. Either compelled by impending elections in which “the Irish vote was an important consideration,”[62] local and state officials in the U.S. opted to prioritize the Irish vote over “British diplomatic pressure,”[63] permitting Fenian militants to clandestinely militarize and advance to the Canadian border, even paying for some Fenians’ return home with few, if any, consequences for violating American neutrality.[64] If the U.S. government ostensibly upheld neutrality laws, their reluctance to act decisively against the Fenians created an environment that was accommodating of, if not conducive to, violent nationalist action.
International circumstances similarly contributed to the Fenians’ use of violence. While Irish nationalists had long courted international support for their independence from the British, the rise of international republicanism and opposition to British imperialism led the Fenians to believe they had international, non-Irish allies who would permit or even contribute to their violent activity. As Senior argues, “a feeling existed among European republicans at this time that they formed an informal international brotherhood,” leaving Americans with the obligation to aid “republican movements wherever they arose.”[65] Further, the Fenians were convinced that “those living under British rule were its natural enemies,”[66] thereby expecting the support of Canadians (especially those of Irish, French, or indigenous ancestry) to support their cause. While the Fenian invasions of Canada ultimately failed, the specter of Anglo-American diplomatic opposition and potential war, contemporary revolutionary republican movements, and opposition to British imperialism led Irish-Americans to perceive violent action against the British imperial zone tenable.
The domestic political environment faced by the American Land League stymied their militance. While ethnically exclusive, nationalist Irish-American groups like Clan na Gael supported violence, the Land League coalitionism led to its prosperity and nonviolence. The League became “undoubtedly the largest Irish-American nationalist organization in American history”[67] through the marriage of nationalism and “labor radicalism,”[68] expanding their ranks while intermingling Irish nationalism with the interests of other, non-Irish demographics within the U.S. Irish-American leaders at the time, including the radical Patrick Ford, also “supported women’s rights, African-American rights, and temperance,” opposed both “British and American imperialism,” and supported the labor and industrial movements.[69] The diversity of interests composing the Land League, and especially their subordination of Irish independence to social and economic reform in the U.S. or Ireland, led to ideological fissures that prevented violence as a viable strategy. The risk of U.S. politics dividing the Land League was manifest from the organization’s conception, for example, in the forbidding of discussion of American politics at meetings of the Boston Branch.[70] Divisions within Irish-Americans’ U.S. interests ultimately doomed the League, however, and ideological divisions preceded and precluded any support for violence. This led to factionalism and radicalism, thereby lowering the domestic costs of defecting from non-violence.
The composition and objectives of the American Land League’s constituencies represented a diverse array of participants and methodologies. Furthering the disintegration of a coherent American Land League ideology was the tendency for members to use the League as a conduit for mustering domestic political support, especially to the Tammany Democratic Machine, despite the League’s mandate to be a “nonpolitical entity as far as American politics were concerned.”[71] Beyond American politics, Irish-Americans representing different demographics coalesced in the Land League: for example, the “involvement in Irish-American nationalism by Catholic authorities was unprecedented,” especially since they had recently denied burial for Catholic Fenians.[72] Church projects attempting to establish the Irish as independent yeomen in the United States, such as the Irish Catholic Colonization Association of the United States, directed Irish-American attention to domestic improvement.[73] Many lower-class Irish-American radicals, including the Knights of Labor in Chicago, supported Michael Davitt’s call for land nationalization, a policy “loudly criticized”[74] by the Catholic Church. The Jersey Freight Handlers, majority-Irish industrial workers, explained the universal applicability of the program: “the nationalization of the land seems. . . to be the only means of forever destroying class monopolization of the natural source of opportunity to mankind—land.”[75] Within the League, Church leaders interpreted nationalization as communism’s harbinger and split from the labor movement faction. As argued by Ely Janis in A Greater Ireland, “whereas conservatives tended to favor the social status quo and sought to achieve inclusion within it, nationalists enthused about social reform pushed for a profound reshaping of American society.”[76] Such divisions prevented the organizational and social cohesiveness requisite for diasporic violence.
If contemporary Irish-American nationalist organizations, like the secret society Clan na Gael and the Molly Maguires, exacted or supported violence, they were unable to accumulate popular support for their cause. Their perpetuation of violent ethno-isolationist violence differed from the demographic and ideological coalitionism of the Land League, which explicitly denied Clan or Molly Maguire infiltration of their organization and convinced its American members that they were “performing their duty to their native land by paying money to the League”[77] and not committing violence. Encompassing too broad an ideological spectrum to endorse land nationalization or Irish independence, the Land League could not condone, let alone execute, violence. The tense coalitionism of Irish-American nationalists with ‘real’ Americans and ‘real’ Irish persisted into the 20th century when Sinn Fein leaders were reluctant to speak of the organization’s left-wing objectives “to avoid alienating conservative Irish-American supporters.”[78] Ultimately, diasporic nationalists consider their internationalist action in terms of its domestic (i.e. non-Irish) acceptability.
Conclusion
If distance and time inhibit refugees’ ability to contribute violently to an insurgency in their homeland, these obstacles are somewhat circumventable. As Salehyan argues, refugees “can and do participate in politics in both their home and host countries, including through violence, and their humanitarian needs should not obscure this role.”[79] An investigation of the emergence of Irish-American nationalist groups in the United States over the nearly two centuries of the Irish Diaspora offers a unique and more transhistorical lens into the motivations and capacities of diasporic groups to influence the course of conflict within their adopted homeland. In comparing the nature and composition of two particular Irish-American nationalist organizations, the Fenian Brotherhood and the American Land League, it is clear that diasporic violence by nationalist Irish immigrants is more a result of domestic (i.e. non-Irish) political circumstances, rather than poverty, ‘tribal conflict,’ or military-material capacity.
Throughout the 20th century, from the Easter Rising of 1916 to the Troubles to the present, Irish nationalism remains relevant. Some Irish-Americans have continued to organizationally express their support for nationalism through organizations like NORAID, which ostensibly “supports through peaceful means, the establishment of a democratic [united] Ireland.”[80] While NORAID’s capacity to contribute to foreign violence has been scrutinized, its ultimate peaceful objective is refracted through a prism of American acceptability. The U.S. has similarly asserted its interest and relevance in Anglo-Irish peace through participation in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Peace Agreement: the four American politicians involved in the process, including Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy, were of renowned Irish-American ancestry.[81] Both Irish Unionists and Separatists continue their attempts to mobilize American Ulster or Irish-Catholic diasporic communities to finance their efforts in a centuries-old conflict.[82] Liberated from the surveillance and repression of the origin state, diasporic actors are empowered by their existence away from the borders of the homeland. Ultimately, however, the diasporic actors are motivated and constrained by the adopted country’s political and demographic composition: the feasibility of their committing violence within the diaspora is determined by the organization’s coalitional dynamics.
Endnotes
1. Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 3.
2. Salehyan, Rebels without Borders, 55.
3. Ibid, 235.
4. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, “Reframing Online: Ulster Loyalists Imagine an American Audience,” Identities 16, no. 1 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1080/10702890802605851, 116.
5. Maurice Hennessy, The Wild Geese: The Irish Soldier in Exile (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973), https://babel.hathitrust.org, 17.
6. Hennessy, The Wild Geese, 17.
7. Ibid, 22.
8. Ibid, 22.
9. Ibid, 131.
10. Ibid, 134.
11. Ibid, 17.
12. Ibid, 36.
13. Ibid, 36
14. Hereward Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada: the Fenian Raids, 1866-1870 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991), 16.
15. Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 14.
16. Ibid, 14.
17. Ibid, 15.
18. Ibid, 15.
19. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Justice-Seeking and Loot-Seeking in Civil War” (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1999).
20. Lars-Erik Cederman, Andreas Wimmer, and Brian Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis,” World Politics 62, no. 1 (January 18, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1017/s0043887109990219.
21. Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 16.
22. Ibid, 16.
23. Ibid, 20.
24. Ibid, 37.
25. Ibid, 88.
26. Ibid, 88.
27. Ibid, 49.
28. Ely M. Janis, A Greater Ireland: the Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 25.
29. Janis, A Greater Ireland, 27.
30. Ibid, 28.
31. Ibid, 51.
32. Ibid 61.
33. Ibid 52.
34. Ibid, 73.
35. Ibid, 181-183.
36. Ibid, 192.
37. Ibid, 196.
38. Ibid, 195.
39. Timothy J. Meagher, “‘Irish All The Time:’” Ethnic Consciousness Among the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1880-1905,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985), https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/19.2.273, 276.
40. David Thomas Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America: the Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 89.
41. Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America, 89.
42. Meagher, “‘Irish All The Time,’” 285.
43. Janis, A Greater Ireland, 62.
44. Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America, 89.
45. Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 19.
46. Meagher, “‘Irish All The Time,’” 276.
47. Ibid. 275.
48. Ibid, 280.
49. Ibid, 284.
50. Ibid, 285.
51. Ibid, 285.
52. Ibid, 275.
53. Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 19.
54. Ibid, 22.
55. Ibid, 22.
56. Ibid, 36.
57. Ibid, 18.
58. Ibid, 22.
59. Ibid, 66.
60. Janis, A Greater Ireland, 179.
61. Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 40.
62. Ibid, 50.
63. Ibid, 101.
64. Ibid, 102.
65. Ibid, 18.
66. Ibid, 18.
67. Janis, A Greater Ireland, 75.
68. Meagher, “‘Irish All The Time,’” 280.
69. Janis, A Greater Ireland, 116.
70. Ibid, 74.
71. Ibid, 81.
72. Ibid, 80.
73. Ibid, 85.
74. Ibid, 187.
75. Ibid, 187.
76. Ibid 114.
77. Ibid, 84.
78. Dochartaigh, “Reframing Online,” 114.
79. Salehyan, Rebels without Borders, 65.
80. “Peace Process,” Irish Northern Aid, June 7, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071102160225/http://www.inac.org.
81. Mary McGrory, “Thatcher's Irish Problem,” The Washington Post, February 24, 1985, https://www.washingtonpost.com.
82. Dochartaigh, “Reframing Online,” 122.