Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865

Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 Nini Rodgers Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 This page int...

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Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 Nini Rodgers

Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865

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Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865 By Nini Rodgers

© Nini Rodgers 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–333–77099–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–333–77099–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, slavery and anti-slavery : 1612–1865 / by Nini Rodgers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–333–77099–4 1. Slavery – Ireland – History. 2. Slave-trade – Ireland – History. 3. Antislavery movements – Ireland – History. I. Title. HT1164.I73R63 2007 306.3⬘6209415––dc22 2006049820 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Introduction

Part I

1

Away

1

Slaves and Scholars

7

2

Servants and Slaves: The Seventeenth Century

27

3

Creoles and Slaves: The Eighteenth Century

55

4 Sojourners, Slaves and Stipendiaries: The Nineteenth Century

82

5

95

The Trade

Part II

At Home

6

Protestant, Catholic

119

7

And Dissenter

145

8

Dublin, Sweet City

159

9

Dynasties

197

Anti-Slavery Literature, Mostly Imaginative

230

10

Part III

Emancipation

11

Daniel O’Connell and Anti-Slavery

259

12

Frederick Douglass and the ‘Antieverythingarians’

278

13

Famine and War

290

14

A Special Relationship?

312

15

Conclusion

331

Notes

333

Bibliography

369

Maps

382

Index

384 v


Introduction

This book examines the relationship between Ireland and black slavery. The first chapter defines the institution of slavery, describing its operation in the Old World by looking at the pastoralist economies of early Ireland and pre-colonial Africa. The main body of the study is concerned with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the tobacco and sugar plantations of the New World made a dynamic contribution to the creation of a global-wide commerce and eventual take off into the first industrial revolution. The term Black Atlantic has been adopted by historians to indicate the key role which slavery played in this development.1 The build up of slave plantations and the slave trade has always been seen as significant for Africa, Britain, France and the United States yet so far their growth has been viewed as extraneous to Ireland. The following study suggests that this is not the case. Such a project is made possible by half a century of work by economic and demographic historians, thus allowing the Irish situation to be set in historical context. Merchants’ letter books, emigrant letters, wills, newspapers, memoirs and biographies furnish much of the particular and personal detail. The following pages frequently focus on individuals whose lives reflect or epitomise general historical trends. Those chosen, with the exception of a number of black slaves, are all people who would have described themselves as Irish, though not necessarily exclusively or consistently so. Wherever possible this book tries to examine the experience of everyone concerned, white and black. Most elusive of all are the slaves themselves, represented perhaps by unrepresentative figures, from St Patrick and St Fintan and the bondmaids of the Táin to Olaudah Equiano, the eighteenth-century Ibo slave and autobiographer, sold onto Montserrat the Caribbean’s ‘Irish island’, and Frederick Douglass, America’s most famous runaway slave, who felt himself a free man for the first time on landing in Ireland some months before the onset of the Great Famine. The story told here is a largely forgotten one, a neglected aspect of Irish history. A number of possible reasons for this suggest themselves. Has 1

2 Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery

Ireland’s involvement with slavery been conveniently forgotten because it came to be considered shameful? Or has it been justifiably neglected because slavery was of marginal importance to Ireland? Evidence for both views could be extracted from the following pages. But the collection of relevant material suggests that Irish involvement with black slavery has been neglected because its elements have been widely dispersed or ill-recorded. The assembling of this transatlantic jigsaw puzzle reveals that black slavery had a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across the Atlantic and upon the economy at home. Echoes of this do remain in Ireland’s historical consciousness. The seventeenth-century flow of indentured labourers to the Caribbean surfaces in the memory that Cromwell transported Irish men and women to the West Indies as slaves. History books dealing with the constitutional crisis of 1779–83, which produced the independent Irish parliament, stress the importance of the ‘free trade’ agitation in creating this change and, in doing so, many of them make gnomic references to sugar duties. The knowledge that the Irish Patriot and Young Irelander, John Mitchel, in exile in the United States, supported slavery, is equally widely disseminated among his admirers and detractors. Dealing with both shores of the Atlantic, this study casts light on the view that the Irish, colonised at home, were colonisers abroad. Out of slavery came anti-slavery. This would never be a large scale movement in Ireland, but at times it had enthusiastic and influential supporters here. At the close of the eighteenth century, Quakers, Patriot politicians and United Irishmen saw the cause of black freedom as symbolising a new world order in which they too would acquire their rights. In the 1820s O’Connell inherited this tradition, while the United States, increasingly a magnet for Irish emigrants, moved into bitter crisis on the issue of slavery or anti-slavery. This book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Away’, stretches from the fifth to the nineteenth century. The first chapter compares early Irish and African slavery. The remaining chapters (1612–1838) then focus on transatlantic slavery and are concerned with Irish activities outside the homeland – on the Amazon, in the Caribbean, Britain, France and Africa. Part II, ‘At Home’ concentrates on the eighteenth century and discusses how the slave plantations in the Caribbean and North America influenced eighteenth century Ireland’s economic, social and political development. The revolutionary changes at the end of the century are emphasised by the inclusion of a chapter which examines the Irish roots, and traces the transatlantic activities, of three politically influential Irish slave holding families in the North American colonies/ United States. The section then concludes with an investigation of the role of imaginative literature in promoting anti-slavery attitudes and discusses the Irish contribution to this genre. Part III, Emancipation, moves from Britain to Ireland to the United States. It traces the links between Catholic emancipation and slave emancipation by investigating the role of Irish

Introduction 3

Members of Parliament (MPs) in Britain’s abolition of the slave trade 1806–7 and examines Daniel O’Connell’s adoption of the anti-slavery cause. The activities of the anti-slavery societies in Ireland are analysed by focusing upon the visit of Frederick Douglass. The position of the Irish in the United States, before and during the Civil War, is discussed largely through an investigation of the fate of John Mitchel and his family in their new home. Chapter 14 explains why the Irish were often described (both by themselves and others) as slaves and attempts to assess the validity of this analogy.


Part I Away


1 Slaves and Scholars

Slavery in its full-blown form is hereditary bondage, the existence of a group at the bottom of society without legal rights. It is identified as prospering in regions where land is readily available and labour in short supply, so that people rather than territory are the most obviously valuable asset. Its flowering in the Americas as a powerful agent of economic development has left a difficult legacy for the Western world and, as a result, it has become an area of keen historical investigation. Its extensive use as a means of production, the creation of a slave economy, can be found in ancient as well as in modern times – in the Roman Empire as well as in the plantation systems of the New World. However, slavery has always been present in less developed economies; an anthropological survey of 800 such societies shows, that those engaged in pastoralism, were by far the most likely to contain slaves.1 Thus, the early Irish and pre-modern African experience can be said to have something in common. Very different in climate and geographical extent, both these regions, possessed populations dependent upon cattle herding and corn growing – predominantly oats in Ireland, and millet in Africa. In societies based on subsistence agriculture, swinging dangerously between surplus and want, beset by famine and war, slavery was an institution which solved many problems. Human beings became property and, as moveable objects, readily converted into a form of currency, a convenient means of exchange. Enslavement was an obvious method for securing a creditor the payment of his debt. Prisoners of war, whom the vanquished could not or would not ransom, were accommodated with a fate other than death. In societies lacking prison buildings, slavery supplied detention facilities for those who had committed a crime. Enslavement provided a source of famine relief for those confronted by starvation. However, the emphasis on war and conquest as the major cause of such enslavement obscures the fact that in many areas, including early Ireland and large tracts of Africa, the majority of slaves were women.2 Because of their status as non-people, the enslaved have not left their own historical record – though, very exceptionally, some who escaped have gone 7


on to do so. Even in literate societies, where they may have been numerous and have done much to mould the lifestyle which made literary activity possible, slaves were rarely mentioned. Yet their importance as property necessitated their inclusion in legal institutions. Thus they make scattered and desultory appearances in the varied forms of early Irish writing from law tracts to literature. And the manner in which they are mentioned, gives a hint as to their importance. In the law tracts (the bulk of which were compiled c. AD 700) they are most frequently listed as units of currency. Cattle were the normal medium of exchange employed in receiving a stipend or rendering tribute, but slaves constituted a higher unit of currency. The value of land was calculated in numbers of slaves – cumal, a single Irish word requiring a double barrelled term in its English translation ‘female slave’. Mug, a male slave, appears rarely in the law tracts and was not part of the developing Irish tariff of exchange rates, which consisted of gold, silver, sét (gems or precious ornaments), cumals and cattle. High-kings secured the loyalty of sub-kings by granting them regular stipends. Thus in a twelfthcentury source, the Book of Rights, the king of Cashel is depicted arranging to pay a stipend of 50 cumals to the king of Déisi and 20 cumals to the king of Fir Maige, while the king of Uí Liatháin was to receive 30 cumals every seven years.3 The law tracts show seven cumals as a key unit underpinning the institutions of early Irish society. A small farmer would have land worth seven cumals; a strong farmer fourteen cumals. The basic rate payable to the kin group for a murder of a freeman was seven cumals, though it could go higher. A person’s status was enshrined in his honour–price (lóg n-enech, the ‘price of his face’). This dictated the variable amount of compensation due for serious crimes committed upon him, such as murder, grievous bodily harm, unjust satire, denial of hospitality, theft. The honour price of a provincial king was fourteen cumals and, for the lowest grade of king, seven. A man who sheds the blood of a bishop must pay seven cumals, an attack which does not draw blood cost only three and half cumals. The highest grade of poet, who could craft the most prestigious and complex metrical forms, could charge seven cumals for a successful poem. A satirist convicted of unjustly ridiculing a king faced the death penalty, but could have it commuted to fourteen cumals. A man who took over the responsibilities of a neglectful son towards an aged or ailing father, could claim seven cumals from the parental estate. The penalty for putting a hand under a woman’s dress with the intention of defiling her was seven cumals and three ounces of silver.4 Literary sources as well as law tracts record the long established importance of the seven cumals currency unit. Frequent mention of it is made in the Táin Bó Cuailnge, ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’, the first written version appearing in the eighth century, while the oldest surviving manuscript dates from the eleventh. In the Táin princely chariots are described as worth seven cumals.5 But special circumstances occasioned by rivalry and war between

Slaves and Scholars 9

Queen Maebh of Connacht and the men of Ulster result in offers of still more costly models. At the beginning of the epic Queen Maebh promises that if Dáire Mac Fichna will himself bring her the brown bull out of Cooley, she will reward him with a portion of fine plain land, ‘a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids’ and the opportunity of sex with herself. Later, fearing defeat, she makes a similar offer (plus freedom from tax and tribute, golden ornaments, supplies of wine and her daughter’s hand in marriage) to Ferdia, to break the bonds of honour and affection and challenge Cúchulainn, his foster-brother, to single combat. The use of the triple seven appears elsewhere as when Cúchulainn receives and rejects a peace package of land, cattle and ‘twenty one bondmaids’.6 The law tracts’ evidence shows that off the battle field, the cumal becomes a notional unit of account. Someone responsible for maiming another’s hand pays a cumal of which one-third must be in silver and the rest in cattle. The conversion rate of the female slave to milch cows, the commonest unit of exchange, naturally varied over the period of time covered by the law tracts and later commentaries (eighth to twelfth centuries) but Críth Gablach, a law tract on status, suggests an eighth-century price of three milch cows to a cumal.7 In one short law tract, Cis lir fodla tire? (How many kinds of land are there?) the female slave is further metamorphosed into a measure of land itself; a cumal thus becomes 34 acres of best arable costing 24 milch cows, sinking down to 8 dry cows for bog land.8 Like the bishop assaulted without blood letting, the fine for raping a girl was three and a half cumals.9 Early Irish law reflects the inequalities of that society – the privileged classes receive more compensation for crimes against them than lesser people. However, the law does exhibit some concern with protecting the weaker members of society. The dóer (unfree) who has no honour price and no land of his own and the senchléithe (hereditary serf) do have some legal rights. The only non-person is the cumal or mug.10 The law tracts show the female slave as a vital and venerable unit of currency, but how the cumal achieved such importance is better explained by consulting literary sources. Again and again the Táin reveals ‘cattle and women’ as war booty. War means men murdered, women stolen, cattle plundered: ‘their cattle and their women and all their herds taken’. Eight score of Connacht warriors, holding a ford in East Meath, collected eight score women as plunder. Queen Maebh attacks Dál Riada, and takes ‘50 women for herself’. The avenging King Conchobar of Ulster swears to beat the enemy ‘in battle and bring back every cow to its byre and every woman and child back home again’.11 The female slave did all kinds of menial work. Looking after animals – St Brigit’s seventh-century hagiographer depicts the cumal parent and holy child as separated when the mother was sent to tend cattle on an isolated out farm.12 Another biography shows the saint herding pigs for her noble father.13 Female slaves were employed in milking and butter making, the


winnowing of grain and the kneading of dough.14 But the cumal’s main job was the laborious and daily task of grinding grain with the stone quern. The key role which this gave her in the early Irish economy is attested in the Táin when Cúchulainn rejects a peace plan based on the return of noble women and dry cows, pointing out that such an offer still leaves his followers deprived of milk and ‘our free women will have to take to the grinding stones’.15 The connection between the cumal and the quern is even more memorably embodied in the legend of King Cormac, Cairnat and the water mill. The seventh-century ruler is said to have introduced the water mill to Ireland, moved to pity by watching the laborious exertions of his heavily pregnant cumal concubine, Cairnat. However, this technological innovation did not make Irish slavery and the quern maids redundant. In Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, the early twelfth-century author, describing Brian Boru’s seizure of Viking Limerick in 968, declared that ‘every one of them that was fit for war was killed, and everyone that was fit for a slave was enslaved … so that there was not a winnowing sheet … that had not a foreigner in bondage to it, nor was there a quern without a foreign woman’.16 The story of King Cormac and Cairnat reveals another reason why the cumal was more important than the mug. She was seen as supplying sexual services. When he should have been defending the borders of Ulster, the youthful Cúchulainn made a detour to the house of the prophetess, Fedelm, where he spent a prolonged night with a bondmaid ‘who was set aside for his use’.17 While literary sources endowed the cumal with sexual allure, it was her procreative capacity which allowed her to feature in the law tracts as something more than an item of currency. A man who made another person’s slave pregnant was a wrong-doer and was required to be responsible for the rearing of the child. Also, should a free woman bear a child to a slave she was charged with a similar responsibility (that the enslaved parent has no rights over his or her offspring is intrinsic to the slave condition). In the case of a slave who bore her master’s child there were no legal provisions and no need for them – she and her offspring were his chattels. A master could do what he liked with his property: killing his own slave was no murder. The position of a child reared by a free father or mother, other than the owner, is not spelt out in the laws. But the existence of such arrangements suggests the possibility of manumission with the admission of the child to the free parent’s tuath (population group) though the law laid down that those from a slave background could not become nobles.18 Yet both the law tracts and the literary sources show an assimilationist tendency at work in Irish society. The possibility existed of becoming an upwardly mobile slave. Apparently even the breaking of the ban on ascent into the nobility was not regarded as particularly shocking for St Brigit was reputed to have done so; as a child conceived by a slave mother and freed by a generous-spirited and perceptive Druid, she went on to become the first abbess of the great, dual gender convent in Kildare. Brigit’s successors came from the noblest families in Ireland,


their status so revered that they were the only women to have their deaths regularly recorded in the annals. In early Irish society the exceptional bondwoman could be influential, well dressed, managerial in position and boastful of her status. (The Táin describes how Cúchulainn mistook one of Maebh’s cumals for the Queen herself. As she went to fetch water, he picked her out, at the centre of a crowd of females, and killed her with a well-aimed stone).19 Whatever the society, a favoured slave was both the mirror and the creature of his/her owner. Yet, in general, historians have concluded that subsistence economies produced less severe treatment of slaves than commercialised ones. Throughout the Americas special slave codes appeared laying down, or restricting, long lists of horrifying punishments, flogging, fettering, branding, mutilation, death by slow burning. Unlike the cumal, the mug makes scant appearance in the law tracts. He receives a mention as the object of a free women’s wrong-doing or as a possible exchange for a criminal who has forfeited his freedom. While the mug could perform any of the laborious tasks carried out by the cumal, he was generally seen as most useful for hewing and carrying wood. Such employment produced a legal ruling illustrating one of the few benefits of being a nonperson – if he killed or injured a passer-by while wood cutting, he was not liable to punishment.20 Though less valued and frequently mentioned in the written record than the female slave, the male slave was nevertheless a long established and consistent presence in early Irish society. Both literature and annals make it clear that boys were as much a part of battle plunder as women and were as often offered for sale as captives. The young, of course, could be easily dominated and instructed in their new calling but, should he survive to maturity, the male slave might prove a problem. Like all slave owning societies, Ireland possessed tales of the slave as a ‘hit man’; St Patrick’s seventh-century biographer Tírechán describes how one Mayo noble reacted to Patrick’s Christian proselytising by sending his slave to kill the missionary; a late tenth-century record reports that Dublin’s Viking king, Glúniarainn (Iron-knees, d.987) was assassinated by his slave.21 The murderous slave, acting as his master’s creature or driven into enraged revolt, is something of a literary archetype; but as far as the slave owner was concerned the classic crime committed by his human property was running away. This proclivity does take the mug into the law tracts, which defines slaves, along with others fleeing their responsibilities, as absconders whom no one may shelter. Even a king will forfeit his honour price if he does so.22 This Irish approach to slave runaways is unusually terse. From the sixthcentury laws of the Anglo-Saxon Ine to the slave codes and newspaper columns of nineteenth-century America, slave-holding societies have commented extensively on this irrepressible and infuriating challenge to authority. In the case of the modern world, fettering of slaves, either as a preventative measure or a punishment, was common – there is evidence of cooks chained to the fireplace, of workers despatched to the field loaded with iron weights.


Yet the combination of ‘chains and slavery’ is lacking in the Irish context. The labelling of the ornate iron age ‘slave’s collar and chains’ unearthed at Lagore seems to have sprung from assumptions cultivated by Sir Walter Scott’s novels rather than from local evidence. In the state of present knowledge, it seems more likely that these precious accoutrements had been forged for the royal wolf hounds.23 Chains were certainly used for detention purposes in early Ireland. The law decreed that no man can be a king who does not refrain from manual labour and hold ‘hostages in chains’.24 Was the mug considered too menial for fetters? A late seventh-century hagiographical life tells the story of an impoverished murderer ‘bound in chains and condemned to death’. He was saved from this fate by an agreement with a rich relative, who paid the required fine in return for the promise of permanent servitude. Having taken on this new status, the debtor/kinsman ‘according to custom’ wore ‘the slave’s belt’ tied around the loins. Within days he absconded successfully to Scotland.25 Ironically Ireland, possessing law tracts which dealt so briefly with the problem of ambulant human property, produced the most famous runaway slave in the history of the western world. Thus, St Patrick provides the mug with an individual historical reality largely denied him by the law tracts. There are of course two St Patricks – the saint of myth and the historical Patrick. Of the many documents mounting around Ireland’s apostle and his writings, historians have confirmed two short pieces as being works from the saint’s own hand – his Confessio and his Letter to Coroticus. These both date from the latter years of his life and both are heavily concerned with the issue of slavery. In his Confessio Patrick reflects on his life and professional achievements. He recounts briefly (some 12 lines) the story of his birth into a Christian, Romano-British family and his capture at 16 years of age by raiders who sold him into pagan Ireland. He devotes much more detail (95 lines) to his divinely inspired break for freedom. Suffering from the rigours of the elements (snow, frost and rain) while herding sheep at an unnamed location, possibly Killala, Co. Mayo (Slemish and the swine are now thought to be later introductions by his seventh-century biographer, Muirchú), he immersed himself daily and nightly in prayer. Eventually he heard a voice telling him that he would soon return to his fatherland, that a ship was ready for him, ‘and then later I turned to flight and abandoned the man with whom I had been for six years’.26 This one swift mention of his master contains within it the essential tension of slave life, recorded with similar poignancy and much more frequency 1400 years later when the runaway slave narrative became a best selling genre in the Western world. For a slave the master was the font of all things. Particularly for one taken in youth, he was a father figure. To have a good master was the slave’s greatest desire, yet simultaneously that owner was the embodiment of his property’s powerlessness and suffering. Desire and revulsion were combined in this experience.


So the master was the object of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, contradictory feelings which the institution of slavery made inescapable. Like others down the centuries entangled in this societal conundrum, Patrick sought to resolve it by calling upon divine intervention. To find his ship he crossed Ireland from northwest to southeast, journeying into an area where he had ‘no acquaintances’. How he accomplished this he gives no clue but it must have required both temerity and good fortune to avoid being apprehended or exploited as an absconder. Sheltering in a hut near his proposed place of departure, Patrick approached a ship as it was about to set sail, only to be turned away brusquely by the captain. At this point, however, he saw his prayers answered as members of the crew succeeded in changing the captain’s mind. However, it remained an equivocal welcome; a tense situation developed when traditional homoerotic sailor standards clashed with Patrick’s modernising Christian correctness – ‘and, on that day to be sure, I refused to suck their nipples on account of the fear of God’.27 Intent on producing a spiritual odyssey, Patrick’s writing shows little concern for specific geographical location. His voyage of three days was followed by 28 days wandering in a desert, a time frame probably dictated by biblical analogy, which nevertheless has caused historians to speculate as to whether his ship had deposited him in continental Europe rather than Britain. What emerges clearly is the continued fraught relationship between Patrick and the crew. Stung by the captain’s jeering, he vindicates his Christian faith by a prayer which produces a herd of wild pigs, thus saving his companions from starvation. But when they discover wild honey, they make it impossible for Patrick to share it by celebrating the find with pagan rites. Even when they emerge from the ‘desert’ into a more settled region, he hesitates to leave the only group he knows, yet at the same time, he fears continually that they will turn upon him and sell him back into slavery.28 This was a fear which would return to him again when, as a middle-aged cleric, he took up his mission in Ireland. Hiring the sons of kings to protect him, making payments (‘the price of fifteen’) to judges to smooth the path of his missionary work, successfully conducting thousands of baptisms, the dangers of challenging traditional society still crowded in on him, provoking thoughts of his own possible murder or re-enslavement. At the end of the Confessio he records how he had been recently subjected to violence, deprived of his property and detained in irons for 14 days.29 But besides the compelling memories of his past experiences as a mug and his insecurities that such bad times might return, the Confessio shows St Patrick, the missionary, as facing other problems created by slavery. He was particularly worried about the difficulties faced by his cumal converts, struggling to observe celibacy within an institution which interpreted their role very differently. He noted that those who vigorously sought to maintain their chastity exposed themselves to ‘terror and threats’.30


Patrick’s other genuine writing, his Letter to Coroticus, a briefer document produced sometime before the Confessio, is even more exclusively focused on the problem of slavery. Coroticus, a Christian and a British military leader (possibly from Dumbarton in Strathclyde), had carried out a raid on Ireland killing and enslaving a group of Patrick’s recent converts. Such behaviour, of course, threatened Patrick’s missionary endeavours, past and future, and revived bitter personal memories ‘of those who once captured me and ravaged the slaves and handmaids of my father’s house’.31 He sought to shame Coroticus by pointing out that the Christian Roman Gauls, so far from preying on newly converted tribes, had spent ‘thousands of solidi’ to redeem baptised Franks.32 But the main thrust of his letter is sterner than this, demanding that Coroticus and his men free those they had wronged (male and female) and repent of their behaviour; otherwise they will suffer everlasting damnation. Slavery had enormous literary potential which Patrick exploited to the full. The Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus illustrate the ease with which this institution could be transformed from a legal reality into a literary analogy. Patrick refers to himself as ‘the slave of Christ’, to his missionary endeavours as ‘the ministry of my slavery’; his converts become ‘my brothers and fellow slaves’. Coroticus and his men are sinners enslaved by the devil and as such are as much to be pitied as those whom they murdered and stole.33 The importance of slavery in Patrick’s life and writing impacted upon his successors in the early church. Hagiographers enthusiastically deployed the experience of slavery as a step towards sainthood. Thus, of Ireland’s three premier saints, Patrick, Brigit and Columba, only the well authenticated and noble Columba remained free from an enslaved background. Slavery made for an exciting story, offering an author a useful narrative device with rich opportunities for biblical reference and spiritual analogies. Her seventhcentury and ninth-century biographers (Latin, Vita prima and Irish Betu Brigte) presented St Brigit as the child of Dubthach, a Leinster nobleman and his cumal, Broicsech. Dubthach’s jealous wife insisted he sell his pregnant slave woman into another territory. Broicsech’s enslaved status allows the hagiographers to invoke an Old Testament analogy with Abraham/Sarah and Hagar and to use the device of serial sale, first to a poet then to a Druid, to set the uterine Brigit off on a widdershins circuit of Ireland, thus establishing a claim to her spiritual predominance throughout the island.34 Enslavement could prove a convenient literary device for hagiographers but that is not to deny its social reality. Just as the wicked step-mother of the fairy tale symbolises a common family problem faced in an age when marriage was frequently ended by early death, the jealousy of the master’s wife for the pregnant slave concubine was a staple of all societies where slavery existed. Besides Patrick and Brigit, other saints were supplied with slave antecedents. St Ciaran’s ninth-century biographer tells of his enslavement by the king so that he worked ‘turning the quern every day to make flour’.35


St Finbarr (Cork), while in the womb, had rescued his slave parents from royal execution.36 St Patrick’s biographer Muirchú, building on the Confessio and Letter to Corotius, added potent extras to the servile experience of Ireland’s apostle, melding Patrick’s slave status, a sign of Christian humility, into the miraculous and powerful Patrick, incinerator of Druids and intimidator of kings. In common with the author of Brigit’s Vita Prima, Muirchú uses the journey, springing from slave status, to make a wide ecclesiastical claim for his saint and the primacy of Armagh. Thus, the missionary Patrick, landing in Leinster, feels compelled to set off on a quick detour north into Ulster in order to contact his old master. Patrick’s intention is to pay back his purchase price to Miliucc (here supplied with a name, royal status and lands around Slemish). He also plans to introduce his quondam master to the benefits of Christianity. Unable to face this threat to his cultural heritage, the elderly Miliucc chooses to turn his palace into a funeral pyre and immolate himself.37 Later in the text Coroticus meets with his just deserts. Resoundingly and publicly denounced by a poet, ‘he was ignominiously changed into a fox’ thereby fulfilling Patrick’s prayer that God should expel’ him from this world and the next’.38 In writing these works hagiographers were acting as church builders, spreading and establishing the faith. For their authors and for those who read them, the stories of miracles, exploding with drama, reverberating with prophecy, fired the imaginations and strengthened the faith. For the twenty-first-century reader it is historical reality, the everyday life of early Ireland, glinting through the miracles, that charms and illuminates. Slavery proved an apt vehicle for bringing together saintly humility and saintly power, but it was also useful for driving home the moral duties of the age. Hagiographers stressed that the virtuous slave must acquire freedom by legal means. Thus, Muirchú highlights Patrick’s determination to return to Miliucc with his purchase price. Adomnán, abbot of Iona and biographer of Columba, tells a tale of a runaway slave from Connacht who arrives on Iona and begs St Columba to allow him to do penance for his sins. Columba sets him a seven year penance, during which he cuts reeds at the nearby island of Tiree, probably for roofing the monastery. At the end of that time, Columba gives the runaway a sword inlaid with ivory, ordering him to leave for Ireland where he should offer the valuable weapon to his ‘worldly master’ in return for his freedom.39 The real Patrick did not reject the institution of slavery. In the Confessio, he speaks of an irreligious youth and hints that such behaviour merited his fall ‘led to Ireland in captivity with so many thousands of men according to our deserts’.40 Patrick’s family was from the Romano-British slave owning complex, a system in theory different from the Celtic fringe or the Scandinavian world. The Roman Empire had organised slavery on an extensive scale in order to supply the market with enough food to support towns, centralised government administrations and a standing army. Patrick recorded that his father was both a town official and the possessor of an estate worked by


slaves. Historians have found evidence in the Confessio suggesting that Patrick sold his lands in Britain in order to pay for his missionary work in Ireland.41 If this is the case, his work in Ireland was not only stimulated by his time there as a slave but by funds drawn from the labour of slaves and perhaps their sale as part of his patrimony. The church that Patrick established did not directly attack the institution which was so important for securing prestige and advantage for the upper classes, from which its professionals came. Monastic settlements, spreading in the seventh and eighth centuries, flourished on an older root system. Abbots emerged from royal families and could enjoy clerical privilege without being in holy orders, noble men and women visited or took up permanent residence, book production flowered with gospels to be illuminated and the lives of founder saints to be written. Around 670 St Brigit’s biographer wrote describing her ‘monastic city in Kildare’: ‘And who can count the different crowds and numberless peoples flocking from all the provinces – some for the abundant feasting, others for the healing of their afflictions, others to watch the pageant of the crowds, other with great gifts and offerings’.42 Traders and artisans serviced such activities. Cumals to work the quern, mugs to cut the wood were as much in need as ever. And to the hereditary cumals and mugs, fresh arrivals were continually being added. The prospect of enslavement, should catastrophe strike, hung over ordinary people. Hagiographies suggest that if a poor man fell foul of the authorities, the whole family could be enslaved. Thus, Adomnán depicts an anxious wife fearing that a criminal charge against her husband would result in slavery for herself and her children.43 St Brigit is shown as rescuing a family condemned to slavery because the father had killed the king’s pet fox.44 The efficiency of their farming operations made the monasteries a beacon for those seeking to escape starvation through voluntary bondage. Probably they preferred and received base clients in greater numbers than slaves but famine was a constant recruiter presumably with records only of the worst years reaching the annals. In 964 the annalist recorded ‘a great and insufferable famine’ in which men sold their sons and daughters into slavery in return for food.45 The practice of selling children is referred to in 1116 and, according to a hagiographical text, they were usually sold into areas remote from their homes.46 Though they lived in an age of a successfully expanding church, Patrick’s successors had inherited the problems he had perceived in reconciling slavery and Christianity. Adomnán (c.628–704), relative of Columba and ninth abbot of Iona, achieved an early career success in 686 when he brokered the return of 60 Irish captives taken to Northumbria. Just over a decade later he brought together a great assembly of kings and clerics at Birr (Co. Offaly), near the Columban monastery of Durrow. Here he propagated his ‘Law of the Innocents’ designed to secure protection of non-combatants – women, children and clerics, all groups fearful of enslavement as war booty.47


Ecclesiastical manuals recommended the freeing of slaves as a particularly holy act. The sixth-century penitential of St Finnian set out to interfere in the relations between master and slave, urging a man who had sex with his slave to sell her and do a year’s penance. If she bore him a child, he should set her free. But Di astud chirt ocus Dligid, a law text dealing with a wide range of matters, expressed a contrary view. Here the release of slaves is presented as an ominous and anti-social act presaging disaster, provoking the failure of corn, milk and fruit.48 By the seventh century the unease of the church about certain aspects of slavery, buttressed by the traditional assimiliationist tendencies present since pagan times, could be seen as helping to undermine the institution. But those historians who view the arrival of the Vikings as disrupting low key hostilities, based on an indigenous and formalised system of cattle raiding, with a more intensive, predatory and vicious type of warfare, suggest that Irish slaving reached new heights from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. Certainly, Viking activity has left behind interesting evidence of the fate of the Irish slave abroad. This is at its most compelling in the adventures of the reclusive and ascetic St Fintan who, from an island in the river Rhine, vividly recalled his Leinster youth. While St Patrick was the only Irish saint to record his own personal descent into slavery and escape into the religious life, the ninth-century Vita Findani gives a much fuller description of such an experience. The detailed nature of this text, produced shortly after its hero’s death, suggests that Fintan (unlike Brigit and Ciaran) actually recounted the trials of his early life to his fellow monk and future hagiographer. St Fintan came from a warrior background, his family operating in the fragmented polity of 840s Leinster. Here the Vikings were a persistent presence. In one of their raids they carried off Fintan’s sister ‘along with other women’ and, when he tried unsuccessfully to ransom her, he almost lost his own freedom. Trouble next struck from another angle. His father, a warrior who served one of the provincial kings, killed the follower of a rival ruler. The incensed ruler, accompanied by his army, made a night attack on Fintan’s family home, firing the thatch and killing Fintan’s father and brother, while the future saint himself escaped obviously by divine grace, ‘running through flames and the enemy’. Fintan now appears to have inherited a leading role among his father’s men and for a time a state of ‘inexorable strife’ existed between them and their attackers. However, mediators were called in and peace was made with Fintan’s people receiving a considerable sum of money in compensation. But those handing over the reparations secretly feared that the young warrior would seek more violent satisfaction for the death of his kin. They invited him to a banquet on the seashore where, by prior arrangement, a group of Vikings arrived, seized Fintan from among the guests, bound him tightly with chains and carried him off. Fintan had been betrayed by his Irish enemies to the Vikings, but it seemed that the first of the groups he encountered


were either resident in Leinster or planning to operate there for some time, for he now found himself the object of serial sale, indicating that those who acquired him were uneasy that he was still too close to home. On the fourth purchase he became the property of a man who was collecting a cargo of captives with the intention of sailing back to Scandinavia. Halfway across the sea, they met a fleet from their native country. A Viking came on board the ship from Ireland to make inquiries about prospects there; during the conversation one of the crew recognised the visitor as his brother’s murderer and immediately struck him dead. A fierce struggle between the two ships ensued during which Fintan, though still in chains, stood up eager to help his master and his companions. When they emerged safely from this engagement Fintan’s master removed his fetters as a reward. The voyage continued till they reached the Orkneys where they made a number of landfalls to recuperate and wait for a more favourable wind. This situation placed Fintan’s newly developing loyalties under strain and he determined to try and escape, hiding under a rock while the Vikings rushed about searching and calling his name. When they left, he emerged and was shocked to discover that he was on an uninhabited islet, the ocean stretching away on one side, the shore of a small bay visible from the other. Feeling too weak, sick and miserable to swim to the coast opposite, he wandered around in the hopes of finding some means of escape. ‘At last, at the dawn of the third day, he caught sight of sea monsters and huge-bodied dolphins playing and rolling about near the shore. He was overcome with divine tranquillity and pondered over these things with a quiet mind.’ The spiritual high of this whale watching experience moved him to consider commitment to the religious life and gave him the strength to plunge into the freezing waves which propelled him toward the opposite shore. When at last he found some Orcadians, they treated him kindly, taking him to the local bishop who had studied in Ireland and was able to talk to Fintan in his own language. His experience on the Orkneys convinced Fintan that there was no going back – memories of his warrior youth in Leinster did not call to him. Thus he changed career from warrior to cleric, aided by the monastic establishment on the Orkneys, where he lived for two years before starting out as a member of a group of pilgrims bound for continental Europe. There he visited the shrine of St Martin of Tours. While journeying on to Rome, he made German contacts which provided him with a position as a cleric in a nobleman’s household. Finally in 851 he was received into the monastic community of Rheinau, near Shaffenhausen, where he spent the remaining 25 years of his life.49 The fate of his unsung sister and the other women captured along with her in Leinster goes unrecorded. Viking raids provide evidence of an even wider slave network – archaeologists suggest that slaves were carried off from Ireland to help establish the Norwegian colony in Iceland.50 In the mid-tenth century an Irish princess


was found in a slave market in south west Sweden.51 One enthusiastic historian has mooted the possibility of an Hiberno-Viking slave trade to the Mediterranean and Islamic territory but the northern sphere is better authenticated. Did the Vikings increase the number of enslaved captives and by doing so cause the Irish to emulate them? There is some general evidence which tends to support such a view. Adomnán’s seventh-century law of 697, which aimed at protecting the vulnerable (women, children, clerics) was rewritten in the tenth century focusing directly on slaves. The total number of slaves distributed to sub-kings, according to the early twelfth-century Lebor na cert, produces a computation of more male than female slaves, a gender breakdown which suggests a change from conditions in pre-Viking Ireland. The twelfth-century description from Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, already quoted, of the defeat of the Vikings at Limerick also gives the impression of intensified warfare and intensified slaving. On the other hand, the fifth century has left lively traces of slaving, witnessed by Patrick’s remark that he was sold into Ireland like thousands of others. The Vikings, it is argued, originally descended on Ireland in search of more portable loot, gold and precious artefacts; captives were enslaved partly out of frustration when nothing else offered and partly out of a desire to intimidate the populace. St Fintan’s kidnapping in the 840s and his rough and ready bartering from ship to ship, fits into such unsophisticated practices. But by the eleventh century the development of commerce was creating a rather different situation. Dublin was no longer a fortified Viking camp but a port town minting its own penny, trading beef and hides to Normandy and Bristol in return for grain and wine. As well as drawing on home grown resources, pirates from the Isle of Man and Welsh raiders with English spoils supplied slaves to the port’s emerging merchant class.52 Whether or not any of these men could be described as slave traders is a moot point. While relieving warriors of their captive booty and selling the occasional female with a large family, it is impossible to prove that such transactions would have formed the commercial backbone of any Dublin merchant’s livelihood. However, we know that across the channel in England the trade was thriving enough to be controlled by merchants. In the late eleventh century the Anglo-Saxon Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester denounced this traffic in Christians with indignant fervour. And the bishop’s biographer wrote sadly of the Bristol slave trade to Ireland; ‘You could see and sigh over rows of wretches bound together with ropes, young people of both sexes whose beautiful appearance and youthful innocence might move barbarians to pity, daily exposed to prostitution, daily offered for sale.’53 It is a scene which revives thoughts of Patrick’s difficulties with the libidinous ship’s crew and his indignant denunciation in the Letter to Coroticus of slavery as a brothel (‘a house of she-wolves’).54 For Wulfstan, like Patrick, it was the fate of the Christian slave, uprooted from his homeland, which the bishop unequivocally denounced. Wulstan himself was rooted in


this pervasive institution; on his ecclesiastical demesne in the West Midlands he possessed 472 slaves.55 At the close of the next century Gerald of Wales, an indispensable source but at times an unreliable narrator, ended his Conquest of Ireland with a comment on the existence of slavery there. He described how in 1171 the clergy of the whole of Ireland met together in Armagh to discuss why their island was being overrun by foreigners. They came to the conclusion that divine vengeance had been provoked by the sins of the people, in particular by the fact that the Irish had bought slaves from England. For this act they had become the subjects of God’s ‘stern judgement’, enslaved by the same race from whom they had purchased slaves. Gerald himself stressed the complicity of Anglo-Saxons in the trade, denouncing them for selling their children because they were not prepared to endure hardship. Both the Anglo- Saxons and the Irish deserved the ‘yoke of slavery’; always an eager Anglo-Norman apologist, he thus simultaneously endorsed the Conquest of 1066 and Henry II’s activities in Ireland. In making this comment Gerald slips easily, as many writers had done before him, away from slavery as a legal reality into slavery as analogy, employing that most popular and enduring of metaphors – that conquest is slavery. His views also resound with resonance from earlier times – from Patrick, from Adomnán, from Bishop Wulfstan and his biographer – that the taking of people from one country into another as slaves is particularly reprehensible. He finished by explaining that the Irish clergy, seeking to atone for their country’s ‘monstrous crime’ publicly decreed that all English slaves in Ireland should be restored to their liberty, a situation which, by inference, left the indigenous population free to continue to enslave one another.56 It is doubtful whether such a council took place in Armagh in 1171. It is not mentioned in any Irish source. In making indignant reference to slavery, Gerald was expressing the conventional twelfth-century wisdom of both church and king. The Normans, interested in serfdom, vassalage and a strong monarchy, discouraged the use of slaves, though twentieth-century historians have hazarded that as late as 1086 some 10 per cent of the population in England fell into that category.57 Perhaps Gerald was more concerned to remind his audiences in Wales and Oxford, where he gave readings from his Conquest, of the sinfulness of slavery and the righteousness of Norman conquest, than to record a real decision by an actual Irish council. In the twelfth century slavery seems to have been fading away, increasingly replaced by an expanding serfdom, which historians see as imposing downward mobility on freemen. But it may also have absorbed and raised the status of the quondam slave. For serfdom, which tied the cultivator to the land, supplied some lowly legal rights. Historians so far have addressed this medieval disappearance of slavery in very general terms, some attributing it to the increase of population, others to the growth of state power. The decline appears to have taken place in feudal Europe and in non-feudal


areas, Scandinavia and Ireland’s Gaelic lordships. Perhaps nostalgia for the good old days of the mug, in all his legal nullity, is reflected in the lament of a talented but troubled early thirteenth-century Irish poet. Threatened with the death penalty for killing a serf (moghadh), Muireadhach Albannach Ó Dálaigh fled the jurisdiction of his O’Donnell lord, crafting his indignation into traditional metrical and alliterative form ‘a Dhé, an adhbhar anfholadh’ (‘O God, is that a basis for bloodletting’)?58 A study of slavery in Africa reveals parallels with the early Irish experience. Historians suggest that, before the development of the Atlantic slave trade, female slaves were more valued than male slaves, prized, as in Ireland, as agricultural and domestic workers and as sexual partners. In both areas the selling of prisoners of war, voluntary enslavement in the face of debt or famine, and the assimilation of second and third generations of slaves into general society based on kin groups, appears to have existed. From Roman times onwards Africa provides evidence of the reception and export of slaves. While black slaves trickled into the Roman Empire, European slaves crossed the Mediterranean into North Africa and beyond. Indeed out of fourthcentury Africa emerges a familiar sounding account of a well-educated lad from the disintegrating Roman empire, who became the apostle of one of the oldest Christian countries in the world. St Frumentius of Ethiopia was born in Tyre; shipwrecked as a boy on the shores of the Red Sea, he was sold up into the mountains as a slave to the King of Aksum. At court he exploited his skills of numeracy and literacy to gain the position of royal advisor. Eventually he succeeded in converting the Aksumites (who then chose the name of Ethiopia out of the bible) and journeyed home to the Mediterranean to renew links with his Christian base. He returned to cult status in his adopted African kingdom, burning his footprints into solid rock, receiving visits from angels and mounting on the tail of a serpent to establish ecclesiastical sites in the most inaccessible places.59 In the late twentieth century the issue of slavery has stirred up historical controversy in both Ireland and Africa, a controversy as to whether or not external forces, bringing new commercial developments, resulted in expanded slaving. Since the 1980s Irish medievalists have debated the role of the Vikings and whether or not their arrival gave slaving a more prominent role in Irish society. On the whole, the debate has proved somewhat inconclusive but it has stimulated thought on the nature and extent of Irish slavery. Poul Holm, who sees the Vikings as having brought new weapons, tactics and standards to Irish warfare and produced an expansion of towns and trade, came to the conclusion that slavery in Ireland was nothing more than ‘a marginal phenomenon of luxury for the nobles’.60 Dáibhí Ó Croinín endorses this view in Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200: ‘The institution and its concomitant, a slave economy, remained alien to the Irish way.’61 Fergus Kelly, on the other hand, describes slavery as ‘of considerable importance in early Irish society, and that much of the hard work in well off households


was carried on by slaves’.62 This, however, is a difference of emphasis rather than direct confrontation. There is no question of Ireland’s possessing a slave economy, but that does not rule out the existence of slavery as a significant aspect of Irish life. In the case of Africa, divisions run deep. Historians in general favour the view, established in the late eighteenth century by the first anti-slavery activists, that the intensification of the slave trade by outsiders damaged that continent.63 From the seventh century onwards the increasing development of an Islamic trade to Egypt, Arabia and Asia Minor, resulted in the development of a consistent trans-Saharan commerce, which chiefly valued women and boys for use in the harem. The latter were made into eunuchs to furnish that market. The arrivals of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century laid the basis of a European trade which in the sixteenth century became a rising transatlantic tide, eventually resulting in the removal of 11–12 million Africans, some 9 million of whom survived the voyage to actually land in the Americas. In this trade Africans sold Africans to the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English. As they did so, European goods (among them firearms and gunpowder) transformed the political map of Africa, causing powers to rise and fall, wars to increase, raiding and kidnapping to become a staple of everyday life far removed from the ports of the west and central west Africa where the sailing ships arrived. Thus, Africa moved from a pattern of domestic slavery (not unlike that described in the early Irish laws) where slaves were a mark of status, rather than the source of wealth, to an economy where production and commerce were dominated by slaving and slavery. Foremost in the creation of this picture is Paul Lovejoy in his Transformations in Slavery describing how as the prices of women declined, the number of able-bodied men who were exported rose. The numbers of those killed in wars and raids increased the incidence of famine, while long treks to the coast left many dead by the wayside. A glut in the market might encourage the mass sacrifice of slaves in a surge of conspicuous consumption by a powerful potentate. Thus, Lovejoy suggests the number of those dying in Africa far exceeded those who were ever loaded on board ship for America so that, by the nineteenth century, the age of those bought by white traders had fallen, till the Atlantic slave trade was a trade in children. Africa, he claimed, lost its strongest and its best.64 But there are dissenting voices. J. D. Fage, who did much to establish the view that the Atlantic slave traders found an age old system of domestic slavery in Africa, which allowed them to build up their new and extensive external trade, does not raise his argument to crescendo, stressing that, though harmful in many ways, the Atlantic slave trade did not depopulate Africa.65 The demographic historian, Colin McEvedy, goes further pointing out that the population figures were rising, encouraged by the introduction from America of new food crops.66 (Perhaps what the potato did for Ireland, maize and manioc did for Africa.) But the strongest attacks, on what for the


moment seems to have settled down as the Fage/Lovejoy orthodoxy, come from two different angles. Walter Rodney, while not denying the venerable existence of slavery in east Africa and the Sudan, made a detailed study of the west African coast around the Gambia (Upper Guinea), a region which saw the first arrival of Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century and remained a busy area for the British in the eighteenth. He contends that domestic slavery did not exist here before the Europeans and that traditional and internal African slavery in Upper Guinea was in fact a new development produced by the explosive growth of the Atlantic trade to the Americas.67 Rodney founded his argument by focusing on a relatively small area. Three decades later John Thornton, produced completely contrary conclusions by working on a much larger area – west Africa and Angola. His interest was not so much in demolishing Rodney, but in attacking the Fage/Lovejoy orthodoxy. He sees African history as the victim of victimhood. He believes slavery to be Africa’s peculiar institution. All societies, he argues, seek to secure the products of the land. Europe and many other regions did so through landownership, Africa did so through the ownership of people.68 Its lands and herds were held communally, so that the only form of private property was the slave. West Africa was a fragmented polity, where raids and wars aimed as often, or more often, at increasing slave numbers rather than extending territory. Such activities could make rulers and tribes wealthy and powerful, producing states and empires. Slavery in Africa offered many openings for social mobility – slaves were readily assimilated into kin groups, a slave concubine who bore children was often freed and could work to ensure that her offspring inherited their father’s status and wealth, the use of slaves as soldiers was widespread; their rise to the position of general and royal administrator was possible. In Africa slaves could own slaves. Thornton posits ‘an enormous slave population in Africa’ by the time the first Europeans arrived and asks how Lovejoy can argue that the number of slaves in Africa increased dramatically in proportion to the total population, when there are no reliable numbers for Africa’s original slave population.69 This confused historiographical situation makes it clear that it is not possible to compare slavery in Africa from the fifth to the twelfth centuries with slavery in early and medieval Ireland. African history is oral. There are no written law tracts, literary sources, annals, lives of holy men, a sprinkled trail leading through the centuries. What Irish historians have regarded as a minimalist amount of material on slavery, African historians would have received as a valuable hoard.70 Any comparison must therefore be with the period after the Europeans established the Atlantic slave trade and, as Walter Rodney tellingly points out, much of the material used to describe ‘traditional African slavery’ is ethnographical evidence dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.71 Nevertheless, the comparisons are intriguing, revealing cattle-loving societies living in fragmented polities, raiding and taking livestock and people, preferably female, rather than


territory. In such situations the slave appears as a unit of currency (in fifteenth-century Senegambia, a war horse could cost up to 15 slaves, reminiscent of Maebh’s 21 cumals chariot).72 The place of enslavement in paying for misdemeanours to the injured party, in escaping famine and in the existence of mechanisms for the assimilation of second generation slaves into kinship networks, is common to both areas despite the quite different time frame. Should Norse Dublin be compared with ‘el Mina’, St George of the Mine, a fifteenth-century fortified trading post which the Portuguese established in west Africa, taking its name from gold trading not slave purchasing? These similarities are striking but so too are the differences. Slavery in Africa had not only a longer life but a wider spectrum than in Ireland.73 The victim slave, individually sacrificed to secure more favourable weather or massacred in large numbers to display royal power, was at one end of the category. At the other, was the slave ruler (king, general, royal administrator, slave holder) who would generally have achieved his position through military service. There is no record in Ireland of the slave as either a human sacrifice or as a soldier. The occasional slave bodyguard seems as near as Ireland got to this last concept.74 Fighting was for nobles and their clients. The Táin records Maebh’s Connacht army as being made up of her own warriors or paid foreign troops. The Irish did allow for a degree of assimilation opening the way to social mobility but, according to the historical record, the only way for an Irish slave to achieve power was to run away and become a saint. What is most remarkable about the problems raised by slavery in early and medieval Ireland is the degree to which they prefigure the problems and criticisms raised by a commercial demand for slaves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In North America and Britain, the seedbed of the modern anti-slavery movement, the external slave trade was banned without touching the internal institution. The Americans, in the year of writing their constitution (1789), set the date for the abolition of the African trade as 1808. The British, by the second half of the eighteenth-century Europe’s largest slaver, turned this thriving trade into a crime by passing parliamentary legislation in 1806–7. Patrick and Adomnán had called for similar measures more than a thousand years earlier and, according to Gerald of Wales, Ireland had embarked on such a policy in 1171. In the eighteenth century, evangelical anti-slavery writers in Britain, Ireland and America would employ exactly the same arguments as the indignant Patrick, making embarrassing comparisons between the behaviour of their slavers and other more enlightened groups and nations. In poetry and in prose they would also threaten the guilty with the prospect of hell-fire.75 Writing in Latin, Patrick, Adomnán and Wulfstan of Worcester had all condemned the dislocation of people torn from their homeland into foreign slavery. But it is a text in Irish, a twelfth-century heroic biography Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, which most intimately celebrates the violation of the


family affections caused by the slavers, a subject which eighteenth-century anti-slavery propagandists, riding the wave of rising literary sentiment, were to make peculiarly their own: Many were the blooming, lively women; and the modest, mild, comely maidens; and the pleasant, noble, stately, blue-eyed young women; and the gentle, well brought up youths and intelligent, valiant champions, whom they carried off into oppression and slavery over the broad green sea. Alas! many and frequent were the bright and brilliant eyes that were suffused with tears, and dimmed with grief and despair at the separation of son from father, and daughter from mother, brother from brother and relatives from race and tribe.76 Fifth and eleventh-century clerical unease about slavery and sexual immorality would rise again, reaching its greatest strength and intensity in the era of the newspaper, pamphlet, slave memoir and public meeting, spearheaded by the nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals in Britain and North America. Any overwhelming human experience could be compared to slavery (political oppression, religious fervour, sexual passion); hence the easy and frequent use of the analogy stretching from Patrick to the pro- and antislavery propagandists of the nineteenth century. Powerful as a literary device, which could be manipulated to arouse sadness, indignation or laughter, the analogy was in the last analysis misleading, distracting attention from the actual legal institution, which could be attacked and extirpated, into more general but amorphous miseries. Patrick and the early church focused upon securing a situation in which Christians would not tear their fellow Christians from their native soil into foreign slavery, but the sexual exploitation involved in domestic slavery caused them unease. In the eighteenth century the spiralling of transatlantic slavery would also awaken similar criticisms in America and Europe. Eventually in the nineteenth century these protests would mount into an attack on the existence of slavery itself and its condemnation as a universal wrong. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, its extirpation on a global scale remains an international aim. In conclusion, an historical study of slavery suggests that it is a system with universal implications stretching from prehistoric times to the present day. In pastoralist society, it appears to have been a useful and popular institution. A staple of early Irish law, it has been suggested that its roots may well lie in Celtic society as far back as 1000 BC. At no point in this prolonged time span is it possible to say what proportion of the Irish population enjoyed its benefits or suffered from its disabilities. As an institution fuelled by war and trade, it may have reached its heyday in Viking times but even that is problematic. Its legal decline began in the twelfth century as serfdom, a less intensive but more stable system of bound labour, became increasingly attractive to the ruling classes.


In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as even serfdom began its disappearance, a new type of slavery was being opened up in the Americas by their European conquerors. A product of the Atlantic slave trade, this child of commercial capitalism has left more numerical evidence behind. The following chapters will attempt to discover the role of the Irish in New World slavery, how it impacted on the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic and on those who stayed at home.

2 Servants and Slaves: The Seventeenth Century

Bernard O’Brien, son of Cornelius O’Brien ‘a noble gentleman of the house of the Earl of Thomond’ was born in 1603 and, at 17 years of age, crossed the Atlantic to become one of the first Irish slave owners in the New World.1 It seems unlikely that he would have thought of applying archaic words such as cumal or mug to his novel property. Though almost certainly, he would have been familiar with that descendant of the mug, moshadh, the classic Irish word for serf. The fact that serfdom in Ireland had been abolished by government decree in 1605 made that institution a matter of fierce discussion for years to come, particularly in the Irish speaking areas. And, writing in Spanish to Philip1V, O’Brien stressed that Irish was the first language for himself and his compatriots in their Amazonian tobacco colony. He explained that he kept a journal of his adventures in Irish, received letters in Irish and described how, in 1629, a diplomatic agreement between the Portuguese and the Irish planters was recorded in Portuguese and Irish.2 O’Brien, of course, came from Ireland’s serf-holding class, the nobility, though the seventeenth century had moved him into a world of primogeniture and plantation, where he was probably a landless swordsman. In this respect he was part of the European norm for overseas venturing. It was the noble, but penniless, hidalgos of Spain and the fidalgos of Portugal, who colonised the Caribbean islands discovered by Columbus and the first European mainland conquest in the Americas, Portuguese Brazil. These areas supplied not only precious metals and tropical produce but an indigenous workforce which could preserve the newcomers’ status, as people who did not sink to manual labour. Born in the years between the battle of Kinsale (1601) and the flight of the Earls (1607), O’Brien was reared in a world split between Catholic and Protestant, Spain and England, a world in which the riches and power furnished by the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires, had aroused the jealousy of other European states with Atlantic coastlines. Out of this situation, the Irish conjured up their tobacco colony on the Amazon. Its founders, Philip and James Purcell, had involved themselves with a group of merchants from Dartmouth, smuggling tobacco from the 27


Spanish Main (today’s Venezuelan coast). As the Spanish authorities began to crack down on this commerce, the smugglers decided to turn colonists and moved to the northern bank of the Amazon, a region which the Portuguese had long claimed but not yet occupied. Around 1612 a group of 14 Irishmen established themselves in a stockaded trading post on the Tauregue River.3 Fourteen men were sufficient to constitute a colony because the plantations they established were worked by the Indians. As so often in these initial stages both natives and newcomers could see mutual advantage in the situation. Indians were entranced by butchers’ knives, scythes, axes, hatchets, efficient metal cutting agents to replace their own implements of wood, stone and bone. Shirts and glass beads, mirrors and whistles were adopted as marks of conspicuous consumption.4 Tupi Indians settled around Tauregue’s fort, growing tobacco, a plant as native as themselves, but now cultivated in a manner recommended to them for the transatlantic market.5 The support of Europeans with their firearms and steel swords could offer the Indians protection from rival neighbours or allow them to win tribal wars by calling upon the firepower of these new allies. Such a relationship provided the Irish with a voluntary labour force, but simultaneously it introduced them to indigenous New World slavery, which in many respects resembled the early Irish variety. In thanks for support, grateful allies might hand over prisoners of war. As in so many societies, the gift of a woman was seen as a suitable token of friendship, particularly apt in the case of these newcomers who curiously did not appear to have females of their own.6 Settled at Tauregue, Philip Purcell speedily learnt that the Dutch had more advantages to offer than the English. They were much better supplied from home – a situation which could make the difference between success or annihilation for an infant colony. Dutch ships arrived more frequently with familiar food and drink, firearms and trade goods for the Indians. These of course came from Europe but the Dutch were also engaged in the triangular trade. Their struggle to free themselves from Spanish rule stretched from 1580–1648 and, conveniently for them, coincided with the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns which meant that, as part of their war effort, they could use their naval strength and expertise to target Portugal’s overseas empire. Thus from their depredations on Portugal’s African bases, they brought in black slaves from Angola, an expensive but prized addition to the planters’ workforce on the northern bank of the Amazon.7 If any of the Irish could have afforded a black slave it would have been Philip Purcell for, by 1625, he had entered Dutch service assuming a key role in organising a fresh expedition, to which he recruited more of his fellow countrymen. Meanwhile in the early twenties, Bernard O’Brien had arrived with 11 other Irishmen, who proceeded to build their own little stockaded trading post not far from Tauregue. From here they negotiated with the Indians to acquire crops of tobacco and cotton. Such a situation could well have provided O’Brien with a Tupi slave but his account of how he came by

Servants and Slaves 29

such property is more romantic. Having learnt the local language and secured a crop, O’Brien set out on an exploratory journey, with a small group of companions (five Irishmen with four muskets, 50 Indians and four canoes). Up river he encountered a warrior Queen who received him on an island, expressed regret when he insisted on continuing his journey and gave him three slaves in return for goods.8 This trading expedition-cum-travellers tale, appears to have lasted several years, taking him from the Amazon and its tributaries into another river system in the Surinam region and back overland to the Amazon again. On his return he collected a cargo, boarded a Dutch vessel and, fortunately, sailed for Europe in 1625.9 By now the Portuguese were growing uneasy about the increasing activity on the far bank of the Amazon, calculating that there were some 250 to 400 northerners, English, Irish and Dutch trespassing on their territory.10 So they launched an attack to dislodge them in which both the Dutch leader and Philip Purcell were killed. The Dutch West India Company responded by preparing yet another Amazon venture appointing James Purcell, Philip’s brother, as its head. For the Dutch had found the Irish tenacious settlers as well as good customers, determinedly extending their tobacco operations beyond the forts, while newly recruited Dutch planters, deterred by the threat from the Portuguese, decided to return home. From the Netherlands, Bernard O’Brien joined this new Dutch expedition, containing Irish and English within its ranks and arriving back in April 1629 to re-establish the scattered colony. The Irish rebuilt Tauregue and other fortifications were established. The Portuguese, determined to root out their European rivals quickly, launched an attack and, according to O’Brien’s account, his success at bringing in his tobacco planting contacts as native auxiliaries resulted in Portuguese defeat. In October, some five months after this repulse, a substantial force of 120 Portuguese and 1600 Indian bow men embarked up river in 98 canoes. On reaching James Purcell’s main fortification, they proceeded to throw up earth works and lay siege to the fort. Purcell fought, supported by some 80 settlers, but the death of his main Indian ally at Portuguese hands faced him with a serious supply problem. Outnumbered and fearing that his force could be starved into defeat, Purcell’s best hope lay in the expected arrival of supplies and reinforcements from Holland. Playing for time while simultaneously trying to ensure against the worst, he opened up negotiations with the Portuguese seeking to extract a promise that, if his men surrendered, their lives and property would be spared. On the 17 October 1629, a group of four, entrusted with the task of securing these terms, approached the Portuguese camp under a white flag and gave up their weapons. They were then blindfolded and led into the presence of the enemy commander, where the blindfold was removed. A Portuguese Jesuit, Father Luis Figueira, recorded the scene. ‘Three of them were Irish, one of them a gentleman with spurs on his boots, as is the custom of his country, another a very good scholar, a third was a mulatto.’11


The team had been carefully chosen. The need for a gentlemanly soldier was obvious and the production of an educated adventurer was something the Irish could invariably call upon, well understanding the importance of doing so. While in both Portugal and Ireland, indeed in any part of Europe, those who claimed to come from noble houses might well be illiterate, nevertheless this was a class with access to learning as well as cavalry training. And of course that learning stressed a common bond – Christianity, Catholicism and the Latin language – which might arouse in Portuguese leaders a surge of cultural recognition and respect. But far more consciously and certainly, the literate swordsman/tobacco planter was there to impress and appeal to the clerics dependably present in any sizeable Portuguese force. This was a professional group to whom the Irish, abroad in a Catholic country, invariably looked for help and from whom it often proved to be forthcoming. And in the case of the Hispanic monarchy it was particularly so, for after the battle of Kinsale the Irish had entered into a special relationship with Spain, received by its king and clerics as tragic and welcome defenders of Catholicism, conveniently eager to swell the Habsburg armies in defence of the faith. If the Portuguese observed a more restrained attitude, Father Figueira’s comment ‘a very good scholar,’ shows that in this case Purcell’s careful planning had produced the desired impact. The soldier and the scholar were traditional figures; the mulatto signalled a new world. In the American setting, the Catholic Irish struggling with the ordinary hazards of pioneer life, found their role further complicated by their ambiguous position as subjects of a Protestant monarch and clients of a Catholic one. Needy and marginalised, they could on occasion find themselves forced into unexpected equality with those whom, in more prosperous moments, they sought to dominate. Hence the adoption of the mulatto, transformed for the occasion by his linguistic skills (the ability to speak Portuguese) into an Irish mediator. Whether or not he was or had been a slave, he came from that commercial nexus. The Dutch had seized him in a raid on the Cape Verde islands, a Portuguese slaving centre off the west African coast, where he had been serving in the household of a royal official. The Irish negotiators set out to secure terms which would guarantee licences for those who wished to return to Europe and, for those who wished to remain in Brazil under the rule of the Hispanic monarch, the right to retain their trade goods, Indian servants and slaves. (The licences would be more likely to appeal to Protestants; continued residence in Brazil, where the church could be expected to look after their interests, to the Catholics.) These conditions were agreed upon but Purcell procrastinated, drawing out the negotiations for over a week because information had reached him that the Dutch supply ship and an English vessel had arrived. Soon, however, this news percolated through to the Portuguese. Their subterfuge revealed, the Irish dared delay no longer; Purcell signed the surrender. The English regarded this as perfidious behaviour, while the Portuguese, indignant over


the duplicitous delay, took the opportunity to ignore agreed terms and seized the property of the defeated. The 80 captives were removed into Maharano and Grao Para, with Bernard O’Brien vigorously denouncing Portuguese perfidy and complaining bitterly about the loss of his trade goods, servants and slaves.12 Captivity in fact meant absorption into Portuguese colonial life, without the advantages of property and with the threat of official interference ever present. O’Brien asserted that the English and Dutch were treated better than the Irish because they were eventually given licences to return home, while the Irish special relationship with the Hispanic authorities resulted in their employment as a garrison in an exposed position to face cannibals. Eventually they were dispersed throughout the provinces. In 1631, 18 discontented Irish stole the governor of Maharano’s boats and escaped to Surinam where they joined English and Dutch settlers in a new tobacco settlement. From there some of them moved on again, attracted to the wide scatter of tiny islands in the eastern Caribbean, islands which Spain claimed but neglected to settle as she concentrated on dominating the gold-rich civilisations of Mexico and Peru. Here the Irish already had a contact. Sir Thomas Warner, an English gentleman who had tried his luck in the Amazon, quarrelled and departed, was now established on St Christopher, where he had agreed a territorial division with the French. By 1626, Warner was producing tobacco and had received letters patent from Charles I giving him the right to colonise, including the immediately adjacent islands in this group which became known as the Leewards. Bernard O’Brien was not among those who escaped to Surinam and moved on to St Christopher; he remained quarrelling with the Portuguese authorities but faring well enough, exploiting his friendly connections with the friars and a Spanish widow so that he was able to sail for Europe in late 1634 with his own trade goods and those of other fellow countrymen. He also brought with him a young Tupi Indian, whom he represented as the son of an influential chief, but who may well have been his slave. As his career in the Netherlands failed to prosper, his thoughts turned to a Spanish initiative. In 1636 he travelled there and wrote his memorial to the king, a lively document in which he sought to present himself as a man of action, influence and charm. Though given to inflating his personal importance (and the numbers involved in trade and battle), where his record intersects with Portuguese evidence, in general, the two accounts tally. Seeking royal patronage, he denounced the behaviour of Philip’s Portuguese subjects, asking for the return of the property he had lost in 1629 and suggesting that the Crown employ him to set up an Irish colony on the Amazon. It was not the first time that Philip IV had been urged to promote the establishment of such a colony. He had already received a request from Gasper Chillan, an Irish merchant with contacts in London, busy in Spain for the past seven years or so. When at home Gaspar Chillan may have been Jasper Collins for Irish names mutated strangely into Spanish. Gaspar/Jasper


itself was an unusual name in Ireland but it could be found in port towns; it was the name of one of the three kings, the black king in fact, a holy trio enjoying current popularity in religious painting and at baptismal fonts in continental Europe. Just possibly Chillan came from Youghal, where there was a Collins family of some standing which included a Melchior. It was a port familiar to tobacco traders and western venturers such as the Purcells.13 As soon as he heard of the 1629 disaster, possibly from an Irish priest who had worked in Brazil with Father Figueira, Chillan sent papers to the Crown pressing for permission to re-establish an Irish colony on the Amazon. Chillan and O’Brien’s requests (Chillan has written in 1631 and 32, O’Brien’s in 36) both stressed the same points.14 They highlighted their countrymen’s loyalty to the Spanish monarch and the Catholic church. O’Brien wrote at some length of the suitability of the Irish for missionary work because of their linguistic abilities in Latin and the Indian languages. Both presented themselves as men of some affluence, prepared to underwrite their schemes financially – Chillan explained that he had a brother with property worth 24,000 ducats which could stand as security for the venture.15 O’Brien claimed that he had Irish land which could be drawn upon to support commercial transactions.16 Highlighting his own filial loyalty and the riches to be gained from Amazonian colonisation, he included in his memorial a description of how he had exerted influence at the Stuart court and expended ‘4000 escudos’ of his tobacco money to rescue his father from imprisonment for treason and secure some restitution of the family lands – though only to about one-sixth of their original extent. Their three castles had gone for good.17 Perhaps both petitioners exaggerated their resources, but appeals to the Crown, attendance in or near court, the engaging of interested parties to help the cause, all required funds and influence. In support of their cause they sought to play on national rivalries – Chillan suggested that if Philip did not use the Irish, the Dutch might employ them again in the Amazon. O’Brien declared, quite speciously, that the English had only been deterred from launching an Amazonian initiative by his refusal to enter their service. Both Chillan and O’Brien pursued their tobacco aims with tenacity, seeing the past venture as a career asset to be capitalised upon. King and clerics were sympathetic to Irish claims. Memorials were received and, despite slow moving seventeenth-century bureaucracy, were considered at the highest level. And there they would fail. The Council of State, while seeing some virtue in such proposals, had reservations, reservations which were sharply developed by the Council for the Indies, a board which dealt directly with the views and demands of the colonists in Brazil. For the Portuguese in Brazil the Irish were only foreigners who must be banned from their territory. They were just another type of northerner, quite unsuited for missionary endeavour for there were always heretics among them. They could not be trusted; wherever they were allowed in, they would bring the English with them.18 So both Chillan’s and O’Brien’s plans were eventually


turned down. There is no further record of O’Brien’s activities. His memorial remains his description of Irish pioneer life on the Amazon, in which he saw himself as explorer and warrior, a leader of men, building alliances with the Tupi chiefs and acquiring servants and slaves to produce his New World wealth. Chillan had given notice to Philip IV of his intention to return home and may have done so for a Jasper Collins was among those who complained of having lost property in Youghal as a result of the 1641 rebellion. If Gaspar Chillan and Jasper Collins were indeed the same person, he was applying for government aid to a Catholic government in a Catholic cause in the thirties and in the forties to the Protestant authorities to compensate him for destruction caused by Catholic rebels. In this respect his behaviour was at one with the Irish tobacco pioneers on the Amazon who had only been able to support their activities by shifting deftly among the complexities of the religio-political world. In spite of the death and difficulties encountered there, the Irish looked back on the Amazon years as expansive and successful. Fortunes had been made in tobacco, hence the eagerness of some ex-colonists from the Amazon and other entrepreneurs from Ireland to join Sir Thomas Warner’s Caribbean venture. The 1641 rebellion which impoverished Jasper Collins in Youghal also reverberated in St Christopher causing rising tensions between English and Irish colonists. The governor decided to defuse anti-Irish feeling on his island by sending off Catholic settlers to Montserrat, the smallest of the Leewards under Stuart control. Peter Sweetman, a leading Irish planter unimpressed by this solution, tried to negotiate a return to the Amazon. As the union of the Hispanic crowns had collapsed, he now had to approach the King of Portugal, John IV. Pleading harassment by the heretical English on St Christopher, Sweetman proposed that he be allowed to lead 400 Irish (including 50 or 60 married men with their families) to settle in Maharano where, near the mouth of the Amazon, they would found a colony with himself as captain-major. In spite of protests from Brazil (this time the Irish close relationship with Spain, as well as with England, was pointed to as a sinister issue) King John was prepared to grant Sweetman’s request but in a redesigned and scaled down form calculated to protect his own interests. Sweetman himself was to be granted land containing Indian villages and the right to build a town where he would be military leader and magistrate. The settlement thus envisaged would contain servants, slaves and a sugar mill, symbol of that much desired product which Europe’s New World empire builders were increasingly coming to see as securing wealth and power. However King John set the number of Irish at 160, and the site designated was less strategically situated than the one Sweetman had requested. The newcomers were to be naturalised and any Portuguese wishing to live among them could do so, Sweetman himself would be subject to the Governor of the Province and was to accept the presence in his town of a Portuguese judicial official. As naturalised Portuguese, the Irish would have to live within


that imperial trading system, which meant that all commercial contacts with the Dutch and the English must be abandoned. Sweetman never took up this grant. In 1646 it was transferred to William Brown and if he acted upon it, he and his followers were so successfully absorbed into Brazil’s Portuguese community as to leave no recorded trace of their presence. Later demographic patterns suggest that the 400 settlers mentioned by Sweetman left St Christopher for Montserrat, which would be described in mid century as ‘almost an Irish colony’. Alternatively some may have made for other Leeward islands, Antigua and Nevis. Islands provided desirable sites for colonists eager to sell their goods back to Europe. (It was an island site which, under pressure from the Portuguese Brazilians, King John had denied to Sweetman.) The eastern Caribbean islands were well placed for trade with Britain and Ireland and even the Dutch. But they had one great drawback over the Amazon; they did not possess an indigenous labour force. They were either uninhabited or peopled by Caribbs, natives so fierce that they were said to have provided Europeans with the rootstock for the word ‘cannibal’. The Spanish and Portuguese, arriving early in the Americas and having the pick of territory, congregated in regions where native labour was readily available. But European late comers had to make do with less enticing areas. The warrior braves of the chilly north preferred death to agricultural labour (women’s work in their eyes) and proved useless as slaves. So the English tobacco planters in Virginia set about devising a novel alternative system, one which proved equally necessary to tobacco planters in the eastern Caribbean. Workers would be recruited from the poor at home, transferred across the Atlantic, their passage paid in exchange for a promise to work unremunerated for a fixed period. Thus the system of ‘bound servants’ or ‘indentured labour’ came into being. The male poor were heavily targeted. Captains promised free passage in return for an indenture usually committing the signer to four or five years of his or her working life (seven for the young, ten for a criminal transportee). When the indenture expired, the free worker expected to be supplied with a bounty which would secure easy access to land thus allowing him, if successful, to become a property owner, perhaps an importer of indentured labour in his turn. In the case of a female servant (probably about one-third of seventeenth-century servants were women) the way was open for advantageous marriage. While in indentures women who got pregnant, or a male servant who impregnated a female servant, could be punished by a prolonged servitude. Given the shortage of women in the early colonies, the likelihood of achieving a husband with property was higher than the chance of the male servant becoming an independent farmer/planter and employer of labour. But for any of this it was necessary to survive and the death rate in new colonies was alarmingly high, historians studying the Chesapeake have suggested that as many as 50 per cent of servants died before their indenture expired.19 None of this however was anything to do with the ship’s captain who signed up the


cargo. On arrival in the colonies he sold off the servants, or rather their indentures, to new masters. Not surprisingly such a system aroused complaints by the servants themselves, and sympathetic colonial visitors, that their treatment was no better than slavery.20 The seventeenth century has been described as the age of English migration. Unlike later centuries the majority of those going abroad to the empire were from the mother country itself, perhaps as high as 70 per cent, most of them being in indentures.21 The first recruiting grounds were the ports of London and Bristol, those who signed up mainly described themselves as labourers and yeomen, coming from the ports’ rural hinterlands. In Bristol the trade spiralled into such unscrupulous enthusiasm that the authorities opened up a register of indentured emigrant in order to guard against kidnapping. From the start Ireland was seen as a good hunting ground for servants. Kinsale, often the last point at which vessels crossing the Atlantic would stop to take on water and food, was a useful supplier, so that the Irish speaking, labouring poor of Munster were among the earliest emigrants to cross the Atlantic to America. A would be tobacco planter himself might of course make use of his influence at home to acquire his own labour force there. Irish planters such as Daniel Gookin, interested in pursuing careers further west, did this. And it seems that Peter Sweetman also indentured labour; in his petition to John IV he explained that, at his own expense, he had brought a number of farmers and soldiers to open up St Christopher. News of poor reception of Catholics in the mainland colonies and of the existence of Catholic settlers on the tobacco islands, helped to convince Munster emigrants that prospects were better there. In 1636, the year in which Bernard O’Brien presented his memorial to Philip IV, London supercargo Thomas Antony sailed into Kinsale with the intention of recruiting 120 servants as a cargo for Virginia. Two Dutch ships were already in the harbour recruiting for St Christopher and Antony’s mainland destination attracted few applicants. He decided to switch his voyage to the West Indies and eventually collected 41 men and 20 women. This was more women than he would have liked and he later dropped three of them on the discovery that two were pregnant and a third had the ‘French disease’ (syphilis). It had taken some five months to acquire his cargo, but on arrival the servants were sold within eight days, paid for at 500 lbs of tobacco each, the Governor getting first pick and choosing the best ten.22 The destination substituted for Virginia was not St Christopher but Barbados, 300 miles south and three days sail from England’s other possessions. The first island tobacco colonies were in an area today described, largely for tourist convenience, as the eastern Caribbean, a curving belt of small islands from St Christopher in the north to Trinidad in the south, just off the Venezuelan coast. Sometimes referred to as the lesser Antilles, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were more commonly thought of as consisting of two groups, the Leewards and Windwards. St Christopher,


Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua belonged to the Leewards. Largest of all, Barbados lay isolated, beyond the line of the Windwards, the most eastern point in the eastern Caribbean. When it was claimed for James I in 1624 it was unpeopled by either peaceful Arawaks or frightening Caribbs, inhabited only by colourful parrots, edible rodents and feral pigs, a sign that the Spanish had actually called there releasing, as was their habit, a number of hogs to provide a familiar food supply on their possible return. After 1627 Barbados experienced demographic and ecological revolution, becoming by 1661 the most intensely cultivated and richest English colony in America. When the servants arrived from Kinsale in 1636 Barbados was producing poor quality tobacco, well below the Virginia standard, most of the jungle clearing and crop planting carried out by indentured labourers who expected to receive a ‘freedom due’ at the close of their bondage, a sum which in theory could set them up independent cultivators. (Tobacco was a crop where a farmer could hope to survive on as little as five acres.) In the next decades changes in the Barbadian economy and in Irish migration speeded up and intensified. At home Cromwell’s campaign and the establishment of the Protectorate swept Irish prisoners and vagrants into servitude. The defeated royalists and Scots also arrived but by the late 1650s the Irish were the biggest ethnic group among the indentured. However, by then indentured labourers were no longer the largest section of the bound workforce, for the Barbadian planters were shifting into the crop which would make their island the gem of the English empire.23 Sugar had been brought from the Mediterranean to America, but it was a difficult crop to handle. It had not only to be planted, cut and harvested but then the cane had to be crushed immediately to prevent its rotting. Then the juice had to be boiled to a particular temperature and poured into pots where the top section crystallised, while the remaining liquor was drawn off as molasses, which could be distilled into rum. Thus sugar required presses, vats and barrels, animals to keep the rollers turning and men to erect water wheels or windmills, so that the sizeable labour force had to include skilled workmen. It was at once capital and labour intensive. Unlike tobacco it was not a crop for the small man. The organisation required was sophisticated and the physical rigours of sugar producing were such that it was supremely unattractive to voluntary labour, requiring long hours in the fields in blazing and humid tropical heat where the heavy implements used for harvesting and the sharp cane itself could lacerate the flesh. Next came the boiling house, hotter than the fields, where the liquid sugar smelled like human faeces, consumed loads of fuel, could inflict lethal burns, generated fear and anger that a mistake in the process would annihilate hours of effort. So sugar attracted the rich, those with sufficient credit to weather a disaster, and in many cases made them richer, as they worked their way up to 100 acres or more and a 60 strong workforce for which they could increasingly afford to buy Negro slaves.


During the period 1645–55, the price of land on Barbados doubled, coinciding with the rise in Irish numbers.24 Smaller planters setting up were driven to produce their tobacco, indigo or ginger on the island’s worst land. For newcomers the prospect of doing anything other than turning into a waged employee was disappearing, while the work regime imposed on them grew more rigorous. In 1647 the servants plotted to take over the island but hours before the revolt was due to begin, it was betrayed by one of their number – 18 hanged and their heads stuck on pikes to discourage others.25 In their search for workers, the planters purchased eagerly and excitedly, sales generating competition and jealousy among them, a feeling that the most influential got the first pick of both black and white cargoes, cargoes which provided the raw material of a new society. A comparison between the conditions of slaves and servants in such colonies is shot through with similarities and differences. A master who wanted rid of either could sell his unsatisfactory employee. Both were put together in the fields to do the same work from sunrise to sunset, called there by an overseer who blew on a conch shell. They lived in little huts which they constructed themselves and were subject, regardless of gender, to physical punishment, even mutilation. In the seventeenth-century Stuart colony there was no thought of using the law to restrain an owner in the treatment of his slave. Treatment of the indentured was also arbitrary. The Minutes of the Barbados Council for May 1640 record that two settlers were imprisoned and fined 500 lbs of cotton apiece for torturing a servant with burning matches between the fingers so that he lost the use of his right hand, which suggests that on occasion the authorities might be shocked into condemning the serious mutilation of a white labourer.26 Undoubtedly the most important factor for anyone in bondage was the existence of a master who supplied food regularly, distributed rum generously after work on Saturday and was not a sadist. The greatest difference between slaves and servants was of course their future, for one it was a lifetime of bondage, for the other a temporary condition, but for many individuals the significance of that was cancelled out by the fact that the death rate for all during the years of seasoning, which came to be regarded as three, was so high. Yet from the start there were differences. Masters provided servants and slaves with different food (servants received meat, slaves did not), different clothes (servants with European dress, including shoes to stop the hated chigger worm burrowing under the toe nails and ulcerating the feet) and different sleeping arrangements. In the pioneer tobacco days planters slept like their servants in hammocks, the occasional slave on the ground.27 The complexity of making comparison emerges on reading Richard Lignon, who lived in Barbados 1647–50 and wrote the first history of the island. He both provides material illustrating that servants were more expensive to support than slaves, while remarking that the masters worked them harder because they would only possess their labour for a limited period. Commentators in


the late seventeenth century would give shocked descriptions of male servants labouring in the sugar fields, derided as ‘white slaves’ by the similarly employed Africans. Such descriptions spring from an acceptance that slavery was for Negroes. The horror of white people being on a level with blacks took firm root in Ireland, expressed in print in the eighteenth-century Dublin Freeman’s Journal, echoing on in the twentieth-century attitudes of Aubery Gwynn, ‘Indentured Servants and Negro Slaves in Barbados (1642–1650)’ and surviving into the millennium in Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados; the ethnic cleansing of Ireland (2000).28 Possible punishment underlined the difference between servant and slave. The most dreaded for a servant was an extension of indenture. For the slave physical punishment had to remain the most serious recourse. Thus, for example, a servant who attacked his master would receive a prison sentence and extended term of bondage, while a slave who struck a white man could be put to death. Sexual rules were different, indentured servants were discouraged from reproduction, slaves were not. African women, though much in sexual demand (and indeed perhaps because of that) appeared to suffer from low fertility. Infant mortality, high in Europe, was worse in the tropics, and among slave babies death, particularly from lockjaw, was fiercesomely common. So the Barbadian planter made a discovery that spread throughout the sugar growing Caribbean – rearing a new generation of slaves was not economic. It was better to buy in than to breed, and the traders were always ready to offer credit. Planters made little effort to keep a gender balanced slave workforce. In the mid 1650s, as African numbers on the island outstripped that of European servants, white women were removed from field work.29 Elsewhere their roles continued to overlap. In both Europe and Africa food preparation was women’s work and the whites quickly took to training black women in all household duties. In 1675 John Blake, a merchant settler from Galway admitted his brother Henry’s accusation that he had brought a whore from Ireland to Barbados along with his wife, but excused himself on the grounds of domestic necessity; his wife’s ‘weak constitution’ meant that she could not manage everything herself ‘for washing, starching, making of drink and keeping the house in good order is no small task to undergo here’. He could not dispense with the services of the whore until the Negro girl he had bought was properly trained in household matters.30 Throughout the centuries of slavery black women remained an essential element in the gangs, hoeing, planting, cutting, and loading the cane, accounting for a third to a half of the numbers involved. On emancipation in the British West Indian colonies the women left regular work in the cane fields and were never again a significant element there. In 1661 the government of Barbados consisting of governor, council and elected assembly, resembling that of King, Lords and Commons, drew up two separate codes for Master and Servants and Master and Slaves.31 The Servant Code directly extrapolated from English common law with, for


example, jury trial for those facing the death penalty. The Slave Code broke new territory, establishing as law much that so far had only been a matter of planter pragmatism and practice. Just as Barbados was the first sugar economy, its example being followed elsewhere, so too its slave code would be used as a blueprint for other codes in other colonies in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland. Central of course was the fact that the slave, being property not a person, did not have jury trial. His misdemeanours were dealt with either by his master or in the case of serious crimes affecting the whole society, such as rebellion or conspiracy to rebel, he would be tried by magistrates. Differences in the matter of capital offences were very obvious. A slave could be executed for striking a white man, while killing a fellow slave did not carry a death penalty. In theory it was a capital offence for a master to kill a slave but not if he did so by accident when inflicting punishment so this aspect of the slave code remained a dead letter. The codes were written and administered by the planters, but they were designed by the responsible planters to police masters as well as servants and slaves, to force the careless and cruel into line. For example, masters who withheld the freedom bounty or turned out old slaves to vagrancy were subject to fines. So too were masters and overseers who neglected security, allowing slaves to gather in large numbers on their property, drumming, holding funerals at night or acquiring fire arms. In their fear of these strange people whom they had so forcefully imported, the planters turned to fierce punishments to secure their domination, punishments not actually laid down in the law. Castration for example was popular. And, over the years a tradition grew up in the islands of executing the rebellious by slow burning, beginning at the feet, moving hourly upwards. A Cork pamphleteer, an ex-overseer in Antigua, deploring the cruelties appearing in a system, of which he approved, wrote in 1789 that he thought the mistaken view that black men were not human lay at the base of their ill treatment.32 This chimes in well with the argument put forward by Winthrop Jordan in White over Black that slavery was constructed out of long established beliefs about the sinister nature of those who possessed dark skins.33 Thinking in European terms, E.P Thompson, looking at the adjustments demanded of the workforce as preindustrial changed to industrial society, wrote about the overthrow of a ‘moral economy’ in which the poor had certain expectations of justice and paternalism and drew on traditions about fair prices, rents, wages, dues and services, to try and preserve them. In the case of slavery there was no moral economy to overthrow, black slavery in Barbados was a new institution for a modernising world. Planters on Barbados and elsewhere complained to the government in Westminster about insufficient supplies for their labour requirements. The Crown responded by setting up a monopoly company, first in 1661, then re-launched as the Royal Africa Company in 1671, the better to deal with the various African states and cope with European competition. By then


the planters had evolved a view about the type of slaves they preferred. Their favourites were the Cormantines, (Akan speaking people from present-day Ghana) the men, large, strong and hardworking once broken into slavery. The Ibos (from the Bight of Benin, now Nigeria) were less popular because they were depressive and prone to suicide. The Mandingo from the Sierra Leone region were Muslims, and ridiculously, in the eyes of their masters, thought themselves superior to other slaves. Those who could afford to set up a large workforce felt that there was safety in mixture – Africans who spoke different languages found it more difficult to communicate with one another and so plot revolt. The planters concentrated on imposing their work routine and preventing revolt. Diagnosed as incurably pagan, the slaves were left unchristianised, the males free to struggle among one another to practice polygamy, all of course having to give way to the personal demands of the white man. The group identity, which the Europeans feared as potentially explosive, was in fact based solely on language, often containing tribes who in their original homeland were enemies. Possibly the closest relationships among the newly enslaved, the nearest they could come to replicating the kin of African society, was the novel but potent link of ‘ship mates’ forced on planters’ attention by its intensity. The persistent runaway was often discovered to be seeking such old companions. In their new situation however Africans did attempt to come together in the linguistic groups which the masters described as ‘nations’, particularly for funerals, celebrated with drumming, dancing, singing, libations and the interment of artefacts with the corpse.34 As far as Europeans were concerned Africans as animists had no religion, but this did not leave them free to practice their beliefs. These of course differed significantly from area to area, while possessing common characteristics symbolised by ‘the obi’ man or woman with the power to inflict or subvert harm. The Myall man, attacked evil in the world more generally, which of course could mean the whites.35 These characteristics were not apparently seen as varying from favoured to less favoured ethnic/linguistic groups. Unnoticed by the Europeans, some of the slaves from Angola may well have been Christians, for the King of Congo had been converted by Portuguese Jesuits in the sixteenth century and Catholicism had spread through his dominions.36 If the purchasers had favourite groups in mind when approaching the slave ships, the same was true of vessels carrying bound labourers, redemptionists and freewillers.37 English, Scottish and Welsh were all considered suitable servants but the Irish were complained of as lazy and troublesome. By the last decades of the century this was reflected in their price of £15, as against the others who could bring in £18.38 Exactly what combination of factors caused the Irish to acquire this reputation in comparison to other whites and Negroes, it is difficult to say. Perhaps peasants from Munster and Connacht were less used to the regular work discipline of commercial


agriculture than Scots lowlanders, East Anglians and West Country labourers. It is difficult to see that herding cattle, making butter, growing oats or potatoes, cutting turf would have differed in labour intensity or communal activity from African agriculture, also based on stock rearing and production of food crops such as rice and yams. Laziness, as American historians have long pointed out in their analysis of slave reaction in the United States to the master’s demands, can be seen as a form of resistance. And the employment of this as a device by Irish servants is equally convincing, many feeling that the ‘push’ rather than the ‘pull’ factor had brought them to the New World, depositing them on an island where their hopes of economic independence were moving beyond reasonable expectation. But why this form of resistance should have appeared more strongly among the indentured Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados than among the recently enslaved Africans is not easy to explain. Traditional anti-English feeling, reinvigorated by rebellion and war, can hardly have instilled a deeper hatred than African fury against the white man whom they perceived as evil spirits, who has brought them fettered in the insanitary darkness of a ship’s hold to a destination where, many believed, they were to be eaten, their bodies squeezed into oil. It would seem that the removal across the Atlantic was more traumatic and dislocating for Africans, leaving the Irish in a better position to articulate their hostility to the island’s ruling class. Hatred nurtured in religious division and Cromwellian conquest exploded in tropic incidents, some of them reaching the Council, as in the case of Cornelius Bryan who had complained about his meal (food was a perpetual servant grievance) announcing that ‘if there was so much English blood in the tray as there was meat he would eat it all’.39 Bryan was sentenced (under a statute recommending corporal punishment ‘on such persons as give out Mutinous language’) to receive 21 lashes on his bare back, inflicted by the common hangman before the prison in Bridgetown. Undeterred by the punishment he continued with similar statements until he was sentenced to deportation.40 The case of the enraged and vocal Bryan reflects the superiority of the servant situation. He refused meat, which the slaves did not receive as part of their diet. He was more culturally akin to the authorities who punished him for he was able to express himself pungently in a common tongue. It is interesting to note that Bryan was not a bound but a wage labourer. He was also a musician, a piper, which may have increased his standing in this fractured community where everyone came from somewhere else. Perhaps he was one of those who had hoped for land and found it impossible to acquire. His deportation, the cost of which would have been borne by the authorities, entailed passage on a ship to another colony, the destination probably dictated by convenience, whatever happened to be available at the time. Vessels bound for Boston were the most numerous in Bridgetown harbour, but the suspected mutineer could have found his way to Montserrat. By 1678 there was a Cornelius Bryan living on the ‘Irish island’ and another at Palmetto Point on nearby


St Christopher.41 The newly acquired Jamaica, which Cromwell was so eager to people with anyone he could find, was another destination to which Irish wage labourers, frustrated with Barbadian prospects, would make their way. Alternatively he may never have been deported at all but lived to prosper into a ripe old age; a Cornelius Bryan made a will in Barbados in 1687, which denotes a member of the planter or merchant class.42 Official documents do exist however which tell the tale of how one Irish indentured servant rose to be a substantial planter, an officer in the militia and a candidate for a place on the Council. Some time in the 1680s Edward Bourke arrived in Barbados and was purchased as a servant by a Tobias Frere. This Tobias died before the indenture was up and thus Edward was inherited by his late master’s son, another Tobias. Bourke was obviously a sociable man, capable of charming his superiors. By the nineties he was a good friend of a titled islander, Sir Thomas Mongomerie. Governor Russell commended him as loyal, of good behaviour and ‘very civil to me’, while a detractor described him as ‘a very loose and scandalous liver’ who had ‘wheedled’ his way into his master’s trust. Back in the eighties when the second Tobias fell ill, he had appointed Bourke (presumably now a waged employee) guardian to his six month old son and given him a lease of the plantation. All went well for Bourke until his ward died at the age of eleven at which point a third Tobias, a nephew of the previous owner, claimed the estate by right of entail.43 This was a typical West Indian occurrence, the climate, rife with malaria, yellow fever, drought, hurricane and insect infestation made debt, bankruptcy, heavy mortality and legal disputes over inheritance, a consistent element in European life, the counterside to the reputation for sudden riches unachievable at home. Invariably the man on the spot, experienced in local conditions and possessed of local contacts, could outmanoeuvre any absent claimant. Only the very wealthy could hope to remain at home and receive their inheritance. The most unusual aspect of Bourke’s story was his Irishness. He had risen to ‘good estate’ from the most despised servant group, but the seat on the Council which would normally have accompanied this performance and helped him to defend his continued lease of the plantation, was put into hazard by his Catholicism. More emollient and successful than Cornelius Bryan, like his fellow Irishman, the difficulties inherent in his ethnic background had catapulted him into the official record. But the position he had reached in Barbados, as a substantial planter, militia officer, legal guardian of a white child and sociable and popular member of the ruling elite, was totally outside the remit of a slave or ex-slave. The cases of both Bryan and Bourke emerged in politically sensitive decades: the 1650s in the Bryan instance, the 1690s in Bourke’s. During the English Civil War the new Barbadians, busying themselves constructing their sugar economy with Dutch help and expertise, had attempted to remain neutral between King and Parliament. If anything the inclination of


the planters was towards the Crown. Daniel Searle, the first governor to represent the Cromwellian Protectorate, took up his position in the mid-fifties, full of apprehensions about the island population and in particular the threat posed by the Irish, which could have both internal and external implications. The 1690s saw the triumph of the Williamite cause, arousing the authorities’ fears that Protestant triumph might produce an Irish Catholic backlash. In opening up these valuable and unhealthy tropical colonies the Irish were seen as a useful but disloyal source of labour and there were ways in which their experience of bondage was more akin to that of the Africans than to that of the other servants. Many of them, perhaps the majority, did not speak English and their religion was perceived as sinister by the authorities. The view of the Irish servants as an alienated underclass, forced the authorities to face the possibility that such people might be prepared to make common cause with the blacks. The prologue to the Master and Servants Act of 1661 made specific mentions of particular Irish habits of ‘bold extravagancy and wandering’ and their ‘profligate and turbulent tendency’ in ‘joining themselves to runaway slaves’.44 For the result of all that eager buying was that planters were frightened of the society they had created. Servants were dangerous as they knew from the 1647 plot. Negroes, though dearer to purchase, were a better long term investment. But in spite of this economic attraction a significant white population was necessary to man the militia, (officered by substantial planters but with indentured labourers in its ranks) for, as Governor Willoughby wrote to Charles II in 1667 ‘the keeping of slaves in subjection must still be provided for’. Willoughby was worried because he considered that of the 4000 strong Barbadian militia, more than half were Irish.45 The issue of a safe proportion of whites to blacks would remain a problem as long as slavery existed in the Caribbean. The first surviving recorded evidence of Hiberno-African collaboration dates from 1655, the year before the Cornelius Bryan incident. News came in of a multi-racial compact in St Philips parish where ‘several Irish servants and Negroes were in rebellion’, hiding in thickets, and plundering estates. Governor Searle ordered that ‘the said servants and runaway Negroes’ be ‘secured or destroyed by the local militia’, which of course contained Irish freemen and servants. Individuals may have been apprehended but the problem continued. In September 1657 Searle consulted the planters and issued a public proclamation. Condemning the rebellious, he particularly called attention to their determination to draw others into their ‘dissolute, lewd and slothful way of life’ based on ‘pilfering, thefts and robberies’. He then laid down methods of control. Irish servants moving beyond their masters’ plantations must carry papers giving them leave of absence. From now on it was illegal for an Irishman to possess arms or ammunition and an offence to sell the same to ‘any of the said Irish nation’, stipulations which


seemed to extend beyond bound servants.46 The carrying of passes and the arms ban was already applied to slaves and would become part of the norm of developing slave codes throughout the colonies. The proclamation therefore put Irish servants on the same footing as the slaves with whom they were accused of caballing. But a runaway slave could be recognised by colour, that a servant was Irish could only be deduced after interrogation. And, as Governor Searle soon realised, not only did some of the Irish speak English, there were also those who wrote it so that he was obliged to issue further public statements warning about the number of forged passes springing into circulation. In 1660 the acts relating to the disarming of the Irish were repealed, though the church wardens were instructed to list the Irish within their parishes and to return the names of those manifesting ‘turbulent and dangerous spirits’.47 Wandering Irishmen continued to be a part of Barbadian society. So too did the official belief that the Irish were prepared to involve themselves in slave revolt. In 1685, the year of the accession of the Catholic James II to the throne, constables in seven of Barbados’s 11 parishes searched Negro houses for arms and munitions as information came in of a plot to destroy ‘all master and mistresses’, a scheme in which the Irish had been asked to participate. 22 Negroes and 18 Irish servants were arrested, but the Negroes were executed and the Irish freed. In 1692, as William III’s accession was worked out in the colonies, another plot was uncovered. The assembly’s commission of enquiry claimed that slaves had arranged with six Irishmen to acquire arms by making the guards at Needham Fort drunk. A small number of Irish were arrested but again it seems the evidence against them was not strong enough to secure conviction. 92 slaves were executed, 14 died of miscellaneous wounds, four of causes unknown and four from castration, 38 others survived this mutilation.48 In the last resort the Irish did not make common cause with the slaves. Only the wildest of them in their wildest moments were driven to it. They were white and wished to exercise the advantage it conferred upon them.49 The division of European politics into Catholic and Protestant power blocks had a destabilising effect throughout the seventeenth-century Caribbean. In 1655 Cromwell, encouraged by London merchants and anxious to find a far away project for the army he had employed in Ireland, drew upon traditional anti-Spanish feeling and sent an expedition into the heart of the western Caribbean. The original idea was to take Cuba, an island as big as Ireland, but when this proved too daunting the expedition successfully invaded its small, southern neighbour Jamaica. This lush and mountainous island, the size of county Donegal, would in the eighteenth century outstrip Barbados to become Britain’s richest sugar colony and, like Barbados and the Leewards, the early decades of this development would be marked by the arrivals of white servants, many of them Irish. Some of them came as Cromwellian soldiers, for the expeditionary force had recruited servants in


Barbados, even, to their masters’ fury, some of those still in indentures. There were also direct arrivals from Ireland. From the west already disturbed by population transfers, the authorities gathered up vagrants for transportation across to the Atlantic. After 1660 Jamaica’s governors, seeking to draw the land hungry from the other colonies, offered a freedom bounty of 20 acres to servants prepared to indenture themselves for two or three years. In 1667 the governor of the Leewards Islands, worried about pro-Catholic sympathies as Britain embarked on war with France, arrested ‘a large number of freemen and servants’ from Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat and sent them to Jamaica. In 1670 a list of 717 property holders from at least five Jamaican parishes, submitted to the authorities in Westminster, contained names which suggest a possible Irish presence of 10 per cent. Such a grouping would be made up of employers of servants and purchasers of slaves.50 Irish numbers seem to have grown and prospered, for James II’s governor, Christopher Monck, Duke of Albemarle, was pleased to be able to pursue a new royal line of policy by pitting small Irish planters and servants against the uncooperative large planters.51 The accession of William III and the war with France of course reduced Irish influence and stirred up suspicions against them – in 1692 a French attack on Carlisle Bay, near Port Royal, was believed to have been encouraged by intelligence passed to the enemy by two Irishmen. Forty years on their reputation as lazy, troublesome and a second column ready to betray the colony in an international crisis, remained. But the notion of the Irish as fostering Negro rebellion seems to have declined. In 1731 Governor Robert Hunter declared that the ‘servants and lower rank of people in Jamaica chiefly consisted of Irish Papists’ who had been ‘pouring in upon us in such sholes as they have done of late years’.52 This remark was made at the end of a decade in which 72,689 African slaves had been poured in while the white population, which had shrunk from 10,000 in 1690 to 7000 in 1715, was just beginning to increase very slowly.53 The idea that people were sent to the West Indies, or more specifically to Barbados, as white slaves, is imprinted in the historical consciousness of both the Irish and the British. It features in popular history books, old and new, and surfaces again on television and radio. In England it is related to the Civil War and to the Monmouth rebellion, in Ireland to Cromwell. Rooted in the political traumas of the seventeenth century, it drew strength from knowledge of enforced and unremitting unremunerated fieldwork in tropical conditions which so often led to early death. For the bound servant dying while still under contract, the difference between indentured labour and slavery was not an obvious reality. But the notion of arbitrary removal from the homeland is an inextricable part of this sense of white enslavement in the West Indies. By the mid-1650s the verb ‘to be barbadoed’ was being used to indicate such a fate. In Ireland the belief that this was introduced by Cromwell has been substantiated by one of his own letters in which he describes the fall of Drogheda. ‘When they submitted, their officers were


knocked on the head; and every tenth man of the soldiers killed; and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other Tower were all spared, as to their lives only, and shipped likewise for the Barbadoes.’ As this was a Royalist army it contained many English troops and the first prisoners subject to transportation were taken a year before Drogheda at the battles of Preston and Colchester; later the numbers would be increased by the defeated from Dunbar (September 1650) and Worcester.54 By this time the number of Scots prisoners ran into thousands. After Dunbar some were sold to Venice as galley slaves, and after Worcester, parliamentary anger reached such a pitch that it violated class – an order was sent out for the transportation of officers, a fate normally reserved for common soldiers. The majority of Scots deported were sent to the mainland colonies or Barbados as indentured labourers.55 Contemporary Barbadians complained with exaggeration that 12,000 military captives had arrived by 1655.56 The majority of soldiers leaving Ireland during these years (escaping or deported) went to continental Europe. But the period 1652–7 saw a new era of transportation. The removal to the colonies of those convicted under vagrancy laws was an organic development of the Tudor Poor Law and the establishment of the Protectorate in Ireland in 1652 meant that vagrants there could be similarly treated. The politically undesirable could also be removed.57 An important factor in ensuring that deportation actually took place was the willingness of merchants to accept such cargoes of involuntarily indentured servants. Under the Protectorate names emerge of merchants in Bristol and Dublin contracting to take Irish vagrants and military captives across the Atlantic.58 In the autumn of 1655, intent on peopling the new colony of Jamaica, Chancellor Thurloe wrote from Westminster to Henry Cromwell in Ireland asking for recruits for the army (not a difficult request to fulfil as many soldiers were just being disbanded there) and 1000 girls. Henry Cromwell proved immediately co-operative, adopting an optimistic official line on the transfer of Ireland’s female juveniles to the New World. ‘Concerning the young women, although we must use force in taking them up, yet it being so much for their own good, and likely to be of great advantage to the public, it is not in the least doubted that you may have such number of them as you shall think fit to make use upon this account.’ Care should be taken to provide them with clothes and provision for the transportation.59 A week later he wrote telling Thurloe that the troops were available and could be sent off as soon as the money to do so arrived. He reiterated again that he could supply the girls and at this point expanded on Thurloe’s plan, suggesting that an equal number of boys between 12 and 14 should be added. ‘We could well spare them and they would be of use to you; and who knows that it may be a means to make them English-men, I mean rather Christians.’60 His greatest reservation on the subject was the need for government funding, which he feared would not be forthcoming. On the


very same day in Scotland, Lord Broghill (later Earl of Orrery) was replying to a similar request from Thurloe. Like Cromwell, Broghill saw no trouble in furnishing army recruits and was quite prepared to add in some urban vagrants, but he strongly advised against any attempt to ‘press’ men and women from the general population. The clergy, he explained would use any such move to set the country aflame; reared as a member of the Church of Ireland, he drew an ironic analogy between Presbyterians and Catholics, popular with intellectuals from his confession, declaring that the Calvinist clergy possessed ‘papal power over their people’. He closed by remarking that ‘For my part I believe you may get many more out of Ireland than here.’61 In the 1640s and 50s, first voluntarily, then involuntarily, the Irish servant population in Barbados expanded quickly. It is easy enough to believe that many Irish perished on the island without reproducing and that many left it at the first opportunity. (In the twentieth century a Barbadian historian calculated that, in the years immediately following 1660, 10,000 settlers, mostly servants frustrated by their inability to gain access to land, left the island, half of them bound for Jamaica, the other half for mainland America, the Leewards, Windwards and Surinam.)62 Nevertheless the absence of any trace of such a numerous Irish group is curious, especially in view of the fact that the island’s original heavy settlement by Europeans meant that, for a sugar colony, the demographic ratio of whites to blacks always remained unusually high.63 Another Barbadian characteristic, and one of the reasons why Europeans were a substantial presence there, was the tenacious existence of a group of poor whites. Over the centuries their condition was much commented upon, invariably unfavourably – they were condemned as lazy, drunken, unhealthy, embarrassingly poor and idle compared to the free blacks and coloured. They were also determinedly endogamous, which was why they had continued to exist and their sense of white superiority also meant that they were too proud to do paid manual labour though their landholding capacity was negligible. ‘They will not work and will not emigrate’, wrote one commentator in 1878 but such descriptions of them had been circulating by then for some 200 years. For most of that time they were referred to as ‘Christian servants’ but in the nineteenth century, as they became regarded by the outside world as a curiosity, they were described as ‘Redlegs’ or ‘Redshanks’. Under these titles their background was embellished by commentators. Scotland was a popular homeland, the idea encouraged by thoughts of the tropic sun turning kilted legs red and by the fact that a community of these poor whites inhabited a ridge at the centre of the island, bearing the name of Scotland. Their roots were extended back to Cromwell’s times, refreshed by Culloden. Others however mentioned an English heritage, citing transportees from Monmouth’s rebellion. (Records show these amounting to no more than 300.) An historical investigation of the ‘Redshanks’ past, published in the 1970s, argues cogently they are in the main the descendants of the white servants


who arrived in Barbados in such large numbers in the mid-seventeenth century only to find their economic viability quickly undermined by the sugar planters’ preference for black slaves. An element of Irish ancestry must therefore be present among these poor whites. Possibly Irish women were less inclined to leave the island than Irishmen, which would explain why Irish names are not obvious among this group.64 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries white commentators noted how free blacks and mulattoes on Barbados prospered economically, while the Red Legs, pale and lethargic, sank into hopeless poverty, to the point where the very slaves regarded them as objects of charity. Yet as long as slavery lasted the descendants of these ‘Christian servants’ were in receipt of benefits from the state which were denied not only to the slaves but to the free coloureds. At worst poor whites were entitled to poor relief, while a substantial number of them were provided with access to small plots of land as military tenants in order to make the maintenance of the militia possible. In 1835 a Kerryman, J.B. Coulhurst, arrived in Barbados to take up office as a stipendiary magistrate, a post initiated by Westminster to supervise the phasing out of slavery. He kept a journal in which he included a sketch of ‘Sergeant Redshanks, a military tenant’. The picture shows a raggedly dressed and emaciated man riding on an equally emaciated horse. The pair are climbing uphill and behind the horse, holding onto its tail, is a black girl, once the rider’s slave now his apprentice. In a written exposition of his drawing Coulthurst emphasises that this is a work of social realism not a caricature. The artist’s intention is to reveal the ridiculousness of the military tenant in his extreme poverty and foolish pretensions. However it could be interpreted differently as showing that even in poverty, the poor white retains privileges; while he rides towards muster and parade, the black girl follows on foot burdened down by his firelock, belts, pouch, breeches and plumed cap, which she will help him don on the field. Afterwards he will return to his leisurely, if impecunious, existence, while she will take up her duties as his ‘maid of all work’. J.B. Coulthurst himself was a member of a landed Kerry family, with substantial West Indian interests dating back to the eighteenth century. On the abolition of slavery, William Matthew Coulthurst received compensation for some 600 slaves in Jamaica. More modestly, on Barbados, Catherine, Maria Elizabeth and Mary Coulthurst were compensated for 143.65 In an earlier generation, J.B. as a young and impecunious relative, would have come to the island as a manager or overseer; now that such a career no longer held out hopeful prospects, he had adapted to a new age and used his social connections to acquire his government posting, as a stipendiary magistrate at a salary of £300 per annum. Though he did not see it in that light, his position was in some ways analogous to that of the emaciated horseman. With the benefits of hindsight, this picture and its artist can be seen as furnishing examples of a long term Irish presence on Barbados.


Class was a determining force among the Irish arriving in the West Indian plantation complex and nowhere did this play a more important role than on the ‘Irish island’ of Montserrat. On Montserrat Irish servants were the most numerous group. Planters were both Protestant (English and Irish) and Catholic (Irish). When France and England went to war in 1666, the Irish servants on St Christopher and Montserrat rose and destroyed the plantations. Their support allowed the French on St Christopher to takeover the whole island. An English colonist describing the battle wrote ‘the Irish in the rear, always a bloody and perfidious people in the English Protestant interest, fired volleys into the front and killed more than the enemy of our own forces’.66 At the end of the war in 1667 (the Peace of Breda) the status quo was restored and Lord Willoughby, arrived from Barbados, to reassert control for Charles II. He described Montserrat as ‘a pretty island with as much plantable land as Nevis, but cruelly destroyed by the French; it is almost an Irish colony.’67 Willoughby saw both the necessity of the Irish as colonists and the difficulties of keeping them loyal. On his landing, 27 of the substantial planters who had remained on the island, professed their loyalty in a petition, saying that they had been plundered and stripped by ‘the wicked people of the Irish nation’, to a point ‘impossible for men or pen to relate’ but 18 of the signatories possessed Irish names, many of them Catholics including Skerrets and Kirwans, Galways and Ryans. (Though of course for centuries back in Ireland the Hiberno- Norman Skerrets and Kirwans had protected their social standing under the derivation ‘old English’.) The need to salvage their property, dictated planter attitudes to French invasion and servant rebellion. Willoughby turned his soldiers upon the ‘wicked people of the Irish nation, the servant class, who were still busy looting the plantations’. Some were hanged, others hunted down in the woods, 400 or so who came in, were resettled on swearing to be loyal ‘and I believe them until an enemy appear’, Willoughby commented. He then deprived the Irish Protestant governor, Briskett of his position and lands, giving his estate to the Catholic, William Stapleton (‘for his better encouragement to plant and settle there’). He went on to raise Stapleton to the rank of deputy governor, describing him to the Lords of the Council in England as ‘a gentleman of known valour and integrity and born in Ireland and therefore understands the better to govern his countrymen’.68 William Stapleton described himself as ‘a soldier of fortune without estate’.69 He was the second son of a Catholic gentry family from Tipperary, tracing their roots back to the twelfth century and loosing their land in the Royalist cause. Typical of those from this Hiberno-Norman background (the old English) he put his faith in the King and in his case it paid off. On Montserrat he set about mending his family’s landless fortune, bringing out his brothers and friends from Ireland to acquire government office, sugar estates and slaves. In 1671, he married Anne Russell, the daughter of a wealthy planter on Nevis and in the next year he became Governor of the Leewards.


Stapleton’s task was to reorganise the islands in order to insure their security and prosperity and therefore value to the Crown. To do this he mapped them and took a census. Such surveys were constructed in colonies, before they became prevalent in the home territory. They were used for tax purposes, for defence requirements (to assess the size of the militia) and to furnish the Lords of Trade and Plantations with material which allowed them to review the development of the colony and take informed decisions. Stapleton’s census differed from other seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean investigations, in that it did not simply categorise the population into two groups, white and black, but divided the whites into English and Irish. So the impressionistic notions of Montserrat as ‘almost an Irish colony’ revealed that as correct, more than two-thirds Irish, (69 per cent), one-third English with a few Scots added in. The Irish appear to have been present as planters, large and small, as well as servants, bond and free; their demographic domination flourished in the south of the island and they were more likely to live in units containing women than the English.70 In the other Leeward islands, the Irish on Nevis and Antigua comprised around one quarter of the European population, on St Christopher a tenth.71 The only group which Stapleton’s census of the Leewards ignored was that of the indigenous population, the Caribbs, whose raids he curbed with some success, hunting them down with dogs Spanish style.72 In the 1670s Montserrat was not a sugar colony. It possessed more whites than blacks and most of the land was given over to tobacco, indigo and cotton cultivation and stock rearing. All the other British Leewards were producing more sugar than Montserrat, but they lagged far behind Barbados and would take at least half a century to catch up.73 On the completion of the census Stapleton decided that Stuart security and planter prosperity would be best served if Montserrat were exchanged with the French for their portion of St Christopher. The irony here, that the Irish island’s Irish governor sought to eliminate the colony, is more apparent than real. The Irish had not voluntarily chosen Montserrat, but been forced onto it from St Christopher. Nor was it ever solely their island. The English presence was always important, reflected in the name Portsmouth for the largest town (nearby Kinsale was even smaller) and the fact that a number of the most extensive estates belonged to Englishmen. The desire to make a mark on St Christopher, the original English colonial settlement and still regarded as the capital of the Leewards, remained an ambition among Irish servants and planters alike. The Lords of Trade and Plantations were favourably disposed towards Stapleton’s proposal but did not succeed in bringing it to fruition.74 Stapleton’s career in the Leewards reveals the importance of social status in building a New World fortune from slaves and sugar. His impoverished gentry connections took him into the officer class, enabling him, like Bernard O’Brien, half a century earlier, to consort with kings or at least their representative. His operations in the Caribbean also illustrate the fact that the real


advantage from high office was not so much the salary, which was voted by the assemblies and could be difficult to collect, but the easy access to land. High office smoothed the way to great planter wealth but most substantial Irish planters and merchants started their transatlantic careers simply on the strength of social advantage which gave them a degree of access to capital. Such was the background of Henry Blake, who moved from Galway to Montserrat in 1668 at the start of Stapleton’s reconstruction era, while his brother John Blake set up as a merchant in Barbados. Henry, driven by debt to try his fortunes in the West Indies, did not intend to stay permanently for he left his wife and children at home. Another brother, Thomas remained, as a merchant in Galway. These Blakes had lost land under the Protectorate and, like many such families, resented not only the invader but the lack of sympathy shown by more prosperous kin. So Henry’s father, John Blake, senior, once mayor of Galway, commented bitterly from his little estate of Mullaghmore. ‘By the tyrannical usage and uncharitable proceedings of my cousin Martin Blake, I was necessitated to sell my few cows – too few – to make him payment, and my poor tenants (excepting four) all destroyed and broken by his means these two years past. And the two quarters of Cornikeallagh and Carrownifagh are waste without yielding any rent.’75 In the oldest Irish American emigrant letters to survive, the Blakes expressed sentiments (migrant satisfaction and paternal gratitude) which would continue to be repeated down the centuries. From Montserrat to Galway, brother to brother, 1673 – ‘I am sorry you have very hard times, there is nothing sweeter than a good, plentiful living, which, I thank God is not wanting onto, your very loving brother Henry’; And from Mullaghmore to Montserrat, father to son, 1674 – And in my greatest need and want you have supplied me, God be thanked. 76 What is unexpected is the source of this emigrant’s New World wealth – sugar production through the work of African slaves. Henry also remitted money (or tobacco and indigo) to pay some of his own debts and made arrangements to have his children brought together in one place so that a female teacher could be hired to school them in English. Beside his contacts with his brother John in Barbados, his letters reveal a network of relatives at work on the Atlantic or permanently in Montserrat. These included his sisters’ husbands, Robert French, Andrew and Patrick Browne, and John Lynch; his nephew Martin and younger brother Nicholas made the crossing and return journey at least once. News from home came by Andrew Óg Blake’s ketch, and cousin Mathew Darcy, travelling on the Pheonix of Boston, undertook the conveying of bills back to Galway. The Endeavour of Cork carried letters to Ireland where merchants Patrick Creagh and Garrett Keone helped with business transactions. On Barbados, John Blake, involved with Dutch merchants, forwarded letters to Galway via London. By 1676 Henry Blake, possessing some 38 slaves, had made enough on Montserrat to allow him to go home and become a landowner purchasing two estates, one at Lehinch,


Co Mayo, the other at Renvyle, Co Galway. His brother John, aided by cousin Edward Bodkin, bought the Montserrat plantation with ‘appurtenances and negres’ for 106,889 lbs of sugar.77 John Blake died there in 1692, his land passing to his daughter Catherine who married an Irish planter, Nicholas Lynch of Antigua. Religion as a political reality was a force to be reckoned in the seventeenthcentury Caribbean but as a spiritual entity or an organised ecclesiastical institution it was weak. The islands, regarded as an extension of the see of the bishop of London, were divided into parishes, churches were built and vestries set up, forming, as at home, a basic unit of local government. But it was not easy to find clerics ready to set out for frontier conditions. The first Protestant missionary societies did not come into being until the end of the eighteenth century; the Church of England possessed no shock troops with which to enter the New World. By 1671 there were some forty parishes in the Leewards, but only one ordained Anglican. There were however church buildings, as governors saw their erection as part of their institutional remit. There were two in Montserrat, St Antony’s and St Peters, and although they were without clergy they were not empty shells, the wealthiest planters buried their dead inside, attended obsequies in the foetid tropical interiors and erected monuments.78 Vestments hung in cupboards, waiting for visiting ecclesiastics; during a Caribb raid on Montserrat, one of the Indians amused himself by dressing up in a surplice to frighten his fellow raiders, who fled in terror before him. A year or so later Father John Stritch, a Jesuit from Limerick arrived on the island. He came via St Christopher where his order had recently acquired permission to build a church in French territory at a location within easy reach of England’s Irish colonists. Father Stritch also crossed to Montserrat where he celebrated mass in the thickets, disguised as a wood cutter, those who attended joining in felling down a few trees in order to give authenticity to the scene. Called back to Ireland in 1660, his successors on St Christopher continued an erratic service to Montserrat.79 In general the Catholic Church was more successful at making slave converts than the Protestant churches in the Caribbean. The missionary orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, accustomed to working in the New World since the sixteenth century were experienced in providing mass baptism to pagans, though the majority of these had been Amerindians rather than Negroes. But their spasmodic and illegal presence on Montserrat meant that they were in a poor position to exercise their missionary skills there. Protestants on the other hand despised mass baptism and insisted on individual instruction, but their emphasis on the Bible, with its equivocal Pauline texts on the subject of slavery, made them uneasy that baptism would somehow confer freedom. Slave holders therefore tended to take refuge in the assertion that Negroes were incurably pagan, an easy enough situation to maintain in the absence of clergy even for their own needs.80


The Montserrat of the Blakes’ and the Stapletons’ time was very much a frontier community with its clergyless Anglican churches requiring rebuilding both from the depredations of war, hurricane and earthquake, its Catholic majority cutting their way into the tropical vegetation for confession, baptism and marriage, its African population left as best they could to forge some kind of communal religious activity from their varied animistic rites. To deport priests and punish ‘obis’ was one thing, to suppress folk practice of religion among sizable portions of the population was another. Thus Africans, coming together to celebrate their dead and propitiate the spirit world, and Catholic Irish, carrying crosses in funeral processions, were largely ignored by the authorities. The slaves interred their people beside their huts and by the early eighteenth century the Catholics had established a burying ground of their own.81 Stapleton himself was in an ambiguous position. As governor of the Leewards and representative of the Anglican church, he repaired St Antony’s and St Peter’s and it was during his governorship that the island’s first Church of England clergyman, an Oxfordshire cleric from Garsington took up his benefice in 1678. At the same time William Stapleton avoided taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy by reminding his superiors of his record of loyalty to the Crown at home and abroad in past times, his preparedness to fight any prince who opposed Charles II. Encouraging others to behave as he did himself, Catholic planters sat in Montserrat’s council and assembly, acted as militia officers and census enumerators. Stapleton died in France in 1686 where he had gone in the hopes of improving his health and to arrange for his sons’ Catholic education.82 By then James II had ascended the throne in Britain and Ireland, seeking the strengthening of Catholicism and royal power by encouraging the exercise of freedom of religion within his dominions. But the revolution of 1689 and the Williamite triumph reversed this process, like Ireland Montserrat would move into an era of penal laws. The real change in Montserrat in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was not religio–political but economic and demographic. Stapleton’s main task, for both himself and the Crown, was to maximise the number of slaves, so that the Leewards could become booming sugar islands. After 12 years of his governorship the Montserratian assembly expressed disappointment in their island’s progress, complaining that between 1666 and 1680 Montserrat and Antigua together had only received 300 slaves, half of them now dead.83 However the year after this complaint was recorded, issued in a decade which was to be one of the three great peaks of British slaving. Between 1681–90, the overall numbers leaving Africa reached 106,800, of which 14,000 entered the Leewards.84 By the first decade of the eighteenth century Montserrat’s slave population stood at 3570: by 1729 it was up to 6063, by 1775 (the final year of a decade which represented the high point of Britain’s expansionary slave trade cycle) it had reached 9834. The day of


the servant was over. He had either died, become a smallholder or left. A new generation of servants made for Jamaica. As did others who were better off like the ambitious and substantial John Carroll, briefly Stapleton’s deputy governor of Montserrat in 1675, leaving behind a plantation which continued to bear his name.85 At no time had the Irish colony contained more than 2000 Irishmen and by the first decade of the eighteenth century the white population had fallen and lodged around 1500. In 1775 the figures were very similar but in 1729 the census showed that for a time it had been even lower standing at 1115.86 St Patrick’s parish was much less densely populated in 1729 than in the 1670s. While planter assemblies were always debating the need for white servants to keep up the militia, their economic preference, a factor which seemed to override all other considerations in the quest for sugar cultivation, was for black slaves. In spite of their situation, caught between two kings, divided among themselves, the Irish discovered advantages in the Caribbean. It resembled the Amazon where they had for almost two decades succeeded in making careers and fortunes by playing between the interstices of European power politics, while in the same period England floated three expensive and disastrous companies. For adherents of the Church of Ireland, the slave and sugar islands posed no special disabilities. For Catholics, prepared to become part of the establishment, Protestantism was less severely demanding than in the mainland colonies. And in the Leewards, it could be escaped altogether by island hopping into French territory. In the early 1670s a visitor came upon a settlement of 100 to 200 Irish on Guadeloupe living ‘much as they do at home in little huts, planting potatoes and tobacco, and as much indigo as will buy them canvas and brandy and never advance so far as sugar planting’.87 This group may not have made such social progress but certainly next door in Martinique there were families from Galway who had done so. And moving further west into a larger colony did not restrict the Irish choice to British Jamaica. St Domingue, developing in the eighteenth century as the richest tropical colony in the world, was hungry for servants, overseers, shopkeepers, merchants, planters, a society of petit blanc and grand blanc in which the Irish could participate. In the 1780s when Britain negotiated arrangements with Spain to allow her favourable access to Trinidad, Irish interest in this Catholic island flourished. Edward Barry held an official appointment supervising Britain’s annual import quota of 4000 slaves, while Phillip Laughton acted as agent for the big Liverpool firm Dawson and Barker. Other Irishmen, taking advantage of such contacts, arrived to trade so that this new grouping came to dominate Trinidad’s developing foreign commerce.88 But in the first half of the eighteenth century some of the Irish planters who had chosen to remain on Montserrat were to find various ways of manipulating slavery to turn their volcanic peak into a golden rock.

3 Creoles and Slaves: The Eighteenth Century

Though Irish servants now preferred Jamaica as a destination and black slaves were demographically dominant, in many respects eighteenth-century Montserrat was still an Irish island. Political arrangements reflected the homeland as penal laws deprived Catholics of rights which they had been able to exercise under Stapleton’s religiously opaque, Restoration regime. Catholics could no longer hope to acquire office as magistrates, councillors and assembly men. This meant that there was a group of well-to-do planters on the island, who did not exercise the power and influence to which their economic standing in the community entitled them. And as in Ireland such disabilities encouraged conversion to the established church. So, as the years passed, those who had emigrated to the Caribbean as Protestants, Parsons, Irishes and Fryes, were joined in the assembly by Trants, Meades, Dalys, Dyers, Lees and Fitzdennises who had probably arrived as Catholics. For Montserrat the first half of the eighteenth century was indeed both penal era and golden age, a time of legally defined religious disability and economic expansion. Perhaps exclusion from politics encouraged entrepreneurial ability for the most remarkable fortunes on the island were to be made by members of the Catholic community. Unlike Ireland, Catholics on Montserrat never lost the right to buy land, thus the Galways, a Co Cork family who had rebelled in 1641 and emigrated around 1660, were able to build up the island’s most extensive estate, 1400 acres in St Patrick’s parish, part sugar plantation, part cattle ranch. A list of the island’s 30 largest sugar planters in 1729 puts the English Wyke first, almost certainly making his the richest property on the island. But he is immediately followed by a Catholic Farrell. The Irish names on the list represent more than two-thirds of the whole, which was equally true of their slave numbers, with the original Protestant settler families of Irishes and Fryes coming out near the bottom, well below Catholic settlers of the same vintage, Roches (at number 5 with 200 acres and 159 Negroes) and Skerrets (seventeenth with 150 acres of cane and 89 Negroes).1

55


Overall the names included in the 1729 census suggest that among whites the pattern of one-third British and two-thirds Irish still existed. 124 households with recognisable Irish names possessed slaves, another 17 were without them. Most of these 17 were listed as labourers, but even white labourers might possess slaves as, for example, John Conner of St Peter’s Parish who had two adult slaves, a man and a woman. A significant number of more prosperous non-landowners (merchants, mariners, tavern keepers, clergymen, spinsters, carpenters, masons) were slave holders. Antony Bodkin, described as a planter, had 13 slaves and no land at all. Garrett Fahey had 16 slaves, four horses and only one cultivated acre. In all, such examples amounted to some 77 owners and 681 slaves. In the most populous parish, St Antony’s, which contained the main town of Plymouth, there were three Skerrets acting as merchants; Catherine Skerret possessed 16 slaves, Thitt Skerret a similar number and Gregory Skerret seven.2 Of course merchants and artisans needed slave labour to run their businesses, but the majority would at times hire out their slaves, investing in a workforce beyond anything their own household or business operation required. Spinsters, the sick and the elderly might be wholly dependant on such an investment. This was a workforce rented out to service a commercial economy. Immediately beyond the island itself, the eighteenth century brought new opportunities for Monserratians. The triumph of Britain in 1713 provided them with certain advantages in Caribbean trading. The most valued was the Asiento which gave Britain the right to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies. The Company set up to run this lucrative and extensive venture established factors in key ports. The position in Havana was acquired by Richard Farrell, born on Montserrat to parents who had emigrated from Longford. His appointment enabled him to become a substantial slave dealer and his Catholicism eased his absorption into Cuban society. By the nineteenth century his descendants were wealthy planters. The female line produced the family who helped to make Cuban slavery the most modern and productive in the world by introducing the steam engine to the plantation process. In the male line, several Jose Rickardo O’Ferrills worked determinedly to undermine the attempts of the Spanish government to stop the arrival of new slaves from Africa.3 The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) also removed the French from St Christopher, which the British, pleased with their exclusive ownership, now affectionately referred to as St Kitts. The Irish, less suspect than before, began making their way back there, a trend set by richer families. Nicholas Galway followed this course and apparently prospered, for in 1735 he was a joint donor with his brother David (head of the family on the Montserrat estate) to the presentation of a silver chalice destined for a Catholic church in Ireland.4 Conditions on St Kitts now enabled George Skerret to become the most successful of his connection. Working with Noblet Ruddock, Bristol’s second largest slave trader, Skerret became owner of a ship, the Anne Brigantine

Creoles and Slaves 57

capable of importing a cargo of 156 slaves from Africa.5 Possibly he was encouraged by (or even played a part in) a highly successful smuggling venture in 1722 when the Mary and Catherine made the forbidden direct Atlantic voyage from Montserrat to Africa, returning to sell its 102 slaves ‘at an extra ordinary price’ in St Kitts.6 British links thus gave Skerret access to slaves, while Irish links furnished him with the Caribbean’s next most desired import, provisions. Records in Ireland survive which show him playing a key role in the commercial activities of one substantial Dublin merchant. Between 1723 and 1730 a Patrick Doran was employed by Richard Grattan of Dublin to captain his ships in at least six voyages (the fifth made in a vessel named the Richard and Henry) to the eastern Caribbean, voyages which illustrate the complexities of eighteenth-century trading and the need to build up experience and maintain existing regional contacts in order to acquire success. Taking on provisions at Cork, sailing via Madeira to pick up wine, calling at Barbados, Patrick Doran would then spend up to a year among the Leewards. Visiting Montserrat and the French islands, he based himself on St Kitts where he would set up a store, exchanging his goods mostly for sugar and rum. In 1724 he despatched his brig The Owners Goodwill with a cargo composed of Irish shoes and provisions and Caribbean produce to trade in Philadelphia for flour and lumber. While on St Kitts, where he hired a horse to move round the island and Negroes to unload the barrels, he despatched some of the sugar he had acquired to Grattan’s Liverpool agent in the Lyon and the Maid Marian before sailing there himself.7 His departure and the success of his operation was facilitated by the fact that George Skerret could be left to handle existing debts. Montserrat’s traders also benefited by their geographical convenience to other European colonies, busily supplying goods to Dutch St Eustatia and Danish St Croix, whose governments encouraged freedom of trade. To the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, they traded legally or smuggled as the nature of the commodity or political situation dictated. (The government in Paris forbade their planters to import slaves other than those supplied by their own merchants.) The government in Westminster allowed Irish provisions to enter the French islands in time of peace but banned them during hostilities as part of the war effort. Such a system favoured smuggling, which of course, if successful, brought in higher profits. Montserrat’s links with the French islands were often familial and long established; Roches, Lynches and Kirwans had emerged on Martinique as substantial planters, the two latter families claiming to have emigrated there straight from Galway in the 1650s.8 But the most remarkable career of an Irish Catholic Montserratian in this expansive age belongs to a planting family who did not qualify for a place among the island’s 30 most successful sugar producers. Nicholas Tuite, (1705–72) with a holding of 100 acres and 41 slaves in St Patrick’s parish, would make his fortune in Denmark’s Caribbean empire.


Possessing a sophisticated merchant community in the seventeenth century, Denmark had developed a company to trade with the Americas, bringing in slaves and returning with tobacco and sugar. In the Virgin Islands, north-west of the Leewards, east of Spain’s Puerto Rico, she claimed islets and established trading points, but made little headway with settlement. As Britain and France struggled more determinedly to erect navigation laws and ‘excluifs’ to ensure that their colonies used their ships for both exports and imports, the possession of sugar territory appeared more and more necessary to a busy mercantile state. In 1733 the Danish Company purchased a larger island in the Virgins, known as Santa Cruz to the Spanish, St Croix to its French vendors, whose nationals were being attracted westward by the magnet of St Domingue.9 While the Danes possessed capital and mercantile expertise necessary for running such a venture, they did not possess manpower eager or suitable for planting their new possession. It was Nicholas Tuite who solved this problem for them. He had bought a sloop to carry Irish provisions and slaves from island to island and a hurricane, blasting his property on Montserrat in 1737, encouraged him to concentrate on St Croix and commercial activities. By 1766 he owned seven plantations there and was part owner of seven others. Between 1753 and 1773 (the year after Tuite’s death) slave numbers are said to have trebled, from 7566 to 22,244, while sugar export rose from 350 to 8200 tons which put St Croix in the same production league as St Kitts or Antigua. Nevis and Montserrat were left far behind with less than a quarter of such a score.10 Having benefited from Denmark’s freer trade policy, Nicholas Tuite had persuaded Frederick V of Denmark to grant freedom of religion to all settlers on the island in order to encourage immigrations from the Leewards. By 1758 there were 250 Catholics on St Croix, most of them Irish, at least 100 of them penniless young overseers.11 Immigrants from families already in the West Indies fared best as settlers. Amongst those who came direct from Europe, to this currently popular tourist destination, the death rate was alarmingly high. The island soon manifested the traits of eighteenth-century European social life; there was bear-baiting at the Fort, contemporary plays and a pantomime in town and a selection of churches to attend. However the wealthy planters remained absentees. In the ten years between 1756–66, Tuite himself visited the island on only two occasions, each lasting a fortnight. In 1760 Nicholas Tuite journeyed to Copenhagen where Fredrick V appointed him chamberlain and paid tribute to his role as founder of Denmark’s Caribbean empire.12 The eighteenth-century Irish on Montserrat who acquired fortunes by buying in slaves, buying up the plots of smallholders and moving into sugar and inter-island trading, were in most cases second or third generation settlers. That is to say they were Creoles. Though it became tinged with the suspicion of mixed ancestry, the word Creole (derived from the Spanish Crillo) originally meant a person of settler stock born in the Americas. Hence


those continents increasingly proliferated in Spanish Creoles, Portuguese Creoles, African Creoles and other later colonial arrivals. By the early eighteenth century Montserrat was therefore rich in Irish Creoles. The existence of any strong Creole group is of course predicated on the presence of women and here, as the census of 1678 showed, the Irish were at an advantage on the island with more of their households containing adult females.13 In the case of the Catholics this situation was further underpinned by preference for marriage within their own confession, religious endogamy. The Protestant Irish could more easily disappear into a white British West Indian melting pot. A sense of ethnicity among a Creole group can draw upon a number of sources, foremost among them language. Like the Blakes, many of the gentry/merchants arriving in Montserrat would have spoken both English and Irish. Only the servant class would have contained exclusively Irish speakers, who might indeed have been in the majority. When servants ceased to arrive in significant numbers, Irish speaking declined. (By 1720 there were only 95 white servants, bond and free, on the island.)14 English, as the language of commerce, as well as officialdom, was always at a premium. There is nothing surprising about the suggestion that, by the twentieth century, the only surviving Irish word on a tiny island settled in the seventeenth century by poverty-stricken servants, soon to be joined by even poorer slaves, should be minnseach (female goat).15 It seems equally likely that by the eighteenth century the Irish brogue would have been overlaid by West Indian English, its vocabulary rich in naval terms, its pronunciation touched by African cadences. Irish Creole identity on Montserrat drew its chief strength from a sense of a common past, symbolised by loyalty to the Stuarts and to Catholicism, which were of course inextricably connected. Given the outcome of international power politics in the eighteenth century, religion, rather than support for the Stuarts, proved to be an issue of continual and practical importance. By the eighteenth century the secret meetings in the woods ministered to by visiting clerics had gone: Montserrat possessed a Catholic burying ground and a resident clergy holding services in the houses of the richer parishioners. The arrival of such clergy meant the renewal of links with Ireland itself. Because he was so wealthy and influential, Nicholas Tuite’s career again furnishes evidence on this subject. Having negotiated the right of freedom of religion on St Croix from the King of Denmark, Tuite petitioned the Propaganda in Rome for a mission to the colony. He intended the mission to be staffed by Irish clergy and asked that its patronage be given to himself and his male heirs.16 This appears to have been granted but it proved no easy matter to find candidates to go to the West Indies.17 A decade elapsed (1749–59) before the Irish Dominicans took up the challenge. Eight members of the order worked on St Croix during Tuite’s life time and, to their disgust, he also added two secular


priests, his nephew, Father O’Reilly from Longford and a Munsterman, Maurice Roche.18 The four Dominicans who established the mission were professional men with very varied personalities. Dominic Allen, from the Portumna convent, was reclusive and Irish speaking, while his companion Hyacinth Kennedy (Lorrha convent) was busy, conscientious and anxious. Both died within three years of their arrival and by 1760 their replacements were appointed. Thomas Devenish, (Portumna and Lisbon), socially charming, confident, optimistic, organising eagerly and quick to move on before his ambitious initiatives showed signs of collapsing, was accompanied by the practical and persistent Terence MacDonnell from Urlar, Co Mayo. A talented quartet of letter writers, they have left a striking account of the problems of trying to missionise in a frontier planter community. The planters are vividly portrayed, scrambling for profit, ignoring even Easter duties, both Lenten fast and confession, turning to the Danes’ Lutheran clergy if their demands for marriage within the bounds of consanguinity were not quickly accepted, arguing confidently and loudly on theological matters on which they were highly ignorant, producing stipends in rum and sugar instead of the promised specie or, worse still, nothing at all. On the matter of the planters, though not how to handle them, all four accounts tally. In regard to the slaves they differ considerably. Hyacinth Kennedy made them his first concern, seeking to instruct and baptise. He wished to encourage marriage among them but was uneasy that, once this novel concept was conveyed to them, they would set about using it to reject old partners and acquire new ones. He was also worried by the matter of inter-island runaways. The large Spanish island of Puerto Rico was visible from little St Croix and, though the prospects of an improved future was most uncertain, in their desperation, runaways crossed in both directions. Denmark’s arrangements about freedom of worship had included the stipulation that runaways from other islands should not be returned if they accepted Christianity. (Whether or not they should also receive their liberty, seems to have been an even more vexed issue.) Kennedy was suspicious about runaways from Puerto Rico, appearing before him in seeking baptism, fearing that many of them were in fact being re-baptised. He would have liked communication and co-operation with the Spaniards on this issue, an idea which the planters would not countenance.19 Dominic Allen was less interested in Africans but did agree that slave converts were often more assiduous in their religious exercises than the worldly and boisterous whites.20 Thomas Devenish’s ebullient letters only mentioned the slaves in passing as he proudly explained to Charles O’Kelly of the Propaganda how he had made arrangements for the Dominican order to acquire a £3,000 plantation on St Croix.21 Terence MacDonnell, a costive correspondent, was left struggling with debts, mortgages and planter quarrels as Devenish’s scheme collapsed and Devenish himself returned to Europe. MacDonnell complained that his very larder was often bare; on such


occasions he was reduced to standing in the doorway of his house, looking round to see where the greatest smoke was coming from. Then he would start off in that direction to share his parishioners’ dinner. His clear, businesslike epistles made no mention of Negroes at all.22 One issue, besides the uncivilised nature of their white flock, which the priests revealed, directly or indirectly, was the family networks which had brought them to the West Indies. Hyacinth Kennedy, discontented with his Birr parish, saw himself as propelled to the mission field by the unwillingness of Irish bishops to produce preferment at home for regulars, but he also had a relative James Kennedy on St Croix. Devenish had a cousin John Blake, rich and influential on St Eustatia and spent much of his time there.23 Terence MacDonnell did not reveal any family already in the Caribbean but he was eager to build his own network. Shortly after his arrival on the island, he wrote to Rome suggesting that his young cousin, who was attending a seminary in Spain, should be transferred to France to learn a language useful on St Croix for religious and commercial communication. The efforts of the Irish clergy in the Caribbean have been seen as an example of the vitality of the church in penal times.24 Their problems with the laity, men gambling on the hope of a sugar fortune and a quick return home, accustomed to combat death with alcohol and rough medical treatments (sometimes European, sometimes African) rather than the consolations of religion, sprang from a colonial society at once frontier and commercial. Yet the clergy themselves were a part of that society; in the colonies the priest followed the planter and the trader, often a brother or uncle or cousin. In the case of individual priests with an aptitude for commerce, like Father Lynch on Montserrat, who was said to have amassed a small fortune from rum, the church rarely benefited financially.25 As in the case of other West Indian inheritances, a needy younger son from some branch of the family would appear to extract the legacy, a move which often resulted in his remaining more or less permanently in the islands. The ambitious Thomas Devenish, following a well tried Portuguese, Spanish and French expedient, saw the best hopes of a firmly established and thriving church on St Croix as being achieved through plantation owning, a scheme which failed to bring ecclesiastical remuneration though it may have worked to the advantage of yet another Montserratian immigrant, Matthew Farrell who took over the property.26 On his 1766 visit to St Croix, Nicholas Tuite, denounced the resident planters there as indifferent to religion and pusillanimous in their support for the clergy.27 Expanding commercial activity and increasing wealth had enabled the Catholic Irish of Montserrat to open up St Croix to their religion. But successful business activities both highlighted and threatened their existence as a distinctive ethnic group. Its members continued, not only as they had in the previous century, to diffuse their numbers throughout the Caribbean, they also began to move to London. By the 1740s Nicholas Tuite had


acquired business premises in Lime Street. Over the next decade he was joined by Farrells, Kirwans, Skerrets, Husseys and Ryans. That the recrossing of the Atlantic by such families focused on England rather than Ireland can of course be explained by the severity of Ireland’s penal laws against propertied Catholics. (As regards other areas such as political activity, office holding and education, the situation in the two kingdoms was quite similar.) The eighteenth century could not produce a Henry Blake returning to Ireland to purchase estates with his sugar money, so Nicholas Tuite was not in a position to buy an estate in Westmeath or a mansion in Dublin. On the other hand he also differed from Henry Blake in being much richer and a second generation emigrant. When Nicholas Tuite settled in London in 1749 he bought Sion House.28 The norm for that exclusive band of Creole Irish rich enough to cross the Atlantic was to buy a house in London and rent a country residence. There were positive reasons for the choice of England. By the 1740s a life based on London and Bath was one aspired to by many absentee British West Indian planters eager to enjoy dinner parties, cards, concerts, theatre going and matchmaking. For Nicholas Tuite and his commercial circle the attraction of the capital as an international and imperial hub of business was also potent. How far life in Montserrat’s Plymouth or Kinsale would have prepared them for this metropolitan existence it is hard to say. But certainly society in Basseterre, the capital of St Kitts and a popular destination for Montserratian visitors and settlers, offered a taste of life dominated by dinner parties, dancing, cards, picnics, cockfighting and amateur dramatics, which included performances of King Lear and Othello. Dancing masters and music teachers could be readily hired to instruct the young. The experiences of the Ryan family from St Patrick parish, passing through inter-island trading to plantation owning in St Croix and residence in Basseterre and London, records a social trajectory common to their Creole group and clearly marking out the rise, dissolution and fall of the Montserratian Irish in the eighteenth century. The Ryans were among the seventeenth-century emigrants to Montserrat. John Ryan signed the petition to Lord Willoughby and a decade later, as a member of the assembly was one of those who refrained from complimenting Charles II on his escape from the Popish Plot. In 1695 two slaves, one belonging to a John Ryan, were convicted of stealing a cow. Such a theft merited capital punishment and, when the state took a slave’s life, it paid the owner compensation. In this case, seeking to limit public expense, the magistrates had the two culprits draw lots to see who should die. John Ryan’s slave was the lucky one and so only received a severe whipping. The Stapleton census records a Thomas Ryan, who might be John’s younger or less successful brother, living in St Patrick’s parish and owning one male slave. The 1729 census shows Thomas, (with a son called John) possessing 18 slaves (eight men, six women and four children) and some


80 acres of land, 18 of it in sugar cane.29 This would make them less prosperous neighbours of the Tuites. There is no record of a marriage connection (within the parish the Ryans had married Mulrynes and Blaneys) but John Ryan’s career would very much follow the path laid down by Nicholas Tuite. Breaking with his father Thomas’s middling plantership, John bought a sloop for inter-island trading and developed a St Croix plantation on Negro Bay. Another Ryan sugar estate was established and named Concordia. Like Tuite, the Ryans were absentees from St Croix, living four days sail away on Montserrat or St Kitts. By the 1750s John Ryan was dead, his will leaving the financial care of his estates (Symes, Lees and Paradise, on Montserrat as well as the St Croix development) to a brother-in-law, the husband of his sister, Mary Ryan.30 In 1757, Mary, her husband and children sailed for England surrounded on shipboard, as they had been in the Leewards, by Irish Creole relatives and friends. Financed from a St Croix plantation developed by her husband (by this time estimated to be worth £50,000 and yielding a yearly income of £3500) Mary’s life in London and Bath contained all the social amusements, but it was also heavily familial, revolving around the education of her four children, three sons and one daughter.31 All attended boarding establishments but the boys were never contented with that life, frequently running away and having to be retrieved and delivered back by their slave servant, Henry Beef. Mary however appears to have found life in England congenial, playing bezique, serving afternoon tea and shopping for clothes. The family frequently lived and entertained in rented residences in the countryside. A memorable day out for example, consisted of a visit to Stonehenge, rounded off by a trip into town to purchase Rousseau’s Novelle Heloise.32 When in London one of Mary’s greatest pleasures was to attend mass at the chapel in the Sardinian embassy with the Tuites, where Dr Patrick Bradley, (bishop of Derry 1751–2) served for many years and was instrumental in helping supply the Dominicans for the St Croix mission.33 Religious affiliation could survive among Irish Creole society in the Leewards, but religious piety was reinvigorated by European conditions. In the early sixties when Mary’s only daughter Martha (Patty) reached her teens, a suitor appeared from a Catholic planter family with Irish roots. Charles Carroll, the French and English-educated heir to a Maryland tobacco fortune, planned to take his bride back to his wide stretching acres in America. Mary was horrified at the prospect. The suitor, who had received some encouragement from Patty’s father, saw the mother as the obstacle to his hopes and denounced Mary as ‘a vain empty woman’ who had brought up her daughter to be too fond of ‘show and parade’.34 Some years later Mary was delighted when Patty married into a landed recusant family, the Swineburnes of County Durham. Her daughter thus remained near her and confirmed in her faith. The demands of religion and class had been vindicated, but simultaneously this marriage marked the end of Irish Montserratian


identity. In 1778 when Mary’s nine-year-old granddaughter died in Rome, she was buried in the English college, her grieving father raising a memorial ‘transmitting her memory to posterity as an honour to her family and to her native country, England’.35 Thus wealth, producing change of location and novel marriage prospects, acted as a solvent upon Montserrat’s Creole Irish community. Mary Ryan herself had been one of the first of its new rich to initiate this change. For the husband she had married on St Kitts was an upwardly mobile English Protestant, the son of a grocer, educated to the law and seeking success by moving to the colonies. Settled in Basseterre, John Baker realised that marrying into the newly wealthy Ryans, would be of great advantage, unduly hindered by the fact that they were Catholics. Subsequent events proved the soundness of his judgement, he married Mary in the mid-forties and in 1750 he acquired a two year appointment as Solicitor General of the Leeward Islands. Soon afterwards he became an assembly man.36 As could be the case in Ireland, the Catholic Ryans found it useful to have a well disposed Protestant connection in official circles. This mutually beneficial arrangement brought Joseph Baker into business association with Nicholas Tuite, who promoted his protégés fortune and made use of his legal knowledge from St Kitts to Copenhagen. Thus Baker was absorbed by the Ryan family and their connections, both in the Leewards and in London. John and Mary retained their own religions. Initially all the Baker children were baptised into the established church but when their daughter entered her teens she converted to Catholicism. Joseph Baker was the more prepared to agree to this change because he understood a convent education in Paris would open rather than shut the door on advantageous marriage prospects. His sons however, unwilling products of Winchester, he destined for official life and determinedly accompanied them to Anglican worship. All of them embraced imperial careers, one joining the navy and another the East India Company. The eldest, Thomas, studied law and left for the West Indies, where he gained quick success, emerging at 23 as Solicitor General of the island of Granada. In 1774, the year his mother died, he became Attorney General and a member of the Council. Grenada, along with Dominica, St Lucia and St Vincent, was one of the Ceded Islands, which had passed from France to Britain at the close of the Seven Years War (1763). None of these French possessions had been fully developed as sugar producers and past experiences made those in the British colonies and at home eager to invest in them. It was easy to borrow money to invest there on terms which made it onerous to repay. Profits were more difficult to make than in the opening up of St Croix and, when the American Revolutionary War drew the French and British into conflict, hostilities interrupted development and depressed or eliminated profits. The youthful Thomas Baker, carried away in the over optimistic atmosphere of Grenada, speculated enthusiastically and disastrously. By 1778 he was in debtor’s prison in London, by which time his


father found that his own expansive investments in St Vincent had reduced his income and eliminated Patty Swineburne’s prospects as a West Indian heiress.37 Briefly in the 1750s and 60s, there was a distinctive Creole group, Montserratian London Irish, rich enough to leave the Caribbean and to settle in the financial capital of the Atlantic world. But the creation of that group, as the Ryan family exemplified, in their marriage arrangements, shift in religion and decline in riches, carried with it the seeds of decay. The difficulties of maintaining a system of endogamy under pressure from rising social expectations manifested itself on the Leewards and in England. Mary Ryan’s niece, Elizabeth Ryan, had married into a wealthy English Creole family, the Mannings of Palmetto Point, St Kitts. As they moved onto that island Galways and Farrells found their daughters readily absorbed into its establishment. Margaret Galway married into the Payne family and Mary Farrell married Constantine Phipps who, together with his five brothers and one nephew, composed half of St Kitts assembly.38 Boom time in sugar meant that all three of these women saw their Protestant sons migrating across the Atlantic where Elizabeth Ryan’s Billy became a director of the Bank of England and an MP helping to defeat Wilberforce’s initial resolutions to abolish the slave trade. Margaret Galway’s son was knighted as Sir William Payne-Gallwey, and Mary Farrell’s son, MP for Peterborough, died in Bath in 1786.39 In 1655, Henry Cromwell wrote (and even as he wrote, he was seized by reservations) that removal to the West Indies would turn the Irish into Englishmen. This proved to be true of the most successful of the Creole generation. William Stapleton’s family changed religion and flowered as Oxfordshire gentry. Also from Nevis, the Tipperary Tobins saw their grandson James set out on a triumphal recrossing of the Atlantic to found the Bristol sugar firm of Pinney and Tobin (1783–1806). From this position James pursued a satisfying and influential career as a pro-slavery pamphleteer, while three of his sons emerged respectively as an admiral, a general and a playwright.40 Irish Creole success was not peculiar to the Leewards. In eighteenth-century Jamaica the appointment of Irishmen to the highest legal offices became something of a tradition. Archdeacons, Fearons and Bourkes took this route, surrendering their Catholicism and acquiring wealth in land and slaves, setting their progeny on a trajectory for Eaton, Oxford and Westminster and the social delights of England’s West Country.41 Even those Irish Creoles who had retained their Catholicism found a ready social niche. Patty Ryan/Baker’s alliance with the Swineburnes was no isolated case. The arrival of Catholic West Indians heiresses was a welcome development for England’s old recusant families, limited as they were in their choice of marriage partners and eager for new sources of income and provision for younger sons. A friend of the Bakers, a Coppinger heiress, married a Howard who eventually became the eleventh Duke of Norfolk. Nicholas Tuite’s daughter Elinor Tuite married into the Selbys of Middleton


in Northumberland. Another daughter married Justin McCarthy, who moved to Toulouse, where he was ennobled as count in 1776. Nicholas Tuite, tried hard to hold onto his Irish links, Danish contacts and West Indian wealth, but even he found it difficult to maintain these diffuse interests in equilibrium. The McCarthy son-in-law settled in Toulouse, complaining that his wife’s promised legacy never actually materialised. Nicholas’s most direct and successful heir was his English grandson, a London banker, Nicholas Tuite Selby.42 West Indian census material, wills, letters and a diary make it possible to trace the sporadic but distinctive trail which charts the changing social expectations and lifestyle of these Creole Irish families. Yet the experience of the slaves, whose acquisition and labour made such a transformation possible, plays little part in such records. By the mid-eighteenth century the Africans transported across the Atlantic in British ships came in the main from the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The traders’ greatest success was in the latter area which meant that they arrived in the West Indies with fewer vigorous Cormantines and more depressive Ibos than the planters would have liked.43 The numbers involved can be computed reasonably accurately two and three centuries later just because these people were cargo. Like barrels of wine and bales of cloth they were entered in customs ledgers so that the state could levy duties. Such numbers, horrifying in height, are also depressing in their anonymity. Of the nine million Africans who landed in the New World from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, only a handful have left any personal record of this experience, yet against all historical odds we possess a first hand account of how one Ibo slave came to Montserrat in 1763 and what type of conditions he encountered on the ‘Irish island’. Olaudah Equiano was born far from the sea, in western Nigeria, probably around 1745. As a boy he was kidnapped from his village compound and sold to an African master, a development which could have resulted in his being incorporated, at the lowest level, into a new extended family/village structure with upwardly mobile possibilities. But the commercial undertow of West African society, swelled by the inexorable demands of the American plantations, drew Equiano coastwards into the transatlantic trading network. Failing to sell in Barbados, he was eventually purchased in Virginia by a Captain Pascal from England, who proceeded to take him there. In London, for a time he was left to serve Pascal’s female relatives who had him baptised as Gustavus Vassa (whether with reference to the renown Swedish king or the contemporary British warship it is hard to say) and set about teaching him to read and write. The Seven Years War (1756–63) brought Pascal into active service in the Royal Navy, where Equiano accompanied him as servant, powder monkey and finally a naval rating. On shipboard he had further educational opportunities, extending his literacy and acquiring numeracy. The dangers, harsh discipline and comradeship offered by naval life caused Equiano to see


himself much as the other able seamen around him. When his ship, the Aetna docked in London in December 1762 he planned to go on shore to spend the day ‘in rambling and sport’.44 Captain Pascal however had other thoughts. Now in his teens Equiano could no longer play the role of ‘black page’; quick witted, literate, at home among white men, let loose in a city already harbouring runaway slaves, the likelihood of his remaining obedient, contented and useful was small. Pascal therefore decided to solve this problem by resort to a solution generally favoured by European masters on European ground; he would sell his inconvenient property to the Caribbean. So the surprised Equiano was hustled onto the Aetna’s barge which Captain Pascal ordered to be rowed down river, where ‘he asked some vessels to receive me and they would not. But just as we had got a little way below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship which was going away the next tide for the West Indies; her name was the Charming Sally, Captain James Doran; and my master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in a little time I was sent for into the cabin. When I came there Captain Doran asked me if I knew him, I answered that I did not; “Then” said he, “you are now my slave”. I told him my master could not sell me to him, nor to anyone else. “Why”, said he, “did not your master buy you?” I confessed he did. But I have served him, said I, many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize money [Prize money, constituting the value of a vessel captured from the enemy, distributed, according to rank, among the crew of the conquering ship, was a vital issue among sailors. Equiano, with the right backing, could have caused trouble with the authorities on this matter as on board the Aetna his official position was that of able seaman not slave.]; besides this I have been baptised; and by the laws of the land no man has the right to sell me: and I added that I had heard a lawyer, and others at different times, tell my master so. They both then said that these people who told me so were not my friends; but I replied – It was very extraordinary that other people did not know the law as well as they. Upon this Captain Doran said I talked too much English; and if I did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. I was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said; and my former sufferings in the slave ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollections of them made me shudder.’ Captain Pascal left the Charming Sally seizing Equiano’s coat as he went and announcing, ‘If your prize-money had been £1000 I had a right to it all and would have taken it’.45 Equiano threw himself on the deck and wept bitterly. Captain James Doran set sail for Montserrat. James Doran (official address, All Hallows Parish, Barkin, a port on the Thames estuary, conveniently situated for the West Indian trade) was a modestly propertied member of Montserrat’s London’s Irish community. Given the hereditary nature of professional activities among that group, it seems likely that the Captain Patrick Doran who worked for Richard Grattan of Dublin and with George Skerret of St Kitts in the 1720s and 30s, would


have been his father or his uncle. James Doran possessed a well-to-do planter brother-in-law on Montserrat. This unnamed in-law could have been a Farrell or a Hussey for in 1764, two years after purchasing Equiano, Doran purchased the Wash plantation for £400 in a transaction which involved both these Creole Catholic families.46 In February 1763 Captain James Doran sailed confidently into a familiar trading pattern, anchoring the Charming Sally off Plymouth, Montserrat, and settling down for four months to sell and collect cargo. On this work he employed Equiano, who was horrified by the conditions he now encountered. At sea since he was 12 years old, like many sailors Equiano could not swim. While his life in the navy had accustomed him to relatively large vessels, he was terrified of the surf pounding Montserrat and the tiny craft (punts, canoes, droggers) in which he had to transport bulky freight to the shore. Also he was quite unused to heavy labouring under a tropical sun. During the war he had served in the Mediterranean, off the French Atlantic coast, in the Channels, and at Louisburg in the mouth of the St Lawrence. In battle he had encountered bloodshed and danger but it had been short-lived; for the most part on shipboard he had run messages, fetched, carried, powdered hair, poured wine, attended the ladies who at times lived in the captain’s cabin. Eager to escape back into this lifestyle, his hopes were pinned on return to England on the Charming Sally. As the ship was prepared for the voyage home, these hopes were dashed. Captain Doran informed Equiano that he had promised Pascal to sell him in the West Indies.47 So Equiano was sold for the fourth time in his life since leaving Africa. The transaction which now took place reflects the contradictory feelings encapsulated in the master and slave relationship. The master wanted loyalty as well as obedience and knew that he was very unlikely to achieve the former. The slave simultaneously resented his lack of freedom while realising that his only security was a good master. Slaves also, as Frederick Douglass, North America’s most famous black abolitionist and autobiographer, would point out, found self-worth in the idea that they belonged to a rich and important person.48 Captain Doran proceeded to sell Equiano to a man whom he represented as ‘the first merchant’ on the island. Robert King was a Quaker born in Philadephia and still resident there, though based as a commission merchant on Montserrat. Doran assured Equiano that he would be as happy with his new master as if he were in England, and Robert King asked Equiano about his varied skills and promised that when he went to Philadelphia he would send him to school there to improve his knowledge of figures so that he could act as a clerk – a promise which he never carried out. Such was the carrot, the stick (which King continued to hold over Equiano even as the years passed) was the threat that Doran’s planter brother-in-law ‘a severe master’, was eager to buy Equiano to use him as an overseer. Doran presented himself as prepared to disappoint his brother-in-law out of consideration for Equiano. At the end of the sale Equiano emerged


feeling himself lucky to have acquired his position with King and grateful to both Doran and even Pascal for providing him with such a good character. However, this elation did not last long. Even as the Charming Sally set sail he was enveloped in depression. His work, which he struggled through, was of two kinds. Employed in Plymouth at King’s house, office and store he dressed his master’s hair, saw to his horse, attended the clerks (who varied in number from one to six) and looked after cargoes of newly imported slaves, whom King either sold to the Montserratian planters, or reshipped for sale in the neighbouring islands. But during the five months of the sugar season, the work was more gruelling. Then he became part of a crew rowing droggers for up to 16 hours a day round the coast to pick up barrels of muscovado and rum. This was the only time in his life that Equiano came close to the Negro field hands, the slave majority in the Caribbean. Equiano had not seen African or English slavery as intolerable, it was bondage in Montserrat which he felt he must escape. For the moment he could only comfort himself with the thought that even the long hours spent at the oars was preferable to the unremitting toil and harsh discipline of the sugar plantation.49 Although he did not work as a cultivator, Equiano had now become for the first time a member of a substantial slave workforce. The crew of the droggers were frequently composed from hired slaves and Montserrat possessed a pool of these recruited from males belonging to the landless. Equiano’s situation underlines this point, when his master did not have work for him, he would find himself rented out as an oarsman. Such arrangements were an ad hoc matter. While the main sum exchanged went to the master, the hired slave might receive money instead of a food allowance from his employer, or even both. But the payment, for the master and for his own allowance, had to be extracted by the slave employee on the completion of the task. (If the boat overturned in the surf, despite the hazards of drowning, it was necessary to try to right it again and again.) Planters were always chronically in debt (indeed in the mid-nineteenth century when the theory of happy slavery was evolved in the Old South, it would draw heavily on the freedom from financial burdens which was part of the slave experience) and this attitude permeated society. To wrest cash from anyone was difficult. Their day’s work over, hired slaves would have to contend with extracting money from their employer and then defending the amount they passed over to their owners as correct. Both could provoke hours of waiting (often on Saturday night) sometimes followed by bitter disagreements which of course could end in physical punishment for the slave – Equiano quoted an example of 50 lashes. Plantation agriculture produced a commercial society based on financial ventures. Even field slaves were familiar with money and naturally sought it. Throughout the Caribbean slaves attempted to cultivate plots and raise livestock which they would then sell in Sunday markets, the one day in the week usually designated as their own time. In 1736, however, the Montserrat assembly banned Sunday markets, mindful that their island was unusually


heavily inhabited by small-holding whites who feared the economic competition from slave producers. This behaviour was a reaction to voter power. The franchise on the island was widely spread among whites; as was commonly the case in British colonial America, a very tiny amount of property entitled a man to the vote and on Montserrat, unlike Ireland, Catholics though excluded from the legislature, remained electors. The sense that they had managed to create a white Creole community, even if it had always been a struggling plant, may have accounted for the fact that alone among the Caribbean island colonies, Montserrat’s assembly had passed a law forbidding marriage between whites and blacks.50 The desire to bolster up the economic interests of poor whites, and thus prevent the existence of the ‘Redleg’ phenomenon, manifested itself in laws which went beyond the banning of Sunday markets. Slaves were not allowed to grow ginger, cotton, indigo and cocoa, all popular cash crops for those with limited land and labour resources. They could not sell alcohol or attend the busy markets in Plymouth and Kinsale. They were prohibited from practicing the trades of cooper, smith, tailor, sawyer, mason and shingler. The effectiveness of such legislation was mitigated by the convenience of the master and the inventiveness of his human property. Money infiltrated slave society in varied ways. Equiano noted people appearing by the roadside selling grass as fodder to passing horsemen. Many white men, who had sex with black women, automatically responded as they would have to a prostitute and concluded the encounter by handing over one or two bits (the lowest rate of Caribbean currency).51 But of course what was acquired by effort, danger or humiliation, was not legally theirs. Slaves were property and therefore had no right to property. Equiano had had experience of this when Pascal decanted him on the Charming Sally, but here in the more deeply racist society of Montserrat, he encountered a new example of this lack of rights. White customers purchasing from black vendors would frequently take the goods and then refuse to hand over the money. Again this was a situation where the slave’s only redress was an appeal to the master, another example of the importance of this relationship and of the opportunities open to the master to cultivate loyalty. Any attempt at serious entrepreneurial activity by a slave had of necessity to be cloaked in subterfuge. Through working with the hired black community in Plymouth, Equiano became friendly with an Ibo slave who wanted to buy a boat, a forbidden article in that it could obviously be used to facilitate escape. The Ibo eventually persuaded a white man to front the transaction for him, but it proved to be a high risk investment. The island governor, Michael White, being in need of craft to move sugar seized the Negro’s boat and refused to pay for it. The man appealed to his master who exploded in fury at the thought that any of his slaves should dare become the owner of such a provocative article.52 Despite such dramatic drawbacks Equiano was eager to join in Montserrat’s commercial activity. Though he had never received wages in England, he


had been used to acquiring money, presents from ladies and others he served, a little trading in the ports. All of this he could try to replicate in Plymouth but at the end of his first year on Montserrat, his entrepreneurial career really took off when he found himself employed on board his master’s ships sailing between the Leeward islands. Now he became a part of the Montserratian trading complex which had so enriched the Tuites, Skerrets and Ryans. On St Eustatia, the tiny Dutch colony visible from St Kitts, he launched his first West India venture buying a glass which he sold at 50 per cent profit (two bits) on Montserrat. Later on St Croix, he sold some oranges and had one of his earliest experiences of the hazards of extracting money from a white customer.53 Proving himself more dependable than many European crew men, who frequently got drunk and failed to return to the ship on time, he eventually prevailed upon Robert King to let him go on longer voyages to Georgia and the South Carolina, which quickly disabused him of his original idea that the mainland colonies might be preferable to the Leewards.54 He tried to acquire navigational skills but found the determination to keep this knowledge away from slaves an insurmountable obstacle. Like reading and writing and boat possession, it was seen as a tool for absconding. However, his trading activities were gathering momentum; North America was always hungry for sugar and as captain’s favourite, he was given permission to carry as much as a tierce of that product. This enabled him to return to Montserrat with livestock, bullocks and turkeys, in the case of the turkeys netting a 300 per cent profit. The massive gains he so carefully and delightedly recorded show how Nicholas Tuite and John Ryan were able to amass such fortunes from this trading complex. When Captain James Doran sold Equiano to Robert King, the latter promised that if ever Equiano could produce his original purchase price, he, King would agree to manumission. Equiano was cautious as well as ambitious and clever, he considered running away, assessed the odds as unfavourable and worked towards buying his freedom. In 1766, after three years as a slave on Montserrat, he had enough money to do so. King was surprised and indignant when Equiano produced his £40 sterling, grumpily declaring that he himself could not make money so fast and for the moment, Equiano agreed to remain as a sailor in his ex-master’s employ.55 While feeling loyalty to King, Equiano was also enjoying his new status among the African community. For his successful seafaring exploits, he was hailed as ‘captain’ an unusual title for a black. Women who had hitherto ignored him now sought his attention. He considered himself to be the foremost free black on Montserrat.56 Nobody bothered to list ‘free coloureds’ (a term covering both mulattos and Africans) in official head counts until 1788, by which time there were 260 of them, while the white community had plummeted down to 880.57 In Equiano’s day, some 20 years earlier, there must have been over 200 such persons.


Focused on his future prospects, Equiano brooded upon King’s remark that the gentlemen of the island thought highly of him, so that if he stayed he would be able to acquire land and slaves. Equiano saw nothing shocking in such a suggestion. Since his arrival on the island he had at times been a slave over slaves, a familiarly African situation. As St Patrick had done, Equiano deplored aspects of slavery while accepting it as an established institution. He also perceived from King’s remark that, despite having gained his freedom, his success would rest on white approval. Even a well-established black property owner on Montserrat could be exposed to inconvenience and insult. On the island there was a black woman who owned land and slaves. When she wanted to marry a white man, a union banned on Montserrat, her prospective husband sought a church ceremony on St Kitts which the clergyman denied. However, he was eventually prevailed upon to conduct the ceremony on shipboard as the pair sailed home to Montserrat.58 Equiano had heard reports of this event but he himself had witnessed an incident which far more vividly illustrated the hazardous position of free blacks in the New World. Early in his island career, he was on board a ship anchored near the Old Road (a Frye plantation) next to a vessel from Bermuda. The captain from the Bermuda vessel boarded Mr King’s ship and seized a free mulatto man, born in St Kitts and living with his wife and child on Montserrat. In front of the white crew, who all knew the truth of the situation, the strange captain announced that the mulatto was a slave of his master in Bermuda and carried him off by force.59 This incident illustrates both the arbitrary nature of white power in the Caribbean and the presence on Montserrat of a black Creole society. It was a varied group made up of slave and free, Africans and mulattoes carrying Ibo, Akan, Angolan, Irish and English genes. Born into the Montserratian society which the whites had created, they were both part of it and restricted by it. In a century of economic expansion and new opportunities, they were expanding in numbers, hope and articulated discontent. Slaves were banned from the market in the Portsmouth but, like the whites, they were accustomed to come into the port capital to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Of course the celebrations were racially distinct, the Europeans attended a gathering in Government House while the blacks held theirs in the streets. All looked forward eagerly to the festival making plans involving choice of music, dance and costumes. Music was provided at both gatherings by black performers. In 1768 the blacks’ party was scheduled to feature a new dance, currently the rage, imported from Antigua. Among the tunes to be included in the Government House entertainment for 1768 was a popular song entitled Fire in the Mountains. On the morning of 17 March an angry exchange took place between a mulatto seamstress and a dissatisfied customer, when she failed to supply the costume he had ordered for the Antiguan dance. She approached the authorities explaining that, in his furious outburst, her client had let fall news of a


plot against the whites, intelligence which confirmed rumours already circulating throughout the island. The whites were convinced that a deep laid plan for revolt, masterminded by the island’s black Creoles, free and slave, had been projected. At a stage in the evening when inebriation would have induced unwary attitudes among the white revellers, the black fiddler was to strike up Fire on the Mountain as a sign that the revolt was to begin and the house servants would set about removing their masters’ weapons. Government House would be set on fire and the whites incinerated or driven out into the streets. Conspirators in the mountains, alerted by the sight of flames, would collect weapons already secreted in the island’s high places, such as Farrell’s Mountain, Galway’s Soufriere, Potato Hill and Roche’s Bluff. Accounts of the projected plot also included a plan to kidnap a selection of the most desirable white women, take over a Dutch ship anchored in port and sail for Puerto Rico and freedom. The whites reacted with fury, seizing suspects, summarily trying and executing them, some hacked and hanged speedily, other starved to death on gibbets. When the commander of the Leeward Island’s fleet arrived the terrified blacks received him as a saviour, streaming out onto the beach and rushing into the surf. As he proceeded into town, they tore off their clothes and strewed the ground before his feet, calling upon him in Creole ‘Dadce God has come he and we!’60 Fortunately for Equiano, he missed these scenes. After spending a year in Montserrat as a free black, and just nine months before the outbreak of this violence in 1768, he had decided that the threats to his freedom outweighed the likelihood of gain in the Leewards. It would be safer to take ship to London and try out his new status there.61 Slave revolt in the Caribbean has been interpreted as following a changing pattern. In the early eighteenth century, insurrection was the work of newly imported Africans, those born on the plantations were seen by their masters as assimilated and relatively loyal. The close of the century marked a watershed in this respect as news and ideas, arriving from Europe, were absorbed by the Creole slaves. In St Domingue (independent Haiti from 1804) the successful slave armies were led by Toussaint L’Overture, a Creole empowered by the crisis of the French Revolution. The abolitionist movement, acquiring political influence in Britain, produced similar shock waves on the other side of the Atlantic. A revolt in Barbados in 1816 was led by the slave elite, Creoles and skilled tradesmen. The planters pointed to its local mentors as Baptist missionaries and an old black woman who could read the newspaper and report on Wilberforce’s parliamentary speeches. In Demerara the rising of 1823 was led by skilled tradesmen and church deacons, who misconstrued the attempts by the Colonial Office to ameliorate the condition of the slaves as an order for outright freedom suppressed by their Governor and Council. The Jamaica Rebellion of December 1831, known also as the Baptist War, erupted as the agitation for parliamentary reform in Britain promoted the fortunes of the anti-slavery lobby. In the United States, where the proportion


of whites to blacks made violent resistance rarer, revolts in Virginia (1800) and South Carolina (1822) harked back to the revolutionary Haitian example. In particular the 1822 incident in Charleston, led by Denmark Vesey, could be said to resemble 1768 in Montserrat because of the free coloured input. Also it was a revolt which never took place, a conspiracy nipped in the bud or conjured up by fears of the whites and nurtured by the pressures inherent within black society. Here the mulatto seamstress’s role as faithful servant/black betrayer was a classic element. Carefully reassembling the events of St Patrick Day 1768, the American historian Michael Mullins argues convincingly that this incident constitutes the earliest example of a revolt masterminded by Creole rather than African born slaves.62 If this is so, their resistance took place without the encouragement of forces in Europe. However it is possible to discern the role of an external agency on Montserrat, the influence in this case emanating from St Croix. The Danish King’s declaration of freedom of worship and the activities of the Irish Dominicans had created a flow of runaway slaves arriving there from Puerto Rico in search of freedom. Perhaps discontented slaves, and even free blacks, on Montserrat hoped that a move in the reverse direction might improve their circumstances, hence the plan to hijack the Dutch ship and sail for the Spanish colony. Ironically Puerto Rico was the last place to turn runaways into freemen, from 1765–72 a Spanish company was actually trying to reduce Britain’s domination of the slave trade by using the island as a transit camp for their merchandise.63 However Creole slave revolts invariably drew strength from favourable misconceptions – the Barbadian slaves translated Britain’s attempt to induce the Congress of Vienna to accept a general European ban on the trade as the abolition of slavery itself. The Demerara rebels believed that they were already free so the soldiers would not fire on them. Jamaican rebels saw themselves as pre-empting the freedom which a Baptist missionary was reportedly conveying to them from Westminster. All these Creole societies had reached a point of maturity and frustration which made them ready to disrupt the world they knew in order to achieve freedom. It is not surprising that Montserrat, a tiny island, proliferating in hired slaves and petty traders, should be the first to envisage this move, involved as it was in a mid-eighteenth century commercial boom which, in a generation, had transformed the Irish volcano into a golden rock. Since earliest times Christianity had found itself uneasy about the issue of slavery. In the fifth century St Patrick had wrestled with it; in the twelfth century European clerics had supported its demise. The opening of black slavery in the New World had created an economic force which had defeated old qualms, though the sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy had devoted hours of debate and reams of paper to discussing the subject. In the eighteenth-century Caribbean, the Catholic church played its traditional role in the Americas, baptising pagans, setting up its own plantations, and seeking to disseminate and apply the benevolent treatment of African slaves


enjoined by the Papacy and the official ‘black codes’ adopted by Europe’s Catholic monarchs. Such a task, always a struggle, was impossible given the production techniques of an expanding sugar economy. The activities of the Irish Dominicans on St Croix represent the end of a powerful missionary effort espoused and developed in the sixteenth century. New efforts to convert Africans would emerge from elsewhere. As the eighteenth century came to a close, enlightenment standards and Protestant evangelical fervour were beginning to fuse into a movement which would eventually harness Christianity and slave freedom together. The man who first reacted to the religious shudder from this cultural seismic fault, a warning of the eruption which would revolutionise the volcanic Leewards and many other Caribbean colonies, was Samuel Martin, born in Antigua in 1693, a Creole planter with Irish roots. His Royalist grandfather had had his land confiscated by Cromwell’s army and had fled Ulster for the West Indies. His father, Captain Martin, moving from Surinam to the Leewards, had created a large plantation in Antigua. When he was murdered by his slaves, the child Samuel was sent home to his family in Ireland. He attended Cambridge briefly, married and returned to Antigua. His second wife was from the Montserrat plantocracy, the daughter of its richest English sugar planter, Edward Wyke, who was related to the Protestant Irish families of Fryes and Irishes. At 36, Samuel visited England and for the next 20 years he lived there on his wife’s estates or in Ireland on his own property.64 Like so many rich West Indian Creoles he was fascinated by London, the fulcrum of sugar sales, banking, fashionable tailors and saddlers.65 But at 56, his income showed signs of deterioration, and he returned to Antigua expecting to pass his old age there. Throughout his life his Irish links remained. He possessed a politically influential merchant cousin, George Martin in Dublin, he purchased provisions from Cork, paid allowances to family members in Irish currency, acted as executor to an Irish planter, involving himself in a legal dispute with the Lyons of Lyonstown, Roscommon.66 His naval son Henry (1733–94), who became a baronet and a Westminster MP, married into the county Cork gentry and leased a farm there where his wife, according to the sharp tongued Samuel, produced ‘a child as regularly and easily as a cottage garden in Ireland produces a potato’.67 Experienced and autocratic, Martin lived like prince or rather a general, on his plantation. From Ireland to Surinam to Antigua, his family had handed down a soldierly approach to life. From his tailor in London he ordered blue coats, shirts, breeches and hats with silver lace, for himself and his son Josiah, with a cheaper version of this outfit for his five white servants, ‘it is our military uniform’. From Bristol he purchased 600 yards of green baize for Negro clothing; it was run up on the island but his black tradesmen sported white buttons to smarten their appearance.68 He owned his own sloop, a Bermuda built vessel, with a white captain and a crew of 12 Negro and mulatto seamen ‘brisk fellows .… worth at least £100 each’.69 Water transport


was absolutely necessary because he supplemented his own lands on Antigua by renting the neighbouring island of Baruba, including most of its slave workforce, from the Codringtons, a powerful family whom he treated with scant respect, falling into heavy arrears whenever it suited him.70 He prided himself on his ability to manage men, though a combination of carrot and stick. The Caribbean climate helped wreck havoc upon his family life; he lost two wives and 16 of their 21 children. He was in vigorous middle age when his second wife died, but he never married again though he felt her loss bitterly and declared that ‘the greatest felicity this side of heaven’ was to be found ‘in conjugal union’.71 Mulattos were noticeable among his slaves and he used manumission generously.72 Energetic on so many fronts, the likelihood of his possessing a considerable black progeny is high. An educated and intellectual man, he wrote incisive letters, recommended reading as an antidote to grief and complained sharply that, on leaving the island, his son Josiah (a future governor of North Carolina) had ‘robbed’ him of his books – Greek, Latin and French texts, a treatise on geometry, Locke’s Philosophy, Swift’s Collected Works and Ralph’s History of England, a testimony to the mental grip of the metropolitan upon the imperial periphery.73 In all of this Samuel Martin represented a recognisable strand in eighteenth-century planter life. Literacy in a commercial community was a necessity and leisure for well-to-do whites a daily occurrence. Boxes of books came by ship, packed in with the large orders for Madeira wine, salted provisions, textiles, hammers, nails and hoes. But Samuel Martin was an unusual Creole in that he not only read books, he turned author himself. He was driven to do so in part because age had matured him into a compulsive advice giver (even on subjects where he knew much less than his recipient) but more directly by his experiences on return to Antigua after a 20 year absence. He arrived in 1749 to reap the fruits of his absenteeism and as he criticised and reorganised, he wrote up his Essay on Plantership (probably printed first in Antigua in 1750) eventually running to eight editions. Here he drew a picture of a challenging lifestyle, demanding organisational powers, engineering abilities, entrepreneurial and business skill, a knowledge and understanding of agronomy. But the planter was also to be sage and patriarch, exercising his duties in public life as assembly member and magistrate, and following justice into his private domain where he must ‘suppress wickedness by suitable punishments, and encourage goodness with generosity’.74 Throughout the English speaking West Indies this book was consumed with enthusiasm by worried planters and ambitious overseers, while finding a market among those with West Indian interests on the others side of the Atlantic. Like any seminal work it spawned further literary development. James Grainger, a Scottish doctor on St Christopher, was stimulated to translate the tenor of this factual treatise into poetry. The form he chose for his


Sugar Cane. A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes was the Georgic, a classical tradition developed by Virgil which specifically concentrated on portraying labour, the efforts of man engaged with nature, in producing a beautiful and harmonious countryside. Shifted from the field to the printed page, slavery became at once practical and high-minded, a paean to progress and human achievement, thus Samuel Martin carried the Caribbean into the vision of the European enlightenment.75 In 1758, aged 65 and almost a decade after his return to his native island, Samuel Martin declared that, for the good of his children, he would remain in the West Indies until his death.76 However at 78 he began to have second thoughts and embarked once more for London. Preparing for a final leavetaking, in 1771 he made an inventory of his 314 slaves. The structure of this document reflected his plantation organisation. Slaves were listed in groups according to their work unit. 18 tradesmen came first, second the ‘great field gang’, the praetorian guard of sugar cultivation, which consisted of 162 people, more than half of them women. Four other units followed – two smaller, weaker gangs, then 63 children and finally 13 old people. Here again his aim at efficiency bulked large – most of the 13 have jobs to attend to. Obviously considered suitably light work, to the twentieth century eye they contain a number of responsible activities requiring vigilance if not strength and agility. One looked after children, the other ducks, two were rat catchers, there was a midwife, a lying-in woman, a house nurse called Cacao Yaws, a ‘cook for the Negroes’, and the mill boatswain, a task which entailed stopping the crushing machinery with a crowbar if anyone fell into it, a hazard of sugar production which often caused loss of limbs if not death. Such inventories are an invaluable source for the understanding of plantation life but invariably they raise some problems as well as furnishing many answers. In this case the entry of ‘dead’ after a number of the names is a curious addition. If so, why were they included at all? Within the great gang, a woman was listed as ‘dropsical’ and a driver as ‘mad’. Altogether the actual numbers of working slaves shown on this document is below two hundred.77 This however would not represent Martin’s full labour force which included rented Codrington slaves on Barbuda. Nor does it reveal the exact number he owned outright. (What has happened to the twelve valuable seamen?) Household slaves are not mentioned but he took a number of them, presumably the most highly trained and personable, to act as servants in England. It was not the right moment to do so. The success of the slave trade, organised to feed Caribbean demand, had gone so well that the results were becoming visible in the streets of London. Africans were rarely auctioned in England, but in the capital their numbers were rising beyond the point where they appeared only as curiosities, the playthings of the aristocratic. The sight of enslaved black people, as servants, runaways, sickly vagrants abandoned by their masters, aroused intense feeling and debate among both


wage labourers and the employing classes. Granville Sharp, a philanthropic civil servant, began by offering charity to unfortunate blacks, but swiftly decided that their situation demanded legal intervention and sought to procure the banning of slavery in Britain by recourse to the courts. The year 1772 was the year of the Mansfield judgement or Somerset case. James Somerset, the slave of a visiting Virginia planter had run away from his owner, who recaptured him and, following best planter practice in this situation, loaded him on board a vessel to be sold in the West Indies. Faced with the evidence Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled that it was illegal for a master to deport his slave from England against his will. This limited conclusion was received at the time, and embedded in history, as a declaration that slavery in England and Ireland was illegal. It was greeted with delight by the growing number of anti-slavery sympathisers and with fury by slave owners, the reactions of both parties helping to establish the significance of the judgement. From Ashstead, Surrey, the horrified and indignant Samuel Martin wrote to his son describing the impact of the judgement on his ‘servants’. ‘You cannot conceive, what pitch of Insolence they are arrived at: and I fear, the many foolish Writers who become their Advocates, will put into the heads of our Colony-negroes, to rebel: and occasion at least much bloodshed.’78 The judgement reverberated immediately in North America where slaves in Massachusetts petitioned the governor and council for a change in their status, pointing out that as freemen they could become taxpayers and contribute to the burdens of the state, at this time such a vexed issue as the colonists in Boston protested their right to ‘no taxation without representation’. Despite his indignation over the Somerset case, as an intellectual Samuel Martin could not remain immune to the ideological ethos of the age. He had always possessed a streak of piety, usually surfacing on the death of loved ones. On this visit to England he had been impressed by a mounting seriousness on religious matters, the combined emphasis on a benevolent creator and the need for personal grace. So he began to re-evaluate his public duties as a Christian. In the past he had seen himself as fulfilling these adequately by playing a decisive role as church warden of St Mary’s, Antigua. In 1758 he had sought to find a suitable incumbent for the parish by activating his Cambridge connections, describing the advantages of an adequate stipend paid in specie, accompanied by a house by the sea, with fishing and glebe land suitable for sheep rearing, all guarantees of ‘a good table’. For himself he would welcome a scholar with a taste for mathematics. Now in his eightieth year, wracked by a persistent cough brought on by the northern climate, he felt that more was necessary. He decided to return to Antigua and instruct his Negroes. This shift in consciousness between the 1750s and the closing decades of the century, reinforces the more famous spiritual pilgrimage of John Newton as he moved from slave trader to Anglican clergyman, author of Amazing


grace and anti-slave trade pamphleteer. Thus Martin’s Greencastle estate became the scene of yet another organisational experiment. On Sundays the tradesmen, the gangs, great, less and lesser, the children and the handful of elderly who struggled with food preparation, pest control and medical matters, assembled while their master read from the gospel, explained ‘the true and genuine sense of Christianity’, invited singing and Halleluhjahs, and ‘concluded with a prayer invoking the divine blessing and protection for the future’.79 He felt that his efforts were promoting a new morality, but given his age he had not the strength to continue so he entrusted the task to a Moravian missionary. He had however written a new introduction for the eighth edition of Plantership reminding West Indian whites of the need to make the lives of their Negroes easier and happier. It included material on Christian instruction, which he recommended the planter read aloud to his workforce.80 This was not authorial advice which Martin’s Caribbean readers welcomed. They did not see Christianity as a mechanism of social control. Martin was too much under English influence, where religion provided a useful means to persuade the lower orders, or emerging working class, to work hard and drink and thieve less. But in the sugar colonies, the Christian message meant the introduction of the Negro to the Bible with its stirring story of Israelite bondage and the escape to freedom. Protestant emphasis on the Biblical text meant that those under instruction should be taught to read. The pursuit of literacy at the bottom of society, a sign of improvement and respectability across the Atlantic, a useful skill in an industrialising state, had terrifying implications for the white Caribbean. A slave could comb the gospel for its socially subversive material. Reading would lead to writing, which meant the forging of passes with ease and he or she who could read the Gospel could read the newspaper. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the printed word imported into the colonies from Britain was growing more and more dangerous carrying an alternative enlightenment vision which would obliterate Martin’s plantership and Grainger’s lush fields and smiling black swains, to replace them with the Negro, kneeling, chained and asking for recognition of human brotherhood, the seal and ikon of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in 1787. Anti-slavery sprang from enlightenment roots, the criticism of monarchical tyranny, arbitrary power, new ideas about the importance of public philanthropy and benevolence. It gathered some impetus during the American Revolutionary War and establishment of the new nation, a period which saw both the acceptance of slavery by the constitution and its abolition in eight of the northern states. In France the Revolution sent it spiralling into sudden success, when in 1793 the Jacobin government abolished slavery in its cherished and distraught tropical empire, a decision reversed by Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century. But the leader in the field, making stubborn progress over these years, was Britain. There, rising evangelical


fervour and anti-slavery combined in a mutually advantageous relationship to produce uncompromising commitment to the view that slavery was incompatible with Christianity, a sin which might bring retribution in the form of defeat by Napoleonic France. In 1806–7, after the victory at Trafalgar, at a time when she policed the seas, Britain abolished her slave trade, which accounted for half of that European commerce. At Vienna she sought to persuade the other powers to adopt a similar policy, but failed. However, she continued to pursue a foreign policy dedicated to a universal ban. In domestic politics the behaviour of the planters toward missionaries sent out to the Caribbean by the newly organised societies caused the movement at home to gather intensity in the 1820s and combine with the parliamentary reform agitation to triumph in 1832–3 with the abolition of slavery itself within the British Empire. Anti-slavery was the first modern pressure group to seek reform through international moral pressure. As such it pioneered the use of the media to change attitudes, create a revulsion against a cruel and unjust system, persuade all those who did not depend upon it for direct economic support, to seek its annihilation. It used all literary forms, prose, poetry, books, songs, pamphlets, sermons, newspapers, the new genre of children’s literature, visual images produced not only as illustrations but as fashionable items, a Wedgwood plaque of the chained and kneeling Negro, cameo brooches, snuff boxes, hair pins similarly decorated. A new politically correct vocabulary began to emerge; the term ‘slave trade’ replaced Guinea or African trade, sugar estates became ‘slave plantations’ and ‘man stealing’, originally indicating the abduction of females, was now transferred to descriptions of West African slaving. In the 1790s anti-slavery enthusiasts turned to economic sanctions, a sugar boycott which sought to involve women, pointing to their power as consumers. So the planters found themselves in the position of many groups in the late twentieth century, subject to moral pressure to revolutionise their society, asked to become self-conscious about a way of life which they accepted as normal as well as economically necessary. Forced to see themselves in the metropolitan mirror of public opinion, West Indian whites denounced the reflection as grossly distorting. It would have been wiser to act less stridently but like most people in such a situation, they did not behave temperately. The machete blade of the evangelical conscience brought down slavery within the British Empire in 1833, and such success helped to fuel abolitionism within the United States. Inevitably Ireland, situated between Britain and America, would be involved. In the eighteenth century Irish Quakers and United Irishmen energetically seized upon the non-consumption campaign, its legacy recorded for later generations in the existence of that Dublin landmark, Bewley’s Oriental Cafe, the eastern adjective referring not only to the tea but to the sugar, which the Quaker family imported from India in order to avoid the slave contaminated produce of the Caribbean.81 In the nineteenth century the


battle between those who wanted to abolish and those who fought to retain slavery widened and deepened. At every level of society Irish people found themselves involved. The Earl of Belmore, whose unyielding opposition to the Union in 1801 had made him unpopular at Westminster, tried in old age to restore his family fortunes by becoming Governor of Jamaica (1829–31) only to find himself reproved and disgraced by the Whig government because he had failed to ‘relieve the oppressed’.82 In 1831, Daniel O’Connell would fight an election in Kerry in support of parliamentary reform and the abolition of slavery.83 In later decades the Irish of Boston and New York would indulge in anti- anti-slavery riots, an American cause increasingly divisive and bloody which could not be ignored.

4 Sojourners, Slaves and Stipendiaries: The Nineteenth Century

In the age of sugar and slaves, the most consistent and pervasive Irish presence in the West Indies was the sojourner, a figure who ensured that Hibernian links were regularly renewed. The term, brought into use by twentieth century sociologists, applied to someone intending to work for some time in the colonies and then return home.1 From a practical point of view, it was of course a permeable state; death might bring about a change of status, the islands’ graves were rich in intended sojourners. Or a man might stay so long that he became a settler, in some cases even establishing a white Creole family. It was more common however to leave a genetic mark among the slave community. Frequently sojourners, who died in the tropics or returned home, were succeeded by family members from the next generation. Given the imperious need for the minor gentry and mercantile classes to find means of support for younger sons, Caribbean contacts were hotly pursued and fostered from generation to generation. The Blake brothers, Henry and John, can be seen as prototypes of the sojourner and settler. In the early eighteenth century, a new type of sojourner from Ireland (neither a Catholic of Gaelic/Hiberno Norman descent, like the O’Briens, or Tuites, or a ‘new English’ planter, like the Parsons and Fryes) appeared on the islands. Perhaps Governor Robert Hunter had this new type in mind when he stressed that it was ‘native Irish Papists’ he wanted banned from entry into Jamaica. This latest strain of migrants (known at home as northern dissenters and in the New World as Irish) were Presbyterians from Ulster. The development of the linen manufacture in the northern province encouraged mercantile activity among the Presbyterians. In the eighteenth century they began arriving in Barbados and Jamaica, extending into the wider Caribbean as opportunities offered. Most frequently establishing themselves in the ports as agents, they dealt in linen and Irish provisions. But a successful agent would have substantial planters among his customers, which could lead to the agent buying and selling slaves, extending the planter credit, acting as mortgagee, perhaps becoming a planter himself. 82

Sojourners, Slaves and Stipendiaries 83

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a Donegal Presbyterian, Samuel Watt, went to Barbados hoping to make a mercantile fortune and, as John Blake had done, moved from there to another island. Separated by more than a century, the letters of the Blakes and the Watts bear a striking similarity. In both cases direct epistolary contact between fathers and sons is limited; the main correspondence is between siblings, the migrant younger brother writing to his eldest brother. Presumably it was the recipient, the prospective head of the family, who collected and kept these letters from abroad. The letters tell of financial difficulties and ambitions, the desire of those in Ireland to see the absent family member return, the migrant’s hope of doing so and the pressures upon him to remain; they hint at sex as well as money as a preoccupation in the new land. The small clutch of seventeenthcentury papers reveal an otherwise lost aspect of Irish activity abroad, while the nineteenth-century correspondence provides an insight into family contacts with the West Indies over an extended period of time. From a literary point of view, the Blake epistles, archaic in spelling, sometimes briefly blunt, at others poetic in expression, carry more emotional impact – ‘And southence your departing heere hench you have my blessing running with you in all places wherein you goe, and so shall have a continuance till my lives end.’2 (John Blake, Mullaghmore, 8 January 1675 to his son Henry in Montserrat.) But the cumulative effect of the Watt correspondence, which follows the affections of youth into practical and supportive action in middle age is, in the end, an equally compelling statement of family feeling. Brothers, frequently working in pairs, quarrelling and co-operating, seeking to promote the family fortune, are a constant presence in European overseas expansion and the building of empire. The Watts were Presbyterians, the father James seems to have been a substantial ‘middle man’ renting himself on long leases from an aristocratic landlord and then re-renting to smaller tenants. Living near Ramelton, a thriving little port on lush land near the shores of Lough Swilly, James Watt senior also invested in the local building boom which was producing tall stone warehouses, elegant dwellings and anti-French fortifications, while his agricultural and mercantile interests took him into flour milling and linen manufacture. Unlike John Blake senior, James Watt had not experienced hard times but he had lived through disturbing ones. In the 1780s, the years of his mature manhood, the Donegal/Derry area in which the Watts lived had been enthusiastic for volunteering. The Watt family at Ramelton were permeated by volunteer attitudes, eager for free trade for Ireland, constitutional independence, the extension of civic rights especially for Presbyterians and bitterly opposed to the Union of 1801. Pitt was a hated name in the Watt household, Castlereagh ‘that miscreant’.3 But the appearance of a French frigate bearing the radical republican Wolfe Tone into Lough Swilly in September 1798 can only have been frightening for the ageing and prosperous James. By the turn of the century he had joined the yeomanry, a landlord-led


force recruited to guard against invasion from abroad and rebellion at home, seen by Catholics as the military wing of the Orange Order.4 In general the next generation inherited their father’s attitudes, though youth may have inclined them towards a more daring course. Hearing of disturbance at home in 1803 (the Emmet rebellion) Samuel wrote excitedly to inquire if ‘the spirit of uniting’ was abroad again.5 Back in 1801 when he had just arrived in Barbados, and was still homesick, he was delighted by an unfounded report that the Irish had brought pistols into the Westminster parliament and ruined the union.6 Samuel was in his twenties at this time, possibly he had left home because his political sympathies or, more likely, his sexual involvements had disturbed his father. ‘Ramelton is a bad school for young men’, he commented on hearing of a Donegal elopement, ‘I did not leave it a day too soon’.7 He regarded his sojourn in Barbados as ‘my adventure’ and saw himself as the most spirited among his siblings, two sister and three brothers. The youngest Watt brother, David, was still a schoolboy in 1801. Another brother Andrew, whom Samuel regarded as unambitious and lethargic, worked for the childless ‘Uncle Watt’, who was a linen merchant. Samuel’s favourite brother and close correspondent was James jr, the eldest son of the family. Samuel promised James he would return and take his place in society. James assured Samuel he would keep him informed of developments at home in order that he would be able to do so. At first Samuel was appalled by the hot climate in Barbados. In particular, whatever his views on physical force, he hated the militia service with its drilling under a fierce midday sun, a service still incumbent on all white males in the slave colonies, another reason why emigrants preferred mainland America. Employed as a clerk by two brothers Hall from Ramelton, Samuel also found his working hours long, often passing the day from six until six in the office, the schedule taking up Sundays. He did, however, regard himself as quite well paid at £100 West Indian currency (worth around £33 sterling). He invested this in some private trading on his own, at first buying linen from his Uncle Watt, later preferring local ventures. He was hopeful that when one of the Halls left for a prolonged visit to Ireland (sojourner firms were usually staffed in such a manner to make restorative trips home possible), he would be made a partner, a position which he attained in 1806 calculating (possibly with exaggeration) that this promotion would provide him with £1,000 a year. Unlike the Blakes, Samuel Watt had no need to relieve his father financially, but he was eager to further his brothers’ careers. In 1806 he celebrated his partnership by offering to remit £500 home for James and Andrew to invest as they thought fit.8 His generosity was certainly rooted in the classic emigrant’s desire to justify his chosen course to those who remained behind, but he also saw himself as better off and more financially independent than his brothers. Uncle Watt, he considered insupportably mean, paying Andrew


a miserly stipend, while ‘our dear father’, James sr, kept business matters so firmly under his own control that James jr was frustratingly devoid of employment. Flatteringly but disturbingly his elder brother increasingly envied Samuel’s life beyond Ramelton, writing to say that he was thinking of joining his friend Mr Conyhaming’s firm in Philadelphia, a move which Samuel vigorously discouraged fearful that, if James went to America, he would never come back. James’s next plan to escape Ramelton, disturbed Samuel even more – for his brother announced his intention of joining the army. Samuel replied in horror, stressing the danger of death by disease even for officers; he knew from his own observation that army doctors were so medically ignorant that their ministrations frequently killed their patients. As an antidote to boredom in Donegal, Samuel pressed James towards marriage, suggesting that he launch a campaign setting himself a six months timescale for its accomplishment. A trip across the province from Donegal to Newry, Co Down seemed to present excellent opportunities; Samuel offered practical advice driving home his point with poetic encouragement, ‘Woman born to be controlled/Stoops to the forward and the bold’.9 He inferred that James should pass all this good advice to Andrew another apparent laggard in matrimonial affairs. Barbados possessed more white women than any other British Caribbean colony and was famous for all kinds of sexual activity. Samuel’s letters exuded confidence and enthusiasm, cheerfully telling his brother that, if he himself were in Ireland and starting from scratch, he could have carried through a matrimonial campaign in only three months. As it was, his correspondence had fallen off in 1804 because, he explained, he was in love. He was coy as to whether this ‘delightful state’ would result in marriage. Hinting that it might do so, he pointed out that such a move usually led to permanent settlement in the colonies. He also admitted that other arrangements were socially sanctioned by Barbadian society (the unmentioned and unmentionable black concubine or mulatto mistress) but assured his brother that he would never become party to such a liaison. While Samuel had strong views on the role his elder brother should be pursuing and offered his advice vigorously, James felt that Samuel’s career choice was flawed and consistently urged him to change course. James was convinced that Samuel should aspire beyond mercantile life in Bridgetown and turn to planting. The social superiority of landowning as against business activity naturally assailed Presbyterians as they advanced in wealth. Family tradition strengthened James’s desire to see Samuel take the first step towards plantership. Their mother was a Delap, from a Donegal branch of a family which had made money as Dublin wine merchants, used their wealth to acquire a large plantation in Antigua and moved to London. Building on his West Indian connections, Mrs Watt’s brother had gone out to Jamaica in the 1770s. By the time Samuel arrived in the Caribbean, Uncle Robert Delap was the proprietor of the substantial Shafton plantation in Westmoreland


County. But after a year in Barbados, Samuel had decided to avoid such a future, explaining to James that planting was a ‘business I would not much like to embark in; the bustle of the town and the regulation of the counting house please me better than the direction of the cow skin’.10 The isolation of the new young overseer was well known in West Indian society, passing his seasoning period among the slaves, sometimes with no white company for miles around, struggling with his sullen and experienced workforce, flogging or at least ordering their flogging, dosing their ailments, pursuing runaways. At home in Ireland stories were told of plantation managers and book-keepers attaining quick and easy wealth; out in Barbados, Samuel Watt saw a different situation. ‘The slaves themselves have every Sunday but the book-keeper, or more properly called the turn-key (for some of them never put pen to paper) is constantly confined, while everyone else is either praying or carousing.’11 In that year Robert Delap died and Samuel, at first expressing sorrow that his uncle had not succeeded in carrying out an intended visit to the family in Ireland, was scathing when he heard that his fortune only amounted to £10,000. He told James that he had expected that it would be in the region of £30,000 and added that after a quarter of a century in a trying climate he would expect to return to Ireland with a comparable sum ‘to show and sport upon in my old age in my native country’.12 While Samuel shied away from the physical force and overseer isolation of plantation life, he had quickly become a perfect Barbadian in regard to the institution of slavery and the slave trade. James reflected the changing views of society on the other side of the Atlantic; while he was attracted by the idea of his brother enjoying the wealth and status of a planter, he was affected by the rising agitation against the trade itself. In the summer of 1804, after a session in which the abolition bill had gone before parliament and failed to pass, James wrote to Samuel asking his opinion on the subject. Samuel began his reply judiciously – abolition would not harm Barbados as it would stop the expansion of new southern regions such as Demerara, now dangerous rivals to the old, less-fertile colonies. It would be the consumers at home who would suffer from abolition as it would raise the cost of sugar. Keeping his cool on economic matters, Samuel warmed to the defence of the trade and slavery itself for, sharing the reactions of society around him, he accepted that an attack on the trade would lead eventually to an attack on the latter. Here he produced the traditional arguments which the abolitionist had worked so hard to displace. All those sold out of Africa had either been slaves there or Prisoners of War (P.O.Ws) so that the trade either saved their lives or improved their conditions or both. He went on to say that ‘the representation in parliament about our treatment of our slaves is in many instances false, in all exaggerated’. and he also asserted that he had never known ‘one instance of one of them wishing to return’ to their homeland.13 From a practical point of view this was hardly a slave option, while for a


sojourner like Samuel it was factored into his future both in terms of short breaks and eventual permanency. Yet he was becoming ambivalent about his expected return, frequently putting it off despite assuring his family that he was eager to make the journey. He actually did so just after the Westminster parliament passed the legislation abolishing the slave trade. That year 1807/8 was, coincidentally, a time of financial crisis for the planters. An excellent harvest and Napoleon’s closing of the continental ports had brought the price of sugar tumbling – a crisis of overproduction. How far and how quickly planter difficulty reacted on the Halls’ little firm it is difficult to say, at any rate the three year partnership to which Samuel had signed up was now drawing to a close. That business matters dictated the timing of his decision to visit his family seems likely. His stay in Ramelton was short. It was a stay which aroused James’s suspicions (probably well founded) that Samuel had misled him about the extensive and prosperous nature of his business interests, an accusation which his younger brother indignantly denied. However Samuel spent considerable time in London, writing home to say that he was being offered attractive prospects which made him consider abandoning Barbados for Jamaica. Eventually he decided to make this move, hinting tantalisingly that his decision was intertwined with matters of the heart and marriage possibilities. While the complexities of his finances made Samuel unwilling to confide fully in his brother, it seems likely that after six years in the Caribbean, he was finding it difficult to adjust to the social mores of Ramelton. Samuel landed in Kingston in mid-1808 entering into a partnership with a Mr Cummings, who was eager to embark on a business relationship which would allow him to make a trip home to Ireland. Now an experienced West Indian, Samuel immediately liked Jamaica, ‘I get more and more in the way of his place every day.’14 In 1801 when he had first arrived in Barbados, he had encountered no less than five men from his small home town. Besides his employers, the two Hall brothers, there was a soldier named Bell in the garrison, an alcoholic overseer in poor health called Dunlevie and Shields a drunken, one eyed sailor who had been one of a slave ship crew tried on the island for mutiny and murder.15 Jamaica immediately offered a more inviting Irish network, containing an array of connections to be developed into clients and friends. There were Delap cousins James Bogle Delap on the substantial plantation of Mounteagle (slaves, 299, stock, 245) in Westmorland parish, Cornwall county and in adjacent western and northern parishes, a Samuel F. Delap (170 slaves, 224 stock) on his Orange estate, Sarah, with five slaves on Vinegar Hill, Charlotte with ten on a unnamed property. (The lack of stock suggests that these women were widows or spinsters, provided with slaves as a means of support.)16 But rather than these relations, Samuel became close to a substantial planter called James Daly who had worked for the Delaps at Shafton and remained in the Black River area. Spread across the island he found old (though less prosperous) Donegal and Derry contacts to


renew.17 On the north coast his richest and most prestigious client was Hamilton Brown, a Presbyterian from county Antrim, the progenitor of a town bearing his name, now shortened to Brownstown, who lived in an elegant mansion on his estate near Montego Bay. Despite his West Indian lack of interest in religion, Samuel Watt’s Caribbean business career sprang from confessional roots and, in so far as it widened beyond that, retained its Irish connections. In the second half of the eighteenth century, contemporary comment draws attention to the number of Scots becoming increasingly important in the Jamaica’s mercantile world. Recent historical research has endorsed this. It has been calculated that in the period 1771–5 Scots accounted for nearly 45 per cent of all inventories at death valued at over £1,000.18 A further study of wills reveals that by 1796 the Scots possessed almost 30 per cent of the estates probated on the island.19 While such counts depend heavily on name derivation for Scottish recognition, so that a number of those included might be Ulster Presbyterians, the mark the Scots left on Jamaica is clear, recorded in the names of the present day population, proliferating in Mackenzies and Campbells, and in a rich collection of commercial records and plantation papers in the Scottish archives. Interestingly the Watt letters suggest no particular association between that family and the Scottish Presbyterian commercial/planter nexus. The names of the majority of Samuel’s Jamaican intimates are either Ulster Presbyterians or Donegal men. Those like James Daly or Dominick Logue, not known to fit into either of the above categories, though perhaps they belong there, have obvious Irish names. Such a pattern highlights the familial and local nature of white sojourner and settler activity which could equally be applied to any white ethnic group in Jamaica. Samuel no longer spent time in the counting house, leaving that to clerks, among them his young brother David encouraged to come out in 1811 and, to Samuel’s guilt and grief, dying of a fever in 1816. A nephew or cousin John Watt, tenaciously following family tradition, would arrive in 1822. Samuel rarely wrote home now, explaining that his peripatetic life style left him in no mood for regular correspondence. But in September 1811 he was shaken into quick riposte by a letter from James announcing his coming marriage and, paying Samuel back in his own coy coin, telling his brother that he was acquainted with the future bride, while withholding her name. Eventually it turned out that Samuel had known her all his life for she was their Donegal first cousin, Florinda Delap.20 Following James’s example, the lethargic Andrew now succeeded in acquiring a spouse. Samuel, Caribbean style, had not married and lived with a concubine, Palmyra, presumably an African or a mulatto, while still encouraging epistolary hopes among Ramelton’s Presbyterian community that he would return there to take a bride. In 1815, another year of financial uncertainty produced by the ending of the Napoleonic Wars, he once again crossed the Atlantic memorably


accompanied by his black slave, Robert. Too set in his ways to resist exercising his man-of-the-world charm, Samuel caused havoc by exciting the affections, and perhaps ruining the reputation of his sister Jane’s sister-in-law, now referred to in correspondence as ‘poor Nancy Scott’.21 As before, Samuel soon pleaded business necessities, leaving Ramelton to travel to Cork and London. There apparently unexpected financial disaster struck, disaster which Samuel claimed was due to his absence from Kingston. Carried away in an enthusiasm of wild speculation, his partner Mr Cummings had gone off to Cuba and spent £50,000 on sugar and coffee at prices which made profit impossible. In London Samuel struggled with an indignant broker who wanted to declare immediate bankruptcy. Seeking help, Samuel found it in Belfast in a sympathetic Mr. John Martin who understood his plight, though Mr Cummings’s friends, also in Belfast, denied Samuel’s version of the debacle. Samuel returned to Jamaica, and Cummings and Watt was liquidated. Mr Cummings retired from commercial life but Samuel made arrangements, which he struggled to fulfil over the next eight years, to pay his Jamaican creditors five shillings in the pound. On reaching Kingston, Samuel immediately moved into another firm, also run by Belfast men, Cramsie and McDowell.22 Among other activities, they appear to have managed a slaughter yard but Samuel was able to continue with his established lifestyle, tending his commercial interests by visits to friendly clients. Young John Watt wrote home complaining that he was left alone for days on end in the counting-house coping with the business while Samuel and Mr. Cramsie disappeared into the island ‘interior’ to stay with hospitable planters.23 Within white society, planter hospitality was famous; meals of turtle, turkey, beef, cold tongue, a variety of fish, washed down with gallons of Madeira wine and brandy often consumed in bare, barnlike rooms. There was dancing, card playing, diatribes against Wilberforce and the abolitionists, discussions about the weather, the sugar crop, the latest in horticultural novelties and botanical knowledge, exchange of books and newspapers, fishing expeditions and male bonding as free masons, an expanding group in white colonial society. All social gatherings, from balls to casual visits and impromptu house parties, promoted flirtations and affairs with the hostess, her female friends and relations and liaisons with the slaves. Jamaica’s most sexually explicit diarist writing in the mid-eighteenth century recorded a social evening when the lady of the house happened to be absent. At a certain stage of drunkenness female slaves were called up and summoned to bed with the master and his guest. When several of them refused to co-operate they were replaced by others and the following day the unco-operative women were flogged. One of their number, seeking retribution, went to the mistress and described what had occurred in her absence, the truth being confirmed by an examination of the condition of the sheets.24 The same diarist recorded his doctor’s diagnosis that fourfifths of white males who lived for a significant length of time on the island


died of venereal disease or related disorders.25 The physician may have exaggerated but heavy eating, alcohol consumption and a degree of sexual promiscuity in a fever-ridden climate did not favour longevity. By 1825 Samuel Watt was in his forties and had been in the tropics for almost a quarter of a century and his health was beginning to decline. In that year he received information from Ramelton that his venerable father had died. This unsurprising news was accompanied by more unexpected information. His father had left him a sizeable legacy and brother James, who had always intended him to come home, now pressed him to return to help with the business in Donegal. As always Samuel prevaricated, pleading mercantile commitments in Jamaica, but in the end he decided to accept James’s offer and made arrangements to travel home via the United States in order to sample North American hospitality.26 He reached Ireland intending to live on his father’s legacy rather than his tangled Jamaican assets, and to work for his brother. The 1820s were not a prosperous time in Ireland; famine for a growing population, increasingly dependant upon the potato, was endemic. The ending of the Napoleonic Wars had brought depression to the commercial agricultural sector, so that the rising rent rolls of the previous half century became a thing of the past. But in this fertile area of Donegal, James Watt sr’s investments in land and buildings, which the young Samuel had scorned as traditional and unadventurous, presented a diversification of interests which held up well. Instead of the provisioning trade to the West Indies, butter and live cattle now left for expanding urban markets in Britain, the flour mills kept working, linen prospered, soon to move into mills in nearby Derry and in Donegal itself. Samuel had gone out to the West Indies ambitious and prepared to work hard. In 1806 he remarked on the bad Ramelton habits of the newly arrived William Hall, ‘I cannot make him sensible how necessary it is for a young person who wishes to get forward in life to pay early attention to whatever line of business he embarks in by which means, in place of being a toil, it becomes a pleasure.’27 By the time he reached Jamaica in his thirties he seemed inclined to hand out this advice to his juniors rather than follow it himself. Perhaps he was never a particularly good business man, overoptimistic and boastful rather than hard-headed. But there is no reason to suppose that he was any more inept than the average white sojourner. Samuel returned to Ramelton, with no trace of the £30,000 he had once said he would acquire. There 25 years ago he had left his brother James, restless and frustrated, envious of his younger brother’s ambition and adventures. But now James, busy with flour milling and real estate, was rich enough to employ Samuel, though he can hardly have been impressed by his brother’s West Indian business record. It was not an easy situation but Samuel’s poor health brought a speedy end to possible problems for he died in 1826 only months after reaching Donegal. His will distributed his Jamaican assets among his siblings.28 But Cramsie and McDowell, in classic Caribbean style,


informed the family that no monies could, or ever would be, released; everything was tied up in mortgages to near-bankrupt planters, which the firm would now have to shoulder. Jane Scott, Samuel’s widowed sister, who had been looking forward to using her legacy to set her young sons up in careers, was bitterly disappointed. If Samuel Watt had brought little back to his family in Ramelton, what had he left in Jamaica? Well, he had left Palmyra who had immediately been taken over by his partner and friend Mr James Cramsie, a fact which so infuriated Samuel that he allowed evidence of her existence to escape into his correspondence. Then there was young John Watt, understandably discontented with the struggling little firm of Cramsie and McDowell. Among various complaints he included the information that his letters were going astray, delivered to a free coloured man, also named John Watt. Perhaps the disgruntled young relative, who had passed on the unpalatable news about Palmyra, was hinting that Samuel had left behind a mulatto son in Kingston. On his death Samuel had been the owner of seven slaves but though pressed from home, John Watt did not want to realise this asset. The slaves were of course useful, serving him as domestics, and in his business dealings or bringing in wages if he hired them out. He explained to the Ramelton relatives that the seven contained a family unit which he did not want to break up, adding that those whom he could have disposed off singly would not be worth much for, thanks to the behaviour of the interfering Westminster government, the price of slaves had fallen grievously in the last few years from about £120 to £ 30 or £40 each.29 Westminster’s attempted invasion of Jamaican legislative rights (an experience resonating with the older generation back in Ireland) had begun two years earlier, in 1823. Then the British parliament had declared slavery a sin, seriously discussed gradual emancipation and, withdrawing from that position, had insisted on ameliorative measures to ensure better treatment of the slaves – limitation on working hours and the use of the whip in the field, a ban on the flogging of women, the encouragement of Christian marriage, the admission of the slave as a legal witness. Samuel Watt had set out for the West Indies in the days of slave-trade abolition and he left in 1825 as the quarrel between colony and metropolitan mounted. John Watt watched these divisions prosper as Jamaica became the cockpit for hostilities between the agents of abolition, the missionaries, and the rest of the white population. He would remain through the Jamaica rebellion and emancipation. Like other sojourners, it was economic depression caused by the removal of the sugar duties in the 1840s, which drove the Watts to sever links with the area. Despite the anti-slavery threat the Irish were not deterred from Caribbean activities. While prosperous English and Scottish peers shied away from a West Indies, inhabited by furious planters and importunate missionaries, Anglo-Irish aristocrats, stumbling under the debts accrued in the past age of rising rents, vied for the governorship of Jamaica in order to solve financial


problems. The Earl of Moira sought the appointment and failed to achieve it. The Earl of Belmore acquired it, only to be faced with a rebellion led by a black Baptist deacon, which resulted in the death of 14 whites and 207 slaves. In the aftermath 626 slaves were tried and 312 of them executed.30 The Whig government recalled Belmore and began to consider some measure of emancipation as a serious option. Between 1834–6 the Marquis of Sligo held the office of governor, presiding over the formal ending of slavery. He found himself involved in the toils of apprenticeship, a scheme designed by the Whigs to train the Negro for freedom and supply the planters with a secure labour supply while they adjusted to the new economic order. It was a compromise solution unpalatable to both sides – the ex-slaves now apprentices, bound to work unpaid for 40 and a half hours a week for their old masters, for six years in the case of a field hand and four for a house slave. The angry masters determined to show their labour force the disadvantages of freedom by reducing food rations and making difficulties about access to provision grounds. Sligo as governor came to dislike the controversial apprenticeship system but the apprentices had difficulty in believing in his commitment to their emancipation as he himself had been a slave owner.31 (He claimed compensation for 286 slaves and received £5,526-9-1.)32 The Browne family of Westport had been large plantation owners since 1752, acquiring this property through a marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth, only daughter of Denis Kelly of Lisaduff, County Galway and Chief Justice of Jamaica, a move which aided their ascent up the political ladder as viscounts and then earls of Altamont to marquises of Sligo. During Elizabeth’s lifetime the austere Cassels house, on Clew Bay, below the ancient pilgrimage mountain of Croagh Patrick, gained its elegant south and west facades. Inside it was rich in darkly beautiful mahogany doors, tall enough to admit giants, the wood said to have been imported direct from the sugar estate of YS, a name questionably derived from the Irish word for ‘winding’, the estate (still owned by a Browne) containing the most spectacular waterfall in the western part of the island.33 Like all governors, Sligo was beset by requests from men eager for colonial appointments and in his case he was able to satisfy some of these applicants by securing them positions as stipendiary magistrates. The Colonial Office had seen the unpaid local magistracy in Jamaica as heavily responsible for the failure of the amelioration policy, undermining the effectiveness of that selection of the improving resolutions which eventually reached the Jamaican statute book. The missionaries had revealed denial of religious freedom by magistrates, who refused justice to the slave Swiney, punished for preaching (an illegal activity) when he was only praying (a legal practice). They complained that the Anglican clergyman, who kicked his female slave, and the overseer who beat another for asking for the price of her pig (amelioration had recommended the recognition of slave property) had gone unpunished.34


The role of the stipendiaries, on salaries of £300 a year, was to police the new system making sure it worked fairly for both apprentice and master. It was too difficult a task. The language of the apprentices, Jamaican Creole, was incomprehensible to them, while, for the masters, it was perfectly easy to understand. They offered the newcomers their usual lavish hospitality making it clear that it would be withdrawn if future co-operation were not forthcoming. The accusation against the stipendiaries that they easily became planters ‘friends’ was often true. Those determined to pursue a more independent course encountered obfuscation, even physical violence. In Kingston, R.R. Madden, anti-slavery writer, stipendiary magistrate and future historian of the United Irishmen, kept the physical punishment of recalcitrant apprentices to a minimum. He also began summarily freeing Indians from the Mosquito Coast, ‘enslaved by custom not by law’, from the bonds of apprenticeship. As a result he was assaulted in the street by an enraged businessman. When the police refused to take action, he decided that the protection of the Negro was incompatible with his own safety and resigned his post.35 Madden was one of a group of Irishmen to be found among Jamaica’s 30 stipendiaries, who acquired appointments both before and after Lord Sligo’s arrival. For penurious men hanging on determinedly to middle-class professional status, the £300 a year represented a desirable opportunity. In this, of course, they resembled the hopeful overseers and book keepers of earlier times. Henry Blake, Otway Browne and G. Higgins were young men who came out with the Earl of Sligo to seek their fortunes. They were needed to replace stipendiaries who had already died, among them Irish magistrates. One was Mr Everard, relative of the Talbots of Malahide. Another was a young Fitzgerald, son of the Knight of Kerry, stipendiary for Port Royal, buried in the parish church at Mavis Bank (1835) in the hills above Kingston, where the white population would retire to try and escape the fever-ridden heat of the of the port. Like Madden and the Talbots, Fitzgerald possessed traditional West Indian interests, as was the case with J. B. Coulthurst similarly employed in Barbados.36 Next to Governor Sligo himself, the other Irishman who achieved a significant post at this time was Dowell O’Reilly from Louth, the Attorney General, successor to earlier countrymen, sufficiently educated to hold such a position and sufficiently needy to accept it in an unhealthy climate, the difference being that in an age of emancipation he did not have to adjust his religion to acquire high office, for like Madden, O’Reilly was a Catholic. In the Caribbean, as in Ireland, the nineteenth century brought greater civic rights and bitter economic disappointment. The stipendiaries were sojourners without the hopes of substantial reward. Like the majority of his sojourning kind, Samuel Watt did not achieve riches, but his was the last generation for which this longed for outcome was still possible. Even on Jamaica, Hamilton Brown’s career proves that a newcomer from a modest


background could find success. For those who followed the sugar frontier westwards even more exciting opportunities existed. In the late eighteenth century James and Lambert Blair left Newry to set up an agency in St Eustatia. In the 1790s their accounts reveal that the largest items of purchase for their planter clients were slaves for a Mr Stevenson. 37 By the turn of the century when the British took Guiana from the Dutch, the Blairs had amassed enough capital to invest in the rich, wet, black-soiled lands of the new colony of Demerara. By the closing years of the war, Lambert Blair, by now the sole surviving brother, was living in England’s west country and had married into the Stopfords of Courtown, an aristocratic but needy Anglo-Irish family. Management of the estates in British Guiana had been taken over by a sojourner with prospects, Lambert’s McEamon nephew from Newry. When Lambert died in 1815 he named McEamon co-heir with another Newry born nephew James Blair. James Blair, also making a Stopford alliance, purchased a seat for himself in Westminster, where he remained almost as silent as William Hare. He is recorded as speaking once during his quarter of a century as an MP; in 1823 he was the only member who had the courage, or the effrontery, to deliver a speech denouncing the Tories’ amelioration measures. After emancipation, when the government paid out £20 million in compensation to the plantation owners for the loss of their slaves, James Blair’s received £83,530-8-11 for his 1,598 slaves. He thus claimed for more slaves and received more money than any other slave holder in the British empire.38 From Montserrat too there was evidence of new fortunes from slavery made late in the day. The names of the Creole Irish, who had prospered in the eighteenth century (Tuites, Ryans, Farrells, Husseys, Trants, Roachs, Meades, Lees, Parsons and Fryes), were not present among the 276 claims for compensation there. As in most other colonies, the majority of claims concerned units of less than ten slaves. But Queely Shiell, vindicated Montserrat’s reputation as an Irish island, by claiming for 920, a number far in excess of anything the island’s largest planters in previous times (the seventeenthcentury Dutch Waads and the eighteenth-century English Wykes) had ever amassed. Indeed this claim meant that tiny Montserrat produced the largest single compensation package in the Leewards.39 The groups who arrived in the slave societies of the Caribbean referring to Ireland as their native land, came from diverse ethnic backgrounds – Gaelic, Hiberno-Norman or ‘Old English’, ‘New English’, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Presbyterians, everyone was represented. Over two centuries they had laboured beside slaves in the field, hidden in thickets with them, bought them off ships, loaded them onto ships, used them as cultivators, domestic servants, oarsmen, pension funds and sexual partners. On the whole the institution had proved advantageous to them, financially and emotionally. Over the same period of time, at home and in other parts of the world, other Irishmen worked as supporters of that burgeoning and economically vibrant institution.

5 The Trade

By the end of the eighteenth century the slave trade, though flourishing, was generally receiving verbal condemnation. As he drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson denounced the trade as the tyrannical and cruel work of George III, but other slaveholder signatories felt this was an embarrassing overstatement and removed the phrases. In 1787, at the making of the US constitution, it was accepted that no union would emerge unless states could be allowed to differ on the issue of slavery but agreement was reached that the African trade should be ended at the chosen date of 1808. In the modern world the equating of race with colour added a sinister and tenacious barrier to any prospect of assimiliating the enslaved outsider, but the idea that removal of people from their homeland was a more reprehensible act than the acceptance of slave status among the native born, carried resonance from Patrick’s excoriation of Coroticus and Gerald of Wales’s denunciation of Hibernians and Saxons. British behaviour now endorsed the universality of such a feeling when in 1806/7 the Westminster parliament at last succeeded in passing legislation to abolish their slave trade. This simultaneous action on both sides of the Atlantic looked like a momentous success for anti-slavery but the British always maintained that it was both coincidental and unimportant as the Americans took no practical steps to ensure suppression. That condemnation of the trade had achieved intellectual orthodoxy can be seen reflected in the slave holding Samuel Watt’s statement (1804) that the founders of the commerce had acted immorally. In Ireland itself, rising nationalist and evangelical feeling was resulting in literary self-congratulation that Hibernia was untainted in this matter. In fact for the greater part of the eighteenth century, Ireland had been banned from slaving. In 1671 the setting up of the Royal Africa Company meant that only those belonging to it could trade for slaves. When the Westminster parliament decided in 1699 that freer access for the merchant community would produce more slaves for the developing sugar islands, this was not a right extended to Ireland. The famously triangular nature of the 95


trade (from Britain to Africa with goods, from Africa to the Caribbean with slaves, from the Caribbean home with sugar and tobacco) was further hampered for the Irish by navigation laws decreeing that valuable plantation produce, sugar and tobacco, should be landed at British ports and from there be re-exported to the Irish market. In the eighteenth century Irish Patriots would complain bitterly that British trade regulations were hindering the economic development of the sister kingdom; denunciation about cattle acts and woollen manufactures were loud and long lasting, reverberating from contemporary criticism into historical analysis. The moral revulsion against the slave trade removed it from nineteenth and twentieth-century discussion about the British stranglehold on the Irish economy, but it was clearly part of that imperial mercantile system. In its respected days as the African or Guinea trade, was it a commerce from which Ireland could have benefited economically? In the opening decades of the eighteenth century before trading habits and mercantile regulations settled into a well-understood pattern, always, of course, heavily underpinned by smuggling, an occasional Irish ship reached the records as a slaver. Two Dublin vessels made the transatlantic crossing and in 1718 the Prosperity from Limerick sailed into Barbados with some 92 slaves aboard.1 The fact that besides London, England’s western ports, first Bristol and then Liverpool, prospered on this commerce, suggests that Ireland could have benefited. Liverpool, after all, developed as a port for Ireland, particularly Dublin, before it came to dominate the British slave trade. One of Liverpool’s earliest slaving voyages was made by The Blessing which sailed for Africa in 1700, its owners, Thomas Johnson and Richard Norris, ordering the captain to collect provisions at Kinsale and then take ‘the first fair wind for the Guinea coast’.2 Later in the eighteenth century Liverpool slave ships would avoid French privateers by sailing round the north of Ireland, making use of a geographical advantage which neither London nor Bristol possessed. But there were elements in the slave trade which did not make Ireland an advantageous base. Britain’s success at ousting Portugal and the Dutch from their established primacy, and at remaining ahead of the expanding French initiative, was very much based on the ease with which she could resource trade goods. Her East India Company supplied cotton cloth and cowrie shell currency but by the eighteenth century the most common unit of exchange was the iron bar, with slave prices frequently expressed in terms of this article. It has been suggested that the technological breakthrough made by Darbys of Coalbrookdale, when they succeeded in replacing charcoal by coke in the smelting process, was promoted by the demand from Bristol for more and more pig-iron for their African trade. Certainly this discovery, a classic cause of the industrial revolution, helped to expand the availability of trade goods at competitive prices as the slave trade consumed cooking pots, firearms and cutlery while requiring chains, mouth-openers and branding

The Trade 97

irons as well as the small bar currency. Such manufactures were not indigenously on offer in Ireland. Easy access to England’s western ports of course provided opportunities for the Irish to participate in the Guinea commerce. A study of Bristol, in the years of its slave trading expansion, ascendancy and decline (1698–1769), reveals names which suggest an Irish presence but insufficient evidence to show whether it was of a substantial or marginal nature. No merchant so engaged would have described himself as a slave trader. They were merchants engaged in the Guinea trade or the African trade, a trade which always included articles other than slaves. Historians have worked hard, sifting through port records to classify freight and thus name and shame those merchants who repeatedly sent out ships designed to procure a mainly human cargo. Calculations have revealed who only invested in one or two voyages and who did so on a larger scale. For three decades (1698–1729) some 19 merchants organised 60 per cent of Bristol voyages, the highest scorer sending out 38 ships, the lowest ten. Among these was the variously spelt Thomas Freke (Freake, Freeke or Freek) with 12: In the same period the number of slaves actually entered for ventures in which he played a part reached 3360.3 Records also show two other Frekes, William and Philip, sending out Guinea ships at this time. However the name Freke is to be found in England’s west country as well as in Castlefreake, Co Cork so it is impossible to be certain which area produced these Bristol merchants. More certainly identifiable is John Teague and Co., who organised five voyages between 1724–7, using captains with Irish names, Barry and Roach.4 William Barry made nine voyages in the 1720s as master of Bristol slavers.5 Another captain with an Irish name, who made a repetitive appearance in the port’s records, was Michael Callaghan, with six voyages, four of them giving slave numbers which amounted in all to 1036, plus a voyage in which he appears in merchant capacity as Callaghan and Co., with a cargo of 280 slaves.6 This shift, from captain to merchant, was one which any man who sailed repeatedly to Africa hoped to make. It was possible to accomplish, not because the captains’ wages were particularly high, but because he had the right to ‘privilege slaves’ which he purchased for himself and carried for free, plus commission on the overall cargo. It was a particularly desirable shift to make because the death rate of captains on such voyages was so high, more than a quarter of them perishing in Africa or as a result of the voyage. At least five captains died in the trade for every one who achieved the status of merchant.7 In the 1760s John Coghlan organised nine voyages transporting nearly 2000 slaves, while a James Connor was responsible for five.8 This suggests that the Irish were busiest in the era before 1730 but again such a conclusion is very tentative.9 At the close of the century, with Bristol’s share in the trade clearly in decline, the Irish presence was still discernible. Of 49 Bristol slave ship captains voyaging 1785–94, some 40 were local (from the south west of England) while six came from Ireland.


History now records that by the eighteenth century, Britain was the world’s greatest slave trader, carrying half of those who made the transatlantic crossing. From 1740 Liverpool was clearly Britain’s largest slave trading port, sending some 1.3 million slaves to the New World, thus engrossing half of Britain’s trade and one-third of Europe’s during the eighteenth century.10 Curiously, given Liverpool’s close relationship with Ireland, there appears to have been fewer Irish merchants and captains involved in the Liverpool trade than in Bristol.11 None of the great slave trading families – Tarleton, Backhouse, Boates, Davenport, Dawson, Leyland, Watt – emanated from Ireland. Irish captains played a smaller role in the Liverpool trade than they did in Bristol. In Bristol they were the only distinct group coming from beyond the port’s immediate coast and hinterland. In Liverpool the northwest coast supplied the majority of captains, but the Isle of Man and Scotland also played a significant part, leaving the Irish well behind. Crew membership however revealed a different pattern. Here the Irish formed the most numerous non-English group – more than 12 per cent as against the Scots with 9.5 per cent.12 The letter books and ships’ logs which provided details of such activities have perished in their thousands. Those that survive have done so serendipitously, deposited in desultory manner in a variety of places. Today in Liverpool only a handful of collections survive which have been listed as slave traders’ papers. (Again many of the leading firms are missing.) Among the half dozen collections in Liverpool Record Office, which reveal a slave trader at work, are those of an Irishman, David Tuohy from Tralee, one of those who successfully made the shift from captain to merchant. The earliest letter among the Tuohy papers dates back to 1753 and refers to a voyage made not by himself but by his brother-in-law Philip Nagle.13 Both men seem to have begun their careers working for a merchant called James Clemens, another name from the Irish network.14 While David Touhy still possessed a brother and a nephew in Tralee, he also had relatives in Cork – one of his correspondents there, Thomas Trant, signing himself ‘your affectionate kinsman’.15 In 1771 Tuohy wrote to a Stephen Fagan in Cork explaining that he had ‘been in the African trade for many years in which I have made a pretty fortune’. He declared that he was now inclined ‘to go no more to Africa but follow the business of a merchant in Liverpool’. He was eager to work up a trade with Cork and asked about the price of beef, butter and tallow there.16 Though he gave up sailing to Africa himself after 1771 he continued to despatch ships for slaves.17 Nearer home he bought rock salt in Cheshire and sold it in Cork and Kerry, where it was used to preserve the provisions which did so much to service the expanding slave and sugar colonies in the West Indies.18 Tuohy was a Catholic working in England at a time when the authorities still collected statistical information on this suspect section of the population (Return of Papists, 1767). The Liverpool return listed 1743 Catholics out

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of a population of 25,787 or 6 per cent of the borough of Liverpool. The majority of these people came from Lancashire’s recusant community. Most of them were poor but some, leaving the country for the town to try and benefit from its commercial opportunities, were from either tenant farming or even gentry backgrounds. They now began moving uncertainly into the port’s newly emergent urban Catholic middle class. The richest were those involved in shipping. In 1786–93 of the number of Liverpool residents (800) who owned shares in Liverpool’s registered shipping, only 16 or 2 per cent were Catholics. If this analysis is shifted to slaving vessels the figure rises to 6.8 per cent In this period the leading Catholic slave ship owners, listed in order of the number of voyages, were Felix Doran (son of a Cpt. Felix Doran), Christopher Butler, Thomas Ryan, James McGauley and David Tuohy.19 All have Irish names but only Tuohy was an Irish emigrant; the others were all natives of Liverpool.20 Yet the majority of the five may have possessed Irish roots. In the eighteenth century it was generally men like Tuohy and Nagle, from established commercial backgrounds, who tended to have the confidence to launch themselves abroad into trading ventures. They possessed support networks, if not much capital, which helped secure success. That Irish participation in Liverpool’s slave trade should be confined to Catholics is highly improbable. A listing of 39 Liverpool captains who emerged as merchants (1785–1807) contains a number of names with a decidedly Irish Protestant resonance.21 The Forbes family, leading merchants in eighteenthcentury Drogheda were engaged in the West Indies trade and briefly produced a West Indian governor.22 Contemporaneously Liverpool possessed a similarly named slave trading family; in 1752 the merchant Edward Forbes owned three slave ships – the Boyne, Dolphin and Grace.23 Records show his son William making five slaving voyages (1785–95).24 Other relevant but undetected names certainly lurk among the archives. Ireland can also provide evidence of the small and occasional investor so important to the Liverpool trade. In the 1750s the Presbyterian McCammons or McEamons of Newry owned a slave and had invested money in at least one Liverpool voyage to West Africa. And the McCammons were relatives of the Blairs of St Eustatia and Demerara, enemies of amelioration (1823) and beneficiaries of compensation (1833), a family network which highlights the durability of Irish connections to the slave trading and plantation complex.25 Philip Nagle and David Touhy came from substantial backgrounds. Liverpool and west Africa had set them off on successful careers, but many less fortunate and more desperate Irishmen found their way down the same route, some never to return. Nicholas and Blaney Owen were an example of the downwardly mobile from the gentry class. In an unspecified part of Ireland, their spendthrift father, in true Rackrent manner, had ruined his estate. In 1746, the penniless Nicholas left Ireland as a sailor making several Atlantic crossings to the West Indies, the first taking him to Montserrat.


Then in 1750, joined by his youngest brother Blaney, he sailed from Liverpool on a slave ship and for the rest of his life remained in that trade. His career furnishes an example of the vicissitudes and opportunities available to those operating at the lower European levels of this commerce. Their first African voyage took the Owen brothers to Cape Mount, an area some way to the south of Sierra Leone. The trading concluded they encountered a French ship, its crew in the process of being slaughtered by their rebellious cargo. In the hopes of taking the vessel for themselves, the men from Liverpool joined the fighting and could, in Nicolas’s opinion, have carried the day against the victorious slaves but for the vacillations of the captain and officers. The result of this was rising tension between officers and crew. After some days sail the Owen brothers and three others determined to ‘obtain that liberty that every Europian is entitled to’; so, undercover of darkness, they stole firearms and a long boat and set off northward back towards Cape Mount. Having concentrated on acquiring firearms rather than stocking up with provisions, the mutineers soon found themselves in danger of starvation. They drew lots to see who would go on shore and try to acquire supplies by pretending to be a ship’s mate. This role fell to Nicholas, who reached the town of Cape Mount in a miserably weak condition and found himself surrounded by Africans who treated him with ‘a great dail of good nature on thier side, some of them setting victuals before me, such as rice and palm oyl with a foul upon the top’.26 Having acquired supplies the fugitives continued to voyage northwards eventually reaching the Turtle and Banana Islands and the mouth of the Sherbro River. During visits on shore they were attacked by alligators, frightened by traces of tigers (which do not exist in this part of Africa) and detained by Blaney’s enthusiasm to explore but incompetence at swimming. At last they decided to make for the English factory at Sierra Leone hoping that their peccadilloes (mutiny and theft but no blood letting) would be overlooked in a region always hungry for crew members. This proved to be a correct calculation and the Owen brothers found no difficulty in signing on with an American ship from Rhode Island. Finding themselves well treated by captains and merchants in America, over the next four years they made a number of slaving voyages from Rhode Island always returning to the Sierra Leone area. Here on Banana Island in 1756 disaster struck. The locals, angry because a Dutch captain had recently landed there and removed some of their free men, took revenge on white traders by seizing the American vessel, its crew and cargo, which of course included Nicholas and Blaney, their savings and property. Once the rum, sugar, tobacco and snuff (all slave-grown products) had been drunk, consumed or sold, the Africans lost interest in their European captives, who were now unfettered and allowed to roam around the island. The Africa which the Owen brothers encountered was pre-colonial Africa. African rulers were in control. Their commercial contact with Europeans,

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who had appeared, first Viking-like, in the fifteenth century, raiding and trading, had settled down into a mutually advantageous relationship. Nicholas Owen noted that the white traders sought the protection of African kings, expecting them to ensure the co-operation of their black suppliers. In the port towns he found that the ordinary people approached him with confidence, trading vigorously, pilfering his goods when the opportunity offered but not offering him violence. In the countryside however he detected a dread of the white man presumably viewed as a sinister rarity.27 Foreigners were fearful of becoming involved in disputes with locals, which could only be settled with endless palavers or, worse still, direct action such as the inhabitants on the Banana Island had employed. A European who became entangled in a quarrel with his African patron often decided it was best to move elsewhere or go home altogether. Their brief captivity on Banana Island was to change the Owen brothers’ lives as they moved from the picaresque world of the sailor into a period of permanent African residence. They did so by acquiring, or rather being acquired by, a local patron, indeed they referred to him as their ‘master’.28 At this point he was an Englishman, Mr Hall, a resident trader on the African coast. Under his auspices they settled on the Sherbro river, co-operating with one another but working from different points at which they built themselves dwellings. From these they traded for camwood, which produced a dye prized by Europeans, elephants’ teeth (ivory tusks) and slaves, using trade goods or iron bar currency. Later when Mr Hall found himself embroiled in disputes with local dignitaries and left for home, the Owens sought protection from Henry Tucker, a fat, multilingual mulatto, gaily dressed and eating off silver plate, his house stuffed with English merchandise. He lived in his own town, constructed and inhabited by his many children and seven wives, his slaves and their offspring. ‘His riches sets him above the Kings and his numerous people above being surprised by war: almost all the blacks ows him money, which bring a dread of being stopt upon that account, so that he is esteemed and feared by all who has the misfortune to be in his power.’29 Given the advantage of hindsight, the roots of colonialism can be traced to the existence of Tucker and the activities of Hall. The Owens can thus be seen as agents of creeping colonialism or informal empire, but all this was still very much an incipient development. Their earlier equivalents (originally Portuguese) had already existed for over two centuries and more than another century would pass before Europeans decided to turn commercial penetration and economic influence into political annexation and conquest. Most Europeans were eager to avoid the lifestyle which the Owens now accepted, alienated as much by its isolation as by fear of the fever-ridden climate. Other members of the crew hijacked on Banana Island had apparently made their way back to a seafaring existence. But this course had little appeal for the downwardly mobile Irish gentry, resenting the oppression of their


nearest social equals, the officers, and shying away from turbulent, liquor loving crudities of the crew. Though their African existence was an exile from the civilised pleasures of genteel European society, Nicholas increasingly came to feel that, unlike shipboard life, it could provide a degree of refinement for someone like himself with a ‘quiet’ and ‘melancholy’ disposition.30 In this wilderness he could experience tranquillity, cultivating his garden and thanking God for his preservation from the dangers of voyaging. A visiting captain fed his artistic leanings by showing him how to construct a picture out of shells. The final product, embellished with a circular mirror at its centre and its intricate shell pattern interwoven with moss, fulfilled his aesthetic sense by providing a truly suitable ornament for his dwelling.31 But the journal he now kept regularly provided more constant satisfaction. Here he recorded descriptions of exotic flora and fauna, curious and shocking African mores, accompanied by his own pious thoughts and philosophical commentary. It represented both a present comfort and a future aspiration, for the choice of subject matter and his careful illustrations, requiring scarce Indian ink, leave the impression that he hoped some day it would see publication. Brooding on his riverside seclusion, he repeatedly referred to himself as leading the life of a hermit. While afflicted by a sense of isolation in an alien society, there was much in Nicholas’s life style, which was not eremitical; he lived with an African woman and was served by a team of four or five men who helped him to acquire and control the slaves he collected.32 The number of captives held, were, at any one time, at least similar in number, most of them sold eventually to visiting European ships. Thus he had acquired an extensive household which he certainly could not have commanded in Ireland. Generally he referred to this grouping as ‘my people’ and on one occasion as ‘my familey’.33 An uneasy degree of power and prosperity was provided by his relationship with Henry Tucker and his access to trade goods. Though in African conditions these last could turn into a hazard instead of a security. Gunpowder was generously included in Guinea cargoes, both for its importance for defence and on account of its commercial popularity. Always a volatile quantity, statistics for the last two decades of the British slave trade reveal that captains were as likely to die in exploding vessels as in slave rebellion. The Owens’ premises on the Sherbro were similarly well stocked. During a thunderstorm, which even by African standards Blaney found exceptional, he was terrified that the ‘prodigous lightening’ would strike his house, ignite the powder and blow his entire property to pieces.34 In Africa, Nicholas Owen had acquired something of the gentry lifestyle he had forfeited at home. But, as he very well understood, it was at the cost, of staying there. ‘As for my self I live in the station of a hermit and make myself contented with my pressent circumstances since I find it impossable to go of without a dail of dangers and risque.’ When he was well and busy and trade was prosperous he was not discontented with his situation. But

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when he was ill it was a different matter. This was a frequent occurrence especially in the ‘tornado season’. Shuddering with malaria, unable to supervise business, homesickness would strike. At the beginning of 1758, he was lying in distress with his large, new, partially built house crumbling around him, ‘I have not brought any trade this 2 months, not so much as a servela [a term for a little slave]. I still long more and more for a return to my native country.’35 Within three months he was dead. Blaney took over the journal to record his brother’s passing and his own grief, provided with all the necessities of life but left ‘disconslate and alone admidist the negroes’. ‘My chief trust is in the Almighty … He teaches me to look at every Christian as my brother …’36 Standards had not changed much since the time of St Patrick. During the same decade John Newton, later an Anglican clergyman and author of Amazing Grace, made three voyages from Liverpool to the same region of west Africa as master of a Guinea vessel. Already an evangelical, but still inhabiting a pre-anti-slavery world, he held services on shipboard for the crew never thinking of extending his religious ministrations to the Africans he was loading and shackling down below. His papers record them as numbers, while his lists of crew names reveal an Irish presence, but not more than two or three out of compliment of around 30. Several of those listed among the skilled crew members were coopers (John Carren and John Megan) men who perhaps had originally worked in the provisioning ports at home. James Gallagher, though entered as ‘fore the mast’ (the term for a common seaman) was also described as a fiddler. (Like Cornelius Bryan in Barbados a century earlier, the Irish presence provided music overseas.) Some of their names presented Newton with greater difficulty. He had trouble in spelling Shaughnessy (Shestnassy) and even more trouble with Cooney (Cooney, Cunneigh and Coney) who took a female slave ‘and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck, for which I put him in irons. I hope this has been the first affair of the kind on board and I am determined to keep them quiet if possible. If anything happens to the woman I will impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83 … .’ Almost fifty years later the drunken, one-eyed Shields from Ramelton found himself beached on Barbados as a result of such west African opportunities. Though more sparsely represented among ships’ masters than among crew members, the occasional Irish captain does make a dramatic appearance in the written record. Perhaps today the most famous slave ship is the Liverpool built Brookes capable of carrying some 600 slaves. In 1789 Thomas Clarkson, collecting material for the London Society’s parliamentary attack on the trade, commissioned and circulated a diagram of this vessel showing shackled slaves, arranged with mathematical precision, head to toe, layer upon layer, not an inch of space unused. This repetitive, symmetrical image, the product of the latest developments in naval architectural design, drove home to contemporaries the shocking realisation that such a brutal and dehumanising commerce was the product of their wealthy, sophisticated


and enlightened civilisation. Today, in the boom time for slavery studies, this dramatic diagram has been reproduced again and again leaping from printed page to film documentary, its black and white message flashed across the coloured television screen. It has been transformed into souvenir jewellery advertised in the Black Holocaust for Beginners (1995) and it can be found etched out in copper on a memorial to African Americans in the gardens of the state legislature in Columbia, South Carolina.37 During the American Revolutionary War the Brookes was, for a time, captained by a Munsterman, Clement Noble of Ardmore. Confronted by an enemy privateer near Barbados, he armed fifty of his cargo and successfully repelled the attack, commenting that the Negroes fought ‘with exceeding spirit’ before he sailed on to Jamaica where he sold them on the north coast at Montego Bay.38 That enslaved Africans had entered the Irish consciousness as an element in transatlantic seafaring is driven home by Denis Macnamara’s The Adventures of a Luckless Fellow. This poem, written in Irish (two parts with some 380 lines) tells the story of a rumbustious hero who, seeking escape from schoolmastering through emigration, takes ship from Waterford. Somewhere beyond Cork his vessel becomes involved in battle with a French frigate, at which point the text explodes into English for two lines as the captain calls out ‘Gunner give fire, we’ll fight the negroes,/We’ll conqueror or die my Irish heroes.’ This message acts as a tonic to the seasick schoolmaster who immediately seizes a cutlass and joins the fray.39 Nearer home than England’s western ports, there were opportunities to benefit from slaving. On the Isle of Man, fiscal duties belonged neither to the London or the Dublin government but to the Lord of Man, that is, the Duke of Atholl, who gave his up in 1765 and the Earl of Derby who held onto his until the 1780s. Such a situation created a smugglers’ haven. One speciality was to supply Liverpool merchants with cheap ‘Guinea goods’. Bargain East India textiles, beads and cowrie shells, together with some European firearms, came from Rotterdam, while the British West Indies supplied the rum. Of the half dozen Irish merchants resident on the island between 1718–64, the names Patrick Stackpole and Thomas Arthur suggest a Munster, possibly a Limerick, connection. Stackpole was busy in the late 1730s, importing at least £ 828-16-7 worth of Guinea goods. In the 1750s Thomas Arthur, aided by his wife and an agent, a Mr Edward Butler, ran a much more extensive venture (£16,900 worth). Thomas Arthur was the single most successful Irish merchant, so successful that he attracted the denunciations of local rivals who sought to hamper him by invoking their rights to collect debts from island residents before ‘strangers’. This protest, coupled with disapproving comment that he was a papist, was ignored by the Duke of Atholl who naturalised Arthur along with two other Catholics, the Reeves brothers, from Dublin.40 The Isle of Man also provided a launch pad for those eager to make their way in the Liverpool trade. But it is the French connection which

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to date provides the most easily recoverable group of Irishmen who left home and benefited from the Guinea commerce. Irish links with France were naturally with the west coast which became the centre of France’s triangular trade, based on Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Le Havre and St Malo.41 As with Bristol and Liverpool, a pattern gradually emerged by which Bordeaux became the main importer of tropical goods while Nantes dominated the French slave trade, in the eighteenth century carrying some 57 per cent of the country’s slaves.42 To begin with, the French trade was organised on Colbertian lines with state companies, designed to service the valuable tropical colonies in the Caribbean with a labour force. Never a striking success, Britain’s victory in the War of the Spanish succession, which secured her the Asiento, further depressed the prospects of these companies. Except for a brief period in the 1730s they made little attempt to secure their monopolies, instead they sold licences to individual entrepreneurs, a move which the merchants of Nantes exploited to the full.43 The period from 1715 to 1740 saw the swift expansion of the French slave trade and it was an expansion which the Irish were well placed to join. Since medieval times, Irish supercargoes had sailed into St Malo selling hides, beef and butter in order to be able to purchase wine. By the mid-seventeenth century, Galway tradesmen and merchants began to take up residence in the Breton ports, augmented soon by arrivals from Limerick, among them Arthurs and Creaghs who settled in Nantes. The political upheavals of the 1650s diversified the background of those arriving from Ireland, but the size of the Breton Irish community remained small until the 1670s from which point it moved into a steady expansion marked by a growing commercial community and the establishment of the Irish College at Nantes. Next to the colleges in Paris, this would become the largest Irish seminary in Europe. War breaking out between Britain and France enriched the St Malo privateers and one such figure, Philip Walsh, claimed to have conveyed James II to France after the battle of the Boyne.44 When Limerick surrendered, the governor of St Malo received orders from Paris to accommodate the troops arriving from Ireland. These latest flocks of wild geese were now in full flight, Irish regiments remained encamped around the port throughout the decade, most of their members eventually moving on to struggle with the problems of pay, pensions and campaigning elsewhere but some found a permanent home on the Breton coast. Trade was intimately mixed with military victory and defeat. For his part in the peace negotiations in of 1691, Godert Ginkel, the Williamite commander, had rewarded Sarsfield with the right to send back cargoes of wine and other goods on the ships which had transported the troops to France.45 As the Irish community in St Malo expanded, some of the established families began shifting southwest to the thriving port of Nantes. On the river Loire, 50 miles from the sea, Nantes in its eighteenth-century maturity


stretched over ten islands. Vineyards appeared in the surrounding countryside, some specially planted to provide grapes for distilling into cheap brandy, again a staple of the slave trade. Elegant streets, squares, bridges, country mansions sprang up as the merchants of the port gained in wealth and status. Churches and convents also prospered and the rich Nantais were proud of their generosity toward charitable institutions. In the 1720s an early cotton manufactory was set up in the general hospital so that the poor could produce and imitate the Indian cloths, which Nantes needed, and already imported, in order to service slavery.46 The merchants of France’s Atlantic ports, like the merchants in Ireland, were for the most part general merchants exporting wine to Britain, Ireland and the Americas, importing butter and salt beef from Ireland to be re-exported to the French Caribbean, from which they received tobacco, sugar, coffee, rum, indigo and rice, some of which, along with textiles, brandy, firearms and other metal goods, went to Africa to be bartered for slaves. The slave traders were a part of this varied exchange, men who would have described themselves as engaged in the African or Guinea trade along with their other merchant ventures. It is possible to claim that all or none of these export merchants in the Atlantic ports were slavers for, while most participated in some degree, no one dealt exclusively in slaves. Historians however have pointed to a group who can be particularly associated with the African trade. These were the armateurs (outfitters) of the ships who set out for Africa to purchase human cargo. Outfitting and investment were not completely coterminous but the armateur would usually have the greatest financial interest in the voyage. In all these respects the armateurs/outfitter was like the British merchant, generally the senior partner, who took responsibility for organising a Guinea voyage. But many individuals might take a minor stake in it, relatives, employees, trusted business contacts, all overlapping categories. The Liverpool maxim that ‘he who cannot send a bale will send a bandbox’ applied equally to the French ports in the 1730s, a time of expansion in slaving and sugar growing. Around 550 families in France outfitted ships for Africa in the eighteenth century, an average of only five expeditions per family.47 Of these 550, some 17 bear verifiable Irish names.48 The majority of the 17 were below the average of five, but there was one notable exception. Taking the century as a whole, Antoine Walsh, with some 40 expeditions, was the fifth most successful slaver in France. He was also a figure who, at the height of his career, would play a formative role in the development and organisation of the trade.49 Antoine Walsh was born into the Irish merchant community at St Malo in 1703 and was therefore an exact contemporary of Nicholas Tuite. Both were second generation emigrants belonging to well established, self conscious Irish communities sharing religious and dynastic loyalties. While the Tuites’ Catholicism still presented them with difficulties, the Walshes were now part of the religious establishment in their new country, a situation exemplified

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by the existence of the Irish College symbolising religious orthodoxy while providing self-perpetuating contact with the country of origin. Unlike Nicholas, Antoine’s first language would have differed from that of his parents but otherwise his Irish links, like that of his community, were closer than those of the Tuites. Antoine possessed a rich maternal uncle in Waterford whose finances were a source of strength to the Walshes and developments in France would make political Jacobitism a reality for them, while in Montserrat it was declining into a sentiment. As émigrés to continental Europe the Walshes belonged to a cherished Irish tradition, while the Tuites Caribbean destination removed them from historical memory. The everyday experiences of both Antoine Walsh and Nicholas Tuite were shaped by their new identities as Frenchman and Creole West Indian and the wealth they drew from the slaving complex, wealth which allowed them to direct the lives of others (black and white) and to consort with kings. Both would die in properties they had purchased from these resources, Nicholas in London and Antoine Walsh on his plantation in St Domingue. In the next generation the Black Atlantic they had both worked to create would play a key role in bringing France’s ancien régime crashing down. Antoine Walsh’s father Philip (of the Sarsfield and James II connections) had been born in Dublin in 1666 and claimed descent from the Walshes of the Walsh mountains in Kilkenny. Settled in Nantes, Antoine married into the Irish community there; Marie Sheill’s (O’Sheil) grandfather had settled in France after losing his lands through attainder; her father, Luc, was a successful shipbuilder.50 Philip Walsh was involved in the slave trade and Antoine may well have made slaving voyages to West Africa as a ship’s officer, before he actually captained St John the Baptist there in 1728. This voyage appears to have gone unusually smoothly, atypical both in timescale and point of sale; the cargo collected in only six weeks, the whole triangular trip accomplished in just over a year, with the 260 slaves sold on the small French island of Cayenne. Much more typical in duration was the experience of L’Aventurier, outfitted by Walsh’s father-in-law Luc Shiell in 1733, which took 18 months to make the round trip from Nantes to Nantes, selling its slaves in the two most popular French markets, expanding St Domingue and well developed Martinique.51 Before its return L’Aventurier had indeed been through many adventures. After two months at Cape Mount, where the original captain died and was replaced by a J. Shaughnessy, collecting slaves proved so disappointing that the ship moved to Ouidah. Here too the assembling of a cargo proved to be slow work. After almost two months 240 Negroes had been loaded but many of the 50 man crew were sick. On 7 April 1734 the captain and a group of the healthier sailors went on shore to trade and Barnaby Shiell, a subordinate officer and possibly Antoine Walsh’s young brother-in-law, was left in command of a crew largely immobilised by fever and dysentery. The result was a revolt by the slaves, who cut the incapacitated pilot’s throat and locked


other invalid whites below the hatches. At this point Barnaby Shiell, with five armed sailors, fired on the Africans and in the ensuing slaughter two crew and 40 slaves were killed. The result in commercial terms was the destruction of one-sixth of the cargo. Inevitably such incidents raised queries with investors and insurers, one of the reasons revolts were so carefully recorded allowing historians to calculate that out of some 4000 revolts between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, some ten per cent involved loss of life. Possibly Captain J. Shaughnessy, had left a dangerously depleted guard on the ship when he went on shore, but in the aftermath of the revolt he determinedly pursued his professional objectives remaining at Ouidah for another seven weeks and finally sailing with 480 Africans for St Domingue and Martinique. Illness however continued to make ravages on shipboard, 76 slaves died on the crossing, while during the whole of the triangular venture, 17 of the crew perished. In the future both Shaughnessy and Barnaby Shiell would act as captains for Antoine Walsh. Ten years later, during the War of the Austrian succession, Luc Shiell outfitted his second and last recorded slaving expedition. Once more his L’Aventurier, tight packed with 480 slaves set out for the Caribbean, emerged victorious from an engagement with an English privateer and, on arrival in Martinique, had to be condemned.52 This was not an unusual end for a ship employed in the African trade which attracted elderly vessels, making the carpenter as essential a figure as the pilot or the surgeon. In 1734, the year of the L’Aventurier revolt, Antoine Walsh made a modest debut as an outfitter; Le Dauphin purchased 156 slaves at Cabigne but then got no further than island of Sao Thome, where it was abandoned as unseaworthy and sold, and a British slaver was chartered to convey the cargo to Martinique, four Africans dying on the way.53 During the next 20 years as an armateur Antoine Walsh was always prepared to take a chance on dilapidated vessels, trusting his captains to sell the disintegrating ship and find alternative transport if necessary, while dealing with storms, surf, torrential rain, malarial heat, alcoholism, desertion, physical violence, sadism, suicide and revolt. Antoine Walsh outfitted seven slave ships in the 1730s and another seven during the first three years of the war (1740–43). Then, though other Nantais continued the trade, he stopped. Perhaps he chose to do so because his activities as a privateer in the English Channel were proving even more profitable, certainly it was from this base that he now launched his most ambitious scheme so far. In 1745, when the French authorities had withdrawn their intention of military backing and official support for the Jacobite cause, Walsh equipped Prince Charles Edward with an armed frigate, on which they sailed together for Scotland. He also provided protection in the channel, which ensured that they arrived there. After their initial experiences among the western isles, of the Jacobite party aboard the Du Teillay, only the Prince himself and Antoine were prepared to continue with

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the expedition. Thus Walsh became one of the romantically remembered ‘seven men of Moidart’ who landed to form the nucleus of the rebellion. He did not, however, remain long in Scotland, returning to France to take up the diplomatic battle. Aided by Charles Edward’s initial military success, he worked to persuade Louis XV to send troops to support the campaign, but his hopes of returning to Scotland in a commanding role were destroyed at Culloden. That autumn his brother-in-law Richard Butler, an experienced captain in the African trade, whose family owned large slave plantations in St Domingue, sailed to Lough Nan Uamh in the Heurex and succeeded in bringing the Prince safely back to France.54 Possibly later generations of the Walsh family embellished the intimacy of their ancestors with Stuart royalty and Antoine’s key role in the ‘1745 rebellion. On the other hand Jacobite loyalty was a basic political tenet of life in the Irish community in St Malo and Nantes and Antoine Walsh was emerging as the port’s most important representative. His appointment in 1740 as conseiller-secretaire du roi highlighted his influence at court and among financial circles in the capital.55 When the war ended he turned to a project where, unlike Jacobite campaigning, he could establish his own organisation and control. In September 1748 he launched the Société d’Angole, the first private joint-stock company in France devoted to the slave-trade. Walsh put in 250,000 livres himself, the rest of the capital 1750,000 livres was supplied by Parisian bankers (Tourton, Bauer and the financier Paris de Montmartel). Antoine Walsh’s aim was to use the joint-stock company to eliminate the state monopoly companies and to establish the Société’s own monopoly of French trade in Africa. He had risen as an independent himself but he now wanted to prevent the rise of other independents. He planned another innovative piece of organisation, the company would have three large ships stocked with trade goods permanently stationed off the Angolan coast. Five smaller ships would make an annual Atlantic crossing to St Domingue, where they would deliver their cargo into a fortified slave camp, from which the Africans could be sold either to the local planters or to other Caribbean colonies, hopefully making unofficial inroads into Britain’s Spanish market.56 In September 1748, the month that he launched the new company, his ship, the somewhat ironically named Prince d’ Orange, reached Whydah and spent four and a half months assembling 245 blacks in conventional manner.57 On occasion this prolonged collection period could be the worst part of the Atlantic journey, for the slaves. Though they would not be quite so tightly packed as during the actual crossing, they would spend more time below (i.e. on the slave deck), more heavily shackled than when far out at sea, for the captain and crew saw the time spent within sight of Africa as the most dangerous part of the operation. Embarked on the ocean, the new slaves were often easier to control, the first weeks were the time for making example of the difficult through physical punishment, from flogging to actual mutilation. So day after day, week after week was passed in foetid darkness,


Muslim shackled to pagan, warrior to debtor, kidnap victim to adulterer, tribal elder to African slave, their language and ethnic group often strange and alien to one another, as would have been their dietary and hygiene habits had they been allowed to observe them. It was a single sex society below hatches with men and women kept in different parts of the slave deck. Women, as less dangerous, were more lightly shackled, if at all, and more frequently allowed up into the open air. Small groups of men would be brought up for brief periods to exercise or to be fed. The bonds of kin struck away, the intensity of shared horrors forged the new one of ‘shipmates’. Just before the Prince d’Orange left Whydah, six women, one with a child at the breast, threw themselves overboard and drowned. A month later at Sao Thome the remaining slaves rose and killed the captain and two sailors. The crew threatened to resort to firearms but the blacks took no notice and the result was 36 dead. By the eighteenth century Africans were accustomed to guns, the desire to possess them was one of the factors fuelling the trade and bringing about political change as states grew stronger or weaker according to their access to fire power. But those Africans delivered to the ships as slaves had no means of acquiring or concealing such weapons. In 50 years the only record of a successful slave revolt on an Irish Nantais vessel, occurred in 1742. Then the 350 slaves on Patrice Archer’s La Sainte Heléne managed to get hold of guns from above deck, set the ship on fire and escaped on shore, where the local ruler proved unco-operative in securing their return.58 On board L’Prince d’Orange, Jean Honoraty (John Hanratty?) replaced the murdered captain and the voyage continued. For an experienced slave-trader it was only a familiar professional setback. As far as Walsh was concerned the real danger to his ambitions had surfaced within Nantes itself where a rival joint-stock company had emerged to challenge his monopolistic ambitions. Société de Guinée, launched two months after Société d’Angole, capitalised at 2,200,000 livres and backed by a Parisian financier, Dupleix de Bacquencourt, was the brainchild of the Michel family, indignant at Antoine Walsh’s pretensions. Inevitably a good deal of personal rancour was involved, the Michels’ partner was the Grou family and one of the Grous was Antoine Walsh’s brother-in-law, his wife a daughter of Luc Shiell. In line with their capitalisation, the two companies remained close rivals (in almost five years Walsh’s outfitted 26 slavers, in seven years the Grous outfitted 32) with the advantage eventually falling to Société de Guinée.59 In 1750 they managed to work together to buy out the Compaigne des Indes but in 1753 when Walsh’s company completed the period for which it had been designed, he did not seek to reconstruct it, bringing his career as an armateur to an end. His greatest ambitions had not been achieved in Jacobites’ politics or in establishing the dominance of his company over the French slave trade. Nor had he become France’s largest slaver, that achievement belonged to an indigenous French family, the Mauntondons (60 voyages), who had begun life as shoemakers.

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However, in other respects Antoine Walsh had been fortunate. He had started his 20 years as an armateur at a time when the trade was expanding so that he acquired great wealth. The year 1753 was quite a good moment to retire, for the Seven Years War (1756–63) would prove a greater problem for France’s African interests and Caribbean empire than the previous war of the Austrian Succession, with the British making conquests of the smaller islands and using the general chaos and their maritime superiority to give the French planters everywhere a taste for bargain British slaves. Like the majority of successful French slavers, Antoine Walsh was ennobled. He left France a few years later, restless perhaps for a new challenge, to manage the family properties in St Domingue. He died there in 1763, slave trader turned planter/purchaser in a colony which was by then absorbing a shipload of Africans a week.60 Thus it became a colony envied as the richest gem in the imperial New World, before the opportunity offered by the French Revolution caused it to implode into the Caribbean’s first black republic. The head of the Walsh family in France was now Francois Jacques, once a Cadiz slave trader, ennobled in 1756 as Count Walsh of Serrant. He chose his title from his fine estate in Anjou which brother Antoine had helped him to buy in 1747, but Serrant may also have been paid for by Irish money inherited from his rich uncle Michael White of Waterford, further plumped up from the dowry of his Irish wife, Mary Harper of Harperstown, whom he had married in 1743.61 Over the years Antoine Walsh had purchased over 12,000 Africans for export across the Atlantic, though not all of them had reached the Americas. No other family from the Irish community in Nantes could claim anything approaching such a score. However, two others, the Rirdans and the Roches, emerged as significant armateurs. The Rirdan (O’Riordan) brothers Etienne and Laurent, claiming roots in Derryvoe, County Cork, sent out 11 expeditions 1734–49, purchasing just over 3,000 slaves.62 The Rirdans were connected by marriage to the Shiells and Thoby (Theobald) Clark. Shiell and Clark, like Philip Walsh, may have been important slavers before the more careful customs returns from the 1730s were established. A daughter of Thoby Clark and Marie Rirdan married a Montauodin, thus entering France’s premier slaving family. Luc Shiell, like his brother-in-law Antoine Walsh, was ennobled in the 1750s and in 1793 his granddaughter Anne was among of the noyés (the drowned ones), executed when Nantes’s republican authorities loaded their political opponents aboard deliberately holed vessels, and launched them out to sea.63 Comparable to the Rirdans in their slaving activities were a group of armateurs, busy 1739–55, bearing the name of Roche. In the case of the Roches the exact relationship of the various individuals to one another is not as clear as in the case of the Rirdans but, given the nature of Nantais commercial society, it is a decided possibility that they came from the same family. Mathias Roche et Cie sent out the first voyage. Then Roche Fréres and Francois


Roche et Fréres make appearances. From 1749 Nicholas Roche, unaccompanied by brothers, equipped six voyages. Nicholas’s penultimate ship was taken by the English on the 10 August 1755 on its way to St Domingue, presumably the enemy also acquired his African cargo, for the Princesse d’Angole had spent some months on the African coast and carried a crew of 37, suggesting a loading of 300 to 400 slaves, which would have taken the Roches’ numbers up to an equality with the Rirdans at 3000.64 (Leaving aside the exception Antoine Walsh, in general France’s Irish slavers recall the pattern established by their counterparts in Bristol; they did well out of the trade without reaching its highest ranks.) There is evidence of Roches in Britianny since 1650.65 In 1721 a Lodivicus Roche of St Malo wrote to the Ulster King of Arms of all Ireland to have his genealogy and crest confirmed in Dublin, an action which suggests that he felt the need to promote his status in France by this proof of gentle birth, was already prosperous enough to afford such an advantage and looked forward to the tax exemptions which in continental Europe accompanied noble titles. The herald’s office was quite content to endorse his descent from the medieval Roches and right to their heraldic arms, (Three roaches stretched out on the shield), choice of crest (a bird triumphantly flourishing a fish in its right claw, or vigorously extending its wings, but always standing on a rock). This motif was re-echoed by the motto, simultaneously indulging in wordplay and piety ‘Dieu est ma roche’ (God is my rock). Ludovicus had provided some very specific information about his father, grandfather and great grandfather. He describes them as Robert, Julius and Richard Roche of Limerick and notes that his mother was a daughter of Bernard Sutton and his grandmother a Catherine Arthur.66 Four years later a James Roche of Martinique made a similar request to the Ulster armourer and received his right to the crest and early genealogy but he claimed to belong to a family from Poulinelough and Currore, Co Cork.67 His father was Dominick and his mother Anastatia Martell which suggests that he had made his way to Martinique from France rather than Ireland. (Earlier female surnames in his family included Gould, Galway and Coppinger and could, by the mid-seventeenth century, be found in either place.) It is not possible to say whether the Nantais slave traders, Matthias, Francis and Nicholas were sons or close relatives of Ludovicus, nor if any of these men from the Irish Breton community were related to James of Martinique who, as he could afford claim to the medieval memorabilia of the osprey and fish, was a likely customer for slaves. The existence of a prosperous and heavily Catholic Irish community in France’s Atlantic ports attests to thriving trade links with Ireland, opportunities for new emigrants, a degree of small scale smuggling, the steady development of an Irish presence in the French West Indies, particularly in St Domingue that tropical eldorado, proliferating in white overseers, commercial agents and planters. In Nantes itself the Walsh family, ennobled as counts of Seurrat, took an interest in the affairs of the Irish college but any

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more direct connection between profits earned in the French slave trade and Ireland is difficult to discern.68 Limerick however does provide one such example. In September 1743 the St Louis, outfitted by Jacques Trant and Paul Creagh to carry some 200 slaves, left Nantes for Africa, loaded a cargo quite quickly and successfully completed the voyage to St Domingue, where it was laid up.69 Though it did not make the return trip to France, it might eventually have been employed elsewhere in the Caribbean or North America. Paul Creagh was a Limerick man and a slave trader, who had emigrated to Rhode Island, the centre of the North American Guinea trade, while possessing a base on that smugglers’ ‘golden rock’, Dutch St Eustatia, conveniently adjacent to Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, St Christopher/St Kitts, Nevis and Antigua. Jacques or James Trant came from an Irish family resident in France and Dublin; he had married Paul Creagh’s sister, Susanah, daughter of John Creagh of Limerick. As a widow Susanah Trant of Trantstown Co Cork inherited, and passed to her heir, legacies from both her husband and brother.70 This is an example of how money from the slave trade could come into Ireland, but such examples are rare, possibly because not much in the way of slave trade profits trickled back to Ireland. Yet curiously links between Limerick and the slave trade occur throughout the eighteenth century, hinting at a special relationship. Paul Creagh’s mid-century involvement did not die with him for in the late 1780s a James Creagh was operating as a merchant between St Eustatia and South Carolina, then the most enthusiastic slave purchaser in the new republic.71 At home, 1779 had at last seen the removal of the trade regulations which had circumscribed Ireland’s trading with the West Indies and West Africa. ‘A free trade for Ireland’ had brought her the right to enter the slave trade. In 1784 Limerick was the first port in Ireland to come forward with a carefully costed and informed plan, six ships annually to leave for the Slave and Guinea coasts of West Africa, outfitted at £3500 each.72 Apparently the profits made from the Prosperity’s 92 slaves almost 80 years earlier had left a mark on Limerick’s commercial consciousness. In England it is easy and in Ireland possible to trace money acquired from sugar and tobacco production back to particular buildings, institutions and landed estates. But in both countries it is more difficult to pinpoint a particular site and attribute its existence to a fortune made in the slave trade. British historians have generally drawn attention to the diffusion of such money into many areas, the building of docks and ships, of houses in urban and suburban Liverpool, Bristol and London, the promotion of banking and other commercial facilities, the expansion and erection of iron forges and textile mills. In Ireland this diffusionist approach quickly reaches a low level. Ireland’s wealthy slave traders were for the most part permanent émigrés. Slave trade profits may have helped to improve Dominick Trant’s Dunkettle estate and built Trantstown house, but no Trantstown village ever seems to have appeared. Slave ships rerouted round the north of Ireland to avoid French privateers may have taken on Irish water and provisions which


would otherwise have come from British ports. The small Irish investor in the slave trade could be found in the east coast ports as well as in Munster. Wages of officers and crew may have reached Irish families and swelled food consumption and the Irish brewing and distilling industries, but it is all small beer. Yet Ireland does possess one institution which can be traced back to a family and a fortune founded in the slave trade. Today it is a heritage site advertised as a premier example of Ireland’s industrial archaeology – that is the gunpowder mills at Ballinacollig, five miles west of Cork, on the tourist route to Killarney. The first powder mills there were built in 1794 by two Cork merchants, Charles Leslie and John Travers. In 1805 it was taken over by the Board of Ordnance, developing a huge 431 acre site beside the Lee and erecting a military barracks nearby to guard over their investment.73 But when the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 the gunpowder mills were soon abandoned. In 1834 the derelict site was bought by a Liverpool merchant Thomas Tobin, who renewed and expanded the plant. The canals and mills and workers houses, which the public see today, were built by the Tobins. By 1837, 200 hundred men were employed and by the mid-fifties it was 500. In their most prolific year (1877) the mills produced 32,000 barrels of gunpowder, most of it going to swell Ireland’s export trade.74 As the name suggest the Liverpuddlian entrepreneurs had Irish roots. In the early eighteenth century John Tobin, an Irishman, probably from Dublin, settled in the Isle of Man as a periwig maker. His son Patrick diversified into property and two of Patrick’s sons, John and Thomas, followed an established trajectory for ambitious Manx mariners by becoming Liverpool slave captains. The Tobins entered upon their careers in the 1790s at a time when that business was both reprehensible and expanding. The fortunes they acquired in the slave trade never reached the heights of those earned by Liverpool’s longer established, premier slaving families, but it provided the brothers with a launch pad into a new era. When the trade was banned, they used their African contacts (particularly close relations with Duke Ephraim, the African merchant prince of Calabar) to switch to the import of palm oil, once used as food for the slaves now increasingly a useful adjunct to Britain’s engineering and metallurgical industries and a key element in Liverpool’s emergence as a soap manufacturer. Throughout their careers, these Manx born Liverpuddlians found their Irish links both useful and renewable. In his early days at sea John was taken prisoner by a French privateer only to be freed by its Gallic Irish captain, Kelly, who had known Patrick Tobin in the Isle of Man. In 1799, as a slave-ship master, he sailed from Africa into Cork in order to land officials from the Cape Castle. Trading activity from Liverpool itself, continued to draw the brothers closer to Cork as they exported Cheshire salt there. The Tobins were Protestants which enabled them once they became successful merchants to move easily into the Liverpool commercial establishment.

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John Tobin married an Aspinall, a slave-trading, plantation owning family, and Thomas Tobin acquired a long lasting business partnership with the similarly associated Horsfalls. Such alliances further strengthened communications with Cork, an essential base for provisioning the West Indies. Though they succeeded in prospering without the trade, the Tobins regretted its passing. In the disillusionment of the 1840s when inquisitions were increasingly held on the difficulties of suppression, Thomas Tobin defended Britain’s past activities to a parliamentary committee, explaining that he had known slaves beg to be taken out of Africa; ‘If they had been in a nursery in any private family they could not have been treated better,’ he declared of the slaves on the ships he had captained.75 His experiences as a slave-trader meant that Thomas Tobin understood about gunpowder, both its commercial viability and its need for careful handling. When Thomas Tobin junior (1807–1881) moved to Ireland to run the new venture, he applied the severe paternalistic standards, expanded from the slave-ship and the Liverpuddlian nursery, to the gunpowder mills. In 1857 a newspaper reported that Patrick Murphy, one of Tobin’s workers had been fined ten shillings and imprisoned for a fortnight for ‘having ignited a match on a sawdust loft, thereby endangering the lives of all within the building’. In the same decade a massive explosion blew up a whole section of the canal and killed five operatives, but neither employees or employer were blamed for the disaster, management pointing out that the careful layout of the works, each combustible unit well removed one from another, had prevented a far higher death toll.76 Thomas Tobin jr. had taken up permanent residence in Cork becoming part of the Protestant establishment there, sitting on the Harbour Board and the National Lifeboat Institution, making charitable donations to the Infirmary and ending his life as a baronet, adopting the title Sir Thomas Tobin of Ballincollig.77 Today’s restored section of the site concentrates on his mills, showing how batches of saltpetre, sulphur and carbon, ‘green charge’, were mixed in the batch house and taken to the incorporating mills, mill cake was transported along the canal to the press house, press cake was broken into small pieces and sent to the corning mill, varying sized small grains were removed from there to be dried in the stove house and glazed with graphite to produce the final black substance. Fuelling Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy and Britain’s victorious but lacklustre performance in the Crimean War, the mills at Ballincollig, firmly rooted in slave trade profits, have done little to boost those of the Irish tourist trade. They are perhaps a suitable, if unintentional, memorial to Ireland’s relationship with the trade. Before 1780 the imperial mercantilist system discouraged Ireland from playing a direct role in the commerce. It was the Irish abroad who became involved in it. Direct impact on Ireland itself came from the slave plantations which required provisioning and in return supplied Ireland’s inhabitants with tobacco and sugar.


Part II At Home


6 Protestant, Catholic

When the Spanish crown acquired its valuable territories overseas it was quick to tie them closely into its mercantile and taxation system. From the start colonists paid the king a 3 percent sales tax the alcabala and he also received ‘the royal fifth’ on gold, silver, tobacco and sugar exported to Spain. Bernard O’Brien in his memorial seeking support for an Irish colony in Brazil stressed the corrupt nature of the Portuguese administration there, working determinedly to cheat Philip IV of his taxes. The goods from home which the settlers longed for, wine, textiles, swords, fire arms, metal tools, all arrived in Hispanic ships. Foreigners were not allowed to trade direct with the colonies, nor indeed were all of the Crown’s European subjects; in accordance with arrangements firmly rooted in the middle ages, specific regions and ports were given a monopoly of such commerce which was focused on Seville and Castile. When the Stuarts in England acquired their unprepossessing colonies on the North American mainland and their perilously tiny tobacco islands in the Caribbean, they took little interest in tying them closely to the metropolitan. Thus the early Irish settlers on Montserrat, like the colonists in all the other areas, traded freely with the Dutch and any other Europeans who appeared, gaining credit, expertise, slaves and cheap freight from across the Atlantic. But after the Restoration, in the later decades of the seventeenth century, the Crown discovering itself the possessor of valuable colonies with sugar in the Caribbean and tobacco in Virginia, began to develop a system of mercantile regulation. Chilly New England with its dubiously loyal Puritans, growing unexcitingly European type produce, aroused little enthusiasm. But enumerated goods, that is, tropical products, sugar, tobacco, indigo, rice, now had to come straight to England, though they could travel in Irish or colonial ships. In this respect, as the eighteenth-century Jamaican historian Edward Long pointed out, Ireland whatever her claim to be a sister kingdom, was being treated as a colony.1 Sugar had always been a slave product, while tobacco had been a white man’s, even a smallholder’s crop, but from the 1780s Virginian and Maryland tobacco from the tidewater country on Chesapeake Bay, was 119


increasingly grown by planters using black slaves, the first shipload introduced by a Dutch captain in 1619. Between 1660 and 1685, after which date the increasingly effective application of the Navigation Acts enforced another pattern, Ireland developed a triangular trade of her own. She sent provisions to the Caribbean islands and sugar to the colonies on the Chesapeake where it was exchanged for ‘huge quantities of tobacco’ which was then brought straight to Irish ports.2 Out of this seventeenth-century base, a theory of imperial trade regulation was laid down, developing in the eighteenth century into an established system which was understood by merchants and producers working within it or seeking to flout it as their interests dictated. All the units involved were supposed to benefit; the colonies were provided with an assured and protected market by the mother country, the mother country provided manufactured goods and access to credit. Lacking a tropical staple New England and Ireland fitted less comfortably into this pattern yet in the case of Ireland certain aspects of the system worked well. The Crown, through the Linen Board, encouraged production of that textile and by the early eighteenth century it was well established in the province of Ulster with spinning spreading to the northern counties of Connacht, Sligo, Mayo and Leitrim. After 1660 two prohibitive regulations passed by the Westminster Parliament had an impact on Ireland’s development. The import of live cattle, Irish provisions and woollen cloth was crushed by heavy duties. In the case of wool, this inhibited Irish manufactures though there was still a home market and a smuggled continental one to be supplied. However, in the case of live cattle, the ban eventually proved to be advantageous to Ireland’s economy as beef cattle came to supply a growing food processing industry. The Irish provision trade, diverted from England, developed to victual shipping in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But it was the West Indies who were the best customers. So valuable had the industry become that, in the 1730s when Walpole suggested that he would repeal the Cattle Acts in exchange for greater Irish activity against wool smuggling, the graziers showed no interest in the concession, fearing that the export of live beasts would cut down the supplies they needed for the provision trade. The need to import animal protein from Ireland, across the Atlantic was the result of the economic system in the Caribbean, not the environment. In 1624, when William Powell claimed Barbados for James I, it was inhabited by feral pigs, for wherever the Spaniards landed they had left a few hogs to proliferate thus providing a future food supply against their possible return. When Cromwell took Jamaica in 1655, it was running with herds of wild cattle. The buccaneers of St Domingue were so called because they slaughtered wild cattle and smoked the meat Indian style (boucaner). Throughout the Caribbean, planters possessed farms (English speakers called them ‘pens’) as well as plantations, but they grudged the deployment of any significant amount of labour away from the valuable sugar. Presiding over an export

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economy it was natural for them to look to shipping to serve their needs. Small in numbers compared to the slave population (20 per cent, as against 80 per cent in Barbados by 1750: in the other colonies nearer 10 per cent) heavy eating and drinking by all who could afford it was the norm in white society. Visitors often commented on the extent of planter breakfasts and dinners, impressed or horrified by the amounts involved. Irish butter, pickled beef, tongues and salmon were popular European fare; basic slave protein came from salted fish and maize flour. While the greater part of this arrived from the mainland colonies, Ireland made an important contribution with barrelled herring, supplemented by cod from Newfoundland (Talamh an Eisc, the land of the fish) to Irish speakers. A seasonal workforce from Waterford processed the catch, packing the prime cuts for Mediterranean markets, and the rejects for the slaves in the sugar colonies.3 In the British islands by mid-century enough barrelled beef was imported to allow every white colonist to consume two cwt a year, as against thirty pounds of fish per slave per annum.4 By that time the French had acquired a reputation for feeding their slaves better than the British, supplying them with beef rather than fish. This beef came from Ireland; the product ‘cow beef’ was made up from elderly dairy cattle fattened at the end of their days to be fit for slaughter and from rejected pieces of other animals. In the hot climate, salted, pickled and spiced supplies, which would remain edible for some time after the barrel was opened, were a form of convenience food. The linen industry was Ireland’s most important exporter but the provision trade with the West Indies had an enormous impact on Munster and to a lesser extent on Connacht. Older than the production of salt beef was Ireland’s production of butter. It was there for exchange in the seventeenth century when the cargoes of tobacco began to arrive, helping the narcotic to infuse itself through Irish society. The Purcells were searching for tobacco by 1612; the Irish along with Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English were growing it in the 1620s and 30s. The Munster satire Pairlement chloinne Tomáis (Parliament of Clan Thomas), written in the first half of the seventeenth century, caricatures the pretensions of a group of upwardly mobile ex-serfs, who hold a parliament and pass a statute declaring their intention to stop eating their own butter (resulting proceeds to pay rent) and to give up tobacco. An English trader arrives, Robinín an Tobaca, and they immediately purchase his merchandise, producing clay pipes from their caps and settling down to smoke. This satire thus illustrates both the firmly established presence of the transatlantic product and how commerce in tobacco carried with it the spread of the English language, as Tomas proudly acts as an interpreter between the trader and the rest of his group.5 In 1641 Lord Inchquin, working to suppress the rebellion in Munster, claimed that the rebels, posing as tobacco sellers, were moving around spreading news to the insurgents.6 As tobacco became part of the warp and weft of Irish life in the 1660s, slavery emerged as a


significant element in the Chesapeake bound labour system, growing gradually so that in the years after 1680 it came to dominate the work force.7 For some 200 years, from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, Ireland’s consumption of tobacco per capita remained much the same (always well over a pound per head per annum, in fortunate decades, 1750 to 1770, almost reaching two).8 By the late seventeenth century, tobacco had penetrated the countryside; snuff (rapee) was sniffed up and sneezed over, pipes and tobacco were laid out at wakes and consumed without reference to age or gender.9 Simultaneously another crop laboured on by Henry and John Blake’s 38 slaves made a remarkable visual impact on Ireland. After centuries of wearing various shades of brown, at the close of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty found the Irish peasantry uniformly arrayed in dark blue derived from indigo. Like tobacco, its re-routing through British ports, did not stop its eighteenth-century market expanding. By the 1780s the Lord Mayor of Dublin, James Horan, was an indigo merchant while Maurice (the Hunting Cap) O’Connell was disposing of a contraband indigo cargo on the Shannon.10 As for tobacco, by then it was being doled out to the deserving inhabitants of poor houses and infirmaries. Henry Flood addressing parliament in Patriot mood in the session of 1773/4 objected to a government plan to increase the duties on tobacco still further, protesting that they were ‘oppressing the poor by taxing the only little luxury they enjoy’ to which the Chief Secretary responded by announcing that he would raise the revenue from cards and brandy instead.11 Before being sold, tobacco needed to be rolled or plaited and such ‘tobacco spinning’ was conveniently suited to child labour in an age of expanding population.12 Tobacco also made an impact on the literary world. In the seventeenth century it entered Gaelic poetry, joining cattle, white breasted women and feather beds as symbols of the good life.13 In the eighteenth century it featured increasingly in newspapers, the arrivals of particular vessels and their captains were announced, the names of wholesale houses advertised; accounts were given of the murders of revenue officers attacked by tobacco smugglers and offers of rewards for information displayed.14 Such printed and official reports are of course only the meagre items of salvage from the lost cargo of oral culture. By 1780 the duty on tobacco was almost five times its original price.15 The attractions of smuggling were obvious. Most smuggling activities were not the result of illicit voyages from the Chesapeake to Ireland, nor were they altogether the work of the reckless bandetti described in the newspaper accounts. Often those involved were wealthy, established merchants, Henry Archer of Ross in county Wexford, 1735, or Waddell Cunningham in Belfast in the 1780s.16 The intention was to manipulate the mercantile system rather than bypass it, the successful merchant knew as much about collecting bounties and acquiring customs drawbacks as about paying duties. Thus tobacco could be mixed with rubbish at strategic


moments to increase its weight and secure a larger drawback. Another ploy was to acquire forfeited tobacco, which was exempt from customs duties and therefore could be sold at a handsome profit. An informer, who succeeded in delivering up a cargo to the revenue officers, was due a substantial proportion of the goods so that an informer might well be in the pay of the smuggler, engaged to hand him back his forfeited property which, shorn of duties, could be worth more than the entire original cargo. During the eighteenth century, government legislation was shifted about uneasily to confront such problems, at times cutting down the informer’s share, burning forfeited goods and paying him with money, or selling the goods ‘by candle’, that is, in a swift, immediate auction to be conducted before a single candle burnt out.17 Often sordid and dangerous, smuggling was nevertheless enticing, carrying with it the excitement of a gamble, the satisfaction of defeating the authorities, offering its successful perpetrators status in their community, a place in folk memory. To the quick-witted and ambitious it could be a means of social mobility. Spirits, tea and tobacco were all smugglers’ favourites, but, of these, tobacco was king. In mid eighteenth-century Kerry, Maurice O’Connell built up his family’s fortune by smuggling from France’s Atlantic ports, sending out cargoes of butter and receiving brandy and tea in return. But, in the fifties, Nantes could not supply tobacco at a good price and by the seventies O’Connell was attempting to use contacts in Guernsey in order to access supplies from Virginia.18 Twentieth-century investigation into the varied and often exaggerated assessments of the extent of eighteenthcentury customs fraud, reveal tobacco as the only commodity which can with certainty be said to have been smuggled into Ireland in large quantities.19 That the Irish consumed so much legal and illegal tobacco was due to the ready availability of slave labour. Having ousted wine in the seventeenth century as Ireland’s most valuable import, tobacco retained that position until 1730 when it was overtaken by another slave grown crop, sugar. In the seventeenth century, sugar had trickled into Ireland. Probably it was too expensive to have wide sale, which would explain why some Irish merchants thought it better to exchange it in the Chesapeake for tobacco. However from quite an early date its presence is indicated in the western ports. By 1641 Bandon Bridge possessed a Sugar Lane, a term usually applied to a place where sugar was further refined as well as sold. Mid seventeenthcentury Galway trade tokens, a local and personal copper currency worth a penny, show Daniel Kelly, a merchant from Loughreagh, striking a triangular image, the representation of a sugar loaf, so shaped because it was moulded by the pot into which the liquid sugar had been poured to cool and solidify.20 The appearance of tobacco, and to a lesser extent sugar and indigo, helped to spread a money economy in west. Butter was becoming more saleable and the impact of commercialised cattle keeping, to supply the Atlantic market, was marked in Munster where dairying, to support the butter trade,


extended through Cork, Kerry and Tipperary. This of course allowed landowners to raise rents, but it also enriched middle men who provided dairy cows as well as land for their tenants. In Munster many of these substantial leaseholders were Catholics. ‘Everyone of them thinks themselves too great for any industry except by taking farms. When they happen to get them, they screw enormous rents from some beggarly dairyman and spend their whole time in the alehouse in the next village. If they have sons they are all priests, physicians or French officers’, wrote the aristocratic and Catholic, Earl of Kenmare splenetically in 1760, furnishing support for the view of the middleman system as providing a refuge for the dispossessed Catholic gentry.21 Kenmare’s description of his fellow countrymen and social inferiors retains echoes from the early Irish laws, where high social standing depended on freedom from manual labour, the warrior and the literate professions received respect and the noble supplied his client with cattle. The merchant is absent from Kenmare’s inventory as he is from the legal tracts. It has been suggested that the Catholic gentry sent their sons into the continental armies rather than into trading activities because it was cheaper to produce a soldier than a merchant. While this does reflect financial reality, undoubtedly the inherited attitudes of the young played a part in this choice. To go off as an army officer was exciting, to return home to recruit among the local peasantry reinforced social standing. Though possibly requiring less investment than commerce, it did cost money to embark on a military career. For the penniless gentry, the West Indies offered a cheap, if unattractive, form of employment abroad congruent with their social status. A slave overseer was in a position of command. This can be seen in the career of Daniel O’Connell’s contemporary and cousin, John Bourke, the eldest son in an infuriatingly large and needy family. In the 1780s both Tom Fitzmaurice, John Bourke’s soldier uncle and great uncle, Maurice O’Connell, refused to fund the military career the young man desired. At Maurice O’Connell’s suggestion Bourke left for Jamaica to become an overseer. From this position he began buying and selling slaves on the island, an investment which eventually allowed him to purchase a 50 acre pen in the north, near Montego Bay. Here he grew provisions and kept a work force of 32 slaves mostly for hiring out. From these resources, in 1793, he despatched money home: £60 to be invested for his father, the annual interest to revert to his sister when the old man died, a gift of £15 for his brother, Thomas, and £25 for his youngest brother, Fitzmaurice, to enable him to come out to Jamaica. Before doing so John recommended that Fitzmaurice be sent to Cork to boarding school, or to a genteel family, where he would learn to ‘drop his brogue’.22 John Bourke’s letter arranging these matters, shows his adaptation to British West Indian standards, the success of the career choice forced upon him by Great Uncle Maurice and the arrival of plantation money into Ireland. Bourke’s career


was not an isolated one; a desultory trail stretches back down the eighteenth century revealing the use of the slave colonies as a destination for the more disadvantaged individuals from among the gentry – hence the fate of the St Croix Dominicans in the 1760s and in 1707 of Patrick Cusack, son of Francis Cusack of Kilbellyporter, Co Meath, sent to the West Indies, by his Catholic relatives as a punishment for turning Protestant.23 Maurice O’Connell’s status as head of an increasingly wealthy Kerry family was heavily based on butter which he collected from the local peasantry and sold in the Butter Market in Cork or smuggled to Nantes. Whichever destination it left for, the heavily salted and pickled article was designed for, and would be exported on to, the West Indies. The O’Connell family experience illustrates the continued importance of the tropical market long after 1759 when trade regulations were lifted to admit Irish provisions into Britain. In 1822, with the English market glutted by their own dairy produce, only tropical connections prevented a disastrous fall in Munster prices. The West Indies proved as reliable as ever, while Lisbon merchants were eager to exploit their Irish contacts to supply Brazil, an eager customer with its slave plantation economy, funded by the investment of British capital, burgeoning with sugar and coffee.24 Lord Kenmare’s comment on the social impact of dairying highlights the existence of a rural money economy in Munster and the encouragement which it gave to local distilling and brewing, legal or otherwise. The ale house provided a point of contact which helped in the replacement of butter factors (agents of the Cork merchants) by a more extensive network of butter buyers working from Mallow Lane, the city’s most Catholic quarter and official butter market. The sale of alcohol opened up a range of rural opportunities. An alehouse keeper might act as grocer, selling the sparse list of goods (salt and tobacco) which had so far become commonplace in the countryside. It could be the stopping place for the dairyman taking his firkins on horse back to Cork, a prized activity for the male head of the household, while the women and young people did much of the daily grind of butter production and animal husbandry.25 Whatever the hazards and difficulties, the movement of goods in an agrarian society provided something in the way of opportunity and change. At the other end of the journey, the fetching of the provisions from port to plantation would be carried out by a carter, often an élite slave furnished with papers to show that he was legitimately absent from his master’s estate. Cow beef and salt herring consumed by slaves in Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Domingue, Jamaica, Barbados and the Leeward Islands, like the bonny clabber on the Munster peasants’ potatoes, were the products of Cork’s merchant contact with the Caribbean, the Atlantic economy reverberating on both its western and eastern shores. In beef production the main figures were the merchant, the grazier and the butcher. The rearing of beef cattle extended even more widely than dairying.


By the eighteenth century, Munster’s demands drew beasts from Connacht. The economic vitality of both dairying and grazing reduced tillage, a trend in eighteenth-century Ireland condemned by contemporary commentators such as Dr Samuel Madden and by nineteenth-century historians.26 From Swift to John Mitchel patriots would sharpen their pens to denounce the iniquity of a land full of poor people exporting its food. These were Irish versions of the intense debate raised by the changes produced first by the arrival of commercial, then industrial capitalism. Wherever it touched the widening market, produced winners and losers, the expansion of wealth and those who enjoyed it, throwing into sharp relief the growing presence of the many who had not, including groups apparently worse off than ever. The richer the corn country, the poorer the labourer, Cobbett remarked bitterly as he rode through rural England in the early nineteenth century. Western Europe displayed pallid and undersized factory children, eastern Europe a peasantry enmeshed in ‘the second serfdom’ to allow their lords to sell grain abroad. Ireland produced butter producers too poor to eat their own butter, America proliferated with enslaved Africans. Like Munster, eighteenth-century Connacht experienced economic change. In Sligo, Charles O’Hara, friend and correspondent of Edmund Burke, worked to transform a peasantry, who supplied him with food and horses, into some kind of paying tenants, so that he could spend time in Dublin, London, Cheltenham and the Curragh. As early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, the O’Haras were exporting provisions to the West Indies and taking an interest in developing herring fishing.27 Later generations watched while dealers from Munster began to appear, buying store cattle to herd south to fatten nearer Cork. Probably the spinning of linen yarn was the steadiest earner on their 6500 acre estate, much of it poor mountain land, where Charles O’Hara urbanely informed a group, who told him they had ‘lived under him this 500 years’, that they had developed modern vices and must introduce modern methods.28 Their relationship with the O’Haras may well have had the longevity they claimed, for back at home in the new and modestly elegant Nymphsfield, the family possessed a pre-Christian golden torque and a seventeenth-century miniature of the little boy whose succession as a Protestant minor had allowed the Catholic Gaelic family to hold onto their estate. But what were the ‘modern vices?’ – presumably a penchant for tobacco, or even tea and sugar. Certainly Charles O’Hara was well aware of the importance of tropical consumer goods. In his economic survey of county Sligo, he highlights the end of a recession in 1752, ‘people began to look cheerful again and lands rose in their value’. He attributed this ‘enlivening of our markets’ to the high price of butter, the increased demand for woollen manufactures from Munster buyers and the arrival of smuggled Portuguese sugar.29 Two out of these three developments were stimulated by the existence of slave plantations acting as both customer and supplier.


Lands rising in value did not make everyone smile. Communal agrarian protest, so much a recognised part of Irish life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first appeared as a significant manifestation in 1711 in Iar Connacht (1711–12), an area west of Galway town, where the ‘houghers’, angry at rising rents and the extension of pasture over tillage, maimed animals (cattle and sheep), without sectarian bias. The names of those involved recalled the servant and planter divisions on Montserrat forty years earlier, Blake, Kirwan, Lynch, Bodkin, Skerret.30 Perhaps this first protest against increased pasture took place in Iar Connacht just because it was wild, poor and inaccessible. Other areas more directly affected by the provision trade may have adjusted quietly at an earlier date. A more serious and sustained outbreak of communal disturbance came in the 1760s from those who had adjusted but now saw themselves oppressed by, rather than sharing in, rising prosperity. The Whiteboys originally appeared on the rich lands of Tipperary among a tenantry protesting about the new demands made upon them by gentry and clergy, Protestant and Catholic, in the wake of the Seven Years War, a war which had enriched landlords, middlemen and merchants. The economic importance of the slave colonies to Ireland did not result in the arrival of many Africans there. The small number who did appear mostly came as slave servants with their well-to- do masters and mistresses and probably remained visitors rather than permanent inhabitants. Recent research lists 160 documentary references of sightings for the second half of the eighteenth century. 100 of these refer to Dublin, but the figure of 40 for Munster is significant.31 This combing of the newspapers has revealed only two Irish advertisements offering a slave for sale, the second one in Dublin (1768) and the first one in Cork – ‘To be sold for account of D.F., a black Negro boy aged about 14 years, remarkably free from vice and a very, handy willing servant.’ (Cork Journal, 15 March 1762 ).32 The county was also home to the century’s only recorded Irish speaking Negro, the South Carolina born, Samuel Burke.33 Munster’s involvement in the Black Atlantic is reflected in the life, work and vicissitudes of her Gaelic poets. There is the inclusion of the African presence in Denis Macnamara’s poetic account of his attempted emigration.34 While the Kerry poet, Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain (1748–1784) schoolmaster, labourer and British naval rating, master of the melodious aisling, is said to have written his only poem in English (a celebration of Port Royal in Jamaica) in an attempt to persuade his Royal Navy commander to allow him to leave the service.35 The development of the Atlantic provision trade which brought changes to the countryside produced even more dramatic development in urban life. In the eighteenth century Cork was a boom town, its population rising by 250 percent, leaping from 17,500 in 1706 to 41,000 by 1750 and almost doubling again in the next 50 years, the source of its expansion, the slave and sugar islands, those gems of mercantilist empire. Taking advantage of its westerly position, outstripping earlier rivals Kinsale, Youghal and Bandon,


Cork pioneered the Caribbean provision trade so that it became the ‘The most advanced meatpacking industry in the eighteenth century world’.36 Simultaneously it achieved the same reputation for its butter production. By the 1740s ships from Bremen and the Dutch Netherlands thronged its harbour seeking to purchase its tropical specialities and suspected of industrial espionage, that is, the attempt to break into the recipes which enabled the Irish to produce stores so resistant to deterioration in hot climates. Merchant shipping sailed up the Lee into a rose-red city, its new brick buildings with their Dutch gables rising on both shores, the customs house, elegantly edged with stone and the expanding quays indicating the dominance of the southern side. Cork had devised methods of barrelling beef to resist high temperatures, importing high quality Portuguese salt with a low moisture content which aided preservation. Products were graded to appeal to different markets, ‘mess beef’ for planters, ‘cargo beef’ for the poorer whites and cheapest of all ‘cow beef’, the fattened carcases of elderly dairy cattle, for the slaves on the French islands.37 This last was an important element in the provision trade. In years of peace from 1730–40 and 1748–56, Ireland’s beef exports to France surpassed all other markets, including that of the British West Indies.38 When the trade was disrupted by wars and their embargoes, the French found themselves, as the British intended, in serious difficulties. In such situations slaves could die in large numbers. Conscious of their dependence on Irish beef to feed their colonies, they tried unsuccessfully to develop cattle rearing in the south of France. During the War of the Austrian Succession they purchased Danish beef but it proved to be ‘wretchedly packed and stinking’; in the end only the import of Irish beef by neutrals (the Dutch and the Danes) kept food crises at bay. Prices were so high as to make complex smuggling manoeuvres attractive. In 1744 Richard Bradshaw the High Sheriff of Cork was discovered selling a ship and its cargo in Martinique.39 The protracted embargo during the American war was hated by Cork’s export merchants because they feared, with some justification, that the French colonial market would be permanently damaged. In the British islands long established taste and the quality of Irish beef enabled it to withstand growing competition from Jamaica and the North American mainland in the later years of the century. The barrelling of butter was an old and widespread Irish industry but the demands of the sugar colonies caused Cork to both expand its output and adjust it to tropical conditions. From 1690–1760 the Caribbean market dominated Cork’s butter trade. Heavily salted butter, packed in full size firkins carrying a rose mark or harp and crown, was further prepared for long preservation in high temperatures by having pickle added. Numerous other items and smaller trades flourished because of these Caribbean connections. Expensive pickled tongues and spiced salmon were popular with British and French planters. The French islands purchased Cork candles in large


quantities. Throughout the century Cork retained its place as the foremost Irish supplier often buying and repacking herring from Scotland and the Baltic to supplement the local catch.40 Until 1782 Cork was the sole centre for provisioning army and navy supply ships, while this included victualling vessels bound for the Mediterranean, a high proportion were squadrons sailing west to protect the precious sugar islands in peace time and war. Ships crossing to the Caribbean made use of Cork’s sail cloth (in mid century the city possessed the only sail cloth manufactory in Ireland), ropes and raw hide for re-rigging. They also added them to their cargoes, for here again the sugar islands, unlike the mainland colonies, did not produce their own supplies.41 Expansion of Cork meant expansion of the Catholic community there. For unlike Dublin, where Protestants were in a majority at the beginning of the eighteenth century and remained a substantial element in its population at the close, Cork was predominantly Catholic. In 1730 there were two Catholics to every Protestant, in 1800 there were four.42 Though English was the language of commerce, Cork supported writers of Irish as well as English, commenting on contemporary affairs such as the quarrel between Boston and the Westminster government. West Indian interests impinged on business classes and professional classes alike, the two groups intimately involved. This is illustrated by the career of John Moylan who, with his six house leases and slaughter yard, rose into the ranks of provision exporters. One of his sons remained in the business, while Francis, trained as a cleric in Toulouse, became bishop of Cork. Stephen settled in Philadelphia as a merchant, on the outbreak of war joined the revolutionary army and became one of George Washington’s generals. A fourth son was a merchant in the French slave trading port of L’Orient.43 Francis Moylan was on occasion drawn into the work of Nano Nagle. Later the founder of the Presentation Sisters, though remaining a lay woman herself, she had moved into town from her landed family’s estate in the 1760s. Horrified by the underside of the thriving port (Cork had been the first city in Ireland to establish a foundling asylum, in order to remove abandoned infants from the streets), she set up a school for poor girls which soon expanded into another for boys. By 1770 she had been approached by merchants who asked her to furnish them with boys for the servant trade. She agreed, like others before and after her seeing the Americas as offering a better life for the young. She was also convinced that the poor were better placed than the rich to impart Christian doctrine. So she encouraged her charges in that skill, equipping them with a supply of brightly coloured pictures specially ordered in from France and urging them to ‘take great pains with the little blacks to instruct them’.44 Her surviving papers do not record how many boys she sent out or the name of their destination. It is impossible to tell whether they were bound for the French or Spanish islands, or tolerant St Croix, or the British islands, where of course Catholic proselytism was banned, though that may not have


concerned her much as, to the horror of her family, she had already ignored Irish laws against the establishment of Catholic educational institutions. The corporation of Cork, which of course excluded Catholics, was fiercely suspicious of their success in commerce. As early as 1709 it discussed organising a kingdom-wide campaign to ban them from foreign trade, but failed in the attempt. It was particularly in the area of foreign trade that the Corporation felt Catholics were at an advantage, sharing religion with the French and the Spanish, reinforced by family ties and linguistic expertise which would ensure easy entry into the valuable cow beef commerce. They were also said to be more successful smugglers, illegally exporting woollens to the continent and tapping return supplies of alcohol. The most prominent among them ‘talked big on the change’. Their communal wealth was displayed in the building of spacious mass houses, which they attended in very large, well dressed numbers, indeed they built three churches in the city during penal times. Cork’s Protestant merchants, also growing in wealth and numbers, and holding the commanding heights of the corporation, were infuriated by this blatant subversion of the social and political order.45 In fact though numerically superior, the Catholics remained economically inferior. Only a third of the merchants in eighteenth-century Cork were Catholics. Of these only a handful were substantial exporters of provisions, probably three in mid-century, Gould, Shea and Moylan. The one area of commerce dominated by Catholics was the butter market in Mallow Lane where they acted a shopkeepers and butter buyers. The siteing of the public weigh house there in the 1720s produced indignant Protestant comment and acceptance of an established necessity.46 Beyond the butter market, Catholics were prominent as grain merchants, tallow chandlers and grocers. And throughout the lower levels connected with the preparation of provisions they were an indispensable work force busy as butchers, salters, packers and coopers. By the 1730s the power struggle between Protestants and Catholics increasingly focused on the quarterage dispute. Throughout Ireland the practical necessity of acknowledging the existence of Catholics in urban economic life was solved by the admission of non-freemen to guilds as ‘quarter brothers’, so called because they paid their subscriptions quarterly. These dues, and the inferior status they conferred, were generally resented by Catholics but Cork Catholics were confident enough to widely default on payment. The Lord Mayor reacted by imposing gaol sentences or confiscating goods, but these urban Art O’Learys continued to resist, threatening to prove the illegality of the guild demands in court. Eventually in 1759–61 they won cases in Dublin and London. As a result of the Dublin case, a middling merchant, Richard Burke, acquired a warrant for the arrest of the Mayor of Cork, a duty which he carried out with public gusto. Disgusted and humiliated by defeat in the courts, Cork corporation petitioned parliament for legal confirmation of the rights of corporations to


demand quarterage from non-freeman. This time they succeeded in unleashing a widespread reaction as Waterford, Dublin, Drogheda, Youghal, Clonmel, Limerick, New Ross and Wexford all designed and forwarded petitions to parliament demanding confirmation of their quarterage rights. Counter-petitions from non-freemen, soon appeared, first from Dublin and Cork, followed by Drogheda, Clonmel and Limerick.47 Co-ordination of this head-on battle now passed to Dublin, where the Catholic Committee, founded in 1759, took over the orchestration of the quarter brothers’ grievances, thus acquiring greater support and interest from their merchant community and strengthening their hand in the struggle for Catholic relief.48 The demand by Ireland’s Protestant freemen that parliament legalise their right over quarterage rumbled on for decades. But in Cork the onslaught of the long embargo resulting from the American war focused the indignation of the corporation on a Patriot cause which both Protestants and Catholics could apparently share. Yet in the first half of the eighteenth century the Catholic community in Cork had used their growing prosperity to confront the establishment, building substantial mass houses, consolidating a firm hold on the lower echelons of the food processing industries and activating the quarterage dispute. Thus in the decades when Cork’s contact with the sugar colonies was at its most dynamic, the city emerged as the leading urban challenger of the penal laws. By the eighteenth century the use of terms like ‘mere Irish’, ‘old English’ and ‘new English’ were no longer in vogue and the term ‘Anglo Irish’ had not yet made an impact. In eighteenth-century Ireland the three main ethnic groups were referred to by religious labels, Protestant (Church of Ireland), Catholic and Dissenter (Presbyterian). In Cork and in Munster the split was very much a two fold division, for the Dissenter community was small. Among Cork’s richest Protestant merchants was Richard Hare, perhaps the richest in the city. In the early 1770s he wrote, ‘I owe the fortune I have made in Business to the care I have always taken to ship the best Provisions and I am now as much a slave to my business as I was twenty years past’.49 His was the last generation involved with the West Indies to be able to write that word without a twinge of conscience or a rush of defensive fury. Richard Hare came from an English background, possibly from a needy gentry family seeking opportunities in Ireland in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.50 A William Hare of Cork, linen draper, who made a will in 1759 may have been his elder brother and it was in the period 1750–1770 that Richard emerged as a notable success among the provisioners.51 By 1770 he was paying more than £6,000 annually in customs duties, while, with an eye to the social advancement of his family, he had acquired land which brought in £2,000 a year. Richard Hare’s fortune so made, allowed him to emerge as the only Cork merchant to provide capital for the establishment of the Bank of Ireland in 1782.52 Like most Cork merchants he did not own ships; instead he was a commission agent, gathering and packing


provisions, arranging freight, very frequently accepting his return West Indian cargo in rum. It was credit availability which tied him into the banking and sugar network in London, a facility used by all Cork’s international traders to give stability to an occupation which otherwise could have been hazardous at home and abroad. The supply of beef and butter was at the mercy of wet springs and dry summers. Though of course for merchants a bad year, as long as it was not too bad a year, could compensate with high prices. The West Indies with its hurricanes, and depredation by insects and naval campaigners, was even worse than Ireland for producing a sudden catastrophic failure of commercial crops. Planters’ payments, as Richard Hare pointed out, were notoriously unreliable, ‘many bills from the West Indies go back protested and other delays in remittances’. He thus agreed only to arrangements acceptable to his big London contact Maitland and Boddington.53 This security allowed him to maintain an extensive trading network. In the West Indies he supplied planters on Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Nevis and Jamaica. He possessed suppliers and customers and distributors in Memel, Hamburg, Lisbon and Amsterdam. (Irish salt beef often went through the Netherlands to France).54 In Bristol his wares were eagerly sought by Alexander, James and Evan Baillie, a firm where the partners owned plantations on a number of islands while plying the triangular trade. In Liverpool he was in contact with the Tarletons, a merchant family providing the city with MPs who stoutly defended the slave trade when the parliamentary attack began in 1789.55 At home in Ireland professional interests and the dictates of class caused Richard Hare to work with Catholic merchants like the Moylans, at times calling upon their special contacts – a shortage of Portuguese salt for example caused him to appeal to a number of them for help in seeking imports.56 Working in the same area, in their need to fulfil contracts or supply the home market, the provisioners would sometimes have to purchase from one another, so that their dealings display both co-operation and rivalry. But such contacts were unlikely to develop into closer relations; commercial partnerships were frequently underpinned by marriage and until 1792 the penal laws banned intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants. It seems clear that in spite of legal prohibitions such unions did take place, but the hazards and complications involved were discouraging to merchant families of either grouping working hard to increase their wealth. Protestantism in Cork, city and county, was strong enough to indulge in political splits, Lord Shannon’s extensive patronage as a great landowner exciting rural and urban criticism. Richard Hare’s commercial roots placed him in opposition to Lord Shannon in mid-century but underlying these often vicious quarrels, was a unifying and unyielding sense of Protestantism. In 1771 the year of Sheriff Morris’s provocative offer of £5 for Art O’Leary’s mettlesome ‘white nosed mare’, Richard Hare was, equally stereotypcially, looking for a small, staid steed for himself.57 That summer he was one of the


signatories to the complaint published in the Evening Post against O’Leary, as the ex-Habsburg officer turned outlaw and moved towards the fate which would produce a keen so piercing that it would penetrate both of the island’s literary traditions. In 1773, after O’Leary’s death, Hare joined those making a public contribution to a reward offered for the apprehension of the avenger who had tried to shoot Morris.58 Hare’s anxiety to see his family permanently ensconced among the landed governing classes was rewarded next year, when two of his daughters married the heirs of substantial properties, Mary to John Bagwell, MP for Tipperary and Margaret Anne to John Croker of Ballinagarde, Co Limerick.59 For his son, William, untrained for the counting house, he purchased land surreptitiously in counties Kerry and Cork; By 1797 William, now sitting along with his son Richard (Eaton and Oxford) for the borough of Athy, claimed to have an estate worth £30,000 a year; others estimated it variously at £25,000, £20,000 and £12,000. The Union, for which both William and young Richard voted enthusiastically, brought the family the title of Lord (later Viscount) Ennismore but the abolition of the borough of Athy left the family outside the Westminster parliament.60 However in the 1812 election Richard II, standing as a Tory, won a seat by challenging one of the Whig Ponsonbys. A silent but loyal government supporter, he dedicated himself to acquiring a further title for his father. In this he was supported by Peel, impressed not only with Richard’s voting record but with the fact that, unlike most Irish peers, the Hares extensive estates were unencumbered. So William Hare, the son of the old provision merchant, emerged as the Earl of Listowel in 1822. More than a century later, his twentieth-century descendant, the fifth earl, William Francis, Labour leader in the House of Lords during the Attlee administration, was appointed Governor of the Gold Coast (1957–60), where he would play a key role in its decolonisation.61 Richard Hare may have been the wealthiest merchant in Cork in his day but, among his contemporaries, there was a Catholic merchant family reputed to be as rich or even richer – the Roches of Limerick. In August 1771 the Limerick merchants had already imported 3–400 hundred puncheons of best Jamaican rum to supply the market there, while Hare was looking for supplies in Liverpool in an effort to hold onto his Cork customers.62 Roche was a common name in Munster and had been so for centuries. As far back as 1609 there were Roches among Limerick’s senior city councillors.63 In the eighteenth century there were prominent Protestant Roches in Limerick, George Roche was Lord Mayor 1702–21 and his son David followed him in this position in 1749. However despite their official advantages, this family did not attain the startling financial progress made by the Catholic Roches. John Roche (1688–1760 or 1701–1760), founder of the Catholic merchant dynasty, did not claim roots in the city. According to their official genealogies these Roches from Castletownroche, were a cadet branch of the titled but extinct Fermoy family, but loss of land in the 1650s and 90s had caused


them to retreat into Clare. This made them relative newcomers in Limerick, arriving about the same time as the Hares appeared in Munster.64 By the end of the century John’s sons were referred to nationally as Stephen/John and Philip/John. The family could be said to have reached its apogee of public importance with the establishment of Roche’s Bank in early nineteenthcentury Cork by John’s grandsons. This was the first Catholic bank in the city and attracted great excitement among the Roche’s co-religionists. Popular with those who produced the provisions, riding high on Napoleonic War demands and paper currency, it crashed in 1822 with its liabilities exceeding assets by over £200,000.65 A number of economic advantages allowed John Roche to set sail on the Caribbean tide of provisions and rum. After the siege Limerick had gone into decline, all but a handful of Catholic families had been moved outside the walls and the number of Protestant merchants was small. But from early in the eighteenth century John Roche possessed links with the rising port of Cork. One of his grandsons James Roche, unsuccessful banker and literary enthusiast, author of Essays by an Octogenarian, refers to his grandfather as living in Cork in the 1730s where, for several weeks, he entertained Peter Beckford (father of the future Lord Mayor of London and sugar millionaire) who was prevented by stormy weather from sailing on to Jamaica.66 The Octogenarian, who, sadly for historians, was chiefly interested in belle lettres, wrote little about his family’s past, did deposit some papers in the British Museum.67 Among these are business documents from the 1720s showing a James Roche (presumably John Roche’s uncle or brother for the genealogy says John’s father was called Stephen) leasing out property in Cork and at that time employing a clerk, Edmond McGrath, who hoped to become his partner. The McGrath family held long leases on two townlands, Kilcory and Ballyhoran from Lord Kingston in the Blackwater Valley near Michelstown.68 This peer had eccentrically married his Catholic servant and converted to her religion, while his fiercely Protestant descendants were to maintain eighteenth-century notoriety through the employment of Arthur Young as their land-agent and Mary Wollstonecroft as their governess. A murder trial in Dublin’s House of Lords and the pitch capping activities of the youthful heir during the 1798 rebellion also kept the family in the public eye. A final sortie into building mania and madness in the nineteenth century allowed de Toqueville to present the Kings of Mitchelstown as symbolic of Irish landlordism. On asking the locals the reason for the peer’s mental state, he was told that ‘he saw himself charged with 400,000 pounds sterling of debts, without hope of ever being able to pay them. The money had been lent him by the Catholic merchants of Cork who hold mortgages on the vast estates … and who receive nearly all the income.’69 That was in 1835; in 1724 the Roches were apparently handling the Lord Kingston’s financial affairs. Given his debts and mortgages running into some £32,000 (the largest mortagees were a Stapleton and a Creagh) the delivery of his income


depended very much on the Roche’s business acumen. For the Roches it gave a degree of access to land and power, a situation which, throughout Ireland, helped to turn small Catholic merchants into great ones. These activities helped John Roche to channel wealth already accumulating in Cork towards Limerick. In the 1730s he married the daughter of Philip Stackpole, leading merchant and city sheriff in James II’s time.70 In Limerick, Roche acquired a useful partner, an elderly and experienced merchant named John Kelly. Kelly’s main enthusiasm lay in importing Chesapeake tobacco, priding himself on his good judgement in choosing a quality product, fastidiously demanding that his Bristol suppliers send him the ‘sweet scented’ and ‘soft black not dry red’ from specific plantations on the York and James Rivers.71 Like Roche, he was a newcomer to Limerick. He had recently arrived in the city from Birr, and just as Roche had married a Stackpole, John Kelly had confirmed his civic importance by marrying into another old merchant family, the Creaghs.72 The Creaghs were Limerick’s patrician family par excellence. In the first decade of the century, at a time when Catholics in Ireland were forbidden to buy land, David Creagh purchased a plantation in Barbados equipping it with 133 slaves (at £26 a head) in 1706 and 93 in 1707 (£24 a head). Both lots were bought from the Larke galley at a total expenditure of £5831-0-0.73 Shifting westward, following the sugar frontier, where cheaper land and newly opened soils supplied richer crops, the Creaghs later acquired property in Jamaica.74 In John Kelly’s generation, the Creagh involvement in the slave trade would stretch from Nantes, to Africa, to the Leewards, Rhode Island and South Carolina. John Roche joined Kelly in his West Indies ventures and together they sent out goods in their own ships rather than acting as commission agents as most of the Cork provisioners did.75 John Roche dealt in anything that seemed to offer advantage but the backbone of his trade was the export of beef, butter and hides and importation of rum and, if he could get it, sugar, mainly from customer/suppliers in Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados.76 But both Roche and Kelly also traded eastwards to Bruges and Rotterdam with the brothers William and John Archdeacon who, in return for provisions, supplied northern commodities, timber and pitch. It may have been the link with the Archdeacons which had taken Roche and Kelly into partnership in the first place, for William Archdeacon was John Roche’s uncle and John Archdeacon was John Kelly’s brother-in-law. Irish butter and beef prepared for the tropics could be sold in the Netherlands or into France to make up transatlantic cargoes. In Jamaica itself there were Archdeacons and Kellys but whether or not they were related to the Limerick/Rotterdam families, it is impossible to say. The families resident in Jamaica certainly knew one another for in the 1720s Andrew Archdeacon/Arcedeckne sat in the assembly along with a John Kelly from Port-Royal, Darcy Kelly and Charles Kelly for St Davids and Dennis Kelly from St Dorothys.77 When Governor Hunter attacked Archdeacon’s fitness for holding public office, accusing him of


Catholicism, on the grounds that he had been educated by a ‘Mr. Sexton’, at least one of the Kellys supported Archdeacon’s denial and along with two other assemblymen, Herbert and Philip, worked to defeat Hunter’s more general policy of denying Irish Catholic immigration to Jamaica.78 Geographical location moulded the religious activities of these families. In Jamaica the Kellys and Archdeacons abandoned their Catholic roots, in Ireland they assumed a low key Catholicism imposed by the penal laws, while in Bruges they enjoyed adherence to Catholicism as the established religion, confirming their links with home by dabbling in clerical politics. In 1748 John Archdeacon wrote to Edmond McGrath in Cork that he had worked hard to secure the appointment of ‘Mr Butler’ to the bishopric of Cloyne and Ross but after all his efforts Mr Walsh (acting for Mr Coppinger) had acquired it for Mr. O’Brien.79 (Perhaps these were the clerics, whose rival claims to the parish around Mitchelstown, would cause it to erupt into physical violence, bringing down interdict upon its inhabitants in 1758.)80 Archdeacon’s letter, while strongly conveying a sense of his disappointment, was nevertheless still a business missive dealing with a consignment of goods, butter, hides, tallow, brandy and wine, worth £1800. From Jamaica, across the Atlantic to Munster and continental Europe, Kellys and Archdeacons constructed fortunes drawing upon the slave plantations of the Caribbean. The Kelly, Roche co-operation was well established by the time the War of the Austria succession (1740–48) broke out, intensifying the hazards, anxieties and opportunities of mercantile life. The Limerick partners worried about their ships; the John Shaw was stranded in Antigua in 1742.81 Insurance was expensive and the threat of privateers a constant worry. In the spring of 1745 a hurricane hit Jamaica, which made them fear for payments owing from their contact, John Curtin. In the summer, Jacobite rebellion in Scotland played havoc with Limerick’s trade. John Kelly described this anxious time, ‘very few here care for buying, afraid of being turned out of town (I say the papists) that many were unwilling to lay out a penny’.82 This was a decade of disastrous weather. The year 1740–41 was bliadhain an a’ir, the Year of the Slaughter; sparsely recorded and scarcely remembered, late twentiethcentury historians have recovered it and declared it to have been as bad or worse than the Great Famine in that it resulted in the death of a larger proportion of the smaller mid-eighteenth-century Irish population. By 1745 it was clear that things were bad again. The cold wet spring meant that cattle died in large numbers undermining the butter trade. Corn, beef and pork were all dear, pork in particular disappearing from the market. ‘The common people could scarce support themselves much less swine’, wrote John Kelly to an importunate customer.83 Provisions were very scarce, which of course meant that those that did come in, sold at a high price with French and British islands, and French and British armies, vying for them. When war had first loomed back in 1740 the Roches had made great efforts to secure contracts for beef and in this commodity they worked to


supply both sides.84 Now it was a seller’s market they juggled between customers, weighing the hazards of avoiding privateers in the Atlantic against the problem of supplying France through neutral Rotterdam.85 From Rotterdam, John Archdeacon pressed for butter but John Kelly responded with bags of feathers.86 He felt Archdeacon had made a fortune on earlier butter consignments.87 White feathers sold better than grey (whether for quills or beds is not clear) but the Archdeacons underlined their disgust with the unwelcome product by complaining that the sacks were wet from being ill-packed. However, by the close of the year, fresh dangers in the Caribbean caused Roche and Kelly to relent and decide that the continental in-laws, rather than direct West Indian contacts, should have first call on their firkins.88 When the war ended it became clear that they had succeeded in moving their stock to minimise danger and that the price of salt beef and butter had secured their prosperity. Their expanding influence outside Limerick was reflected in 1749 when John Roche was awarded a government grant of £200 to make hardware.89 Possibly he saw this, among other things, as an aid to developing sugar refining. The extent of the partners’ riches was further recorded in 1751 when John Kelly’s daughter Margaret married John Roche’s son Philip. The venerable tobacco merchant as always took care to record financial matters. Margaret Kelly brought Philip Roche a dowry of £1,237-10-0, if she survived him she was to have this back or acquire one-third of her husband’s real-estate which in 1751 stood at £5000, with personal property valued at £50,000. These arrangements reveal the Roches and Kelly as possessing wealth on a level with the landed gentry or minor aristocracy.90 When hostilities next broke out again between Britain and France (the Seven Years War, 1756–63) John Roche was able to embark on the most profitable venture of all, privateering. Roche secured letters of marque for his ship, the Catherine, which sailed for the West Indies in pursuit of tropical prize goods, which could then be sold free of duties, thus bringing in a huge profit. Such a vessel had never been seen in Limerick before bristling with guns (Pi 14/16 pounders) at a time when Catholics were forbidden to bear arms.91 The family’s success continued unabated, both the Roche sons, Stephen (1724–1804) and Philip, proved good businessmen. In the early 1770s their purchases of West Indian rum surpassed that of Cork’s wealthiest merchants and when the war with America broke out they succeeded in acquiring a contract for supplying the army and navy, a plum usually reserved for Protestants.92 Their wealth of course attracted the attention of the corporation Roches and their associates who viewed Catholic merchants as a source of income to be mulcted. Cockett duties, an impost originally devised to apply to foreigners, were levied upon them. Soldiers were billeted in their properties and taxes imposed for dwelling within the walls, as John Roche did in Englishtown on central St Mary’s Street. From 1735, sheltering behind his considerable residence, was the Friary of Fish Lane, a newly built


Dominican convent, the order’s first place of public worship since the siege. Reflecting the living and working habits of their commercial neighbours, the friars lived upstairs, while the ‘tastefully decorated’ chapel, sixty foot long and thirty foot wide, took up the ground floor.93 On Quay Lane, another central thoroughfare, which held the Court House and the Mayoralty House, Stephen and Philip Roche, together with Kellys, Creaghs, Arthurs and others, attended a classical and mercantile school run by the Franciscans. In the same street the ‘independent merchants’ (non-corporation men) possessed a set of rooms where they met to discuss matters of common interest.94 Thus Quay Lane encapsulated Limerick’s mixture of Catholic mercantile success and Protestant civic dominance. As in Cork, new economic developments heralded renewed political struggle. In the early 1750s Stephen Roche, entertaining the Limerick educated Hapsburg general and Irish émigré, Field Marshal Ulysses Browne, took this celebrated military visitor and British ally for a tour of the walls. There they were apprehended by the authorities on suspicion of spying and thrown into gaol. Such a humiliating situation could most easily be resolved by the intervention of an influential Protestant. To secure his release Stephen called upon the good offices of his family’s patron, friend (and perhaps kinsman) Edmund Sexton Pery.95 The Perys were seventeenth-century newcomers (English and Protestant) to the city. The Sextons were as old a Limerick family as the Creaghs and from Tudor times onward they had produced Protestant and Catholic branches. Edmund Pery (d.1719), had inherited merchant and landed wealth from both Sextons and Perys, which eventually passed to his grandson Edmund Sexton Pery (1719–1806). Edmund Sexton Pery inherited estates in counties Clare and Limerick and an understanding that his Limerick merchant roots endowed him with Catholic connections. His closest current relationships, however, involved him intimately with the Church of Ireland. His father was the Rev. Stackpole Pery and his younger brother, William Cecil Pery, to whom he was much attached, was a businesslike cleric who acted as agent for two Limerick estate owners, and as such was deeply concerned with beef and butter prices.96 The political scene in Protestant Limerick was one of vigorous division. Great landed families fought bitterly over domination of the borough’s two parliamentary seats, while other interests in the city (the Corporation, the Governor of the garrison and the Church of Ireland) sought to influence the choice of representatives.97 By the mid-eighteenth century, the Limerick Corporation stood firm in its siege mentality while the Church of Ireland asserted a liberal stance. In 1760 a disputed election for one of the borough seats brought these disagreements to the fore, Protestant freemen outside the corporation protesting against the in-group’s mishandling of power and loudly demanding reform, from improved street cleaning to Catholic relief. In 1762 Edmund Sexton Pery, now MP for Limerick brought forward a bill for the better regulation of the Corporation and City of Limerick, which included the removal of taxes


levied by the corporation on Catholics. Despite indignant denunciation of it as a Popish stratagem from a city containing almost 100 priests and friars (the Catholic computation was 16), Sexton Pery succeeded in piloting the bill through the Dublin parliament and the Irish Privy Council only to have it rejected by the English Privy Council. It was an experience he was not to forget. Pery then resorted to a piecemeal redress of grievances and thus eventually succeeded in carrying through many of the desired reforms.98 Sexton Pery was well versed in economic matters and eager that his city should share in Ireland’s expanding commercial economy.99 He was determined that the Crown’s rising income from customs duties should flow into Irish improvements. He sought grants for the widening of Limerick’s roads and bridges, the draining of land and the introduction of navigation schemes, acquiring some £27,000 in just over five years.100 But government grants could only be acquired if entrepreneurial initiative set matters in train. Pery therefore sought to tap both local landowners and Limerick’s mercantile wealth, so often Catholic wealth. In 1768 a Company of Undertakers was formed to raise £10,000 to make the Shannon more navigable. There were 25 subscribers, nine of them merchants, seven of whom gave £250 each, while Philip and Stephen Roche gave £500 each. Sexton Pery and his clergyman brother the Rev. William Cecil Pery, made a similar contribution. The only family to subscribe more were the Maunsells, their landed wealth reinforced by banking and an East Indies fortune.101 In the years before the Shannon scheme, the Roches had contributed to bridge and street improvements. Development as always requires demolition; in the 1760s Limerick’s walls were pulled down, another move which must have given Stephen Roche satisfaction, eliminating the scene of his past and vividly remembered humiliation. In 1769, the new Customs House was completed, an impressive Palladian villa, sited on the north bank of the Shannon, beyond Irish town, where most of the land belonged to Sexton Pery himself. The Italian architect of the Customs House also provided a grid plan for the fashionably new Dublin style houses, which were to rise there. In this development, Catholic participation was immediately evident. Leases around the Customs House were made to the Arthurs, a Catholic family described in the 1790s as ‘timber merchants’ but like all the other Limerick merchants their eighteenthcentury fortune had been based on provisions exports. (The import of timber itself was tied into the West Indian commerce, pine from the Baltic for barrels, firkins and ship repairs; mahogany from the Caribbean for doors, staircases and furniture in gentlemen’s residences.) The Roches also acquired land near the Arthurs’ plots. Their first build here consisted of a number of short terraces desultorily placed on the grid plan; one would form the south side of Rutland Street, and here Philip used a house as business premises. Another became part of Bank Place, where in 1787 Philip would erect his famous store, stone walled, four stories high, the windows trimmed with


brick, said to be the first of its kind in Ireland. These sites, then very marshy, were purchased by the Roches in the late sixties and early seventies at a time when Catholics were still banned from buying land, so the transaction was fronted for them by Rev. William Cecil Pery, future Bishop of Limerick.102 However, such dealing soon became unnecessary with the passing of the Catholic relief acts of 1772 and 1776 supported by Sexton Pery, now in the politically influential position of Speaker of the House of Commons. Pery had achieved this office because of his ability to manage the House and bring in the majorities the administration in Dublin Castle required. He and the Castle agreed on Catholic relief but the outbreak of the war with the American colonies brought an embargo on exports causing problems for the provision trade and unleashing a public and parliamentary agitation for ‘a Free Trade for Ireland’. As Stephen Roche explained to his parliamentary contacts, any disturbance in supply might bring irretrievable damage to the valuable French cow beef trade for by now Danes, Bremners and Russians were beginning to break into the secrets of preservation to successfully produce their own alternative supplies.103 The hope of commercial advancement and then, as the unsuccessful war against America offered Ireland greater opportunities, the demand for constitutional independence were issues woven into Pery’s Limerick psyche. Thus Grattan would describe the Speaker as ‘the first man who in the parliament of this age denied the supremacy of Great Britain, the first man who conceived a demand of [Free]Trade and … drew the most productive acts for the strength and prosperity of this country …’. The conclusion of Dublin Castle was very similar, but given their perspective was couched in different terms. ‘A cursed jobber, hates English government and tries by all means in his power to ruin the King’s hereditary revenue and raise the consequence of Irishmen by inducing every possible difficulty upon the Crown.’104 In tracing the Roches’ rise to wealth, women played an important part. Marriage alliances between Kellys, Archdeacons and Roches were the structure on which long-term trading links were built. Even the patronage of the Perys may have sprung from kinship. Edmund Sexton Pery’s grandfather, Edmund Pery had married a Dymphna Stackpole and together they had lived in a house named Stackpole Court. Possibly she was related to Philip Stackpole, John Roche’s father-in-law. In a merchant family, wives could be efficient business women as well as conduits of wealth, but their activities went unrecorded. Preaching at Nano Nagle’s funeral, Bishop Coppinger described the role of a good woman in Catholic commercial society; she should serve her family day and night in domestic matters, while being ambitious for them in their professional lives.105 It is possible to see from Margaret Kelly’s dowry the monetary advantage she brought to Philip Roche but no further, though her will suggests that she was careful and thoughtful about the disposal of her property. She died in the 1780s, a decade before her husband, leaving legacies amounting to £11,000. Philip Roche himself died


in 1797, his full estate valued in 1801 at £83,000.106 These property transactions are one of the few way in which women from merchant families, women who, for the most part, would be able to read and write, achieve a place in the written record. Legal and commercial archives, providing so much valuable knowledge of past societies, are weak on conveying anything about their human participants individuality. The unavoidable inclusion of female names on aspirational genealogies, their repetition in marriage settlements and wills, are a reminder of their key role in merchants families as the creators and guarantors of partnerships, possessors of wealth and influence if not direct power. Slaves, because they were international trade goods, also reached the written record, not as names but as numbers, which have enabled historian to reconstruct the extent of this form of commerce. The brief repetitive vocabulary accompanying the figures ‘noirs morts pendant la traite’ (blacks dead during the trade) ‘noirs morts pendant la vente’ (blacks dead during the sale), or less frequently ‘noirs de pecotille’ (blacks as cheap goods) is so sinister to the modern eye, that it humanises a dehumanising past.107 Like customs returns, commercial letters books are full of numbers, with pounds shillings and pence dominating, thus illustrating the vital importance and endless complications of passing on and discounting bills, every merchant in a sense creating his own currency, the value set by his reliability in this matter. Frequently the very products themselves remain anonymous, generically described as ‘goods’ or ‘freight’. Every letter book had a master, but their actual writers were often nameless clerks struggling with splitting quills and watery ink in the flat faced, slate roofed, newly built brick houses on Ireland’s expanding quays, or in the sodden, mosquito-filled heat in the office shacks of the Antilles. And, if commercial necessity meant that the letter had to be written after dark, in Cork or the Caribbean, by the soft, shuddering light of an Irish tallow candle. The letter book containing only copies sent to business contacts, is always a one sided conversation, the solo voice that of the merchant – confident, decisive, factual. All the more dramatic in this setting are the occasional explosions of feeling, cathartic letters full of anguished personal detail, letters invariably concerning women. Thus in 1748 John Kelly described the distress of his recently widowed daughter and the miseries of his four month sojourn in Dublin helping the bereaved family. In the summer of 1747 her husband, Martin Killikelly, an apparently sound tobacco merchant had died unexpectedly, revealing a catastrophic financial involvement with one of John Kelly’s sons, Mr Martin Kelly of Cadiz, ‘God forgive him, though I cannot’, John Kelly wrote to the London bankers Messrs Blake and Lynch, in tortured suspicion that his son was concealing further financial depravities from him.108 In 1776, the 82 year-old Samuel Martin, corresponding with one of his suppliers of horse beans, (a coarse staple in the slave diet), lifted the pen to comfort the provisioner whose little child had just died, and found himself suddenly thrust back into his own past. ‘I have lost two wives and


sixteen children out of twenty-one. My last wife and three children all died in one year. I thought my poor heart would not sustain it … .’.109 The same pattern emerges from the strange little collection of Roche and McGrath mercantile papers, which the octogenarian discovered. Here the inletters about ships, cargoes and money owing, are more frequently punctuated with personal matters but once again it is women, the muse of the emotions, who stimulate the writing and perhaps the preservation of such documents. Thus in 1737 William White of Bordeaux, remitting a debt he had collected for his Cork friend, remarks on Edmond McGrath’s seduction of his employer’s daughter and suggests that he calm Mr James Roche’s anger by asking him, if in love would he not have acted in the same way. ‘If his silence gives consent, he makes a full apology for your innocent crime and can’t reasonably refuse you and his daughter remission for a lovely sin he would have committed himself on a like occasion.’110 Less happily one of Roche/McGrath Protestant clients, who used the firm to help him negotiate vexed issues of land ownership, calls upon Edmond to produce money in another crisis ‘For God sake see that poor girl and don’t let her want whatever is necessary’.111 Some curious undated papers show Edmond McGrath involved in a brawl where he drew a pistol and wounded a man, behaviour which he declared absolutely fitting as he had been dealing with ‘a ruffian …... fit for the gallows’ who has committed a crime against ‘a poor lady’ now ‘deprived of her health and use of her limbs.’112 Later in the century when the anti-slavery movement decided to concentrate on the abolition of the trade rather than slavery itself, they discovered female suffering to be among the most potent of their arguments. The public (male) was being continually asked, how would you feel if your wife was captured, abducted, raped, sold into slavery, reduced to the point where she sought death by drowning with the child at the breast? Faced with such evidence and analogies, defence of the trade was not easy. The rate of long term survival for eighteenth-century letter books, heavy leather bound tomes tight packed with figures, was poor – only one for Richard Hare’s 30 years in commerce, and the same for John Kelly’s 50. In the case of the Roche family, there are none at all. What survives is often accidental, sometimes serendipitous. A single piece of evidence might be the lone survivor of many, the representative of a well established and economically significant trend, or a rogue example, an idiosyncratic and misleading instance. Yet the desultory evidence linking Limerick to the slave trade does suggest a continuous relationship. With Sexton’s Pery’s keen participation, in 1779 the trade regulations which had circumscribed Ireland’s trading with the West Indies and west Africa were removed. ‘A Free Trade for Ireland’ had brought the right to enter the slave trade. The desirability of taking advantage of Ireland’s geographical position and importing sugar and tobacco straight across the Atlantic, had from the start of the agitation been stressed by its supporters. Optimistic


claims were put forward that such a change would soon double the amount of these imports. The issue of the African trade was rather more complex. For those acquainted with the West Indies through the provision trade, the need to supply the planters with slaves in order to acquire significant cargoes of sugar seemed obvious. Cargoes for Africa itself presented a challenge. While the Africans traders and potentates, from whom the slaves were acquired, had never shown much interest in linen or woollens, they were always eager for cotton cloth. And cotton in the 1780s was an industry being eagerly promoted by the independent parliament. Here again Limerick had intimated its willingness to take part in entrepreneurial activity. A local landowner, Lord Courtnay, had just opened a cotton manufactory, the raw product at this time largely furnished from the Caribbean.113 The developing of an Irish slave trade can therefore be seen as in tune of Sexton Pery’s new Ireland, patriotic, prosperous, liberalising. In November 1784 Limerick came forward with a carefully costed and informed plan to launch an ‘African company’. Six ships would be employed annually to leave for the Slave and Guinea coasts of west Africa, outfitted at £3500 each. Outfitted in Limerick, they would carry ‘linens and cottons, plain and printed, tallow, arms etc’.114 To these might be added whiskey and gunpowder and non-local produce ‘tobacco, iron in bars, India goods and Dutch toys’.115 (No problem for the Roches whose trade with Rotterdam was booming.) Such a vessel could be expected to convey 500 to 600 slaves to the West Indies, where they could be exchanged for sugar, cotton and other tropical staples. (The triangular venture would take 12 months. With the cost of the ship and wages for the crew, plus cargo the entire amount would come to around £8000. But a successful voyage could be expected to bring in a return of £20,000) It was a large scale project, dwarfing the activities of the Prosperity back in 1718. Yet despite the detailed and ambitious planning, no ships were actually despatched from the Shannon to Africa. Why was this so? The slave trade remained a prosperous arm of British commerce until 1808 and for Portuguese, Spanish and illegal US slavers until the mid-nineteenth century. The first high profile, public attack on the trade would not be launched until three years after the 1784 scheme, when in 1787 the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. So it seems unlikely that anti-slavery sentiment would have deterred Limerick merchants, except perhaps in the case of the Quaker provisioner Thomas Mark and the Harveys and Fishers. However they were not in the habit of entering into partnerships with the Roches, Kellys, and Creaghs. Perhaps the proposed ‘Africa company’ was undermined by those who originally supported it. It was becoming easier to make money nearer home rather than to invest in far flung ventures. Britain itself was now absorbing more and more provisions. The hopes for those who fought for ‘a free trade for Ireland’ had very much focused on West Indian commerce, but in fact the 1780s and 90s saw its relative importance in Irish economic life decline. Limerick was entering a new


era in which the distilling of whiskey, rather than the import of rum, would expand. The expansion of the grain trade and flour milling would also increase. From the 1780s on, the Roches’ main interest would shift more and more into locally grown grain and imported flaxseed and rape seed from the Netherlands, thus signalling the arrival of a new era. Plans for participation in the triangular trade appeared hopeful in 1784 but were in fact backward looking. Yet it seems unlikely that they would have been promulgated without the expertise of the city’s wealthiest and most experienced West Indian merchants. Only one other Irish port is recorded as having planned a slave trade venture. That was Belfast, where the proposed company was said to have been the brainchild of the town’s wealthiest merchant, who had made his first fortune in the Caribbean.

7 And Dissenter

During the eighteenth century Ulster was seen as the heart of linen manufacture, and linen counted for three quarters of Ireland’s exports, provisions for only one quarter. Yet Belfast remained a small port, its population in 1750 only half the size of Cork’s in 1705. While it was bigger than its northern rivals, Derry and Newry, the possibility that it would be surpassed by Newry, the first Irish port to construct a canal cutting deep into the countryside, seemed a distinct possibility to contemporaries. All three ports played a modest role in the linen trade for the existence of quality control and credit facilities in Dublin made it the fulcrum of linen sales. Heavily loaded wagons set out from a series of market towns within a 30 mile radius of Belfast, to trundle the 70 or 80 miles south to the capital, where the streets leading to the Linen Hall bore their names, Lurgan, Lisburn, Benburb. As a port, for the greater part of the eighteenth century, Belfast’s export trade was dominated by provisions. In 1759 the merchants held a meeting to discuss how they could improve their processing in order to emulate Cork standards. Until Britain was fully opened to provisions, ships from Belfast often carried their supplies to Cork for the Atlantic voyage, and beyond that date, in the early seventies, Richard Hare’s letter-book shows that he was still working with many of Belfast’s provision merchants, Henderson, Holmes, Ewing, Galan, Thompson, Greg and Cunningham.1 In one respect, however, Belfast differed from Cork, the richer merchants often owned their ships or banded into small groups to do so. In the seventeenth century, the little town’s wine importers, always the first to embark on long distance voyages, began sending out vessels which ventured from Spain and Maderia to the Caribbean and mainland America, trading everywhere they touched. Thomas Pottinger, a Presbyterian who acquired the position of town sovereign under James II’s new charter in 1688 and managed to remain in government favour under William and Mary, claimed to have been the first Belfast merchant to go to foreign parts to trade, sailing for the sugar islands in the Angel Gabriel and landing in Nevis in 1662.2

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In the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Greg (1718–96) was one of Belfast’s up-and-coming general merchants. He lived at his premises in North Street, imported alcohol, groceries and manufactured goods. Like his father (a blacksmith from Scotland who had prospered and acquired a slaughter yard) Thomas was a lease holder for some land on the edge of the town, where his tenants provided him with a sure supply of provisions for export. In 1742 he diversified further by marrying Elizabeth Hyde and becoming a partner in the Legg/ Hyde sugar refinery in Rosemary Lane (the Old Sugar House, established 1683). By 1750 Thomas Greg owned his own small brig, The Greg which took provisions to the Caribbean and sugar, if he could get it, to Liverpool or some other relatively convenient British port.3 Ever inventive however he now devised a new pattern of trading. After selling his provisions in the West Indies, his ship would sail for the American mainland and exchange Caribbean specialities for flaxseed which would allow him to bring a cargo back across the Atlantic to Belfast and to receive a bounty upon it. Government offered a bounty on imported flaxseed as an aid to the expansion of Ireland’s linen industry. Linen manufacture required that the flax plant be pulled before the seed had ripened, so that extra supplies of mature seed were always in demand with mainland America offering a developing source. In conventional Irish, indeed European manner, Greg activated confessional commercial contacts to acquire a partner in New York. Waddell Cunningham was a Presbyterian, his family also originally from Scotland, had come as part of the Jacobean plantation in the early seventeenth century, settling at Kilead, Co Antrim. They were substantial people. (Cromwell had devised a plan, which proved inconclusive, for shifting the Presbyterians to Munster and the Kilead Cunninghams had been on his list.) But Waddell was very much a younger son. He had gone to the West Indies with the salted provisions in the midforties and later settled in New York where he established himself as a commission merchant, dealing heavily in Irish linen and handling Caribbean wares, mainly Jamaican rum and log wood from Honduras. Such ventures meant that, on occasion, his merchandise would include small numbers of slaves.4 In November 1756 he celebrated his new partnership by ordering Captain William Stewart, carrying a cargo to Jamaica in the Charming Nancy, to ‘purchase a Negro boy’ for the firm, ‘Let him be a good one: let him cost what he will’.5 Waddell was 27 in 1756 when the partnership was established and Thomas Greg was 38. Greg was the wealthier partner but Cunningham was the more assertive, telling Greg to get out of the office and on his horse to drum up new flaxseed customers in Ballycastle, Coleraine and Larne. The flaxseed business worked well enough, but right at the beginning of their partnership, they had a stroke of luck when the Seven Years War broke out between Britain and France. Greg and Cunningham armed their ships and became privateers. The prize goods (mostly sugar and coffee) brought enormous

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profits but there were other ways of making money out of the war. Like Richard Bradshaw and the Roches in the previous conflict, Greg and Cunningham were eager to get into the French cow beef trade and any other line of smuggling made profitable by hostilities. Waddell set about supplying the French through the neutral islands. On St Eustatia, a resident Ulsterman, Robert Stewart handled cargoes for him, but he also possessed agents on Danish St Croix, and on Monte Christi, a Spanish islet off Hispaniola. The scale of these operations was revealed when, on a number of occasions, the firm was apprehended, brought to court and fined both in New York and in Kingston, Jamaica, Waddell declaring indignantly that the authorities had ‘grievously oppressed him’.6 When the war ended the partners were rich beyond anything the flax seed trade could have done for them. They had also developed a new and useful contact in the slave colonies. In 1758 at the age of 42 Thomas Greg’s elder brother, John, left for America. Probably John was not as astute a business man as Thomas, perhaps he decided to move encouraged by the successful establishment of Greg and Cunningham. He settled in Charleston, South Carolina where he entered into business with two other Ulster Presbyterians, Torrans and Pogue, who specialised in importing indentured labourers and African slaves. The close of the Seven Years War brought a further upturn in John’s fortunes when he secured a promising official post, becoming secretary to the King’s Commissioner and auctioneer of the lands of the Ceded Islands (Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Tobago). From this position John arranged the purchase of an estate on Dominica for Thomas and Waddell. And beside Greg and Cunningham’s ‘Belfast’, he bought Hertford (250 acres) for himself and then Hillsborough (150).7 In becoming the owner of 350 acres, the auctioneer was breaking his own rules, for the government had restricted purchases in Dominica to 300 acres. They did so because they wanted the colony, situated between two French islands, settled and cultivated quickly.8 Dominica was a small island, wild, mountainous, heavily wooded, its few French planters had mostly grown coffee, but now the British moved in determined on a sugar offensive. (This was the pattern throughout the Ceded Islands, which between 1766–5 received one-third of the slaves taken to the British West Indies.) Quick stocking in large numbers to grow sugar on newly opened ground produced the worst slave mortality – illness brought on from the unsanitary conditions of the voyage, crowding together of new arrivals so that infection spread easily after landfall, heavy work to establish the plantation added to the normal rigours of sugar growing, a crop which at the best of times demanded continuous exertion in unrelenting heat. Dominica’s slave imports rose sharply after 1763 and remained high till the early seventies.9 Probably John Greg was buying briskly to stock the three plantations, for he was acting as agent for Thomas and Waddell. He remained in the West Indies for the next 20 years (1764–84) moving among the islands to complete the remaining land sales and carry out other business


in Jamaica, Antigua, St Lucia, Martinique and Hispaniola. Dominica was not easy to bring under cultivation; out of the Ceded Islands, it rated third out of four on sugar exports but John Greg’s career suggests modest success10 if he could not afford to come home after a brief spell. The plantations remained in production and in the family for the next 70 years. When eventually he returned he did not go into business in Belfast, retiring instead to England to the home counties. A childless man, he left his fortune to his nephews Samuel and Thomas Greg and in 1835 Thomas received compensation of £ 2830-15-9 for his 128 slaves. In all there were some 1000 Dominican claimants, the majority small slave-holders from a French background. Thomas Greg was one of only 13 claimants possessing over 100 slaves and receiving more than £ 2000.11 In 1762 Waddell decided to invest some of his wartime profits in mainland land speculation and purchased 20,000 acres in Albany and Ulster County in New York State. He was proud of his success in privateering and smuggling and began to live dangerously. Often in court, twice in these years he served prison sentences. The first was brief, imposed for inciting a riot in which the crowd (including himself) carted a merchant, who had informed on illegal traders, through the street pelting him with ‘filth and dirt’. The next imprisonment, which took place in 1763, was a much more serious affair. Thomas Forsey and Waddell quarrelled over a debt involving a protested bill drawn on John Greg’s Charleston firm. Waddell was enraged by a letter which Forsey had written to Torrans, Greg and Pogue. He said it defamed his character and as result a violent altercation broke out between the two men outside the Merchant’s Coffee House and Waddell assaulted and wounded Forsey, almost killing him. He spent several weeks in prison and declared himself bitterly sorry for what had happened, ‘My conduct was imputable to heat not malice, of want of self-possession’ but when the jury fined him £1500 in damages he tried determinedly to reduce the payment, seeking a court appeal.When that proved fruitless, he demanded intervention by the governor, who in his turn referred the matter to the Privy Council in London. In the atmosphere of rising colonial confidence, created by victory in the Seven Years War and expanding in the coming decade into a rejection of British rule, Waddell’s case, already the talk of New York, now turned into a constitutional crisis. Riots broke out, the troops were called on to the streets and the governor was burnt in effigy for undermining colonial rights. The whole incident made Waddell a dangerously unpopular figure and in 1764 uncertain exactly what course he would pursue, he sailed for London, leaving his junior partners, both Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, in charge of the business. Almost a year later, in May 1765, he arrived in Belfast and in early November he married Margaret, the youngest Hyde sister, so that he and Thomas now became brothers-in-law.12 Both men immediately began investing their new wealth in and around Belfast and in the late sixties Thomas Greg, working on familiar ground, was

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the more confident of the two. Unlike Waddell, he was always at ease with the local aristocracy. Accepting the impossibility of success without their support, he carefully constructed good relations with all the great landowners in the vicinity, the Hills in County Down, the Conways in the Lagan valley, the Chichesters in Belfast and Antrim. He was skilled at paying them thoughtful compliments, naming ships for them; in 1762 his Lord Hertford, called for a Conway who conveniently happened to be the current Lord Lieutenant, formally opened the first section of the Lagan Navigation. In 1765 he changed the name of his ship The Prosperity to The Countess of Donegall, while a section of his new quay was opened in 1769 as Chichester Dock, to mark the birth of the Donegall’s heir. Through Lord Hillsborough, for whom he sometimes acted in financial matters, he gained the mineral rights to three northern counties and spent large amounts of money searching for coal and other frustratingly elusive substances.13 In 1787 when Lord Rutland, the Lord Lieutenant, made a tour of Ireland and visited the north, he had supper at Thomas Greg’s house.14 Perhaps conversation there helped to shape the comment he later entered in his journal, ‘Belfast is a giant of a town, flourishing in everything …. Their trade is immense. They go to the West Indies, and to almost every quarter of the globe.’15 In 1765 Thomas Greg marked his post-war wealth by moving his home and business premises from North Street to Ann Street, into a large house, garden and offices. Waddell Cunningham settled down several hundred yards away in a rambling property in Hercules Lane, where he developed his familiar trading interests, buying linen and provisions for export, adding to them live horses and mules to send to the sugar islands, importing tobacco, sugar, alcohol, flax seed and manufactured goods from Britain, anything that would sell. (At the heart of the old town, Hercules Lane was completely demolished a hundred years later in order to provide a broad thoroughfare suitable for shops, offices and horse trams and discouraging to the sectarian riot.) He also became a partner in the New Sugar House (established 1704) in Waring Street.16 Next year, making use of the new water communication link into the heart of linen weaving country, Greg and Cunningham established their Vitriol Manufactory, on an island in the Lagan at Lisburn, an entrepreneurial project to provide Ireland with a supply of sulphuric acid, a more efficient bleaching agent than buttermilk. Developed at considerable expense (£3500), it never paid; in 1771 Richard Hare had to admit that he could not help them market the product in Cork, declaring consumption to be ‘very trifling in this part of the kingdom’.17 However other projects in town prospered. In 1767 Greg opened a timber yard and acquired a lease for land near the mouth of the Farset (Bel fairte, the mouth of the sandy river) where he built a dock 100 yards long. At the same time Waddell helped to establish himself within the merchant community by acquiring a lease for a second Presbyterian church in Rosemary Lane. To produce any significant development in and around Belfast required the co-operation of its landlord, the Earl of Donegall. The young earl, for his


part, was pleased to find such rich and busy merchants in his town. The Donegall family had left Belfast half a century earlier in distressing circumstances, when their castle had caught fire and three of the daughters had been burnt to death. The present peer was an absentee, who had inherited his massive estate from a mad uncle, which meant that for years it had been held in static trusteeship, so that it yielded much less than the property of his great landowning neighbours, the Downshires. By the late sixties, adjustments to generate more income were all the more pressing because the earl had already begun to build himself a great house, Fisherwick Place, on his English estate in Staffordshire. In 1767 Donegall visited Belfast specifically to grant and sign new leases, leases which of course were paid for by ‘fines’ such as Thomas Greg produced to build his dock on the Farset and Waddell Cunningham to erect the new Presbyterian church. The earl was simultaneously planning to take similar measures with his county Antrim lands, a development from which Greg and Cunningham were eager, to benefit. It seemed to be a fortuitous moment, bringing together Anglican aristocrat and Dissenting entrepreneurs into mutually advantageous combination. In the next four years however it was to make County Antrim ungovernable and the trio infamous. Donegall was denounced as the classic oppressive, absentee landlord. At home the ‘two rich merchants’ became objects of popular hatred and from government in Dublin and London came criticisms that harsh handling of tenants had resulted in a dangerous degree of emigration among the manufacturing classes.18 To try and restructure land holding in Ireland was always, if not to open Pandora’s box, at least to reveal a Chinese puzzle. Many of Donegall’s worst paying tenants, were large landowners in their own right, such as Mr Clotworthy Upton , who held seven townlands from Donegall, and Lord Dungannon, who had a lease on an Island Magee estate, the rent of which had not changed since 1618. Presbyterians were not prevented from purchasing land by their religious disabilities, but estates were tied up in such a legally complex manner that there was nothing on sale. Eager to invest their wealth in landed property, Greg and Cunningham had to think in terms of the purchase of leases, of becoming middlemen, in their cases a richer version of the Earl of Kenmare’s Catholic gentleman tenants, to bring in income by letting farms, only in Antrim it was more likely to be to beggarly farmer/weavers rather than dairymen that paid them rent. To Thomas Greg it seemed a straightforward operation. He took over leaseholds held by his father in county Antrim, added others to them, thus acquiring 1292 acres which included 72 at Edenderry on the outskirts of Belfast where he was already building himself a mansion. In the west of the province, on the earl’s Donegal estate, which incorporated the whole of the Inishowen peninsula, he took on another 4000 acres. In both regions he started to adapt the land to his interests in the Caribbean market; on his 600 acres at Lisnalinchy in County Antrim, he cleared off under tenants in order to extend the rearing

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of beef cattle. In Donegal he sought to revive herring fisheries and to experiment with new techniques of curing in order to produce greater resistance to tropical temperatures.19 Waddell Cunningham’s investment was limited to County Antrim, comprising 520 acres in all, the lion’s share, 370 acres at Ballypalliday near Templepatrick, an area 20 miles from Belfast, thick with linen weavers. Some ten others (four of them linen drapers, one a linen dealer) emerged with substantial leaseholds, some more extensive than Waddell’s investment, others rather smaller. Only one man reached 1180 acres, thus rivalling Thomas Greg’s Antrim operation. (Dr Alexander Haliday, had inherited his holdings from his father. Haliday was a wealthy and intellectual physician, a pupil of Francis Hutcheson, the Co Down born son of the manse and Glagow professor, who would enter the anti-slavery canon as one of the first philosophers of the Enlightenment to condemn the African slave trade.)20 All these men were prepared to take part in their landlord’s restructuring, expecting to make money as they recouped their investment from those below them. But on his huge estates Lord Donegall possessed many small direct tenants who were uneasy about the new developments. Most disappointed of all were substantial sub-tenants of long standing who had leases, or some kind of written agreement, with their middleman, and had hoped that changes might enable them to become direct tenants and gain greater security. But on the estate there were people with no written records at all, unknown to Lord Donegall’s Belfast agent, for under tenants sublet in their turn to cotters. There was even such a thing as a ‘cotter’s cotter’. A serving officer reported to the Lord Lieutenant that ‘over most parts of the county the lands are sublet six deep, so that those who actually labour it are squeezed to the very utmost’.21 Six deep might have been an exaggeration, though Lord Donegall with his worries about his London bankers, his expectations for a moderate and respectable return on his lands, his plans for Fisherwick Place with its eleven bay facade, Corinthian portico, Bonomi plaster work, Rigaud ceiling, carriage house for eight carriages, stabling for fifty horses, glass house, hot house, artificial lake, cascade, bridge, Chinese pavilion and 100,000 trees planted by Capability Brown, was not very well placed to know whether linen manufacture had indeed produced such a densely populated countryside.22 By the beginning of 1770 widespread indignation at the prospect of new leases, ‘fines,’ and rising rents, had hardened into a communal agrarian protest ‘the Hearts of Steel’. Most of the Steelboys seem to have been undertenants and downwards. They took a secret oath and set what they believed to be fair rents, refusing to pay the new demands. They delivered threatening letters to those tenants who appeared unlikely to conform; houses, barns and hay were burnt and cattle maimed. In the disturbances attendant upon this process a number of murders were committed. The small garrisons of soldiers in Belfast and Carrickfergus were quite unable to cope with such


widespread disaffection and, when cases came to court, juries were unwilling to convict. The eye of the Steelboy storm was around Templepatrick, an area farmed by Clothworty Upton tenants, but also including Waddell Cunningham’s Ballypalliday. Waddell was worried and infuriated by this situation, receiving no rent he was unwilling to pay his fines to Lord Donegall.23 Determined to push the authorities into action and clear the way for the free operation of market forces, he ‘did in Person support and aid a constable’ to arrest David Douglas, the ring leader of the Steelboys, which presumably meant leading some type of armed, official band from Belfast up to Templepatrick. Several days later, on the Sunday before Christmas 1770, a force of 1200 variously armed Steelboys marched into Belfast and laid siege to the military barracks where Douglas was imprisoned, calling for his release. A frustrated splinter group made for Hercules Lane, where they entered Waddell Cunningham’s house and attacked the furniture. A mediator appeared (Dr Haliday) and promised to use his influence to get Douglas freed. But while these negotiations were taking place a group of soldiers rushed out of the barracks and fired on the crowd, killing five Steelboys and wounding others. In the ensuing fracas Cunningham’s house was set on fire and shots were fired into Thomas Greg’s home. By now the protestors were declaring their intention of burning the entire town, at which point the authorities released the prisoner.24 The government in Dublin, while critical of Lord Donegall, sent troops to the north to deal with the disturbances, which were spreading into Down, Armagh, Tyrone and Londonderry, feeding on the never ending grievances of Irish agrarian society, tithes, cess, rising rents. Arrests were made, several Steelboys were hanged and by 1772 the movement was on the wane. Though this time he had acted in the name of authority instead of flouting it, once again Waddell Cunnigham’s resort to physical action, had (as in New York) brought him into greater difficulties. However, as before, his position and abilities as a business man eventually saved the day. The parliament in Dublin agreed to compensation of £737-16-7 for the damage to his property in Hercules Lane. A credit crisis in the early 1770s brought many merchants into bankruptcy, which both Greg and Cunningham managed to avoid. When an increasing number of Antrim farmers and weavers, disgusted by the fall in linen prices (which came swiftly on the heels of the rising rents no longer kept at bay by the Hearts of Steel) decided to emigrate to America, they were able to find passages on the partner’s ships plying to Baltimore and Philadelphia. South Carolina was also a popular destination for these families, the emigrants given land on the frontier by the planter dominated assembly in Charleston, hopeful that the newcomers would hold back the Indians so that they could enjoy theirs slave estates in safety. These ‘poor Protestant’ settlers speedily acquired the ambition to own slaves, and even those who failed to do so, were eventually prepared to fight in the Civil War to defend the institution.

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War with America, or rather the later stages of it, made Waddell an Irish Patriot. In 1778 the American privateer captain John Paul Jones sailed into Belfast Lough and shelled the town. As Ireland had been denuded of troops to fight on the other side of the Atlantic, no defence was offered and in the aftermath of the attack, the prominent citizens met to organise themselves. Belfast prided itself on being the first place in Ireland to form a Volunteer company, an achievement also claimed by Cork. The Volunteers paid for their own arms and uniforms, so that they represented the men of at least some property, though a landlord or rich merchant could always choose to outfit his own tenants or clients. Waddell was immediately elected as lieutenant in the First Belfast Volunteer Company, effectively becoming their commander when its captain, Stuart Banks became town sovereign (mayor). As a Presbyterian, Waddell Cunningham could not expect to find a place on the corporation. Waddell loved the Volunteers, with their uniforms, weapons, dinners, toasts, military reviews and law and order role. He would march at the head of the company to execute writs by destraining property, apparently uninhibited by memories of David Douglas and the Hearts of Steel.25 Back in the sixties, Thomas Greg had had his portrait painted at the centre of his young family, with four sons grouped on his left, his wife and eight daughters on his right. Waddell and Margaret Hyde had no children. Now Waddell Cunningham, with thinning hair and alert, suspicious eyes, had his portrait painted in his Volunteer uniform, red coat and gold epaulettes, large shinning metal buttons, frilled stock.26 All over Ireland, those who could afford it, were doing the same. Most exciting of all, to an action man like Waddell, was the political agitation, the dawning prospect of power which the Volunteers opened up. As the war with the American colonists imposed more and more strain on Britain, the opportunity offered for Ireland to acquire greater control of her own affairs. The Patriot party in parliament and rising public opinion out of doors, of which the Volunteers were the armed wing, pressed for change. Hence the uniformed companies drawn up on College Green, outside the Houses of Parliament, in the autumn of 1779 with their plackarded cannon demanding ‘free trade or else’. For the first aim was to solve economic problems by the introduction of ‘free trade’ (i.e. the dismantling of arrangements instituted for Britain’s not Ireland’s benefit, thereby gaining the right to export manufacture woollens and to import tobacco and sugar direct from the New World). When this was granted at the close of 1779 the momentum for change was carried on producing the new constitutional settlement of 1782, which established an independent, or more independent, Irish parliament. In all of this outdoor agitation Waddell Cunningham played a leading role, in the Volunteer Convention held in Belfast in 1780 and the National Volunteer Convention at Dungannon in 1782. By the time the first session


of the new parliament was called in the autumn of 1783, Waddell Cunningham was committed to parliamentary reform, a parliament less exclusively Anglican and landed, in which the dissenting and mercantile interest could play a significant part. A petition from ‘the whole respectable inhabitants of the town of Belfast’ was presented to Lord Donegall asking him to allow Waddell to be chosen for one of the seats in the next session of parliament. (In 1780 an act had been passed making it legal for Dissenters to take up public office, but Lord Donegall had no intention of employing this reform for Waddell Cunningham’s benefit.) Without landlord goodwill, there was no question of Waddell representing the borough; Belfast returned two MPs to parliament but its electorate was restricted to the 13 man corporation, all Donegall’s Anglican nominees. (Only five of them actually voted in 1782.) Waddell Cunningham had never cultivated the aristocracy with the thoughtful attentions which Thomas Greg employed. Rejected by Donegall, knowing that Belfast was impossible to breach, he turned to a constituency, under Donegall’s influence rather than within his power. The borough of Carrickfergus, in Donegall territory in County Antrim was a freeman borough with a large electorate by eighteenth-century Irish standards (some 800 voters as against Belfast’s 13). The government candidate was a lawyer, son of James Hewitt, Chancellor of Ireland, who frequently acted as speaker in the House of Lords, an Englishman ennobled in 1767 as Baron Lifford of Lifford in County Donegal. Waddell, referring to himself as ‘a freeborn Irishman’ promising commercial and parliamentary reform, and playing the anti-aristocratic, Patriot card with some gusto, won by a comfortable margin. When he took his seat, Waddell was praised by the opposition as an honest merchant bringing a fund of commercial knowledge to the House, but the government party regarded him as a Patriot and a smuggler and were eager to be rid of him. The defeated Hewitt lodged an official complaint that during the proceedings at Carrickfergus, men from Belfast and Lisburn Constitutional Clubs had appeared intimidatingly close to the poll with ‘Freedom of election’ written on their hats. The charge of using undue influence on the voters was upheld and Waddell was removed from the seat. This raised the anti-aristocratic temperature in Belfast. Thomas McCabe, the radical watchmaker, thundered from The Belfast Mercury, ‘I trust the day is not far off when the illegal and unconstitutional charter of this town shall be annihilated and that we shall be at liberty to return to parliament men of our choice.’27 Rising to fight a second time at Carrickfergus, Waddell in his election address called upon the free men to resist landlord pressure as before, pointing out that his opponent could not be trusted with the newly independent parliament. ‘The same interest will be employed against you, and the same acts practised as before. Whoever be that instrument, it will be managed by the same lordly hand, supported by the same lordly power, and directed at the same infamous end – that of enslaving and destroying the rights of your constitution.’28

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He lost by 36 votes, Lord Donegall having compromised by putting forward a popular local man as a candidate. This was more the situation to which the Carrickfergus electors were accustomed. From 1727 into the 1770s, the borough had been represented by the Dobbs family, first father, then son. Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), a local landlord, economic writer and thinker saw Ireland’s improvement as dependent upon transatlantic trade. He speculated in lands in North Carolina and, in his old age, he succeeded in having himself appointed governor of the colony. In 1754 he emigrated there with a number of his tenants and developed an estate, Castle Dobbs. Mostly applying a tenurial system, he also used slave labour, probably acquired though his marriage to the fifteen-year old Justina Davis of Brunswick, Cape Fear.29 However it was not the first time that the Dobbs family had benefited from this means of production; in 1740 they had inherited Fort Stewart, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, from which Richard Conway Dobbs received the revenue.30 So it appears that Waddell Cunningham was not the first slave owner to defend the freedom of the men of Carrickfergus. Failing in his direct attempt to undermine the traditional Anglican establishment, Waddell turned to other methods. In the year in which he was elected and ejected from parliament, he, Thomas Greg and other merchants set up a chamber of commerce in Belfast, a device being simultaneously applied in Dublin in order to provide a forum for merchants outside the pale of the Anglican Corporation. Excited by the prospects of free trade, Belfast’s merchants, shopkeepers, entrepreneurial artisans now embarked on a new and ambitious development. They raised a public subscription of £10,000 to build a White Linen Hall, to challenge the dominance of Dublin, put a stop to the growing pretensions of Newry and make Belfast the fulcrum for linen manufacturers in the north. In embarking upon this course, they were encouraged by the fact that the Dublin parliament, seeking to strengthen the economic base of its independence, had set up a new system of bounties designed to encourage exports of linen to the West Indies. Those who had traded provisions there for years were convinced that the new favourable circumstance would enable them to build up considerable Caribbean sales. The Belfast venture prospered and by the 1790s the port was exporting more linen than Dublin, though most of it went to Britain not across the Atlantic. The new Linen Hall survived and throve because it was underpinned by two other important developments. The first was the opening of a Discount Office, suitably sited in the Old Sugar House, this critical ability to discount bills was provided by the town’s richest merchants, Greg, Cunningham, Hugh Montgomery and Valentine Jones.31 Hugh Montgomery had for a time been engaged in commercial activity in Virginia but his rise to great wealth may have owed more to his partnerships with Waddell. Valentine Jones belonged to an Anglican dynasty, whose pattern of trade was rooted in the early years of the century. Trading in wine and sugar, they had developed close links with the Caribbean. While Valentine Jones I and III


looked after affairs in Belfast, Valentine Jones II spent nearly 30 years in Bridgetown Barbados, where he held office as a judge and assembly man, worked as an agent, importing provisions and buying slaves, some for local planters, others sold on to South Carolina.32 Another barrier to Belfast’s expansion was now swept away in a patriotic drive for expansion; parliament passed an act to set up a Harbour Commission to improve the port, for the shallowness of its anchorage was a limitation on both the size and number of vessels .Here again Waddell Cunningham played a leading role in the inception and management of the Ballast Board as it came to be called. In his wealth and audacity Waddell Cunningham stood out from his fellow merchants but in many respects, such as his enthusiasm for volunteering and political change, he was typical of the class and religious grouping to which he belonged. While the source of his wealth was much more varied than most of those involved in Belfast’s commercial world, there was nothing singular about its link with Caribbean markets and slave products. Like Valentine Jones, other Belfast men (Musseden, Bateson, Ewings, Thompson) had acted both as provision merchants and agents in Barbados. The Ewings were among the first group to establish a bank in Belfast (1785); less financially successful, Robert Thompson became a leading organiser and pamphleteer in the movement to have Ireland’s sugar duties adjusted in order to protect her refining industry. Nor were Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg the only slave owners in town. The Blacks of Bordeaux, Belfast and the Isle of Man possessed a plantation in Grenada by 1779 and another in Trinidad at the turn of the century. Wealth, created by slave labour, played a significant role in making Belfast the dominant market for the Irish linen industry and in improving the harbour, thus helping to launch the port into an era of continuous growth. But Belfast’s development as a manufacturing, rather than a mercantile centre, also owed much to West Indian connections. Here smaller operators played a lively part. Tallow chandlers could sell their soap and candles to finish off the cargoes of provisions bound for the West Indies. By the 1780s rope works set up to supply local need were diversifying into producing cordage and sail cloth specifically designed for the sugar islands. One effect of ‘free trade’ was to make it possible to send manufactured products direct across the Atlantic so that Belfast shoemakers began to service the Caribbean, making specially broad-fitting shoes for the slaves. In 1783 there were some 224 shoemakers in Belfast, in 1791 the number had risen to 312. Only linen weaving now employed more craft workers in the town. But most significant of all was the introduction of cotton manufacturing, the raw cotton supplied at this early stage by the British and French Caribbean colonies. Like the Montaudon operation in Nantes half a century earlier, Belfast’s first attempt at cotton production (1777) was set up to make use of pauper labour in the town’s Charitable Institute. The partnership which pioneered this was made up of the Joys (linen merchants and owners of the News

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Letter), John McCracken, ships captain, and Thomas McCabe, entrepreneurial watch maker. The trio saw themselves as ‘the first Irish Adventures’ in a new and hazardous project. Though the labour was cheap, the acquisition of the necessary expertise in this quickly evolving industry, the touch paper of the industrial revolution, was difficult and even dangerous, involving one of them (probably McCabe) in prolonged industrial espionage in England. By 1785 they had moved beyond the Charitable Institute to become the Irish Cotton Ware-house, Rosemary Lane with 125 looms, 66 spinning jennies, 4 carding machines, 500 employees and the intention ‘to spin twist by water in the manner of Richard Arkwright of Manchester at the Falls, two miles from Belfast’.33 Others quickly followed their example.By 1800 cotton was the largest employer in the lower Lagan valley: ‘More than any other industry, it laid the foundation for rapid industrial expansion in the following century.’34 And with new industry came new demographic patterns. The development of the mills brought a Catholic work force, in significant numbers, into the Presbyterian town. In 1832 Belfast had its first sectarian riot, sparked off by election fervour and erupting in Hercules Lane.35 The White Linen Hall, Chichester Dock, the Ballast Board, the cotton industry, the rope walks and sail cloth all led into the future. Other equally percipient ventures, the patriotic sulphuric acid project at Lisburn, the attempt to reproduce an Irish Etruria in Ballymacarret, struggled and faded. Coal, which Thomas Greg spent so much money failing to find locally, increasingly poured in through the improved harbour facilities which his generation had begun, allowing Belfast, against natural odds, to create an industrial city in Ireland in the age of steam. The year 1784 had been Waddell’s most radical and patriotic year, a year in which he won his seat in parliament only to realise that it was immediately under threat. The maintenance of Volunteer strength, the main tool for achieving parliamentary reform, was very much on his mind. On 13 May he called upon ‘persons of every religious persuasion’ to join the First Belfast Volunteers. ‘The interest of Ireland at the present juncture demands that all men sensible of the value of their civil rights should be prepared to assert and defend them: that a general union of all the inhabitants of Ireland is as necessary to freedom as prosperity of this kingdom, as it is congenial to the constitution.’ Even before this invitation Waddell Cunningham had developed good relations with the Belfast’s small Catholic community. His house and outbuildings in Hercules Lane backed onto a site upon which the Catholics had acquired a lease to build their first church in the town. When the opening mass was held on 30 May, Cunningham captained his First Volunteer Company to form a guard of honour in front of the church and then gave an order to dismiss. Then the uniformed men took their places in church, joining a number of ‘respectable Protestants’ already seated inside. The close of the same year was marked by another ambitious and patriotic gesture, this time seeking to exploit Ireland’s new trading opportunities.


Waddell proposed the launching of a slave trade company in Belfast. A plan with detailed costings, published in the Mercury, suggested a well-armed, 300 ton vessel (£ 3000) with provision and wages at £ 1000. The cargo (£ 3000 to £ 4000) was to contain locally produced goods, linen, cotton and tallow to be exchanged for 500 and 600 slaves, who would then be conveyed across the Atlantic to the West Indies where they would be traded for sugar.36 Like the Limerick initiative, it was an adventurous and expensive attempt to give Ireland her own triangular trade and, as in Limerick, it came to nothing. Unlike Limerick, Belfast has preserved a tradition, first recorded in 1806, that the plan was scotched for ideological reasons. Thomas McCabe claimed to have secured its rejection, writing in the proposal book ‘May God eternally damn the soul of the man who subscribes the first guinea.’37 If he did so, three years before the founding of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, it was an intimation of Belfast’s ability to rush forward into novel political developments. In the early and mid-eighteenth century, slavery and sugar impacted on the ports and countryside of Munster, involving all classes in the struggle to extract a share from the expanding commercial economy. To find similar reverberations in the linen region in the northeast is more surprising. Yet the ubiquity of Irish contacts with the Caribbean is marked. Like Greg and Cunningham, Connaught gentry, Catholic and Protestant, Bellews, Lynches, Frenchs, Stauntons, O’Connors, invested in the Ceded Islands after the Seven Years War. Charles O’Hara of Annaghmore joined with Robert Browne and acquired a 500 acre plantation on Dominica. Thus landowners as well as merchants were attracted by patriotic agitation for ‘free trade.’ For those in the establishment these were challenging times, the combination of growing urban wealth and civic disability, was destabilising. In spite of the good offices of their Protestant contacts in Limerick, the Roche brothers, Philip and Stephen joined the Catholic Committee in 1779. In the same year, Hely Hutchinson, certain of support from his Cork constituency, led the Patriot attack on government in Dublin and Westminster which would result in their capitulation to ‘free trade’. From then on, all over Ireland the business community became more demanding. Wealth from the slave plantations had encouraged growing political confidence among Cork and Limerick Catholics, now it fed Dissenters’ discontent in Belfast.

8 Dublin, Sweet City

In the case of Cork and Belfast, West Indian trade had played a formative role in urban growth. Dublin presents a more complex pattern; seat of government, dominant port, woollen manufacturing centre, national linen market, many strands came together to produce the impressive expansion of Ireland’s capital from a population of 60,000 in 1700 to 180,000 in 1800. Like Cork and Belfast, Dublin shared in the export of those products permitted by trade regulation to go straight across the Atlantic, but given the relative size of the three ports, this export trade in provisions and linen was of limited importance to the capital so that eighteenth-century Dublin is correctly described as having ‘no significant direct colonial trade’.1 Like Belfast’s merchants, there were Dubliners who owned plantations or acted as agents in the West Indies and (again like Belfast) a number of these were involved in the wine trade. Dublin’s richest wine merchants based themselves at Bordeaux, which was of course France’s largest sugar port. Here they could see the fortunes amassed from tropical produce and the advantages of diversification in that direction. Thus the Delaps established in the wine trade in the 1720s and 30s, by the 1760s owned a plantation in Antigua and carried on trade with the West Indies.2 Galway merchants, seeking opportunities beyond their own declining port, threw out a web of contacts encompassing the West Indies, Bordeaux, other ports on the continental seaboard, and Dublin. A family network held together the Blakes, as plantation owners, agents and merchants in St Domingue, Bordeaux and Dublin. Bellew brothers owned a plantation in Dominica, operated businesses in Cognac and Cadiz and developed into importers and flour millers in Dublin.3 In the mid-eighteenth century there was a merchant Antony Lynch in Dublin (connected by marriage to Frenchs in Galway and Bordeaux) related to a merchant Antony Lynch in Bordeaux; while in Bridgetown, Barbados, Antony Lynch and Son were among the most successful agents on the island, holding large slave auctions and handling the business of the Newton estate with its 600 slaves.4 In Dublin, as in other parts of western Europe bankers, found themselves drawn to West Indian property. Sir George Colebrooke, 159


who had opened his Dublin bank in 1764, purchased a plantation in Grenada in partnership with Nesbitts, a north of Ireland house based on London.5 In Dublin the La Touches began the century as Williamite soldiers and silk, poplin and calico manufacturers, custodians of valuables, discounters of bills, and closed it as landed gentry, Directors of the Bank of Ireland and plantation owners in Jamaica.6 But such information attests to the far flung and intricate nature of the Dublin commercial world rather than revealing a distinctive role for the slave colonies in its development. The important bond attaching Dublin to the slave economies of the new world was sugar, which arrived via Britain. By the mid-eighteenth century sugar had become Ireland’s most valuable import, surpassing old favourites, wine, metal goods and tobacco.7 From the passing of the Molasses Act (1733) to the outbreak of the American War in 1775 the amount of sugar imported into Ireland went up five fold.8 At all levels of society it became an object of desire: it appears in Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mhean Oiche (The Midnight Court), fed to the greedy midwife attending upon the lower gentry/strong farming family.9 Quakers sweetened cider with it, Anglican clergy had it added to raspberry whiskey to make a pleasant afternoon drink.10 It featured as part of the normal stock in the apothecary’s shop, sugar cakes being regarded as an effective cure for worms. Sugar bowls, dusters and nippers featured amongst the most elegant articles produced by Dublin’s silversmiths. In 1791 a Dublin newspaper bemoaned its rising price ‘as to prove not a little distressing to the public’ to whom it had become ‘in some sort a necessary of life’. In Belfast the committee of the Charitable Society struggled with the dilemma that if they gave out tea and sugar allowances, they would be accused of unsuitably supplying luxuries to paupers, while failure to do so would tempt the poorhouse workers to steal the yarn they were spinning in order to acquire these articles.11 Though Irish consumption per capita was only a quarter of England’s intake, it had increased far faster, quadrupling in four decades, while England’s had not even doubled during that time.12 Twothirds of Ireland’s sugar was refined in Dublin.13 In the early years of the eighteenth century sugar reached Ireland in small and irregular amounts. In the 1720s France began exporting substantial consignments to Ireland and refining took off in Dublin handled mainly by immigrants from Bordeaux. The passing of the Molasses Act of 1733 changed that situation, raising high tariffs against foreign sugar attempting to enter Britain and Ireland.14 French imports ceased and Irish traders established ties with British sugar houses finding supplies readily available. In some cases they acted as carriers for their new contacts, sailing from Ireland to the Caribbean with provisions and returning loaded with sugar usually to London, Bristol or Liverpool.15 The sugar leaving the West Indies was muscovado, that is a heavy, wet brown sugar created by crushing the cane and boiling the juice on the Caribbean plantations. Before being consumed in Europe it required further refining.

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On arrival in Britain, duties were levied on the muscovado but a full drawback was paid if it was re-exported to Ireland. The Irish importer then paid duties in Dublin or any other port of entry (slightly reduced duties so that in spite of the extra voyage it could sell at about the same price as muscovado in England). The intention was to promote production in the colonies, secure an extensive market for sugar importers in Britain and encourage Irish refining and consumption. Tied firmly into the British imperial system, receiving regular supplies, Irish sugar importing prospered and expanded. By the mid-eighteenth century there were some 40 sugar houses in Ireland, half of them in Dublin.16 The claim that sugar baking employed 4000 families and a capital of £340,000 may have been exaggerated. But the same merchants’ figures for the amount of muscovado imported (between 148,000 and 186,000 cwt per annum) is borne out by official records.17 In the mideighteenth century sugar refining was a quickly expanding urban industry, busily supplying the home market. (There were no bounties in place to encourage re-export as was the case with the British industry). It took three cwt of muscovado to produce one cwt of fine white sugar (loaf and lump). But Ireland’s sugar bakers did not focus their energies on that end of the market, producing instead large amounts of cheap, brown sugar (powdered sugar and brown bastard) which initially suited both the available technology and the local clientele. Britain, catering for a wealthier, more slowly expanding market, concentrated on fine, white sugar experimenting with new ways to produce it more cheaply. Three sweet spin-offs resulted from sugar refining – sugar syrup, sugar candy and molasses. By the 1760s the British refiners had discovered how to turn sugar syrup into loaves and lumps, a skill which eluded the Irish.18 But the hot intricacies of sugar baking were further complicated by the issue of government regulation. After the Seven Years War the British sugar refiners, seeking to expand their market for fine white sugar, succeeded in persuading parliament to add an export bounty to lump and loaf sugar leaving for Ireland. Ireland’s importers of muscovado and her refiners, seeing their activities threatened by superior technology and Westminster’s trade regulations, immediately sought protectionist measures. In Dublin, 110 merchants and traders connected with ‘the importation and refinement of sugar’, and representing the interests of similar parties throughout the kingdom, called upon the Irish parliament to respond by raising import duties on lump and loaf sugar. In their campaign the merchants eagerly sought the support of Hertford, the Lord Lieutenant, well aware that on many counts sugar was important to those in government.19 Even in Britain sugar duties were an important component of revenue. But in Ireland, a country without a land tax, plantation crops (i.e. slave produce), sugar, rum and tobacco, were swiftly becoming the mainstay of government income. In eighteenth-century Ireland the main requirements of government were the upkeep of the army and the payment of the national debt. The chief


source of income was the hereditary revenue, consisting of quit rents (paid by those who had had their land titles confirmed by Charles II’s Act of Settlement and pegged at that rate), the hearth tax (difficult to collect because the majority of those involved were poor) and customs and excise, which rose steadily throughout the century. This meant that the king could almost have ruled without calling parliament. But more was invariably required and that was produced by the legislature voting extra duties, (the additional duties) designed originally to run for two years and pay for the loan required during the wars of the 1690s. Though not an annual event as it was in Westminster, from the close of the seventeenth century the Dublin parliament sat regularly every two years from autumn through to the following summer. To those members galled by thoughts of subjection to Westminster, the expanding hereditary revenue appeared as yet another threat to their freedom already limited by Poynings Law, 1494 and the Declaratory Act of 1720 which ruled that British legislation could invalidate acts passed in Dublin. From the London perspective there were two possible ways of governing Ireland. One was to have an assertive Lord Lieutenant who spent considerable time on the spot, the other (more popular with the aristocrats considered suitable for the appointment) was to allow him to be an infrequent visitor, and for some great Irish landowner, other than an absentee, to run the business of government. The first half of the eighteenth century was the age of the ‘undertakers’, opening with the domination of William Connolly (1662–1729), millionaire, Speaker of the House of Commons and Chief Commissioner of the Revenue Board. As contemporaries expressed it, the seat of power lay in ‘the Castle and the Customs House’.20 The Old Customs House (1704) was one of the first new buildings to appear in eighteenthcentury Dublin, designed by Thomas Burgh, engineer, architect, and surveyor general who had already produced the barracks for four regiments upriver on the northern bank. His customs house sited on the southern side, just below Essex bridge, was a stalwart classical building, impressive and practical, 200 feet long, the ground floor an open arcade composed by solid pillars and arches, the fourth storey consisting of dormer windows set in the sloping roof. Behind it, through a few twists and turns of narrow streets, was the crumbling Chichester House, where parliament sat. Beyond that rose the diverse fortifications of the castle dominated by its medieval gateway and ruinous Bermingham tower. The Revenue Board of seven commissioners sat in the Customs House. Here they collected quit rent and hearth tax, as well as customs and excise. The routing of the quit rent and hearth tax to the Customs House symbolises the declining importance of these sources of revenue, while the presence of the Commissioners in Burgh’s new building reveals the close link between government and the rising import and export duties. The actual Customs and Excise revenue which reached the Exchequer amounted to over half a million sterling in 1750 and to a million pounds in


1790.21 But on top of this, and quite unquantifiable was a large amount which never reached the Exchequer, fees being invented and inflated by the officials involved, the commercial public understanding that to query their legality would only produce inconvenience. Such fees, paid out along the way, formed an essential part of government’s patronage system designed to secure the smooth working of parliament and administration. The customs provided jobs and sinecures. At each port a Customer, Controller and a Searcher had once been responsible for recording loading, unloading, checking goods and one another, issuing warrants and countersigning documents. However, as early as the mid-seventeenth century, these positions had become sinecures. By the eighteenth century Collectors for both Customs and Excise had emerged. Below that were Surveyors appointed to board vessels with the book of rates and to set a rate if the cargo was not listed in the book. Below that again came tide-waiters who recorded the cargo parcel by parcel and then delivered it to the land-waiters. Landwaiters opened the parcels, recorded the contents and delivered the record to the surveyor. Gaugers, measured alcoholic liquid – wine, rum, imported beer, locally distilled spirits. Inland revenue, as well as that lifted at the ports, was taken up. In this case each gauger was responsible for a district, divided into walks, where he went round checking on retailers and producers, but very often this charge was taken over by wholesalers, thus giving big rum importers like Richard Hare and John Roche even more influence. ‘The revenue service was the most pervasive agency of central government in Ireland in the eighteenth century.’22 In the 1760s an Irish MP calculated that there were eight customs officers for Cork, while in England ports of comparable size would have possessed five. Yet it seemed that size was not a very correct measure for there were as many as 17 in some of the smallest ports, the arguments being that serious smuggling was conducted from the more obscure sites. Thirty years after the union there were complaints that the Irish establishment was still too large. Whether or not it was actually overmanned is another question. Sinecures such as Customer, Comptroller and Searcher were sufficiently well paid (in the region of £1000 and upwards) to be directly attractive to aristocrats and landed gentry. Offices such as surveyor, tide-waiter, land-waiter, gauger could be used to support needy family members, distributed to useful retainers, rented out or openly sold.23 Again those who acquired them might feel themselves too gentlemanly to actually practise them but someone, literate and numerate, had to do the work. As early as 1715, parliament had decreed that those with positions in the revenue must keep a six-hour office day.24 Clerks of course could be employed to act as substitutes, but some degree of personal activity, would undoubtedly raise the amount of cash a man could extract from his position. Who to know and what to pay was the secret of commercial success. To get goods cleared quickly, to be able to produce cash immediately, was the first essential for an importer and exporter. (Perhaps


the estimate of a quarter of a million in fees which never reached the exchequer was an underestimate.) The great merchants, all had special relations with customs officials and as usual the impetuous Waddell Cunningham was the one to leave the most obvious trail. Amayas Griffith, Belfast’s Surveyor of Excise was invited onto the new Belfast Chamber of Commerce. Waddell himself was well known as a smuggler when he entered parliament in 1783 but it was only after Griffith’s departure from office and Waddell’s outspoken criticism of the governing class that he was actually brought to court for claiming a drawback on a cargo of tobacco bound for Norway, which turned out to have travelled no further than Strangford Lough.25 Patronage thus flowed both from the Exchequer and from the fees which were removed at an earlier stage. Henry Boyle, Earl of Cork, in his undertaker’s years was the font of patronage. Simultaneously his rent roll, and that of many of the Munster MPs, was satisfactorily buoyant, enriched by commercialised agriculture nurtured on the provision trade. A wide range of Irish peers and members of parliament thus received extra sustenance from the development of slave plantations in the New World, but a more select number were drawing deeper on sources they had already tapped. In the 1760s Charles O’Hara possessed a position as Ranger at the Curragh worth £400 a year and a pension for 31 years, both of which he proceeded to sell at about the same time he invested in the development of a Dominican sugar estate. Perhaps the two financial transactions were not unrelated.26. The Brownes of Westport, Ireland’s premier slave holding family, were rich enough to keep their younger sons at home and in parliament rather than having to submit them to the fevers and hurricanes of Jamaica. John Browne (1709–76), father-in-law to the Jamaican heiress, Elizabeth Kelly, was made first viscount and then Earl of Altamont by Lord Lieutenant Townsend (1767–72), to whom he returned unswerving support. By the early 1770s he was an ageing patriarch in the House of Lords, with two of his younger sons, Arthur (the second son) an army colonel and James, (the fourth son) a lawyer, sitting in the Commons. Col. Arthur Browne was regarded by the Castle as a particularly steady man, who could keep more petulant members of the family in check. He was Constable of Carrickfergus, Co Antrim with a salary of £365 and lands worth £200 or more. From 1775–8 he acted as Inspector of Recruits, employing a clerk, renting an office and paying for firing; for these expenses over a three-year period, he was reimbursed with £1378–14–10.27 He also gained a cornetcy for his son (which seems to have been given not purchased, as his own rank had been) and he had the right of appointment for one boatman, one gauger and one hearth money collector. James, the lawyer, was Collector for Foxford, County Mayo, with the right to recommend one boatman. A third brother held an appointment as Surveyor General which brought in a salary of £500 a year.28 The Latouches of Marly (Rathfarnham and Jamaica) were also plantations owners with a multiple representation in the Irish House of Commons,


though they augmented their fortunes rather less liberally from government funds. Forbes, the Patriot MP, briefly in a partnership with Thomas Greg in the 1770s, seems to have possessed a plantation or an agency in the West Indies, acquired the office of Governor of Bahamas in 1798 and died there within months.29 In the late seventies and early eighties Fitzherbert Richards, returned from Jamaica where he had made a ‘small fortune’ from two plantations, emerged as the representative for the borough of Lisburn and became a Commissioner of Barracks at £400 a year. He was eager to improve on this by acquiring a seat on the Revenue Board (£1000 a year) but when the government failed to fulfil his request, he showed no ill will, retaining his reputation as ‘a good humoured, noisy, laughing bon vivant’.30 But the members of the Irish parliament did not simply use the public revenue, so conveniently plumped up by duties on slave produced consumables, to line their own individual pockets. Just because their power was limited and because they were suspicious about the growth of the hereditary duties, they demanded that accounts be placed before them. These they carefully monitored and considered what public projects should be supported. Lead by Speaker Connolly, one project on which they could easily agree was the building of a new house for themselves. Chichester House, which was falling down anyway, was demolished. While the new building was being erected, it was hidden from view behind a row of dwellings which had still to be purchased for demolition. When revealed it appeared as a wonder, a symmetrical building in an asymmetrical space, in style quite different from the austere Irish classicism which had emerged from extensive and sturdy barracks building. Its frontage was light and spacious, a Palladian forecourt with tall colonnades of gleaming white ionic pillars. A domed and porticoed central block stretched out into wings, ending in open arches. These arches led the way through the colonnades to the doorways, the left to the Commons, the right to the smaller chamber for the 147 Lords. It was not built with any intention that they would all attend or be able to sit if they did, a wise arrangement as many of them lived in England and a handful of them were Catholics or suspected of being so. Some 30 of them actually appeared to enjoy the panelled walls, the richly ornamented arch of the ceiling and apse, the overall design derived from Palladio’s temple of Venus. The House of Commons, of which the young architect Lovatt Pearce (Irish on his mother’s side of the family, who traced their descent back to the O’Mores) had recently become a member, was the fulcrum of the building. An octagonal space, with a domed ceiling, this legislative chamber is recorded not only in architectural plans but in a Francis Whealtey painting (1780) which shows the MPs on tiered seats, those in the back row framed against pillared alcoves, pierced by fanlights giving onto the corridors beyond. Above this arcaded wall the chamber opens up into a gallery; light streams through the upper windows, including a circular one, inserted in the dome, which is supported by the Corinthian columns. Visitors lean over a


delicate wrought-metal work balustrade to observe and hear the debate. The front row is dominated by women. In the third bay on the right is a lady accompanied by her dark-skinned servant, his dress suggesting the Orient rather than Africa. Nothing could be more different from Hickel’s picture of the Westminster House of Commons painted in 1794. There the members sit aligned below the Venetian window of St Stephens Chapel with no visitors in sight, an accurate representation of the situation for the small visitors’ gallery was a male preserve. Women could only get a glimpse of the proceedings by climbing up into the ventilator, a small dark space above the chandelier, from which they could peep down and gain a glimpse of the scene below. Wheatley’s painting celebrates the elegant swirl of the Irish chamber just as political hopes began to rise. The legislature is packed, the members carefully and individually recorded for themselves and posterity – the occasion the debate on free trade. Lovat Piearce died young and never saw his work finished and in use. Earlier in his short career he had hoped to design a palace for George II’s Queen Caroline. Instead he had built a civic temple to the enlightenment, symmetrically proportioned, dignified, well lit, creating an atmosphere in which reason could thrive, an inspiring home for a representative institution, which the philosopher Locke stressed as the greatest bulwark against royal tyranny. So here they came (300 members, 66 from the counties, the rest from boroughs, usually elected by their corporations). As in tiny Montserrat their names carried historical and ethnic significance. There were Gaelic names: O’Brien, O’Callaghan, O’Hara, O’Neill, Connolly, Coghlan, Cotter, Grogan, Kearney, Lysaght, Langrishe, Malone, Moore, Quin, Shiel: Hiberno/Norman/Old English; Barry, Butler, Coppinger, Daly, Fitzgerald, Fitzgibbon, French, Kirwan, Roche, St Leger, Talbot, Tyrell, Tighe: ‘New English’, Tudor, Jacobean, Cromwellian, Williamite; Parnell, Foster, Yelverton, Flood, Grattan, Latouche, all come together in this propertied and Anglican melting pot. The fondness for using surnames as Christian names, sometimes reveals the historical mix, but overall reflects the fact that they married one another and wished to give public notice of their kin group – hence Fitzgerald Aylmer, Beauchamp Bagnell, Townely B. Balfour, Kildare Burrowes, Pierpoint Burton, Shapland Carew, Dixie Codderington, Vesey Colclough, Armor Lowry Corry, Conway Dobbs, Rigs Falkiner, St John Jeffereyes, Denham Jephson, Lodge Morres, Rochfort Mervyn, Mervyn Archdall, Capel Molyneux, Colville Moore, Silver Oliver, Wyndham Quinn, Clotworthy Rowley, Boyle Roche, Duke Tyrell, Crofton Vandeleur, and most curious of all, Barry Barry and St Leger St Leger. As a watchdog against any extension of royal power the Irish parliament would grow in vigilance. But of course at the heart of the enlightenment lay a conundrum. Its exponents believed in universal man, sharing common characteristics at all times and in all places, but they had evolved and cultivated such notions because they were educated and privileged. How could


they apply the universality of man to those at the bottom of their own societies, in the Old World, serfs, peasants, the urban poor, and in the New World peons and slaves? So they evolved recipes for the improvement of mankind to be achieved through rational and humane government, the encouragement of science and industry, changes in treatment of criminals, the abolition of torture, the removal of superstition, the introduction of religious toleration. In pursuit of such ends, in some countries in central, south and eastern Europe, enlightened thinkers were prepared to suspend criticism of monarchy and compliment rulers dedicated to humane and rational reform, hence the arguably oxymoronic term ‘enlightened despot’. But as western Europeans who had digested Locke, possessing their own parliament, Ireland’s ruling class had to struggle with these problems themselves. ‘Very magnificent … indeed too fine for us,’ commented the Bishop of Elphin, after viewing the most elegant legislative building in early eighteenth-century Europe, and he comforted himself that it ‘hath chiefly employed our own hands’.31 Parliament, encouraged by the immensely wealthy William Connolly, who perhaps believed in spending the country out of its depression, voted the original £6000 for Pearce’s design in 1727, a miserable year, when the harvest had been a disaster and even the tobacco duties were falling. By the time they faced a bill of £20,000 in 1731 the value of sugar imports had considerably surpassed that of tobacco. In 1739, with nothing more to do but install external railings and digest the final calculation of total monies spent (£30,000), it was clear that such rising customs receipts were now part of a recurrent pattern. Before 1728 they had already had an established tradition of spending money on public buildings in Dublin. The earliest example of money being appropriated to a specific purpose (1698) was a grant of £3000 for enlarging Trinity College to be paid out of additional tobacco duties.32 Further grants from the revenue, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, supported Burgh’s building of the library and continued through to the erection of the west front in 1754. Now a heavily impressive, granite edifice took an angled look across King William’s statue (which avoided eye contact with both buildings) to parliament’s Palladian piazza. The connection between the two was close. Many of those MPs who had received a university education had done so at Trinity. Undergraduates could stroll or lurch across the Green using their gowns as a passport to gain entry to the visitors’ gallery. In the eighteenth century it was unusual for government, rather than individuals or ecclesiastical donors, to fund building work on an educational institution. Here support for a bastion of Anglicanism, and the enlightenment standard of respect for knowledge, happily combined. It is interesting to note that the Protestant parliament made no attempt to raise a Hibernian St Paul’s, and of course the great baroque churches of Catholic Europe were significant by their absence, counter-reformation ornament confined to the private chapels of rich merchants. At the centre of the city,


Eustace Strel recorded a restrained Presbyterian and Quaker presence. But the mass houses were obscurely sited; a popular and central Fransciscan chapel being reached by passing through a public house named the Elephant. The Church of Ireland received some grants towards rebuilding but far more was spent on Dublin Castle, in adding money to efforts made by private philanthropists supplying the city with hospitals and in supplementing municipal efforts at widening roads and building bridges. Reaching towards greater independence in the early 1780s, the government’s first plans were for a New Customs House and an extension to parliament. Downriver, on the northern shore, on a site bitterly denounced for its unsuitability by the merchant community, James Gandon erected an elegantly domed palace for the Revenue Commissioners, famed for the originality of the river gods decorating its facade, eventually transported by Malton’s print, celebrating its affinity with water and sky, into becoming perhaps the most famous building in Dublin. In this flowering of the city into a classical capital, the architects were usually English, the designers of plasterwork, painted ceilings and sculpture, Italian. Local people supplied labourers and skilled tradesmen such as stone cutters, joiners and glaziers. By the mid-century the Dublin Society (another recipient of public money) had established a school at which it was possible to train as an architect. In 1780, one of their students, the eighteen-year old James Hoban, a Catholic from Carlow, took a prize with a design for ‘stairs, roof, etc’. He emigrated to America and in 1792 became one of the three architects employed to build the White House. Arguably he was the most important of the three; though the difference in size and more prominent positioning of the bowed projection is disconcerting, the relationship of the presidential mansion to Leinster House is discernible.33 Later he made a significant contribution to the construction of the Capitol. On first arriving in America, Hoban had settled in Charleston, South Carolina. When he won the design competition which took him to Washington, he travelled north with his team of five skilled slaves. Most of the unskilled work on the public buildings was done by slaves on hire from the masters of surrounding plantations. Irish indentured labour was heavily used at first but slaves were regarded as more reliable as the Irish servants frequently ran away, able to melt into the majority white community in the adjacent states. Other Irish emigrants, trained in their country’s building boom and unfettered by indentures, acquired some of the better jobs. The commissioners appointed a James Dermott to assist in surveying, and they were later disturbed to learn that he had been put in charge of the slave axe-men, doubting that anyone recently arrived from Ireland would be able to handle blacks. However he adjusted quickly, described as ‘unruly and troublesome’ when drunk, but not so frequently so as to injure ‘the business he was engaged in’. After six years, he was discharged by the commissioners for misconduct and, in the burgeoning atmosphere of building site and labour camp surrounding the emerging


capital, easily turned his hand to slave trading and slave catching. Though publicly accused of filching another man’s slave, he extended his business by advertising a service to help planters get back their runaways.34 A duty of government recommended by enlightened thought was the encouragement of the economy, to make a country strong and combat poverty. Again this was an area where parliament could have some impact. In the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession, the economy expanded and the need to service a swelling national debt declined. With the revenue in surplus, and some seven-tenths of it still hereditary rather than additional, a bitter row over the extent of parliament’s control of money bills broke out. From the mid-fifties onwards MPs sought to prevent further clashes over surplus revenue by designating appropriations more generously on economic projects.35 Prior to that, they had concentrated public monies on the Linen Board mostly by transferring duties on imported textiles there. Navigation schemes were also favoured. In the 1730s grants were made to Hugh Boyd to improve the harbour at Ballycastle, Co Antrim to facilitate the exports from his coal field. In the 1750s there was a growing emphasis on manufacturing; John Roche’s £200 to assist with the production of hardware was an early example. Textiles other than linen received support, and the setting up of paper factories in Limerick, Belfast and Dublin was subsidised. Paper of course encouraged the spread of knowledge and was required in increasing amounts by the business and administrative world. One such grant (1753) was given to the Sleators, parliament’s official printers, producing the House of Commons Journals, leather-bound with marbled end-papers, their appendices constructed in parliamentary offices by the Vesey brothers, listing income, expenditure, salaries, pensions, annuities, imaginatively tabulated in symmetrical columns, as carefully balanced as Lovatt Pearce’s plinths, pillars and portico. Carried forward on the high of greater independence in 1782 the number of grants and bounties burst into spate, with fishing and support for cotton manufacturing becoming as popular as inland water ways and coal production.36 Nothing emerged as a marked success. People who failed in their applications (like the Irish Cotton Warehouse, Rosemary Lane, Belfast) expanded and survived. Others, who received large amounts, like Charles Brooke and his ironically named Prosperous in Kildare, went down, a record which naturally provoked criticism by contemporaries and historians. MPs were accused of backing foolishly speculative schemes and the already rich of pocketing the money and doing nothing in return. Original attempts to encourage Irish coal production may have been supported because Dublin was inconveniently short of fuel but, in the later decades of the century, after the invention of the steam engine, continued concentration on it was surely percipient. No one then could be sure that the coal was not there. Those who sought to develop fishing on the west coast were encouraged to do so by the hope of profit in the West Indies trade. John Foster, Speaker and economic


expert, further recommended support for such efforts in the name of humanity, explaining that Irish herrings were bigger than Baltic imports and therefore of advantage to the slaves.37 But throughout the eighteenth century, hopes were expressed that more fishing would raise home consumption. The build up of a significant industry in the west would certainly have been a boon when the Famine came. In nineteenth-century Europe cotton would replace sugar as the key slave product fuelling economic growth, creating a textile which, unlike wool and linen, sold readily the world over providing basic covering in hot countries and the luxury of underclothing, relatively inexpensive and easily washed, for those in cold climates. In 1785 Pitt was faced with irritated British cotton manufactures airing their fear about rising Irish competition.38 These fears proved illusionary, but in the late eighteenth century when the Irish parliament voted grants towards the support of coal mining and cotton manufacture, it was investing in the sinews of industrialisation. As for the unused and abandoned inland navigation schemes criticised as early as the 1770s by Lord McCartney, these were an attempt to set in place the infrastructure without which developing countries in the twenty-first century are told they will get nowhere.39 The final complaint is always that government money was wasted because Ireland lacked capital yet in the twentieth century both economic historians and government advisors seriously discussed and recommended the Gerschenkron theory. This thesis, based on the economic development of czarist Russia, argued that where there is insufficient capital for industrial growth, the government must step in and provide money for infrastructure and manufacturing. To do this the czars sought foreign loans, while the eighteenth-century Irish parliament, on a small scale for a small island, sought to dip into the customs and excise and, particularly after 1782, to utilise protective duties. Ireland did make economic progress in the eighteenth century, but in the oncoming age of iron and coal it was difficult for a country without either to continue its industrial growth. There was no industrial equivalent of the potato, something which apparently provided even the poorest with a basic resource. Understandably the eighteenth-century parliament was of little interest to a new state built on a reaction against landlordism and Protestantism. But the struggle to try and promote their industry through tariffs was common to both. Another shared experience of late eighteenthcentury and late twentieth-century Irish parliamentarians was the pressure, when boom did come, to reward influential supporters with advantageous economic opportunities, a particularly difficult pressure to resists in the intimate confines of an island. Because of its importance, sugar inevitably became involved in constitutional matters, eventually emerging as a Patriot cause. The first indication was given by Limerick’s Sexton Pery. Dedicated to trying to reduce the hereditary revenue and thus curtail the power of the King (and of course Westminster) over the Irish parliament, he seized the opportunity offered by the 1765


sugar petition to strike a blow at royal resources. He suggested that parliament should respond to the merchants’ petition by abolishing the duty on muscovado, a move which would have given the country’s refiners the cheapest raw sugar in Europe, while significantly diminishing the hereditary revenue. Such a bold stroke, challenging the mercantile modus vivendi between the sister kingdoms and eating into the resources of patronage (of which Pery himself was no mean recipient) was seen by most members of parliament as impractical or provocative or both.40 Pery’s suggestion and the refiners’ demands were ignored, but other developments in this decade amply illustrated the importance of slave produce to the Irish government and the Irish economy. The West Indian lobby in Westminster had long been convinced of the potential of the Irish market. Back in the 1730s its members had eagerly supported the Molasses Act which, among other stipulations, had prohibited the direct import of French sugar, rum and molasses into Ireland. And, in the hopes of undermining the Irish taste for French brandy, they had persuaded Westminster to allow rum from the British islands to be imported direct into Ireland. This direct access did increase the popularity of rum but the real boom in consumption came after 1763 and resulted from manipulation of the customs duties. Then Westminster agreed to a complete drawback on the re-export of West Indian rum from Britain to Ireland. This made such rum cheaper than directly imported rum, which was paying a higher Irish customs duty. The West Indian Committee reported that ‘the Consumption of Rum began to make a Rapid Progress, inasmuch, that the Importation into Ireland rose in the year 1764 to upwards of 900,000 Gallons … in 1769 to upwards of 2,100,000 Gallons’.41 In 1771 the drawback on indirect rum was cancelled but the rise in Irish consumption continued, now augmenting Irish customs receipts. From 1766–74 Ireland absorbed more colonial rum than England and Wales together.42 Such precedents for expanding both commerce and revenue were not forgotten. By 1778 the American War began to bite. The raising of the Volunteers signified the government’s problem in raising regular soldiers and money. Without the latter, bankruptcy loomed. More revenue was required but where was it to come from? One obvious source was a land tax but that was a political impossibility. As far back as 1704 the Irish parliament, had taxed absentee pensioners, but though absentees landowners had been named and shamed in 1730, and frequently castigated thereafter, in 1773 a serious attempt to tax them had failed to pass, certainly undermined by influence from Westminster, but in the last resort abandoned through the fear that it might in the future be extended into a general land tax. Loans and tontines could be resorted to but they had to be serviced by more taxes. While provisions were conveyed by the British navy across the Atlantic to the sugar islands, the embargo on export to unfriendly countries grew more serious as France and her allies joined in support of the Americans rebels. Cargoes of cow beef intended for French slaves, rotted on shipboard, considered


unsuitable by the authorities as food for naval ratings or soldiers.43 Ports other than Cork feared to send out vessels. Economic recession reacted on the textile industry which, except for linen, was always under pressure from British competition. By 1779 there was public support for a non-importation campaign, enforced by attacking those who sold or appeared in the streets dressed in foreign woollens, tabinet, silks and calicoes. Faced with the need to produce new revenue in difficult circumstances, the successful experiment with rum emerged as a potent example. Influential supporters of the government, the Revenue Commissioners and John Foster, a clever and ambitious young lawyer, taking on the role of economic expert, pressed the Lord Lieutenant to pressurise Westminster to allow plantation goods, sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, cotton (all desirable, valuable, enumerated goods and slave-grown crops) to come straight from the colonies to Ireland. Though at present the supply of these slave-grown crops was seriously disturbed by war, the Revenue Commissioners optimistically claimed that such a move would soon double the duties derived from these articles.44 It was also clear that the move would bring an increasingly unpopular administration, popularity with both people and parliament. By February/March 1778 the Lord Lieutenant was pressing Lord North to accept some version of this solution. In April the ‘Friends of Ireland’ raised the issue of the relaxation of duties in the British House of Commons and Lord North agreed in principle that this would be beneficial to Irish trade.45 The year 1779 saw all these issues escalate. The debate in Westminster over the introduction of commercial concessions to Ireland and then the rejection brought Ireland to boiling point. In the Dublin parliament the Patriots were demanding not just the direct importation of plantation goods but a more general ‘free trade’. The old sores and grievances about the destruction of the woollen industry were reopened; the injustice of this and the insulting bondage imposed by the constitutional situation rehearsed. The Patriot cause drew on well-established figures, Grattan and Flood joined by George Ogle, Hussey Burgh, Hely Hutchinson, new young talent like Barry Yelverton, men versed in the technical detail of parliamentary practice as well as oratory. It was a Lord Lieutenant’s nightmare, the carefully constructed majority, lovingly tended with sinecures, pensions, preferment in the church, commissions in the army, recommendations for tide-waiters, land-waiters, gaugers, supernumerary gaugers, hearth tax collectors, began to give way as the prospect of new opportunities, safety in numbers, patriotic satisfactions and fear of the mob, gained ground. Grattan shocked, excited and threatened his audience that, if parliament were not prepared to support a ‘free trade for Ireland’, he would appeal to the people. Speaker Foster for the government pressed the house to vote supplies (a short money bill) to deal with the crisis until free trade could be introduced and harvested. Outside the traditional hostile groups of Protestant weavers and Catholic butchers melded into a dangerous crowd of Patriotic supporters. On College


Green the Volunteers drilled, their cannon placarded with the message ‘free trade or else’. Parliament was unanimous in support for its introduction. In December 1779 Lord North beset by mounting problems elsewhere agreed to the relaxation of the commercial regulations. Until this time sugar and tobacco, flowing into the hereditary revenue, had strengthened the Crown, now they began to fuel opposition and independence. A ‘free trade’ for Ireland differed from Adam Smith’s free trade since it did not recommend the lowering of customs duties. It was aimed at removing restrictions on Irish trade imposed by Britain for Britain’s benefit. The seventeenth-century restrictions on the export of wool, woven or raw, to any other country other than Britain were revoked. Bans on the direct import of goods between Ireland and the American colonies were cancelled, as provisions and linen already moved freely westward and, in the opposite direction, flax seed, grain and rum were similarly unfettered, this change obviously focused on the most desirable of colonial products, sugar and tobacco. As part of the Atlantic system direct trade with West Africa (participation in the slave trade) was now admitted. On the other hand eastern trade was still out of bounds, falling as it did within the monopoly of the London-based East India Company. As the Dublin parliament had always claimed a right over money bills, it had adjusted the rates for customs duties. But drawing confidence from the recent commercial triumph, Patriots and merchants alike now sought a more audacious, proactive policy in this area. Many of Irelands ‘free traders’ were enthusiastic protectionists, foremost among them the sugar bakers. No sooner had news of Westminster’s concessions arrived than they set about trying to acquire the changes petitioned for in 1765, which the disturbed conditions of supply in wartime made more attractive than ever.46 The situation looked hopeful. So many officials had gone to England to superintend arrangements there, that John Foster, sympathetic to protection, was virtually acting as Chief Secretary. So they approached him, explaining that to gain advantage from the free trade concessions offered by Westminster, the Irish parliament must immediately surround sugar with protective tariff against English imports of refined white.47 A new and expanding area of the urban economy in the eighteenth century, sugar fuelled the rise of the Catholic middle class.48 When the wealthy Catholic merchants of Usher’s Quay had come out in force to support the 1765 sugar petition, they accounted for rather less than a quarter of the 110 signatories.49 But in the spring of 1780, of the 28 Dublin sugar refiners who addressed their petition to the Irish House of Commons putting forward the case for protective duties against imported white sugar, at least a third were Catholics and of these eight were members of, or fund raisers for, the Catholic Committee.50 The most famous among them was Edward Byrne, named in Gilbert’s history of Dublin as the wealthiest Catholic merchant in Ireland. Statements about who is the richest of all always owe


something to public perception; in Byrne’s case his reputation was underpinned by the contemporary revelation that he paid an annual £80,000, or perhaps even £100,000, in customs duties.51 While his huge wealth aroused Protestant vituperation in some quarters, in others it provoked respect. Cork Corporation debated presenting him with the freedom of the city and in parliament Protestants favouring Catholic relief pointed to the necessity of allowing men of such resources to buy land lest they leave the country to invest their wealth elsewhere.52 In 1765 Byrne, apparently not important enough to sign the merchant and traders petition, described himself as a grocer. By 1780 he saw himself as a sugar baker though he also possessed interests in brewing and distilling, both activities in which the products of his refinery could form a lively component. At the Catholic Committee in 1779 he was entrusted with the task of securing the financial support of the Roches of Limerick, whose reputation for tapping the riches of the slave colonies vied with his own.53 The refiners’ campaign began on 11 January 1780 when Edward Byrne and John Sutton, both Catholics, wrote to John Foster requesting his support for the raising of protective duties. Just over a week later six Presbyterian merchants from Belfast sent off a very similar letter. Waddell Cunningham was one of the signatories but the man who did most to shape northern demands was Robert Thompson. While Byrne and Sutton presented clear, formal dignified expositions on the subject, Robert Thompson, delivered excitable, strident effusions.54 He was in a very different position from Byrne or indeed Waddell Cunningham, for Thompson and his Dublin partner Peter Galan, had experienced bankruptcy in 1774, though both of them seemed to have been trading again by 1780.55 Earlier in his career Thompson had worked as an agent in Barbados and he was firmly convinced that, in order to break into the sugar market in the West Indies, Irish merchants would have to supply the planters with slaves. He also pointed out that African chiefs were eager to be paid for slaves in rum and sugar. Unlike many others, he did not think only in terms of refining but pressed for enthusiastic participation in an Irish triangular trade. Private lobbying soon turned to petitioning. The manner in which this pressure was now exerted on parliament was much more sophisticated than in 1765. Then a single petition signed by Dublin merchants and traders had added that it represented those of similar interests all over Ireland. By April, Dublin and Belfast were presenting a combined front, John Sutton and Robert Thompson printing and circulating a pamphlet advising other groups on the arguments to be employed when pressing their case.56 So Dublin and Belfast were joined by Cork, Donegal, Drogheda, Galway, Londonderry, New Ross, Newry, Newtownards and Waterford. In all, some twenty-one petitions calling for protective duties were received over a period of six months.57 By April the general feeling among the sugar bakers was for a prohibitive tariff of 16s.17 –12 d per cwt on refined sugar from Britain. In the same month


the Lord Lieutenant asked Lord North to name a figure and he chose 5s.10 –12 d.58 This was brought forward in the Irish parliament, with government’s supporters defending a moderate duty and the keenest Patriots pressing for the petitioners’ 16s.17–12 d. Some of the patriots were deeply committed on the sugar issue. Sir Edward Newenham for example, a member of a Cork gentry family, a radical representative for county Dublin and an advocate for the removal of all legislation penalising dissenters, was an arch protectionist and an active believer in the West Indies as the gem of the British empire. When natural disaster, in the shape of a hurricane, wrecked havoc in Jamaica and Barbados in the autumn of 1780, he rushed to the rescue, organising an Irish relief expedition, three ships carrying much needed food supplies (flour, beans and herring) for the stricken islands.59 Others, more interested in politics than economics, were eager to grasp an opportunity to build bridges with the merchant community and enlist their support for the long desired plan of greater independence for the Dublin parliament. Thus Yelverton, Hussey Burgh, Ogle, Grattan and Flood, would all show themselves capable of making impassioned speeches on sugar but their interest in it per se was doubtful. Government supporters, Foster, Beresford and Ponsonby (with whom Newenham had fought a duel) responded with displays of financial expertise in favour of moderate duties. After protracted debate parliament settled for a compromise 12s. duty. Even a faithful government supporter like Foster was drawn, by the feeling in the house and his own belief in protection, to go beyond the figure the Lord Lieutenant favoured.60 In July the English Privy Council altered the Irish bill, bringing the duty down from 12s. to 9s. Objecting in principle to this interference, in which he was supported by a unanimous House of Commons, banker David Latouche suggested a technically face-saving move and parliament agreed to the changed rate.61 But many of those, in and out of parliament, who floundered among the arguments about variations in price and quality of muscovado and molasses, the relative British and Irish costs of transport, coals, refining implements and wages, understood clearly the constitutional significance of 9s. as against 12s., which had turned free trade into a hollow victory, revealing Ireland’s commercial development as still under England’s control. Now the popular element began to assert itself as Dublin turned to meetings and resolutions. On 11 August 1780 the merchants and traders met at the exchange and indignantly rehearsed their views on the probable collapse of the sugar industry, thus rousing to action three volunteer companies who held consecutive meetings and produced their resolutions.62 Denouncing parliament’s supine acceptance of Privy Council changes to Irish legislation, they coupled the sugar duties with a revised mutiny bill which had also been returned and accepted earlier in the month. Each corps produced stronger and stronger resolutions. The Merchants Corps, headed by a young and indignant Digges LaTouche, warned parliament that they were courting a


despotism ready to violate the liberties of Ireland and promised that they would act with their fellow subjects to avert such danger. The Independent Dublin Corps repeated the Merchant Corp’s message adding that they would not vote in future for any member of parliament who had supported the mutiny bill or the altered sugar duties.63 The Liberty Corps (so called because it was raised from the weavers of the Liberties and considered dangerously volatile as it contained illegally armed Catholics) went even further. Making sinister reference to the Volunteers’ law and order role, they announced that in future they would not protect the property of any of the offending MPs.64 This was upsetting to many of them. The Duke of Leinster and Thomas Connolly, who had earlier disagreed with Lord Carysfort’s suggestion that the ‘free trade’ crisis had ominously turned parliament into the voice of the people, now began to have second thoughts. There was talk of prosecutions to be brought against the protestors. David Latouche apologised in parliament for the hotheaded behaviour of his youthful kinsman. On 24 August a refiners’ meeting called for non-importation of British white sugar.65 The mood of mounting public dissatisfaction had by now spread north. On 21 and 22 August, 17 volunteer companies at the Newry review signed indignant resolutions about the sugar duties and the mutiny bill.66 Sugar in Dublin in 1780 had not proved as explosive as tea in Boston in 1774. There was no parliament due to sit next year – annually held parliaments were of course another Patriot aim anxiously avoided by the Castle. But as soon as the legislature opened in the autumn of 1781 the refiners presented another petition, repeating the need for a higher tariff on loaf and lump. Barry Yelverton announced, quite untruly, that the sugar industry had been ruined by the acceptance of the Privy Council ruling and declared that in order to stop such disasters in future he was demanding a modification of Poyning’s Law. To work the house up into a state where it would take courage to storm this venerable constitutional barrier, the Patriots sought to arouse indignation against the alteration of the sugar duties and the mutiny act and found that sugar offered by far the most fertile ground for continued prevarication. There was wrangling over the nature of the committee to examine the refiners’ complex evidence, then hours of varied interpretation of the evidence itself. The existence of outside pressure was orchestrated by ‘spitting and coughing from the gallery’ when decisions went against the higher duty. The Patriots evolved this strategy more by inclination and accident than prior consultation, from which they were inhibited by personal jealousies. The administration extended grudging patience, fearful from past experience which had seen government majorities melt away into unanimous opposition. But as November closed the resolution reconfirming the moderate duty passed. Even the most tenacious of speakers on the matter Henry Flood, had to face the fact that the issue could be dragged out no longer. The debate on Poyning’s law was tabled for early December and the


government felt that so far they had successfully held the Patriots at bay, when news arrived of the defeat at Yorktown. Once again England’s difficulties became Ireland’s opportunity. After the Christmas recess Patriots in parliament, and Volunteers outside it, were in the ascendant. By the end of the session Poyning’s Law and the Declaratory Act had gone and a new constitutional situation had emerged. In 1783 the independent Irish parliament (now sitting annually) enacted the 12s sugar duty.67 The remainder of the eighties unfolded for some as a stimulating, for others as a frustrating, decade. Independence (or at least greater independence) achieved, there were differing views as to what to do with it. The volunteers who held a convention at Dungannon wanted to move on to parliamentary reform to produce a legislature less landed and less Anglican, but they disagreed on whether this change should involve Catholics. Thus the Catholic question proved a divisive influence among them at the very moment when the end of the war was about to undermine their importance. Henry Flood was prepared to bring a reform into the House of Commons. He saw the new Ireland as requiring only a small military establishment as the volunteers had shown themselves capable of sustaining law and order. He wished to open up the closed boroughs, which formed the backbone of parliamentary representation, to a wider Protestant electorate. It was a view which appealed to Patriots such as Sir Edward Newenham and Waddell Cunningham, but the bill failed, for the great borough holders were not going to participate so easily in their own demise. There were those in the country, particularly in the north, who were still agitating for parliamentary reform in 1785 but it proved an unrewarding process. Non-importation movements also smouldered on. Government supporters, such as Speaker Foster, concentrated on working out an economic modus vivendi. Cotton in particular attracted attention in the 1780s, pointed to as a future panacea for undermining rural poverty, even as its manufacture sidestepped demands by workmen for higher wages because it employed so many children. It was praised in parliament as an answer to the problems of the textile industry. Its introduction by various entrepreneurial landlords (Lord Hamilton in Balbriggan, Sir Lucius O’Brien in Clare, Lord Courtnay in Limerick, Sir Richard Brooke in Kildare) was hailed as an example of an improving and therefore patriotic venture. As potential cotton exporters, the proposed slave-trade companies, which never got off the ground, could be seen as part of the same expansive patriotic nexus. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal waxed enthusiastic about the Limerick plan but Dublin itself, eager to receive, sugar and turtle meat direct from the islands, showed no interest in a triangular approach. More than anywhere else in Ireland, the capital was aware of the growing criticism of the slave-trade. One of the first Irish attacks launched upon it was by Fredrick Jebb, in his Thoughts of the discontents of the people last year respecting the sugar duties published in 1781. Jebb was a medical man with a


flair for pamphleteering which he had exercised in the Patriot cause, until he accepted a pension (which he never received) to support the government.68 The long, detailed, carefully researched 1781 pamphlet was the fruit of this transaction. In it he pointed out that the down side of protective duties were higher prices, making fun of the fact that some of the wealthiest merchants in Ireland were petitioning parliament about their financial difficulties. Curiously (or deviously) he condemned ‘the licentious practice of publishing the opinions and resolutions of private men in direct and seditious contradiction of parliament on the same subject’ while completing his pamphlet with appendices which included a reprinting of all the volunteer demands.69 But he also condemned Robert Thompson’s argument that Ireland should establish a slave trade – ‘Is the emancipation of the ports of Ireland destined to carry additional slavery from Annamaboo and the Gold Coast of Africa? Accursed spirit of excessive commerce when, having tortured its inventive arts in experiments upon all the subordinate objects of nature, did at last subject human society to its depredations and turned the very Liberty of Man into a commodity of barter!’. Using materials from Malachy Postelwaite and Liverpool customs returns, he suggested that Ireland concentrate on other valuable African commodities.70 Later the abolitionists would popularise this approach as nurturing Africa through the establishment of ‘legitimate trade’. A year after the Limerick company failed to emerge, an anonymous author, who claimed to have been born in Ireland and to have worked for 20 years in west Africa published Observations on the advantages which would arise to this country from opening a trade with the Coast of Africa: with a plan for the same by which the Slave -Trade may be Ultimately Abolished (Dublin 1785). In fact he was setting out a prospectus which he hoped would result in his own employment as an Irish agent funded to set up a trading centre on the African coast. Incorporating Frederick Jebb’s approach, he promised that he would encourage the local chiefs to bring goods other than slaves. He was however at pains to state that this was a long term aspiration, and he did not approve of any immediate attack on either the trade or slavery itself. Though he had flung his net as wide as possible in an effort to attract supporters to his scheme, the result was disappointing.71 As the circulation of anti-slavery ideas boomed in 1780s readers in Dublin were well placed to encounter them. During the eighteenth century the Dublin book-trade, run for the most part by printers who were also booksellers and free from law of copyright, expanded steadily.72 In some cases Irish editions were added to London imports of anti-slavery classics, to purvey the steaming anger of John Wesley’s sermon, Ramsey’s revelations that the British planters made no attempt to convert the slaves, the moral and statistical fervour of Clarkson’s pamphlet. The Abbe Raynal’s History of the East and West Indies, with its call for a black Spartacus, was one of the best selling books in Ireland. More generally an awareness of anti-slavery seeped in from newspapers and periodicals. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, recognisably


a brother to the Gentleman’s Magazine, had been established 1731. Like all Irish periodicals the greater part of the contents came straight from material already published in London, though the Irish items which did appear included accounts of Dublin’s parliamentary debates. In August 1780 the Hibernian Magazine printed the volunteer resolutions condemning parliament’s acceptance of the altered sugar duties and mutiny bill, but these explosive pieces took up much less space than a story entitled The Grateful Slave, a sentimental tale with a Latin American setting recommending human benevolence as an antidote to the tyranny of slave owning. Books dealing with the problem received attention. Matthias Christian -Sprengal, The Origins of the Negro Slave Trade was reviewed as was the Dublin edition of Ramsay’s 1784 pamphlet, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies. In 1782 A Speech in favour of the unhappy Children of Africa, A Vision, was reprinted.73 In this very unusual piece a Westminster MP dreams of supplying a young Negro with a university education so that he comes before the House of Commons and makes an erudite speech calling for the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies. Some years later this speech would actually be delivered in Dublin in a debate, at a law students’ society, by the versatile Leonard McNally, playwright, composer, barrister, legal defender of (and paid informer upon) the United Irishmen. After the launching of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Hibernian Magazine for 1788 carried a full selection of views supporting and attacking the Committees aims. But it also included a serialised story, obviously from the pen of a local author, which reflects Dublin’s growing sense of other races impinging upon Ireland’s existence. The tale of Catherine Netterville, or Kitty-cut-a-dash’s social climb, tells of the heroine’s involvement with Ireland’s first ‘mulatto’ MP. The term is in fact rather loosely used, for in spite of a reference to Oroonoko, the text shows that Kitty’s first lover is of East Indian extraction, an exciting example of Asian depravity. However he is superseded by a gullible West Indian Creole who appears in the story’s full page illustration in the midst of a domestic fracas, backed up by his Negro servant, presumably a slave.74 The vigour and fascination of the anti-slavery debate was now such that it began to generate indigenous publication. In the next year, 1789, a pamphlet entitled A short and particular and impartial account of the treatment of slaves in the island of Antigua was printed in Cork. Its author, who signed himself SK, had worked as an overseer, possessed an attractive and flowing prose style, and had obviously been irritated into pamphleteering by the feeling that anti-slavery activists often lacked direct knowledge of the system they denounced. Thus he began by attacking Clarkson, who had claimed that African chiefs actually started wars in order to acquire POW.s for sale, while Lieutenant Matthews writing from the Gulf of Guinea denied that. In the case of both the trade and plantation slavery itself the introduction of


‘a very few regulations’ would improve matters.75 Turning to his Antiguan experience SK describes the arrival of the Guinea ships with slaves dancing, gay, unconcerned, hung with glass beads, as if celebrating a festival, and declares that ‘There are one thousand of Irishmen … who have been spectators of the merriment’.76 Onshore slave housing conditions are compared favourably with that of the Irish peasantry. Their diet also appears as sufficient and even varied, a distribution of six herrings a week plus maize meal, possibly supplemented by yams and sweet potatoes which they grow themselves. However, he qualifies this by saying that wartime disruption of supplies (he arrived in 1774) meant that slaves ate dried beans instead of herring, which often had a bad effect on the health. Both beans and maize ought to have been ground up before boiling to make them digestible, but the Negroes often neglect this precaution. Also provision grounds supplies can run short because the slaves fail to cultivate assiduously enough. But diet is also adversely affected by ‘indolent managers’ failing to distribute rations. If slaves fail to tend the overseer’s livestock to his satisfaction, he seizes what they possess, often with draconian thoroughness.77 SK also comments that the African children are bigger than Creole children. Gradually as the writer proceeds, his descriptions grow darker; the sick houses are full, the plantation doctors ride in and ride out again neglecting their patients, masters turn out old slaves, the boatswain or chief feeder in the crushing mill keeps a crowbar handy to stop the machinery when accidents occur, but in spite of this there is frequent loss of hands, feet and lives. The law, setting whippings at 39 lashes, is frequently flouted. He had known as many as 100 administered, 50 with the whip, 50 with the cat o’ nine tails. Runaways are working in the fields chained to heavy weights and locked up at night in airless conditions resembling the black hole of Calcutta.78 Finally, from his store of true tales, SK produces a shocking eighteenth-century forerunner of Beloved, relating the story of a one-legged slave woman, sexually harassed and physically assaulted by an overseer, who eventually threatened to treat her two children with equal violence. In an act of ‘savage heroism’ she drowned them both, attempting to end her own life in similar manner. Failing to do so because of her crippled state, she was later hanged for infanticide.79 The pamphlet ends with a tribute to the Negro as clean, musical ‘with airs as sweet as Irish or Scotch’ fond of fishing and swimming, not beautiful by European standards but beyond a doubt fully human. The belief that they are not so, the writer feels, goes far to explain their treatment at the hands of whites on the slave ships and plantations.80 SK’s pamphlet was dedicated to ‘to the nobility, gentry and the liberal minded in general, in the county and city of Cork’, a dedication reflecting his commitment to amelioration. Yet, it is an uneven work, running counter to its avowed intention by providing a rich fund of emotive material for anti-slavery writers who never left home. With such examples provided by an ‘impartial’ and experienced witness, there was little need for them to worry about unrealistic exaggeration. As a


writer SK is, in many respects, a typical ‘West Indian’. Unlike the slave-holders of the American south, the planters of the sugar islands never developed a pro-slavery theory, defending the system purely on practical necessity. Small in numbers, often briefly resident, they were closely tied both economically and intellectually to Britain. Opposition to slavery conquered the literary world long before it succeeded in abolishing either the trade or the institution. As a writer SK was already affected by the dominant discourse of anti-slavery. The debate on the right or wrong of the anti-slave trade agitation published in the Hibernian Magazine in 1788 had ended with an editorial warning, recommending caution where anything as nationally vital as the West Indies was concerned. But there were those in Ireland who had already made up their minds where they stood. In that very year the Dublin Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution condemning the slave trade as ‘odious’, while commenting with pride that ‘the traffic in human species does not appear ever to have been carried on from this kingdom’.81 This motion of support for the anti-slave trade committees in Britain was carried by packing the Dublin meeting with Quaker merchants. Though their knowledge of early Irish history was weak, Quakers were the one group in Ireland to possess a well-informed and well-established attitude to antislavery. Attending the annual Quaker Meeting of Sufferings in London, possessing close links with America, particularly Pennsylvania, where a number of wealthy Cork Quakers had invested in land, they were well aware that the Philadelphia Meeting had banned the Society of Friends from slaveholding in 1774, and that in the same year the London meeting had imposed a similar ban on participation in the trade. Knowledge was further reinforced by the system of ‘acceptable ministers’ which meant that Quakers, male and female, travelled on transatlantic missions to address the Society of Friends wherever they gathered together. In eighteenth-century Ireland there were probably at most some 6,000 Quakers but their influence on the island was increased by that spiritual power-house, the Shackleton boarding school in the Kildare village of Ballitore. The Shackletons were Quaker intellectuals. The school had been started by Abraham Shackleton, a Yorkshire Quaker who had migrated in 1726 and married into the Irish network. Over the years it could claim a startling variety of men among its alumuni, Edmund Burke, James Napper Tandy, Paul Cullen. Abraham’s son Richard, who succeeded his father as headmaster, had been sent to Trinity College, Dublin, a rare experience for one of his sect. From his time there, as well as from his schoolboy days in Kildare, he retained his lifelong friendship with Edmund Burke. But in his youth Richard Shackleton also created a close, mixed sex circle of fellow intellectuals and religious enthusiasts around him at Ballitore. Among them was the aesthetic and determined Mary Peizley, who as an acceptable minister travelled to America in the 1750s where she lived for a time among blacks


in North Carolina and published a denunciation of the Quakers’ treatment of their slaves. On return to Ireland, after a prolonged engagement, she married Samuel Neal, another member of the Ballitore circle, and died on her wedding night. Samuel, later married a Quaker heiress from Cork, but he retained his first wife’s interest in the problem of slavery. In 1772 he visited Philadelphia. There he met Antony Benezet, the Quaker schoolmaster, who ran a school for free blacks. Benezet had become famous for his dissemination of tracts and pamphlets describing the horrors of slavery, from the African continent to the farms, towns and plantations of the colonial world, thus providing a later abolitionist like Clarkson with an invaluable fund of information. Benezet and Neal discussed the possibility of having the issue of slavery raised in the British parliament and Neal suggested that Benezet should approach Burke through Richard Shackleton.82 Thus Burke’s Irish Quaker connections made him the object of an early appeal to join the nascent anti-slavery movement. The first Westminster MP to take up the anti-slavery cause in the House was David Hartley, member for Hull, who in 1776 introduced a debate on the slave trade as ‘contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men’, thus securing himself a place in the anti-slavery Pantheon and the twentiethcentury historiographical debate.83 Had Burke reacted positively to the Ballitore approach, his intervention would have pre-empted Hartley’s claim to fame. However he had rejected the Friends’ appeal as an impractical suggestion. That he should do so is not surprising, for Burke was already tethered into the slave plantation nexus from a number of angles. Back in 1757, as he and his friend and cousin William Burke struggled to exploit their legal training to avoid becoming lawyers, Edmund had helped William to write An Account of European Settlements in America. This book, stressing the importance of the colonies to Britain, naturally drew attention to the vital role of plantation agriculture and slave labour. In 1759 William Burke was rewarded for his interest in empire with an appointment as Secretary for Guadeloupe, a sugar island captured from France and rated by many contemporaries as Britain’s most valuable overseas conquest in the Seven Years War (1759–63). Edmund’s beloved younger brother Richard, generally regarded in England as amusing but embarrassing with his ‘animal spirits and brogue’ accompanied William in search of a career. Neither of these Burkes found success in Guadeloupe, which at the close of the war was handed back to France, while Britain retained Canada, a move seen by Edmund, and many others, as an economic mistake. William cherished hopes of becoming Governor of Grenada, which were also dashed, but Richard Burke received an appointment as Collector of Customs there.84 Edmund, the only one of the trio to avoid an overseas appointment, had watched his relatives leave for the tropics with hope and anxiety, fearing for their health but eager to see them solve the family’s complex and demanding financial problems. From 1759–65 his own position (inferior to that of the absent William) was that of


private secretary to W. G. Hamilton, a commissioner of trade, who then became Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. During these years, whether in Ireland or England, Burke, advised by his friend Charles O’Hara sr, worked diligently and unsuccessfully to secure a readjustment of trade regulations to give Ireland freer access to the sugar islands, thus prefiguring many of the gains eventually extracted in 1779.85 At the close of 1765 Burke, now attached to Lord Rockingham, entered parliament, where he used his remarkable talents as an orator to mould this aristocratic Whig grouping into a serious party of opposition. While prepared to adjust trade regulations and handle the colonists with tact, the Rockingham Whigs were deeply committed to the prosperity of Britain’s imperial possessions. When approached by Shackleton and Benezet on the subject of slavery in 1772, Burke did not see criticism of that institution as compatible with the needs of his party. Nor had his family interest in the West Indies declined. Though mainly resident in England, Richard Burke, was still Granada’s Collector of Customs; behind him on the island he had left his 11 slaves and apparently more enemies than friends. Back to Britain he had brought disputes over his absenteeism, a discrepancy in his accounts (sometimes estimated at over £2000, sometimes at over £9000) and, most dangerous of all, a complex and dubiously legal purchase of land on St Vincent, where he had intended to make the family’s fortune by developing a sugar plantation.86 Like the Ryan/Bakers, Richard Burke was to find this mountainous island the deathbed of his financial hopes. As his brother’s prospects in the West Indies receded, the pressure on Edmund to remain true to the mercantile status quo deepened rather than lessened, for in 1774 he was elected MP for Bristol. Yet as an enlightened thinker and an orator the temptation to criticise at least the trade was growing; in 1775 in his three-hour speech, which riveted the house, on Concessions to America, Burke had referred to the slave trade as ‘that inhuman traffick’.87 Two years later in 1777 he found himself faced with a less congenial task, when requests were made in the House for an investigation into the management of the Company of Merchant Adventurers trading to Africa. This African Company, dear to the hearts of his Bristol constituents, received £13,000 a year from the government in return for which it supplied governors and garrisons for its 11 forts. It was also empowered to make treaties with African potentates and generally encourage trade, which of course was dominated by the commerce in slaves. Accusations were being made that the money was being improperly applied largely to secure the continuance of the Company’s rights, while, the forts crumbled and trading profits declined. Burke defended the Company’s management of these affairs and declared that its use of public funds was legitimate and efficient. But when Hartley arose, waving a pair of handcuffs and demanding that the Board of Trade investigate the cruelties practised by British slave dealers, Burke commended his behaviour, agreeing that the trade produced hardships.


The irony of such comments was not lost on the public. The London Evening Post remarked that Burke as ‘an advocate of liberty’ appeared awkward, shackled to a situation in which he appeared at once to condemn and defended the use of fetters.88 Two years later in June 1779 Burke found himself once again faced with defending the African Company in parliament.89 This did not result in any recorded oratorical flourishes but as a result of his research into the workings of slavery and the slave trade, he wrote his Sketch of the Negro Code proposing a plan to ameliorate conditions in Africa and the West Indies. Back in 1777 Burke had remarked on the traditional nature of African slavery, ‘time out of mind’, the continent had been in a state of slavery, therefore the inhabitants only exchanged one species of slavery for another. But he added that slavery imposed by Europeans was more severe, a view which Equiano was to make central to his condemnation of the slave trade in his Interesting Narrative published nearly a decade later. In many respects the Negro Code can be seen as a percipient document; four years before Ramsay’s revelations about the lack of effort to convert the slaves, Burke’s plan concentrates heavily on the need to supply religious instruction both in the African forts and on the West Indian plantations.90 Eight years before Dolben’s bill (which laid down the number of slaves in relation to the tonnage of the vessel) Burke dealt with the need to regulate shipboard space and diet for slaves and crew.91 The chief agent of reform he envisaged as the Africa Company, endowed with greater powers and more personnel and territory on the West Coast, building hospitals and churches, appointing inspectors of Marts, schoolmasters, surgeons and clerics.92 In the West Indies, the Attorney General of each island was to double as a Protector of Negroes, with the duty to appoint inspectors to supervise slave conditions.93 Constantly stressed was the need to hold out the prospect of freedom to the hardworking and virtuous. Thus extensive and complex arrangements were made for manumission; age, marital status, family size and attendance at a place of worship, being combined together to allow slaves to purchase freedom for themselves and their families at reduced rates.94 The idea of creating legal officers, who would be responsible for improving the lot of the Negro, rather than expecting their colonial posting to supply them with land and slaves, does in some degree prefigure the establishment of the stipendiary magistrates introduced half a century later. Other changes suggested by the Negro Code would be promulgated in 1823 by the Bathurst Resolutions limiting the use of physical punishment unless a magistrate was present, giving the slave the right to own property and to contract a legal marriage. According to Burke’s scheme all healthy men between 21 and 50 were to be compelled to marry. Also in the cause of encouraging natural increase among West Indian slaves, women were to be removed from field work for a significant time before and after childbirth.95 Like the early Irish penetentials produced a thousand years earlier, Burke’s Negro Code condemned the sexual harassment of female slaves by those in authority over


them and suggested suitable punishments.96 But like John Stewart Mill, a century later, Burke felt that those he considered savages were not entitled to liberty. Thus his Sketch stated that the Negro should be firmly under the control of Europeans; idles, dissolute and vicious free blacks should be tried by the Protector of the Negroes and two JPs and, on their agreement, sold back into slavery.97 The sexual behaviour of slaves was to be policed and religious instruction enforced (Ten blows could be administered for ‘disorderly conduct during divine service’).98 His own personal experience and the disadvantaged position of Catholics in Ireland caused Burke to feel strongly that education should be supplied to those in oppressed conditions and that bright boys should be picked out and supplied with an avenue leading to cultivation of the intellect and social mobility. Thus, both in Africa and the West Indies the authorities were to buy promising youths, educate them to become clerks and teachers and eventually, if they fulfilled expectation, give them their freedom. Burke’s respect for religious toleration and learning was also recorded in the stipulation that literate Muslims (or indeed anyone who could read a book) should not be sold as slaves.99 Having produced this long and detailed plan, packed with suggestions for improvement, some of them quite impractical, others perceptive and farreaching, Burke took no action upon it. The Negro Code was pushed away among his papers, not to be produced again until Wilberforce made action on the slave trade a burning parliamentary issue. This delay, allowing Hartley and Wilberforce to carry off parliamentary laurels, which might otherwise have been his, has caused historians to wonder if Burke’s Code was really written, as he claimed, in 1780.100 The very prescience of some of his suggestions has strengthened that doubt. But the 1770s had generated much discussion of slavery though it had manifested itself in a diffused and desultory manner. There had been the publicity given to Granville Sharp’s court cases, Benezet’s ideas circulated by the Quakers, the Virginia colonists’ complaints that they had wished to ban the importation of slaves only to be prevented from doing so by George III, dramatic stories in the London press of exploding slave ships and kidnapped Africans and the newly serious evangelical standards communicated in sermons which had affected Samuel Martin in 1772. Burke, an omnivorous reader and a voracious absorber of facts and ideas, was quite capable of welding these diverse sources and opinions into a detailed plan of reform. While Burke felt obliged by his studies of the African Company and his knowledge of the situation in the West Indies to evolve his plan of amelioration, he found it easy to abandon it in the face of more congenial and compelling issues gathering momentum in 1780 as the ill success of the American War allowed opposition to storm ahead to new triumphs. The drive for economical reform (cutting down government sinecures and therefore the power of the Crown) was absolutely central to the Rockingham Whigs’ philosophy of government. India with its ancient aristocracy, long


legacy of literacy, thousands of years of complex and sophisticated religious rituals, being victimised by its most recent conquerors, fired Burke’s imagination. Here he saw parallels with Ireland’s past, which the Negro, savage and illiterate, did not evoke. While he recommended the introduction of Christianity as a force to civilise the African and rehabilitate the slave, he lacked Wilberforce’s evangelical fervour, which made the anti-slavery movement so eager to claim the Negro as a man, a brother and a potential convert, whose animism did not command European respect, respect which (in the case of the Indians) inevitably raised the vexed issue of religious toleration. But social background as well as intellectual inclination, allowed Wilberforce to emerge as the hero of anti-slavery while Burke’s overseas commitment, the harrying of Warren Hastings, brought him few such accolades. The needy Burkes with their struggling West Indian appointments and unfulfilled hopes and the Bristol constituents demanding protection for the triangular trade, had made Burke aware of the problem of slavery, but it was easier for a high-minded man from a rich merchant family, based on an east coast port, to lead a head-on attack on that commerce. Back in Ireland, on the plains of Kildare, the Shackletons continued to hold the moral high ground, as they worked to secure the hereditary survival of anti-slavery sentiments. Richard Shackleton was not only concerned with the education of the 50 or so schoolboys within his care, he was also determined to cultivate the minds of his own children, (the majority of whom were female). For he was anxious to avoid a situation in which he found himself surrounded by ‘insipid and distasteful conversation’. All three siblings from his second family, (his only surviving son Abraham and two daughters Sally and Mary) would emerge as committed anti-slavery enthusiasts. Sally Shackleton, became an acceptable minister, never married and in middle life went blind. Following her mother’s example, and displaying a talent for it at an early age, she often spoke in the women’s meeting at Ballitore. Mary Shackleton (known in her published works by her married name of Leadbeater) suffered as a child from a speech defect, which perhaps was an added stimulus in encouraging her to cultivate her considerable literary abilities. She wrote poetry influenced by classical Augustan tradition and from the age of 11 she kept a journal. Carefully paginated and indexed it was at once a spiritual aide-memoir and a history of her times at Ballitore. (Like her poems, these writings were read aloud around the fireside on winter evenings and passed around in manuscript to family and friends.)101 Mary’s journal revealed that she was an omnivorous reader, Virgil in translation, Shakespeare, Steele, Addison, Dr Johnson. Among her favourite books, indeed very popular with Irish Quakers in general, was John Woolman’s Journal, which recounted the New Jersey Quaker’s fiercely peripatetic life among his co-religionist, frontier settlers, Native Americans and blacks. As a youth in the 1740s he worked as a clerk for a shopkeeper. His life changed when he was told to write an invoice for the sale of a slave and found himself


revolted at the thought of disposing of a fellow human being in such a manner.102 The Shackletons were proud of the anti-slavery record of William Edmundson, the seventeenth-century founder of Irish Quakerism, who visited Barbados, where he denounced the planters’ failure to convert their slaves with more assiduity than William Fox himself. Increasingly in the 1780s, Mary Shackleton’s journal reveals that the sufferings of the Negro were a matter of everyday comment in the schoolroom, at the tea table and during afternoon strolls at Ballitore. In1789, when the debate on the slave-trade opened in Westminster, Edmund Burke for the first time spoke movingly and at length on the issue, supporting Wilberforce’s motion. Burke’s successful public career aroused admiration, excitement and a degree of spiritual unease in the Shackleton family. They were aware that his commitment to abolitionism was novel and that his interest in East Indian affairs could easily immerse his talents. Mary, who had visited the great man’s home in England and enshrined these occasions in congratulatory verses, now decided to put her poetic talents to a practical end. As her sister Sally embarked on her career as an acceptable minister, Mary composed an Ode celebrating Burke’s contribution to this rising moral cause, constructing a Pantheon of philanthropic rather than military heroes, and thus encouraging him to maintain his active involvement in the abolition of the trade.103 The year of SK’s pamphlet and Mary Shackleton’s Ode was also the year of the French Revolution. The revolution had an enormous impact on Ireland, sweeping away the inertia and frustration which had begun to afflict political reformers, making moderates and radicals alike eager to press their case. In Dublin, Thomas Connolly and George Maquay, (a Protestant sugar baker) founded the Whig Club (August 1789), Lord Charlemont encouraged the establishment of a northern branch which Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg joined. Slavery in the Lockean sense, a people subject to tyrannous royal government, was always a term used by the Patriots in Ireland, heavy with resonances from Molyneux and Swift.104 In and out of parliament, in poetry and prose, they cried that Albion was enslaving Hibernia, referred to trade regulations as commercial bondage, and described government supporters as slaves to corruption.105 After 1783 parliamentary reformers argued that the nation thought itself free but was, in fact, in a state of slavery.106 By the 1790s radical voices supporting full-scale emancipation declared that Protestants could not be free if Catholics were slaves. But the growing importunities of the campaign for the abolition of the slave-trade with its potent slogan ‘am I not a man and a brother?’ called for the development of new, inclusive analogies. In Britain the anti-slavery campaign moved into its most popular phase, as Clarkson travelled through Britain, lecturing, informing, displaying African products and artefacts, encouraging the franchised and unenfranchised to sign parliamentary petitions. The establishment of the Amis des Noirs in


France further enhanced the hopeful nature of the movement. Abolitionism became a symbol of freedom. In May 1790 a Dublin procession marking the electoral victory of Grattan and Sir Henry Fitzgerald (brother to the Duke of Leinster and the citizen/lord Edward Fitzgerald) displayed a little black boy holding on high, the cap of liberty. In this hopeful atmosphere reverses simply fuelled new initiatives to achieve change. When Westminster rejected Wilberforce’s motion to abolish the trade in 1791, an alternative and more radical strategy of non-consumption immediately developed. The idea of abstaining from slave produce had emerged earlier but had not acquired wide spread recognition, being generally seen as a hardship only sought after by pioneering spirits such as John Woolman. Now it was publicised as an alternative to government action. By abstaining from slave-grown produce the people, the moral conscience of the civilised world, would not simply strike at the trade but at slavery itself. If sugar and rum were no longer economically viable the planters would have to renounce the odious system. (Wilberforce was horrified by these overtones of Jacobinism, Clarkson attracted by the radical nature of the approach.) It was said that some 30,000 people in Britain became abstentionist, certainly it publicised the cause to the point of producing a cartoon of the royal family refusing to sugar their tea.107 In Ireland it had a special attraction. First it allowed the country to participate directly in the abolitionist campaign, a situation which had been denied them by the Westminster focus on banning the trade. It also suggested a mode of protest with which they were familiar through their nonimportation campaigns aimed at foreign textiles. In 1791 abstentionists produced a powerfully written anti-slavery pamphlet, a literary tour de force, William Fox’s anonymous work highlighted the complicity of the consumer with the slave traders and plantation owners. It drove the message home by statistical calculations seasoned with Gothic horror.108 In December 1791 Robert Grubb, the Shackleton’s cousin, brought a copy of the pamphlet to Ballitore. Sally, the youngest Shackleton sister, read the argument aloud. Listening to her, Mary was particularly haunted by the assertion that consumption of sugar made her an accessory to robbery and murder. Up to this point the Shackletons, though aware of non-consumption as a mark of virtue, had not seriously applied it to themselves. Now the campaigning pamphlet caused an emotional upheaval at Ballitore and the family became abstentionists. Mary did not turn to the writing of pamphlets herself, but she pressed the anonymous work upon her Dublin friend, Molly Bewley, encouraging her to see to its reprinting in the capital. Other female Friends there helped with this endeavour, even taking over the selling of the ‘little book’ to chapmen so that it could circulate freely throughout the island.109 In Ireland, as in Britain and America, the moral and imaginative appeal of antislavery worked to launch women into the public sphere. The excitement attached to non-consumption at Ballitore was all the more potent because it coincided with French Revolutionary times. The sight of


France, a Catholic country, suddenly leading the way towards liberty, equality and fraternity was a revelation, on a road to Damascus scale, for Irish Protestants. Mary watched impressed as France divested herself of her priesthood and proceeded towards a more egalitarian era. Though the manner of its arrival was quite unexpected, this signalled a change which Quakers had longed for, the dawning of an era which would dissolve society’s inequalities in a new moral world order. Mary Leadbeater’s Quakerism committed her deeply to non-violence, yet also aroused her sympathy for radical politics. As Burke’s Thoughts on the Revolution in France stormed from reprinting to reprinting in England, Mary and her husband, William Leadbeater, eager to promote the new world order, decided to leave Ballitore for Loire en Cher. There, under the patronage of Madame Roland, they were to set up a school and a series of industrial workshops in the confiscated royal chateau of Chambord offering training in the latest English technology.110 As radical Ireland’s enthusiasm for anti-slavery reached its apogee, in London Edmund Burke began to have second thoughts about the attempt to ban the trade, which he had voted for in 1789 and 1791. His mind turned back to the ameliorative measures he had favoured 12 years earlier and he dug into his papers to retrieve his Sketch. This he forwarded to Henry Dundas, the Cabinet’s leading expert on colonial affairs, with the suggestion that a more gradualist approach than Wilberforce’s ban might prove more practical. Dundas picked up on the suggestion with enthusiasm. So far the parliamentary debate had simply considered rejecting or accepting Wilberforce’s motion, now the introduction of a third possibility prolonged the debate and, in the estimation of a number of historians, caused the failure of abolition for a third time. Eventually the Commons set a future date for introducing a ban on the trade, choosing 1796. But, in the Lords, Viscount Stormont claimed that the peers must conduct their own investigation into the suitability of such a course, creating an inconclusive situation as the session closed.111 So 1796 passed without the trade being abolished. The year 1797 (the year of Burke’s death) saw the last serious eighteenth-century attempt to abolish the trade, which again met defeat, while Dundas, re-echoing ideas present in the Sketch, successfully passed a bill for the Breeding of Negroes in the West Indies. In these years, when it was under threat the slave trade throve, as merchants and planters sought to stock up lest the commerce should disappear. This was the era when the Tobin brothers made their fortunes and overall the amount of capital invested in Britain’s slave reached its highest point.112 William Fox’s anonymous pamphlet, launched by Molly Bewley in Dublin, proved so popular that others on the same subject appeared. Samuel Bradburn’s ‘Address to the people called Methodists concerning the evil of encouraging the slave trade’, which called for abstentionism and explicitly appealed to women to support the campaign, had first been published in Manchester and was now reprinted in Dublin. Molly Bewley and her fellow


Quakers had soon discovered that their greatest appeal outside their own denomination lay with Ireland’s evangelical female elite, rich, philanthropic, avid readers and book buyers, normally considerable sugar consumers.113 In Dublin a group of ladies supporting the campaign had banded together to donate the money saved from their economies to chosen charitable institutions in the city.114 Eager to promote this development, moulded by her Quaker experience of the Women’s Meeting, where female members testified before a female audience, and excited by Ireland’s political ferment, the young Dublin Quaker, Mary Birkett, joined in the pamphleteering, publishing A Poem on the African slave trade addressed to her own sex.115 Clare Midgley in her Women against slavery: the British Campaign 1780–1870 has described it as the only anti-slavery poem by a woman directed specifically to women.116 The first part of the poem focuses mainly upon theological concepts, evangelical concerns and the miseries of Africa but the second part more directly reflects the rising revolutionary hopes at home. Here Mary Birkett pursues a nationalist theme, developing the idea expressed earlier by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, of Ireland as unsullied by the slave trade. But support, or at least publicity for the cause, was now taken up by secular radicals. A satiric pamphlet condemning the recent arrest of the populist politician, Napper Tandy, opened with a section wittily conveying the favourite maxims of the non-consumption campaign that the Negro was a man and a brother and that sugar was manufactured with blood.117 Dr William Drennan, Belfast radical and Dublin physician, like Napper Tandy a member of the recently founded Dublin Society of the United Irishmen, drew up a paper for publication, to which he was confident he could attach a thousand signatures, alphabetically listed and arranged in gendered columns. ‘We, the undernamed, do engage that we will abstain from the use of sugar and rum until the West India planters, themselves, have prohibited the importation of additional slaves, and commenced as speedy and effectual a subversion of slavery in their islands as the circumstances and situation of the slaves will admit, or till we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery and unpolluted with blood.’118 Most startling of all was a work by James Mullala, free mason, Trinity College scholar and Patriot historian. He parodied the title of the anonymous abstentionist pamphlet with his Compilation on the slave trade respectfully addressed to the people of Ireland while flaunting a provocative introduction informing the ladies of the kingdom that he was going to argue for the consumption of sugar.119 Abstention, he declared, had no hope of being effective. Only kings and governments had the power to abolish slavery and this they had better do quickly before they perished as victims of their own tyranny: ‘Who ever justifies so odious a system [slavery] deserves the philosopher’s contempt and the Negro’s dagger.’ This blunt assertion of the African’s right to revolt against his white master was an unusual feature in anti-slavery discourse, which in general tactfully stressed the


helplessness of the enslaved, and reserved retribution for his oppressors for the next world. Mullalla’s stance was the more remarkable because he drew his essay to a close by turning to an Irish analogy, recording how his native land had recently been released by Patriots from ‘oppression and slavery’. ‘Yet in such an enlightened moment to see the Protestants of Ireland refusing their Roman Catholic brethren the rights which, as men and fellow subjects, they ought to enjoy, is disgraceful, unwise and absurd.’ The idea of drawing parallels between Catholic emancipation and slave emancipation began at this time, though the term ‘emancipation’ was not as yet employed, ‘relief’ in one case and ‘abolition’ in the other still dominating the language of the day. Whether accidentally or subtly the Hibernian Magazine of 1782 juxtaposed the two issues by printing a plea for toleration by a Catholic divine, Dr O’Leary, immediately before A speech in favour of the unhappy Children of Africa, A vision. The idea of pursuing full-scale Catholic emancipation and using analogies with anti-slavery was first articulated firmly by radicals in Belfast. Presbyterians had traditionally seen Catholicism as an enslavement of the mind unfitting its adherents for constitutional liberty. The French revolution taking place in a Catholic country prepared the more radical among them to adopt the view that late eighteenth-century Catholicism was no longer the danger it had been in the past. The French example illustrated the democratic principle at work and held out rewards for those who dared to agitate it. They had already seen how parliament was strong enough to ignore demands for reform which came only from dissenters and volunteers. Practical politics propelled Presbyterians towards a Catholic alliance; without the support from Ireland’s majority, how could they exert sufficient pressure on the Dublin oligarchy to reform itself? Such views emanated from Belfast but not from Waddell Cunningham, Thomas Greg and the Northern Whig Club. As early as spring 1791, a secret committee (the forerunner of the United Irishmen) had been formed in the northern town to pursue a democratic and patriotic political agenda.120 Among its leaders was Samuel Neilson, later nicknamed the Jacobin, son of the manse, a thriving woollen draper, who would become the editor of The Northern Star, a popular and populist newspaper which would provide a variety of entertainments, political editorials attacking kings and aristocrats, business news, advertisements, patriotic poems, vernacular satire and antislavery propaganda in prose and verse. Neilson’s best friend Thomas McCabe, watchmaker and cotton manufacturer, also emerged as an antislave trade enthusiast, referring to himself as ‘the Irish slave’ when denouncing Dublin parliament’s right to lay new taxes upon him. Two outsiders were influential members of this radical Belfast grouping. One was a young man, Thomas Russell, an army officer from Kilkenny and friend of the unsuccessful Dublin lawyer and talented radical pamphleteer, Wolfe Tone. The other was Thomas Digges, a middle-aged American, a Catholic from a rich planter family in Maryland. Digges was convivial, socially charming, diverse in his


interests (he is said to have been the first American to write a novel) and intellectually stimulating. Unknown to Belfast middle class, among whom he enjoyed immediate popularity, his career had been a chequered one. He had left his native country a quarter of a century earlier, driven out for financial peccadilloes by his family. The outbreak of hostilities with America attracted him to England, where he had acted as agent for American POWs. By 1790 his interests had shifted to industrial espionage. An expert in breaching the legislation banning the export of artisans and machinery from Britain and Ireland, he had successfully smuggled a partner of Thomas McCabes and his ‘experimental double loom’ across the Atlantic. In spite of his planter background, Digges expressed anti-slavery sentiments, claiming that the institution was already dying in the Chesapeake and encouraging emigrants from Ulster to make their way there to improve their own prospects and lessen the need for slave labour. Outspokenly patriotic and democratic, he fostered republican sentiments in the group generally, exciting particular enthusiasm in Thomas Russell, who disseminated his ideas to Wolfe Tone. Digges was, of course, personifying proof that Catholicism and progressive politics were not mutually exclusive. Eventually he would disappear from Belfast, his career, as so often in the past, the subject of recriminations about petty theft and political treachery. On return to America, where he inherited the family plantation, he was entertained and commended by GeorgeWashington, thereby strengthening suggestions that his interest in espionage had not been purely industrial.121 He was, however, at the height of his Belfast popularity in 1791 as the radical group, encouraged by suggestions from William Drennan and Wolfe Tone in Dublin, set about planning carefully choreographed celebrations for Bastille Day. Central to the volunteer parade was a great standard elevated upon a triumphal car, displaying a picture of the fall of the Bastille, while on the reverse appeared a Volunteer presenting Liberty to Hibernia, who was hung with chains. Since 1787 the anti-slavery society had popularised pictures and momentoes of a fettered African so that visual representation of chained figures readily provoked thoughts of Negro bondage. Significantly the very next banner in the procession bore the motto ‘Can the African Slave Trade tho’ morally wrong be politically right?’ It was not a sentiment which was likely to arouse enthusiasm in Thomas Greg and Waddell Cunningham. However, they were well aware that recently in London, John Greg had been defending traditional interests in front of the parliamentary committee to investigate the slave-trade, where he appeared as a witness drawing upon his Dominican experiences to defend the humanity and necessity of existing arrangements. Later in the day the company sat down to a dinner in the White Linen Hall where 28 toasts were drunk. The nineteenth was ‘The Society for abolishing the Slave Trade – Three cheers and nine plaudits’, that is, rounds of applause. The loudest reception of all had been accorded to number 18 with


‘nine cheers and nine plaudits’ for Tom Paine. Number 16, another abolition, had done quite well ‘An abolition of the Popery laws; and an extension of privileges to Roman Catholics [Three cheers and three plaudits]’ Next month the campaign for parliamentary reform was taken a step further with the publication of Wolfe Tone’s pamphlet An argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland and in October, Tone visited Belfast. The Society of United Irishmen was now officially founded, Tone himself drafting their resolutions for publication, committing the society to pursue ‘the cordial union among all the people of Ireland’ and ‘a complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in parliament’. On 28 January 1792 a town meeting was called to discuss the petitioning of parliament in favour of Catholic emancipation. Not unexpectedly it turned into a duel between the United Irishmen and the Northern Whig Club. Whig Club supporters, wanted Belfast to declare for a gradualist policy. Their opponents nicknamed them the ‘time to time’ party. They also made much play with remarks about the enslavement of Catholics under the present system. At one point the danger and hypocrisy of gradualism was highlighted by a bitter analogy with the Westminster parliament’s handling of the slave trade issue. ‘The situation of the African was to be meliorated; they would cease exporting them from time to time according to expediency’122 commented Dr James Mc Donnell. This debate coincided with the visit to Belfast of Olaudah Equiano, who had left Montserrat nearly a quarter of a century earlier to seek his fortune in ‘old England’. At first the experience had not been an easy one and he had found himself unwillingly driven back to sea to earn a living. But in the 1780s, the emergence of the anti-slave trade movement as a popular cause had transformed his life allowing him to emerge as a political activist and autobiographer. In February 1792 he was completing a tour of Ireland designed to sell the Dublin edition of his book. He may have been present at the town meeting, for his main contacts in Belfast were Thomas Digges and Samuel Neilson and he afterwards recalled the northern town as the most hospitable place in a welcoming country. Wolfe Tone endorsed the same view, describing his 1791 visit there as ‘perhaps the pleasantest in my life’.123 The outcome of the Belfast town meeting was a vote of 267 for a gradual petition and more than 600 for immediate emancipation. The United Irishmen were triumphant, they had chosen the timing carefully. This gesture of support from Belfast was designed to reach parliament just as the Catholic Committee presented their petition calling for a further removal of their disabilities. But the radicals’ intention was not simply to put pressure on parliament but to influence Catholic behaviour. Determined radicals like Neilson and Drennan considered the Catholics too cautious, doubted their interest in full-scale parliamentary reform, feared them as temporising even on issues concerning themselves, ready for example to accept the right to vote, rather than to press on with demand to become MPs. In Belfast the United Irishmen could feel after their victory that they were beginning to


convert their townspeople into revolutionaries, a development in which they felt sympathy for anti-slavery sentiments had played an emollient role. Now they had to try and ensure that the Catholic Committee could be equally enthused with revolutionary fervour. The Catholics were indeed cautious. (In Belfast itself the parish priest had written off to America to consult co-religionists there about the advisedness of accepting a political alliance with Presbyterians and had received some disturbing information about Thomas Digges.) They had reason for their caution. The one significant relief measure, allowing them to buy land, had been passed in 1778 with encouragement from the Lord Lieutenant and the Westminster government. The independent Irish parliament had so far shown no enthusiasm for moving further. Catholics tended to look towards the throne as a source of relief and the anti-clerical and monarchical upheaval in France were not calculated to excite their enthusiasm. Yet by 1791 they were beginning to be affected by the climate of hope. In that year a newly elected Catholic Committee, encouraged by the adoption of further relief measures for English Catholics, set their sights on significant concessions in Ireland. At this point a Glasgow educated Catholic, Dr Theobald McKenna (another of the intellectuals who visited Ballitore) anonymously published a pamphlet demanding wholesale removal of religious disabilities. Chief secretary Hobart summoned representatives from the Catholic Committee to the Castle and demanded that they publicly disclaim their interest in such pretensions. A sub-committee of four arrived, all of them merchants. Edward Byrne, the sugar baker, acted as leader, accompanied by his partner Randal McDonnel, John Roche, son of Limerick’s Stephen and nephew of Philip, and Denis Thomas O’Brien, native of Cork, signatory to the 1765 sugar petition and currently embroiled with the import and manufacture of another slavegrown product, cotton. Though Byrne opened in restrained manner, the group soon warmed to the subject and rejected Secretary Hobart’s request.124 In January 1792 the great sugar-refiner was chairman of the General Committee, which turned against the behaviour of the aristocratic leadership, denouncing Lord Kenmare’s addresses to the government as ‘servile’.125 By now Byrne was hosting lavish political dinners at his home in Mullinahack, seeking the introduction of a relief measure which would give Catholics the franchise and admit them to grand juries.126 Charles O’Hara jr had agreed to introduce the petition but did so in an embarrassed and bungling manner. When this failed, Byrne, displaying the ability to adopt a different mode of political manoeuvring so typical of the 1790s, backed the calling of a Catholic Convention using the Committee’s parish system to bring delegates to Dublin from all over Ireland. Byrne’s call for action on reform was issued at the end of May. Many Protestant landowners reacted with furious indignation. Using the assizes later that summer, formal protests were produced by counties, Wexford, Carlow, Mayo Cork, Donegal,


Down, Armagh, Dublin, Derry, Sligo, Louth, Leitrim, Limerick and Fermanagh. In particular Protestants were enraged by Byrne’s declaration that Catholics must assert themselves if they wished to be freemen not slaves. An angry lawyer, accusing Byrne of issuing an incitement to riot, denied the truth of any such analogy for a group which enjoyed ‘the fullest toleration of their religion, the most perfect liberty and security of their persons and estates’. All they were excluded from was the right to overturn the constitution of church and state.127 (In Lockean terms Byrne’s accusation was well founded: if the standard applied was that of the Negro, the irate barrister could be said to have been correct.) The Convention, nicknamed the Back Lane Parliament, met in Tailors’ Hall, Byrne taking the chair on the opening day. The clergy were wary of the whole operation but archbishop Troy, convinced of the necessity of showing a united front with the laity, was present; the only other bishop to attend was Francis Moylan, son of the Cork provisioner. Wolfe Tone as secretary and agent to the committee had worked hard to secure the impressive turnout of 233 delegates. His greatest success in this respect was to persuade the Galway landowners, ‘the flower of the Catholic gentry’ to give their support. They were, of course, a group with long-established West Indian links. One young delegate, whose family had purchased a plantation on Dominica at the same time as Cunningham and Greg, made a particularly strong impression in debate. It had come increasingly to focus on the issue of whether or not the petition for complete emancipation should be presented direct to the King rather than the normal mode of approaching through the Lord Lieutenant. Like George Washington, plantation conditions came to Christopher Dillon Bellew’s mind when he brooded on his own need for liberty. Defending the right to bypass Dublin Castle and appeal directly to George III, he had made a spirited speech in the convention. ‘It has been said my plan is disrespectful to the administration, I answer it is intended to be so. It is time for us to speak out like men. We will not, like African slaves, petition our taskmasters.’128 Support for Christopher Dillon’s stand was decisive, and he was chosen as one of the five man team (two other members of the gentry and the two mercantile leaders of the Committee, Byrne and Keogh) entrusted with the task. In December 1792 the delegation set out in prearranged style to see the king, travelling first to Belfast, then down through Scotland and England to London, accompanied by many servants and displaying their wealth in hotels. It was a conspicuous, processional event, worthy of a Gaelic chief or a sugar millionaire. In February 1793 the Catholic Relief bill, dismantling most of the remaining penal laws, enfranchising Catholics but withholding the right to sit in parliament, was passed. Byrne accepted this solution, supporting the dissolution of the Catholic Committee and resisting the move by a more radical element to recall the Catholic Convention in the hopes that it would reiterate its commitment to full emancipation. Byrne has gone down in history as a


moderate, usually so described in comparison to the radical Keogh, who in 1793 shared Byrne’s view that the relief package should be endorsed.129 In the early 1790s Byrne was an active and stalwart supporter of political change. Wolfe Tone, appointed assistant secretary to the Catholic Committee in July 1792, liked and respected him, finding him intelligent, ‘an excellent conversationalist’, noting with approval his cordial dislike of the government and speculating how wealth fuelled Catholic grievances, so that Byrne resented his political disabilities much more ‘than one of his own porters’.130 In those days it was not the sensible Byrne but the garrulous and boastful Keogh, who aroused Tone’s criticism of mercantile vulgarity. A stalwart as long as moderation could achieve something, everyone knew that Byrne had no intention of committing either himself or his sons to any violent solution or, as Tone euphemistically expressed it, ‘the tented field’.131 Given the government’s hardline stance on further reform after 1795, Byrne could do nothing but accept that his active political career was over. In 1795, in a much less hopeful atmosphere after the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, he would make a second journey to court to put the Catholic case once again before the king.132 Since 1779 sugar and sugar men had played an active role in seeking to bring change in Irish politics. Byrne and Waddell Cunningham can be seen as moderates, overtaken in revolutionary times by radicals who espoused the anti-slavery cause. But this is an oversimplification. There were revolutionaries who took little interest in the plight of the Negro – Tone himself is an example. There was William Sinclair, a founder member of Belfast’s United Irishmen who attributed his growing fortune to the Dublin’s government’s bounties on West Indian linen, and foresaw parliamentary reform and greater independence as issuing in an even more exciting age. Simultaneously Thomas McCabe and Mary Ann McCracken, both anti-slavery enthusiasts, were unintentionally encouraging the spread of a form of labour they deplored by their commitment to entrepreneurial textile activity. Belfast’s radicalism was firmly rooted in its economic development, in which Caribbean contacts had played a vital part. The same is true for the whole of Ireland, where the export of provisions and the import of sugar and tobacco created fortunes for a few and touched on the lives of many. In the next century, Ireland’s economy would be shaped by other forces. Anti-slavery, introduced so dramatically in the late eighteenth century, would retain adherents. For some individuals, prominent men among them, it would emerge as a vital cause. But it could never be the formative influence on Irish life which slavery itself had been. That was the situation for those who stayed at home. However for those who left for the United States, it was a very different matter. On the other side of the Atlantic, the controversy was assuming inescapable proportions.

9 Dynasties

The surge of revolutions though the transatlantic world at the close of the eighteenth century has generally been seen by historians as empowering for America and embittering for Ireland. The claim that Irish emigrants (Scotch Irish, i.e. Ulster Presbyterians) played a significant role in securing American independence has been frequently made and increasingly queried. Less contested is the view that plantation owners headed the struggle for colonial freedom and a study of these founding fathers shows that three of the most important slave-holding dynasties in North America were established by Irishmen. This chapter will investigate how the ownership of slaves enabled three Irish emigrants to become important figures in mainland America and helped them to bring the politics of their old home into the development of the new. Like the merchants examined earlier, this trio contains a Protestant, a Catholic and a Dissenter. The Carrolls of Maryland produced the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (1776), a signatory of the constitution (1787) and America’s first Catholic bishop (appointed 1789). From the Presbyterian Calhouns of Convoy, Donegal and Long Canes, South Carolina came Patrick Calhoun, Indian fighter, Regulator, judge, colonial and state legislator. Patrick’s nephew John Ewing Colhoun was signatory to the constitution and senator, and his son, John Caldwell Calhoun, was twice vice-president. But J. C. Calhoun is best known as the first politician to articulate the South’s right to secede from the union if slavery was threatened. He is commemorated in statues and street names throughout the Old South and more recently his memory has been revivified by his portrayal as the presidential eminence grise seeking the political perversion of justice in the Stephen Spielberg film Amistad. The last dynasty to be established was the Anglican. Pierce Butler, the younger son of a landed and titled Carlow family, settled in Charleston in the 1770s, became a member of first the colonial, then the state legislature and (like Daniel Carroll III of Rock Creek) attended the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. His family is remembered mainly as an example of the troubles which can beset the wealthy and prominent.1 His descendants achieved notoriety in the 197


mid-nineteenth century through the sale of 440 slaves on the Savannah race course and the anti-slavery revelations of Georgian plantation life recorded by the actress Fanny Kemble, a talented and estranged Butler wife.2 The first of the trio to leave Ireland was Charles Carroll. In the late seventeenth century, he set out for the New World, as many Europeans had done before him, in a desperate bid to save his gentlemanly status. In this his career closely resembled that of the Stapletons a generation earlier. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century Charles Caroll’s ancestors had been chieftains in the Gaelic Lordship of Ely O’Carroll, inhabiting one of its 23 gaunt castles, their position enhanced by territorial control of the church of Litterluna and a nearby holy well. By the sixteenth century the location of Ely O’Carroll, in the midlands, just west of the Pale, and bordered by the expanding ambitions of the rival Butlers and Fitzgeralds, made the area a crucible for change. Thus some of the Carrolls began to shift from warlords to landlords, as the Tudor policy of surrender and regrant asserted pressures and opened up opportunities. During the Nine Years War (1593–1603) and the 1641 rebellion Charles Carroll’s family sided with the Crown. The years of their most marked success occurred in the early decades of the seventeenth century when they joined in James I’s plantation of the midlands, agreeing to drop the O from their name and receiving title to lands (940 acres in 1605 increased to 1700 by 1641). They also agreed that either rebellion or the assumption of the name ‘the great O’Carroll’ (a position their sept had never possessed) would result in confiscation. They promised to establish villages, employ primogeniture, take long-lease tenants only from ‘the English race’ not the ‘mere Irish’ and grow hemp. Some of these adaptations, the substitution of rents for food tribute and military service, they may well have been introducing already, some were probably never carried out. Thus they became indistinguishable from the ‘old English’ with whom they were now intermarrying, acquiring relations among the Dillons, Condons and Graces. Their expanding land ownership now supported a four storey house supplemented by fortifications and named Ballymooney Castle.3 Their burgeoning social and economic strength as Jacobean gentry was blighted by Cromwell’s wars. Charles Carroll’s grandfather Antony fought for the Stuarts first in Ireland and then on the continent, losing his house and lands and dying in European exile. Back in Ely O’Carroll, his young sons were reduced to ‘keeping calves’, a situation from which they were rescued by their cousin Richard Grace. A kinsman of the Protestant James Butler, Duke of Ormond, and a valued soldier with the court in exile, Grace now succeeded, in an unusual feat, emerging as a Catholic who acquired more land in Restoration Ireland than he had possessed before the Civil War. Petitioning and apparently failing to persuade Charles II to return their patrimony to his young Carroll cousins, he eventually bought most of the Ballymooney lands for himself and installed Daniel Carroll, as head tenant of the 136 acre town land of Aghagurty. Such an arrangement provided

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Daniel’s eldest son, Antony, with a future but Grace went on to extend his patronage to Daniel’s second son, Charles, sending him to be educated by the Jesuits in Douai and Lille. By the mid-1680s Charles Carroll was in London reading law, a profession which Catholics were allowed to study but not to practice, though by this time the accession of James II seemed to indicate better times. In July 1688 Charles received an appointment, as attorney general of Maryland and left hurriedly to take up this promising office at £500 a year.4 Charles Carroll arrived in Maryland to become a part of the ruling oligarchy there. This was a proprietary colony, the property of the Catholic Calvert family, Lords Baltimore, who had had set up the colony dedicated to toleration. As proprietors they owned the land, collected the revenue, dominated the Council and appointed government officers. Most office holders and the wealthiest landowners were Catholics and Calvert relations. However the majority of the settlers, a majority which could control the assembly, were Protestants. Friction between proprietor and settlers, present in all such colonies, was sharpened in Maryland by the existence of religious antipathies. This was the situation which Charles Carroll entered in October 1688. A month later, back in the Old World, William landed at Tor Bay. By spring 1689 James II had taken flight and the news of Protestant success had produced a rising against the proprietary government in Maryland, a revolution which the assembly sought to secure by vesting the government of the colony in the Crown. Charles Carroll saw his new found appointment, and £500 salary, ebbing away before he had ever actually drawn advantage from it. He fought determinedly to try and secure it, urging legal expedients, which proved quite ineffective, upon Col. Henry Darnall, Baltimore’s chief agent in the colony, while smuggling out letters to Lord Baltimore pressing him to take up a no surrender position in London. As the upheavals over the changes in succession settled, Westminster came down in favour of a compromise solution for Maryland. Government would be vested in the Crown as the Protestant majority had wanted, but Lord Baltimore would retain his ownership of all land and continue to receive certain revenues. Furiously Charles Carroll denounced the Protestant Governor and Council as ‘not worth a pottle of cider’, attacking the new judicial system which had made his appointment as a Catholic attorney general impossible. In his opponents opinion, his speeches were intended to ‘create a breach of the peace’, behaviour which resulted in his serving prison terms in 1691 and 1693.5 Yet despite these troubles and disappointments Charles Carroll was already adjusting to new conditions and finding ways of drawing financial advantage from areas other than the emoluments of office, which had been so hastily snatched from him. Legal activities brought him fees, friends, contacts and most important of all a wife with substantial property. Martha Ridgley Underwood, English and Protestant, was some years older than Charles Carroll and this was her third marriage. She had come to the colony


as an indentured servant and married her master Robert Ridgley; when he died she married one of his up and coming employees, Antony Underwood, plantation manager, merchant and lawyer. In 1689 Charles Carroll became executor of Underwood’s will and when Underwood died he married his widow. In 1691 she died in childbirth bearing Carroll a short lived son, Antony. Charles Carroll retained control of her estate, though not ownership for Martha had children by her first husband. He lived on the Ridgley dwelling plantation (94 acres) in a seven room house on Inigo Creek, St Mary’s parish, with facilities for landing goods, smuggled and otherwise, and a warehouse in which to store them. Here he was served by four indentured servants and two slaves. But Martha also owned a 1200 acre tobacco plantation. How much of this was actually under tobacco cultivation and the exact size of the workforce and the relative proportion of servants and slaves now under Charles Carroll’s management it is impossible to say. Martha Ridgley Underwood in life and death had given Charles the opportunity to struggle successfully through his troubled colonial seasoning.6 She had supplied him with the financial backing which enabled him to establish his reputation as an astute man of business. In 1694 Charles remarried, this time to 15-year old Mary Darnall, an alliance which took him into the heart of the colony’s Catholic elite and set the trajectory which was to make him the richest man in Maryland by 1720. Henry Darnall, Mary’s father, had lost his government offices in 1691, but he had remained in Maryland as Lord Baltimore’s chief agent, holding the Proprietor’s seal, and to some extent running a government within a government. After marrying Mary Darnall, Charles Carroll settled further north on the Chesapeake establishing Doughoragen Manor on Elk Ridge, a dwelling plantation, with 42 slaves, 32 miles from Baltimore. But large tracts of Doughoragen’s 10,000 acres were let out to tenants who delivered their rent in tobacco at Annapolis, where, in the 1730s, he built himself a town house down on the waterfront, while further increasing his wealth by speculating in urban lots and properties.7 Carroll’s relationship with Henry Darnall had led to his appointment as clerk to the colony’s land office, paying £100 a year, a key position in protecting Catholic access to lands while providing its holder with opportunities for expansion as a land owner. By the time of his death in 1720 Charles Carroll owned nearly 48,000 acres of land worth some £20,000. He also possessed 112 slaves, spread over Five plantations.8 The number of slaves, though large, seems quite disproportionate to the vast acreage. These were still early days for the growth of Maryland. Those in a position to do so ploughed their money into capital investment, land, which for the moment they did not have the resources to develop. From the start Charles Carroll showed as much interest in acquiring tenants as directly farming himself. To collect rent from the relatively newly settled, resenting the landlord as part of the proprietary system, was not always easy. As the son of the head tenant of Aghagurty, the descendant of the Carrolls of

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Ballymooney, and the representative of the proprietary interest, such arrangements seemed natural to him, though he had little personal experience of it for, as the educated member of his family, Charles probably lived for a decade in France and England before leaving for America. While he acquired land, early on, his intellectual interests were excited by speculating in it rather than supervising its cultivation and in legal activities, to which he added banking (almost a quarter of the land he eventually owned came to him through mortgage foreclosures), mercantile ventures and political activity. Given that Charles, the emigrant, now Charles the settler, possessed so many interests other than slave holding can he be said to have built a fortune on slavery? His appearance in Maryland had coincided with a socioeconomic as well as a political revolution. The fall off of supplies in indentured labourers by 1680 meant that the Chesapeake shifted to the use of slaves for tobacco production. Before that date they had been few in numbers. But the decade of Charles Carroll’s arrival also saw the arrival of 3000 slaves on the shores of the bay, and in the decade of his death it rose to an import of 15,000.9 The value of as yet uncultivated land was driven up by the prospect of bringing it into production through tobacco and slaves. As a banker Charles often received the interest owed him in ‘tobo’ rather than cash. His mercantile ventures involved the import of rum and sugar and the export of wheat to the Caribbean and there is evidence to suggest that he invested in the slave trade. Unlike many tenancy agreements, the Carrolls arrangements did not contain stipulation against the keeping of slaves.10 At every turn his fortune was underpinned by slavery. Economic success fed Charles Carroll’s political ambition. Soon after his marriage to Mary Darnall, the couple made their first trip to England, where her contacts enabled him to socialise and politic in the Baltimore’s aristocratic circle. On his father-in-law’s death Charles used this personal influence to have himself confirmed as the Proprietor’s chief agent.11 Shortly after this the Baltimore family converted to the Anglican church and the freshly crowned George I rewarded them by returning all the proprietary power they had possessed up to 1690. Charles Carroll decided that he could manipulate this apparently unpropitious turn of events to regain Maryland Catholics full civic privileges. After a hurried trip to England, he returned with a paper declaring his right, as Lord Baltimore’s representative, to government office, even to the point of receiving the revenues which paid the Governor’s salary. A vicious quarrel between Carroll and the Irish Protestant Governor, Robert Hart, then ensued.12 Both courts and legislature were involved and in the end their furious protests proved too much for Lord Baltimore’s loyalty to his chief agent. He agreed to dismiss Charles from his official posts. In 1718 the Maryland assembly completed their triumph by repealing a 1704 act which had protected Catholics from the rigour of the English penal laws. At the same time they removed their right to the franchise declaring that Carroll and his clique had been seeking to elect a


pro-Catholic assemblyman in Annapolis.13 Economic success had not secured Charles Carroll political ascendancy. His determined and angry stand had left his co-religionist officially worse off than before. His son Charles Carroll II made no attempt at retrieving office-holding or legal practice, concentrating on banking and building up his plantations. By midcentury he owned twice as many slaves as his emigrant father had possessed. Charles Carroll’s leadership of, and immersion in, Maryland’s Catholic society drew him towards England. There was the link with the Proprietor and the growing network of in-laws in the colony itself, Darnall, Hall and Digges. His three sons, enrolled for Douai as he had been, travelled across the Atlantic with other Maryland youths bound for a European Catholic education, while his daughters, accompanied their cousins, the Misses Darnall, to the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in Liege.14 He himself made at least three voyages back to the Old World but nothing suggests that any of these trips included Ireland. His son, Charles Carroll II behaved in like manner. In the 1740s and 50s, Charles Carroll III, who spent 16 years being educated on the continent and in England, toyed with the idea of a visit but decided that going to Ireland would be too ‘melancholy an experience’.15 Perhaps his father and grandfather had been deterred by similar feelings. Nevertheless Charles Carroll I remained proud of his Irish background. He called a number of his plantations after lands in Ely O’Carroll, Doughoragen, Litterluna, Clinlamira. He possessed a manuscript of his genealogy, written in Irish, a language which he may or may not have been able to read.16 And though he never returned there, the troubles of his family back in Ireland, brought him into direct contact with his relatives. In 1688, the year he left for America, his father Daniel at Aghagurty had died and a Carroll cousin had taken over as head tenant in that townland, renting from Richard Grace. Charles’s elder brother Antony had already married into Carroll kin and moved nearer his wife’s family becoming head tenant on Lisheenboy, near Kilfadda in county Tipperary. When war between James II and William III broke out in Ireland, Charles nearest male relatives were his three brothers, Antony, Thomas and John. Thomas, a prominent officer, was killed at the battle of the Boyne. John, whose movements during the war are obscure, joined Charles in Maryland where he followed an equally unremarked career as a small planter, marrying without issue and leaving an estate worth £160 after some 30 years in the colony. The head of the family, Antony, who was present both at the Boyne and the siege of Limerick, returned to Lisheenboy and in 1699 succeeded in having his position as head tenant there validated. Two of Antony’s sons (Daniel and Michael) remained in Tipperary, but his other five children, two boys and three girls, emigrated to Maryland. These Carroll nephews and nieces began appearing in the colony during the first decade of the eighteenth century.17 The most successful emigrant, and probably the closest to the busily ambitious Uncle Charles, was Antony’s second son, James Carroll. By 1707

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avuncular influence had inserted him into a proprietary office as Rent-Rolls keeper for the Eastern and Western Shores. His £40 a year emolument often proved difficult to collect but his position enabled him to acquire land, some 10,000 acres, most of which he sold. James Carroll’s chief enthusiasm lay in mercantile activity. He invested profitably in the slave trade, probably involving his uncle in these ventures and eventually became a factor for an English tobacco firm, while lending money and importing dry goods.18 He never married and it was he who now maintained the closest links with the family back in Ireland, supplying funds to educate at least two of his brother’s sons for the priesthood, while welcoming another nephew, Dominick, to Maryland. It was however a young cousin arriving in 1717, just three years before Charles I’s death, who made the most significant contribution to the Carroll dynasty. Daniel Carroll was 21 when he reached America, the son of Kean Carroll, the cousin who had become Richard Grace’s head tenant for Aghagruty back in the 1680s. Ironically Richard Grace’s patronage, once a lifeline to the Carrolls, had turned into a poisoned chalice. For the elderly Grace had commanded the Stuart army at Athlone, refusing to surrender and dying during the siege. In 1694 Kean paid £450 to secure Aghagurty under the Treaty of Limerick. But in 1700 Grace’s estates were pronounced unredeemed Jacobite land and sold by an English joint stock company, Corporation of the Hollow Sword Blades. When Kean’s son Daniel emigrated to Maryland, he bought 203 acres of land from Charles Carroll, thus founding a fortune which was to see his family emerge as the Carrolls of Rock Creek.19 By the late twenties Daniel had married into the Darnalls, his son Daniel II of Rock Creek married Eleanor Carroll, a granddaughter of the settler. Daniel II of Rock Creek became one of the three Marylanders to sign the new constitution in 1787, while two years later, his younger brother, the judicious John Carroll emerged as America’s first Catholic bishop. Thus it was within the settler’s lifetime that most of the Irish relatives made their way to Maryland, during his three decades in the New World, he was joined by at least seven close relatives from Tipperary. But there were other Irish emigrants whom he claimed as his kinsmen. One was a William Fitzredmond, imprisoned in 1716 for denigrating George I and supporting the firing of two great guns to mark the Old Pretender’s birthday from Court House Hill in Annapolis. It soon became obvious that this was an unofficial salvo issuing in Charles Carroll’s quarrel with Governor Hart.20 An even more unruly element among Charles Carroll’s Irish connections was Thomas MacNamara, a kinsman through marriage. MacNamara was a literate redemptioner from Ireland whom Carroll took on to help with his legal work. Thomas Carroll, who had died at the Boyne had been married to a MacNamara, so there is a possibility that some connection existed there, but the marriage which certainly related this redemptioner to Charles Carroll was that with Margaret Carroll, one of the nieces from Lisheenboy. In 1707


she appealed to the Council to sanction a separation from a barbarous husband with ‘a tyrannical, haughty domineering carriage too severe to be used even to slaves’. The council awarded her a separation and £15 annual alimony recording that she had been so inhumanly beaten that it was surprising she had survived. Over the years MacNamara continued to appear in court on charges of extortion, buggery, assault and murder. However, the courtroom had no terrors for him as he continued to practice law, protected by the proprietorial interest within the colony and the Crown. A convenient and loyal Protestant contact, Charles Carroll used him as defending counsel in his court battles with Governor Hart.21 Soon after Charles Carroll I’s death, another Charles Carroll from the Irish midlands arrived in Maryland. This emigrant was a doctor, a profession which throve in slave colonies. The newcomer, eager to quit medicine for slave-owning and business interests, prospered under the patronage of James Carroll. In his will James, who died in 1729, left considerable amounts of money to the nephews in Ireland whom he had educated for the priesthood and appointed his cousin, Charles Carroll II and Dr Charles as executors. However, before all the bequests had been dealt with, Dr Charles became an Anglican. He achieved election to the colonial assembly and put himself at the head of militant anti-Catholic feeling there, feeling which in the mid forties and fifties was drawing renewed strength from the 1745 rebellion and the wars between Britain and France. Dr Carroll now resisted his co-executor’s and kinsman’s demands that the beneficiaries in Ireland be paid in full by declaring that, as Catholic priests, they were ineligible for their legacies. In 1757 Charles Carroll II, now an autocratic man of affairs in his fifties, was so angry that he nailed a complaint to the assembly door, an unwonted essay into politics which caused the legislature to threaten him with imprisonment. As a result of this he seriously considered leaving Maryland and re-establishing his plantations in the Catholic colony of Louisiana.22 The Catholic religion can be seen as the Carroll’s main legacy from their Irish past. The penal laws replicated the Irish and American experiences producing the suffocation of political activity among those who felt themselves entitled to it; Charles Carroll II’s frustration at possessing wealth without commensurate civic power and his thoughts of escaping from insulting and frustrating circumstances by taking that wealth elsewhere, were feelings and thoughts shared by Edward Byrne and Randal McDonnell in Ireland a generation later. Figures familiar in the old world appeared in the new – the Protestant kinsman or connection who could provide useful help in a crisis or, the counter side of the situation, the dangerous betrayer of his kin, the convert out to prove himself and thus more virulently anti-Catholic than his cradle co-religionists. Throughout penal times the advantages to be gained by a change of religion continually complicated and embittered the rivalries and quarrels inherent in propertied family life. By 1720 Alexander Carroll, a patron and kinsman of Michael Carroll of Lisheenboy, had become a

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Protestant; following through the principles which had stimulated his conversion, he took Michael to court for a ten pound debt, further underlining their difference in circumstances by describing himself as ‘gentleman’ and his debtor as ‘farmer’, though that was a decline in status which the latter never recognised.23 It was religion which fostered the longest lived direct family links between Maryland and Ireland. In the 1740s Antony Carroll’s grandson, also Antony, who had become a Jesuit, acted as tutor to Charles Carroll III when he was studying on the continent at Douai. Epistolary contact continued and it was to him the Maryland Carrolls turned for information when, in the 1760s, the American generations began to take an interest in their roots.24 As late as 1767 Charles Carroll II arranged for John Ashton, also a Jesuit and a great grandson of Antony Carroll and great grand nephew of Charles Carroll I, to join the family as their chaplain. It was not a success and Ashton did not stay long in the post. The older Carroll described him as a ‘Silly, peevish, disagreeable man’ who caused trouble by complaining about the relationship between the white overseer on the Poplar Island plantation and the wife of one of the slaves. Respect for the clergy caused the Carrolls irritably to make minimal adjustments to their plantation arrangements, so that the female house slave was removed both from the white overseer and her husband and sons. She and her daughter came to serve in the Annapolis household.25 The resilient web of cousinhood and Catholicism was renewed rather than eroded by time. Henry Carroll’s prominence as the United States’ first Catholic bishop stimulated interest and professional connections in Ireland. In 1792 the parish priest in Belfast wrote to Bishop Carroll consulting him about the attempt there to draw Presbyterians and Catholics into political alliance. Here Carroll saw a name which immediately aroused his anxieties; he wrote back to Archbishop Troy in Dublin warning him against the machinations of a sinister American, possibly a spy and agent provocateur. It was of course Thomas Digges. This friend of Equiano, mentor of Thomas Russell and Wolfe Tone was also Henry Carroll’s black sheep of a cousin, who would soon through a fraternal death inherit the family plantation and return to Maryland.26 The operation of the penal laws provided a shared experience for the Carrolls in Maryland and Ireland but a shared experience in a totally different economic context. As plantation owners of over 400 slaves, the Carrolls of Maryland possessed more unfettered power over more people than they had ever wielded as Gaelic chieftains within the lordship of Ely O’Carroll. On their plantations they bought, sold and supervised their workforce from birth to the dissection of the dead (‘The boy Antony … died. He was filled with worms, it is odd the faculty cannot stumble on an effective vermifuge, most Negroes are killed by them’; Charles Carroll II to Charles Carroll III, 17 September, 1772.)27 They built themselves fine dwellings in town and countryside. A visiting German baroness described Doughoragen as it


appeared in Charles II’s old age. ‘The handsome house’ possessed ‘a large court-yard’ and ‘magnificent garden’. Beyond that lay as an ‘extensive orchard’ and ‘an elegant vineyard’. ‘The grapevines were planted alternately with hollyhocks and amaranthas. The view from both sides of the hill and looking down from the top was the most beautiful I had ever beheld in the whole part of America I had visited.’28 Charles Carroll I had indeed achieved for himself and his descendants the aristocratic status he had left home to preserve. On their own plantations and within the Catholic coterie, the Carrolls were princes in Maryland. Back in Tipperary brother Antony struggled to preserve gentlemanly status, a status above all defined by freedom from physical labour. That was what had so horrified Richard Grace when he returned after the wars to find his young cousins ‘keeping calves’. His provision of a head tenancy was intended to obviate that, but Alexander Carroll’s definition of his Lisheenboy kinsman as ‘a farmer’ suggests that by the start of the eighteenth century this stratagem was not working. It seems likely that at Lisheenboy, Charles Carroll’s elder brother Antony, and in the next generation James Carroll’s elder brother Daniel and younger brother Michael, did labour on the land themselves. And in 1718 Antony left his sons Daniel and Michael in charge of the farm and moved up to Dublin taking advantage of a building boom to seek employment as a stone-cutter. It was the Dublin of Speaker Connolly and architect Thomas Burgh, where a stone-cutter could find work on Trinity College Library, St Werberg’s church, Stephen’s hospital, or on the fine houses erected for the very wealthy among the peers and commoners increasingly attracted to the capital by the well-established biannual meeting of parliament. The term stone-cutter could be applied to substantial firms employed on large public buildings or individual skilled tradesmen actually carrying out the work. The elderly Antony Carroll must have been closer to the latter rather than the former, but almost certainly he would have been accompanied by some young and poor social dependant, needy relation or tenant, to help him with his work. While his contribution to portico and column, stairwell and mantlepiece, is lost, he used his time in the capital to negotiate a new lease for three lives on 100 acres at Killecregane in Tipperary, apparently intended for his married son Daniel. For even in such difficult times, the Carrolls were not wholly dependent on their own physical efforts. As head tenants the family would have possessed under-tenants to deliver duty fowl, or potatoes, or grain, perhaps even cash for they lived in a tillage area where a commercialised agriculture supplied Dublin with wheat. They possessed horses and a copy of Keating’s history. Fathering clergy themselves, they offered hospitality to the parish priest which meant having mass said in their house. They signed leases, were involved in court cases, produced wills, were buried in the churchyard of the Dominican convent at Lorrha (alma mater to Hyacinth Kennedy of St Croix) in county Tipperary. Lacking in wealth and carrying out a degree of physical labour, they

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nevertheless retained a gentlemanly reputation. Perhaps among the locals they preserved a respect which Alexander, the Protestant had forfeited.29 Antony Carroll outlived his wealthy planter brother by four years. In the early 1720s as he and his sons, Daniel and Michael, struggled with debts, leases and wills in Tipperary, the family had apparently discarded intentions of any further emigration to America. When they thought of moving for economic advantage, it was to Dublin, by the early eighteenth century a bigger and faster growing city than anything in the 13 colonies. Or, like other members of their class, they looked towards educational investment in the form of clerical training for younger sons. Perhaps some of their under tenants found their way to the colonies, poor people trying their luck in the ports and finding none, carried over the Atlantic as convicts or more frequently as indentured servants. It has been calculated that 100,000 Catholics left Ireland for America, one quarter of emigrant numbers in the eighteenth century. This figure has been queried not least because no substantial Irish Catholic community emerged in colonial America.30 Yet this is hardly surprising. The missionary orders, who could have worked in the north American colonies, were banned from doing so. The wealthy, like the Carrolls, quietly imported private chaplains but no such options were available to those struggling for existence. Back in Ireland religious observance was part of a folk culture of patterns, pilgrimages and wakes. Widely scattered, often as individuals, convict or indentured labour in small, port towns or among farming families, the Catholic Irish had scarcely more opportunity for indulging in familiar and communal religious practices than the Muslim Mandingo of Gambia and Ghana who became the slaves to small planters in Maryland and Virginia. If, after indenture, Irish Catholics succeeded in marrying partners from an existing church that was where they, or at least their children, would attend. Despite its economic advantages, eighteenth-century North America was perceived by the Catholics of Ireland as a daunting, unfamiliar destination, yet simultaneously for Dissenters it developed into the Promised Land. The first Presbyterian settlers had come from Scotland to take part in James I’s Ulster plantation. Most of these early arrivals had worked in the Scottish lowlands as tenants and moved to Ulster in the hopes of acquiring better holdings. Religious persecution under Strafford followed by the 1641 rebellion was discouraging but the tradition of moving west survived and revived. The immigrants possessed the advantages of the periphery, their tenancies giving them rather more independence that in Scotland, the church they set up enjoying less supervision from the authorities than its Scottish counterpart. A pattern of chain migration was established, fluctuating in strength according to economic and political pressures. War in the early 1690s, bringing down population numbers and the cost of leases, produced a surge in immigrants but the Williamite religious settlement was disappointing.31 Now Irish Dissenters were more harshly treated than Scottish Presbyterians. By the


1720s and early 1730s the favourable leases granted for three lives were beginning to fall in bringing in an inexorable rise in rent as the landowners sought to cash in on their established tenants’ gains. The development of trading links, provisions and linen, had already furnished a means of transport westward. Religious grievance (payment of tithe to the established church, bans on Dissenters holding public office, illegality of marriages performed by Presbyterian clergy) articulated discontent. Ministers preaching against these disabilities which forbade their congregations finding ‘liberty and ease in their native country’ discovered that biblical allusions to better conditions elsewhere gained an attentive audience. ‘God had appointed a country for them to dwell in … and desired them to depart thence, where they will be freed from the bondage of Egypt and go on to the land of Canaan.’32 As with the slaves a century later, the example of the Israelite’s divinely ordained and communal escape proved a potent call to action. With a bridgehead built in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake in the first 30 years of the century, a bad harvest could create a rising exodus. In 1728 the Anglican authorities saw ‘an infatuation’ for emigration sweeping over the north of Ireland like a ‘contagious disease’, heard the Presbyterians talking as if they would become great landowners as soon as they stepped off the boat. Departures were now running at 3000 a year.33 The Presbyterians tried to go as families. Some raised the passage money from linen manufacture, others were able to sell up their tenancies. But many of them were described on arriving in America as very poor, their habits appearing wild and slovenly compared to the Germans, as they set up frontier farms in Pennsylvania. Their one room log cabins often leaked, they planted crops without uprooting trees, built taverns before meeting houses, and meeting houses before they could find and support a minister. After Ireland’s bare, eighteenth-century countryside, the forest was frightening, so too were the Indians, yet in some respects the situation was familiar. Dissenters were used to living as a discrete entity, meshed by marriage, generating their own intellectual pleasures through the sermon and theological controversy, while surrounded by unwelcoming neighbours, arrogant Anglicans and hostile Catholics, linguistically impenetrable, socially despised. The Presbyterians referred to Ireland as their native land, called themselves Irish, while simultaneously describing the Catholics as ‘native Irish’.34 Semantically confusing, their understanding of the ‘natives’ position was perfectly clear. It conferred no rights of ownership, rather the reverse (‘like the native Irish trotting in our bogs’).35 Natives were people who should be ousted as part of the divine plan. Suggestions by late nineteenth-century historians, that life in Ulster over the previous century had trained them to become American frontiersmen, like all stereotypes contains an element of truth. And it was these writers, who popularised the term Scots Irish, which their emigrant forebears had not used. Never popular in Ireland, it did provide a useful linguistic tool for expressing the sense of difference which Dissenters and Catholics carried with them to America.

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Like an earlier Carroll generation, the Calhouns were drawn to emigration by their bitter discontent with the manner in which the plantation settlement had worked out for them on the damp, rolling countryside of east Donegal. At best by the 1720s they might have reached the same economic level as their Tipperary contemporaries at Lisheenboy, that is, substantial tenants who worked the land themselves but had their resources supplemented by under-tenants. More probably the labour on the Calhoun farm was a purely family affair, agricultural activity possibly augmented by the spinning and weaving of flax. They would have lived in a one to threeroomed thatched, mud floored dwelling, with walls of turf or perhaps mud and stone, the presence of a chimney and wooden door marking it out from the general run of Gaelic cabins. It is impossible to be sure which wave of seventeenth-century Scottish migration brought the Calhouns to Ireland but Patrick Calhoun and his wife, Catherine Montgomery appear to have been born in Donegal around 1684 and the decision to leave was not taken until they were in their late forties. By this time their daughter Mary was married and she and her husband John Noble were part of the emigrant group, the remainder consisting of the Calhoun sons, James, Ezikiel, William and the six year old Patrick.36 Like most Presbyterians who left in this period they paid their own passage. They just avoided the full rigours of this pioneer period, moving from Donegal to Donegal, a Presbyterian Kirk session already established in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, where roads were being built to make a way for commerce and some of the earlier emigrants were now wealthy enough to purchase an indentured labourer, or a slave.37 The elder Patrick Calhoun I died there in 1741 leaving a respectable estate, land, tools and stock worth £150.38 However, like many of the younger Presbyterian generation in frontier Pennsylvania, the Calhoun sons were not convinced that this was the Promised Land. New emigrants were constantly arriving eager to purchase already cultivated farms, so that established owners could hope to cash in on rising prices and move on to use acquired frontier skills on cheaper, virgin acres to the south and west. Yet again the Calhouns joined an ethnic flow, this time to the Shannandoagh valley in Virginia. Perhaps they could claim kindred there in Augusta county; the first recorded Irish Presbyterian settler in this area was John Lewis from Donegal whose mother had been a Calhoun.39 Despite introductory clashes with officialdom (like Charles Carroll I, they suffered an early prosecution by the authorities for speaking out of turn) they began to achieve a significant position. Just under a decade after their arrival the combined family members had acquired 5,000 acres on the valley floor. Busy with crop cultivation, poised for a degree of land speculation, they were on course to emerge as the strongest of the yeomanfarmer community, when they left suddenly to move further south. Their third relocation would prove to be a continuation of the Presbyterians’ colonisation of the frontier, but now the Calhouns were very


much its spearhead. In 1754/5 the French Indian wars broke upon west Virginia and the menace of Delawares and Shawnees hung over Augusta county. Even when Indian raids did not result in loss of life they produced loss of property, the settlers escaping from one door, while the Indians, entering by another, laid hold of weapons, tools and stores. (The typical oneroom Scotch Irish log cabin is said to have been constructed with two doors, one directly opposite the other.) In 1757 Patrick Calhoun II went visiting in North Carolina and came home with news that the government of South Carolina had just brokered border arrangements with their Cherokees neighbours and was offering free land on the newly negotiated frontier. The prospect of an official appointment, that of deputy surveyor for Patrick, was a further enticement. The family moved off in their covered wagon-train through the winter snow, very much the same grouping which had set out from Convoy more than a quarter of a century earlier.40 Old Patrick and John Noble had died but Mary Noble and her children were still members of the party, while James, Ezikiel and William were now accompanied by their wives and children. Only Patrick remained unmarried yet, in his thirties, he was beginning to emerge as the leader of the unit. South Carolina, established in 1670, was the only one of the 13 mainland colonies, which would eventually make up the United States, to develop in a manner which recalled the Caribbean. On the hot, fertile, flat lands where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meandered to the coast the settlers developed plantations experimenting with commercial crops, tobacco, cotton, indigo and rice. In the early years the two latter were the most popular. Slaves were imported from Britain’s Caribbean colonies or direct from Africa. The result, of course, was a thriving trade in slaves and indentured servants as well as in the commodities they produced. The capital of Charleston became the home of burgeoning merchants; some of those who grew rich gave up commercial activity preferring the social prestige of estate owning, which helped the slave plantations to be expanded while creating urban opportunities for less monied newcomers. As a result by the early eighteenth century the coastal lowlands of South Carolina resembled Jamaica rather than Barbados with a demographic breakdown of one white to ten blacks. As with the Caribbean colonies, the Irish appeared early, their impact permanently recorded in the names of some of the region’s best known landmarks. Cpt. Florence O’Sullivan, original 1670 settler, first Carolinian Surveyor General, landowner, legislator, gave his name to Sullivan’s Island, its fortifications protecting Charleston, while its barracoons and quarantine station made it the entry point for a third of all African slaves reaching America. O’Sullivan was also an Indian fighter. (It was an Irish immigrant who killed the first native American on the coast in 1671). But in this respect O’Sullivan was by far surpassed by the famous John Barnewell, profusely recalled by the distribution of place names throughout South Carolina.41 The Barnwells were an old English/Hiberno-Norman family from Louth, some of

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whom had emerged as successful merchants. John Barnewell’s father was a Dublin alderman, who joined James II’s Irish army and died at the siege of Derry. In the mid-eighteenth century, the landed and titled branch of the family, headed by Lord Trimlestown, would unsuccessfully try to negotiate the first official military employment of Irish Catholic forces by the Hanoverians. The Barnewells had little difficulty in prospering economically in the Williamite capital and relatives put down young John’s departure to a thirst for adventure. He fought in Florida and North Carolina during the war of the Spanish Succession, his anti-Indian activities thus forming part of Britain’s struggle to prevent French/Catholic domination. To fight the Tuscalora, he used his own Indian allies, and accusations of acts of cannibalism and female slaughter were made against him, though it did not seem to dent his reputation as ‘Tuscalora Jack’ saviour of the nascent colony.42 In the first half of the eighteenth century, trade with the Indians was seen as an essential element in establishing a European presence. Those described as master traders and middling traders, invariably married to Indian women, could possess considerable establishments based on the ownership of stores, packhorses and slaves. Here names and record of origins reveal a diverse Irish presence, George Galphin, Robert Brown and Kennedy O’Brien in the Creek trade, Cornelius Dougherty and Bernard Hughes with the Cherokees.43 Again, as in the Caribbean, men from Ireland featured among South Carolina’s early governors. In 1684 the office was acquired by Sir Richard Kyrle, a Cork merchant who had made his money exporting timber, and in 1700 by James Moore, reputedly a descendant of Rory O’More.44 One of the first plantations on the Cooper River was founded, using white indentured labour, by a McMahon and called for his Limerick home. He soon left for Barbados but the new plantation mistress, Aphra Harleston Coming, a Dublin Protestant, built up a largely African workforce, half of which she bequeathed to her nephew John Harleston. Arriving from Ireland in 1699 his plantations spread through the county and his name into Charleston’s streets.45 Another early settler a Lynch from Connaught, whose great-grandson Thomas signed the Declaration of Independence, is said to have established the first rice plantations.46 This crop prospered on the marshy coastlands and islands, an area where the slave purchasers quickly acquired a preference for Africans from Sierra Leone, who, they discovered, were skilled in growing rice at home. As the sea islands also produced valuable long staple cotton, this was a region heavily stocked and restocked with slaves and thinly peopled by whites. In 1735 an Irish physician John Rutledge, emigrated to Charleston and established another of the low country’s most prominent planter dynasties. As early as 1749 the first Irish society in the port was founded in order to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. In 1773 Rutledge’s talented second son, the planter and lawyer Edward, organised the Friendly Brothers of St Patrick, acting as its secretary and treasurer. Three


years later he was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, signing rather late in the day, a reflection of his own and the Charleston’s assembly’s hankering after a compromise solution with Britain.47 Another more fiery revolutionary and recently established planter was Aedanus Burke. He had left Ireland as a Catholic priest, abandoned that profession in Jamaica and moved on to South Carolina in the 1760s. Charleston was from the start a place of varied ethnic groups and religions, Huguenots, Germans, Jews, Scots Presbyterians, but the colony’s close connection with the West Indian islands encouraged the Bishop of London to bring it within his control, using Gideon Johnston, born in Tuam, Co Galway, to pioneer the setting up of an established church there. As Aedanus Burke’s career showed it was better to be Anglican.48 Overall the Irish input into the lowlands was varied, diffuse, yet persistent. Though at times they were to regret it, it was the wealthy planters and merchants of the coast who called on the Ulster immigrants to settle the interior. By the early eighteenth century the planters were becoming unnerved by their own success. Inland, the expansion of their estates was provoking Indian aggression, while the overwhelming black presence all about them suggested Caribbean style insurrection. The idea of using one problem to solve the other now occurred to the colonial assembly. As early as 1731 the legislature voted a duty on slave imports, the proceeds of which were to be used to encourage the migration of poor white Protestants onto the frontier by granting them land and tools. Some did come, probably the majority of them Germans travelling via Rotterdam, but by the end of the decade the initiative had lapsed.49 Then in 1758 Torrans, Greg and Pogue arrived, their intention being to develop a flax seed trade from Charleston and bring back emigrants from Ulster. To strengthen this plan they successfully pressed the legislature, growing more and more nervous of Indian trouble, to encourage immigration upcountry by offering not only free land but a bounty for new arrivals. At first this scheme appeared to be working. Torrans, Greg and Pogue, brought in perhaps as many as 1000 northern Presbyterians most of whom settled in Boonesborough, surprised and somewhat intimidated to find that their bounty included a distribution of arms with which to fight the Indians. In 1762 John Greg travelled back to Belfast to look for emigrants and in his enthusiasm for trade and Protestants, sought and received permission from the Board of Trade in London to recruit Huguenots from the Bordeaux area, another scheme which he succeeded in executing. The bounty system would end in 1768, abolished in reaction to the scandal of the Nancy (not the property of Greg and Cunningham) a grossly overloaded emigrant ship sailing from Belfast. She arrived with 60 out of the 287 passengers dead, allowing Henry Laurens, Charleston’s foremost slave trader, to declare that it ‘would make your humanity shudder’.50 It was not however John Greg’s commercial schemes which filled the South Carolinian upcountry with the sound of psalmody, but the

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simultaneous overland arrival of experienced Presbyterian settlers from Pennsylvania and west Virginia attracted by the lush growth of the trees and the free, red soil beneath them. This exodus was largely responsible for ensuring that by the time the first US census was taken in 1790, more than a third of the state’s white population was Scotch Irish.51 In the same year as the establishment of Torrans, Greg and Pogue in Charleston, the Calhoun family arrived at Long Canes Creek, where they chose a riverbank location, which seemed to offer the prospect of setting up a sawmill and a store. Patrick, as deputy surveyor, marked out the land grants; 500 acres for Ezikiel and family, 300 each for James, William, Mary Noble and their families, 200 for himself. Other settlers soon joined or perhaps accompanied them. The very success of this frontier community brought swift reaction. In 1760 the Cherokees rose as the spread of European settlement seriously undermined their hunting needs. Rather than defend their homes, James Calhoun thought it wiser for the moment to lead a retreat. While he was doing so, the Cherokees attacked the wagon-train. 23 people were killed, including the 76-year old Catherine Calhoun and one of her granddaughters. James himself perished and, in line with their custom of the ‘mourning raid’, where the spirits of the dead were propitiated by the capture and incorporation of enemy young into the tribe (a tradition stimulated by their falling fertility rates provoked by European encounter) two of William Calhoun’s young daughters, Mary and Ann, were carried off. After the massacre it was Patrick Calhoun who went back to find the bodies of his brother, mother and niece.52 These were traumatic years for the Calhouns. By 1762 Ezikiel was also dead. Soon after his arrival at Long Canes he had suffered a severe illness but family tradition, unfortunately not recorded and researched till the 1970s, strongly asserted that he had died in Virginia, making a lone return visit to his lands at Reed Creek, where he was shot down by an Indian sniper as he stood outside his cabin.53 William and Patrick were now the only representatives of the emigrant generation and Patrick had emerged not only as the leading man of the family but of the community, another fruit of his official position as deputy surveyor. He captained a company of rangers (mounted militia) at the ready for possible Indian incursions. The Cherokees for a time continued successful raids on the settlers but the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 pushed the colony’s official boundary westwards and future developments would weaken the Indian position still further. By the mid-sixties, at Long Canes, now the settlement of Abbeville, a congregation of 500 Presbyterian families had built a church though as yet they had failed to find a minister.54 By this time Patrick Calhoun, busily surveying lands and helping newcomers to build houses, was seeking to stock his own property with slaves. The number he owned in these days must have been small; a quarter of a century later the first census recorded him as possessing 31.55 He used them to clear the wild canes, to plant wheat, indigo and cotton and to help him


escape from the daily drudgery of such activity. In seeking eagerly to acquire slaves, Patrick Calhoun was acting as a typical prosperous piedmont settler. By 1768 a twelfth of the colony’s slaves were living upcountry, and lowcountry buyers were finding the small men, eager to expand in indigo and tobacco, rather than cotton at this stage, were prepared to offer the highest prices.56 Perhaps it was this that encouraged Torrans, Greg and Pogue, who had originally concentrated on indentured labourers and bounty emigrants, to develop an interest in the slave-trade. In 1764 advertisements in the Carolina Gazette reveal them as offering ‘ a shipload of Fanti’ for sale in 25 August and on 29 October ‘70 healthy new Negroes picked out of sundry cargoes from Havana’.57 But as the backcountry opened up and became more prosperous and populous, new problems developed. The frontier attracted those more interested in hunting than farming. Some ranged through the woods, practising the Indian technique of fire hunting, a method of killing wild animals which could now prove equally fatal to domestic stock. Such groups easily became banditti, breaking into wealthier, more settled communities, drinking their liquor, stealing their property, including their slaves. These gangs became a magnet for those marginalised by society, dislocated Indians, mestizos, mulattoes, run away Negroes, settler women discontented with their husbands. Complaints to the assembly in Charleston, which did not contain any backcountry representatives, about the need for courts and prisons beyond the coastal parishes, were ignored. Indignant property owners like Patrick Calhoun (some with slaves, some without) came together as the Regulators and took justice into their own hands, administering public floggings, sometimes with bands playing, to thieves, bandits, whores, horse-stealers and fire hunters. They also destroyed the houses of those whom they saw as harbouring such offenders. It was the complaints of some of those so used by the Regulators which caused the Charleston government to try and arrest their leaders, an action which unleashed armed insurrection. Some of the Regulators were hanged. Patrick Calhoun was one of another group arrested and imprisoned and then freed by the violent intervention of their supporters. It seemed for a time as if this battle between eastern seaboard and western piedmont, rich planters and fierce frontiersmen, would cause the disintegration of the colony which dispossessed Indians and enslaved Africans had failed to achieve. In March 1769, Patrick Calhoun marched a hundred miles into the coastal parish of Prince William at the head of a group of his armed supporters. There they entered the polls and voted him into the colonial legislature. They also marched into the history books as non-slave-holding democrats demanding fair representation from the rich slave-holders of the coast. This, of course, was an oversimplification. While many of the Regulators were yeoman-farmers, the protection of property included the protection of slave property. Men like Patrick Calhoun wanted a law abiding backcountry so that they would have the chance to emulate the planters on the plain. From now on

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Regulators’ policies of extending political representation and the court system into the backcountry was taken more seriously in Charleston. Patrick Calhoun continued to press for and benefit from both developments.58 During the years when Patrick Calhoun was moving from rebel to legislator, Pierce Butler, the Irishman who would co-operate with him to build the South Carolina they both desired, arrived in Charleston. Calhoun/Butler involvement was a New World development but back in Ireland the Butlers could count a centuries old involvement with the O’Carrolls. Pierce Butler’s Old English family was an offshoot of the main line, the Butlers of Kilkenny, later the Protestant Dukes of Ormond. Pierce’s branch held strategically important eastward territories, stretching from Roscrea in Tipperary into county Carlow. Here they worked to strengthen their position by drawing Charles Carroll’s forebearers into their sphere of influence. Like the Carrolls they did well under the early Stuarts. Thomas Butler, ennobled by Charles I, was created the first baronet of Cloughgrenan in 1628. Though the early Stuarts did create some Catholic peers it seems likely that the Carlow Butlers had converted to the Church of Ireland for they seem to have survived unscathed through the Restoration and Williamite war, Pierce Butler, the fourth baronet, emerging in 1725 in possession of 28 townlands.59 Throughout the eighteenth century, the growth of Dublin encouraged the expansion of tillage and rising rents on their fertile and conveniently situated Carlow estate. Thus unlike either Carrolls or Calhouns, the Butlers had prospered continuously under the Stuarts. However as a younger sibling in a family of ten and with an eldest brother who produced eight children, to be a success Pierce needed to make an effort. His father bought him a commission when he was 11 years old; at 15, having just taken up his position as a lieutenant, he was wounded at Louisburg. He then spent some years with a regiment frequently stationed in Ireland, after which he was posted to Philadelphia.60 Now in his mid-twenties, like Charles Carroll before him, he seized New World opportunity to make himself a landowner. Something of a Sir Lucius O’Trigger, Sheridan’s blustering, fortune hunting Irishman, he was quite well received when he travelled south to Charleston where, as an officer and an Anglican he had an entrée into the best society. After an initially foolhardy attack and speedy repulsion, he succeeded in marrying an heiress in 1771. Mary Middleton’s family fortune had been made in slave trading. Her father was also a planter and soldier, a general in the Indian wars against the Five Nations and Pontiac’s Rebellion. In the years immediately after his marriage, Pierce Butler accumulated land and slaves at a rate far outrunning that of Patrick Calhoun or even Charles Carroll. He began by claiming his free allocation of land – 500 acres in the name of himself, his wife and eight slaves. Within a decade he had acquired some 10,000 acres, 8000 of it in the backcountry, most of which he intended to use for speculation.61 The death of his father-in-law revealed financial difficulties, for the general had been too easygoing in allowing his clients to buy slaves on credit, but these problems served merely to increase Pierce Butler’s


reputation within the family as he charged into the legal tangles determined to sort out confusion. In particular Mary Butler’s maternal grandmother, an immensely wealthy plantation owner, was impressed by his decisiveness. Her will, dividing her fortune amongst her granddaughters, reflected her respect for her Irish grandson-in-law.62 Mary Middleton also seems to have brought her husband land on the sea coast in Georgia, which grew the highly desirable long staple cotton and would eventually become famous as Butler’s Island. In 1773 Major Butler (who always liked to be addressed by that title) sold his British army commission and invested the money in these Georgian lands on the Athama estuary.63 It is impossible to say how many slaves the young couple possessed in the early years of their marriage but in 1779 when the British attacked South Carolina, their plantations there were invaded and they lost 200 slaves, the majority of whom were eventually returned.64 The South Carolinians were not trailblazers in the war with Britain. In the backcountry ex-Regulators remembered that in the past the Crown had shown them more sympathy than the low-country merchant/planters. A trio of Presbyterian clergy from the plain, sent up to arouse the piedmont against King George, met with a mixed reaction. Bitter fighting did eventually break out there, colonist against colonist, as old scores and local rivalries caused them to choose to arm themselves as loyalists or revolutionaries. On the coast the planter merchant community settled upon a low-key, revolutionary position. Pierce Butler’s recently abandoned profession of British army officer obviously placed him in an uneasy situation but South Carolinian conditions rendered his embarrassment less acute than it might have been. He did not bring his military skills to bear on the conflict, taking refuge in the widespread excuses about the need to stay at home to protect the womenfolk from potential Negro insurrection and Indian raids. Only when the Butler plantations came under attack did he seek military involvement.65 Patrick Calhoun, now in his fifties and some 17 years Butler’s senior, also had a quiet war, acquiring a considerable amount of new land.66 Younger and more enthusiastic members vindicated the family’s republican credentials, the most successful being Andrew Pickens, a nephew-in-law from an Antrim Presbyterian background, who now emerged as a revolutionary general by fighting Ulster loyalists and Indians in the backcountry. Negotiations with the latter in 1774 produced the handing back of his unknown niece-in-law, Ann Calhoun, accultured for the past 14 years as a Cherokee.67 By the time the Revolutionary War ended both Calhoun and Butler were firmly established as members of the state legislature, but Pierce Butler’s wealth took him on into national politics, a sphere which Patrick Calhoun never reached. Peace had been made with Britain in 1783 and after that for a time it seemed as if the 13 colonies, brought together by common dislike of imperial authority, were moving apart. A desire for further, more radical change manifested by some of those lower down in society, who felt that they had fought for the revolution and got very little out of it, made the rich

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and powerful uneasy. Thus the leaders gathered together once more, this time to write a constitution which would make their union strong and permanent. South Carolina’s legislature sent four wealthy representatives to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 – Mr Butler, John Rutledge and two Pickneys (both Charles, a general and a lawyer) all of them tied together by a network of marriages, a web of property, two of them subsequent governors of South Carolina.68 Though their colony had not pioneered the drive to independence in 1776, their state now played a leading role in brokering the constitution. And in the defence of South Carolina, Pierce Butler, an abrupt and explosive rather than a polished speaker, invariably led the charge, declaring that ‘the security the southern states want is that their Negroes not be taken away from them, which some gentlemen in and out of doors have a mind to do’.69 While each state was entitled to two senators, numbers in the House of Representatives were to be calculated according to population size. To secure the maximum numbers of Congressmen for the southern states, Pierce Butler demanded that blacks be included in the roll of representation equally with whites. To the twentieth-century mind this is contradictory, hypocritical, (an Irish bull, perhaps) or a clear admission by a slave owner that slaves were potentially equal with a rightful claim to citizenship. However this was not how Pierce Butler, or the assembly he addressed, understood the matter. The government they had come together to construct was one which would represent all the people but, to qualify for active participation in the body politic, a man must be a property owner. A citizen was there to represent and look after the nation’s property; owners therefore represented slaves. ‘Mr Butler insisted that the labour of a slave in South Carolina was as productive and valuable as a freeman in Massachusetts, that as wealth was the great means of defence and utility to the nation, they were equally valuable to it as a freeman and that consequently an equal representation ought to be allowed for them in government which was instituted principally for the protection of property and was itself to be supported by property.’70 This sectional attempt to secure Southern advantage naturally produced counter sectional claims by the North and bitter debate ensued. At the Constitutional Congress, as one of the Maryland representatives, was Daniel Carroll II of Rock Creek, the owner of only 33 slaves as against his cousin Charley’s 400 plus. Reflecting his position as a merchant in a state with an increasingly diversified economy and prefiguring Maryland’s decision to side with the Union in 1861, Daniel Carroll voted against the inclusion of slaves in the count. Eventually a compromise suggested by a Pennsylvania delegate was accepted. Each slave would be calculated as three-fifth of a person. Pierce Butler continued to reiterate the unfairness of such a solution, but there were other ways open for him to secure himself against those whom he saw as menacing his Negro property. As a barrier against such people Mr Butler and Charles Pickney, the young lawyer and the most impressive speaker among the South Carolina representatives,


moved to require that slaves and indentured servants escaping from their masters into another state should be apprehended and delivered up by the authorities. This motion was unanimously accepted. The fugitive slave issue was of course one around which the incandescent fury of both abolitionist and supporters of slavery would burst forth in the future.71 At the end of the day Pierce Butler endorsed the constitution he had helped to make as satisfactory to all, manifesting ‘a pretty general spirit of accommodation’ between ‘various territories with different manners and contending commercial interests’.72 Patrick Calhoun warily accepted the outcome. Over the next decade, in the South Carolina legislature he and Pierce Butler took the lead in creating a similar co-operation of the varying manners and interests in regard to the backcountry and the lowlands. Representing the backcountry, Calhoun wished to secure its greater weight in state politics, but his position as a substantial landowner and slave holder meant that he did not wish ‘democratical’ methods to rule the day. He sympathised with the need for legislation designed to alleviate the problems of debt which hung heavy on the rich planters of the plain.73 Pierce Butler, for his part, did not press for low country dominance. His landed background fostered a snobbish dislike of Charleston’s merchants and, in spite of the wealth and respect he had achieved in the area, he always felt himself something of an outsider there. (While he was careful to maintain enough property in South Carolina to make his citizenship secure, his main planter interests came to lie in Georgia, and after his wife’s death in 1790, he moved his residence to Philadelphia.) Thus he was quite prepared to co-operate with Calhoun in securing better representation for the backcountry and the recognition of its political importance by the removal of the capital to Colombia (1790), both of which ends Patrick had pursued with moderation.74 Once the war was over they shared the South Carolinian leniency towards Loyalists. Pierce Butler also seems to have worked harmoniously with Calhoun’s military kinsman by marriage, General Andrew Pickens, when they sat on a commission to settle the boundary between South Carolina and Georgia around the Athama River. Here fugitive slaves from Savannah area had been trying to form a maroon community and the commission both defined territory and organised minutemen and Native Americans to catch the Negroes or shoot them down.75 Dedication to slavery held these two immigrant Irishmen, lowland Anglican and the backcountry Presbyterian, together. Patrick Calhoun not only led the Scots Irish into South Carolina but he then led them into accepting the role which the South Carolina legislature had hoped they would play, protectors against both Indians and slaves. The majority of these people (like the majority of whites in the South) never became slave holders but the hope of doing so, the comfort of having an underclass whom they could look down upon, the historic and emotional pull of white over black, made them loyal to slavery. Thus Calhoun and Butler played an active role

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in the creation of a powerful slave state which would lead the way to secession in 1861. In 1820 when John Caldwell Calhoun emerged as a key figure in national politics, his stand on Southern rights was all that the elderly Pierce Butler could have wished. Charles Carroll died in 1720 leaving 112 slaves, Patick Calhoun in 1796 with 31 or more. Pierce Butler’s widespread plantation interests make exact calculation elusive in his case. In 1809 he possessed 600 slaves on Butler’ Island but by 1831, less than a decade after his death, his immediate heirs controlled more than 900 slaves as a result of his legacies to them.76 Evidence from the Carroll plantation regime reveals an efficient system, where the master oversaw his overseers, promoting his black drivers to this management level on some of the smaller division at Doughoagen. The development of slave families was encouraged but not conversion to Christianity. The aim of the Carrolls was self sufficiency. The plantations were to provide enough food for those who lived there as well as tobacco and grain for commercial purposes. Control and discipline were established by flogging the declining number of white indentured labourers and redemptorists as well as rising number of Creole slaves. There seems to have been an attempt to keep the supply of alcohol to both groups at a minimum.77 The evidence for all this comes from the American born generations, most of it from the 1760s and onwards. In the case of Charles Carroll I we know nothing directly about his attitude to slaves and slavery. Inevitably the emigrant founder’s life in Maryland seems to have been less well organised than that of his descendants. The hunting of heiresses, the patronage extended to wild Irish company, the continual wrangles with authority and a willingness to embark on truly dangerous quarrels give it a boisterous, stereotypically Irish pioneer quality. Perhaps Charles I’s treatment of his slaves would have been more careless, volatile and brutal than that of his successors. Certainly more of those he acquired would have been fresh from the horrors of the middle passage. Yet, unlike later generations, he did not have to worry that the system he was constructing was condemned by some as morally reprehensible. The existence of such criticism was well known to Patrick Calhoun in the revolutionary years as his slave numbers mounted. By 1790 he articulated a paternalist view, writing of ‘my family white and black’, an attitude attributable to his Presbyterian patriarchical sway over that unit, though the line between paternity and paternalism in the case of male slave holders was always a permeable one.78 Beyond this there is little trace of his personal feelings on the subject. The Calhoun ambition to acquire slaves would have been planted in their Pennsylvania days. Pioneer wagon trains and Indian fighting do not conjure up images of black bondage but, like horses and cattle, slaves were valuable moveable property and a small number of better off Scotch Irish settlers shifting south west must have taken Negroes with them. The success of the Calhoun brothers in Virginia makes such a scenario conceivable. Log cabins raised a few feet above the ground provided sleeping


accommodation for Africans as well as animals, in this pioneering stage the Scotch Irish were not speedy barn builders. If they stayed, prospered and constructed a more spacious one or three-room dwelling, the original cabin could be turned over to the slaves. Though it is not possible to say with certainty when or how the first Calhoun acquired his first African, it is possible to trace the family’s inexorable march towards substantial slave-holding. In 1741 Patrick Calhoun senior’s Pennsylvanian £150 estate did not include slaves (A neighbour in Donegal presbytery whose estate was valued at over £500 in the late thirties owned one slave.)79 In 1759 Ezikiel Calhoun, recently arrived at Long Canes, fell ill and made a will leaving land in Virginia and South Carolina to his pregnant wife and young children. His wife was to have her one-third of his ‘goods, chattels and personal estate’ and management of his plantations at Long Canes and the ‘Patten lands at Reed Creek, Virginia’. Slaves were, of course, chattels but their value meant that they usually received specific mention in wills. In this case only Ezekiel’s eldest son John Ewing Colhoun was singled out for a special bequest ‘my gun, saddle and bald-faced horse’.80 In 1760 after James Calhoun’s death in the Long Canes Massacre, his brothers and two Noble nephews recorded an inventory of his property, 13 horses (Two stallions, Two geldings, and eight mares and one colt. The most valuable, a black stallion and a white mare both branded with his initials assessed at £50 each.) He had also possessed a wagon and 27 cattle (a bull, three steers, the rest cows and calves). Debts owed to him from three individuals amounted to more than a third of the total amount.81 No assessment of his land was made, and the inventory could not have been a fully comprehensive list of his belongings for it did not include household effects, weapons or tools. On the other hand it obviously covered his most valuable possessions so that had he owned a slave or slaves they would almost certainly have been listed. In 1783 Patrick Calhoun as tax collector for the 96 District recorded his own taxable assets and declared 2100 acres of land and 16 slaves.82 His position as a dominant figure in the community is clear, the number of acres and slaves being five times that of the average upcountry holding.83 In 1797, the year after his death, three of his nephews made an inventory of the possessions on his main plantation which included 26 slaves. (The remaining five, or more, could have been on his other four properties.) The inventory opens with a list of furnishings, seven beds with feather mattresses, two walnut tables, 11 chairs, five trunks, two chests, a desk, three set of fire-irons, a looking glass, four candlesticks and firearms (one rifle, two shotguns, a case of pistols) and a silver watch. Such furnishings and accoutrements suggest a sizeable wooden dwelling, perhaps with three rooms on the ground floor and two upstairs. At this point the three men constructing the inventory seem to have left the house and set out on a tour of the outbuildings. A number of agricultural tools are listed, followed by the kitchen equipment. (Cooking on a South Carolina plantation would be carried out in a separate building,

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partly to avoid the hazard of fire in the main house, partly perhaps because it was the work of slaves.) Beyond the kitchen was a still and a collection of useful implements, two cotton spinning-wheels, wool shears, five saddles, a curry-comb and brush. Now the trio seem to have reached animal pens or the route into the fields, for 70 hogs and 45 head of cattle, appear next. Then comes the stable area, two ploughs and their tackle, two wagons and harness and 12 horses. Twenty sheep bring the animal entries to a close and then the listing of slaves commences. (Perhaps they had reached the slave cabins.) There were 11 adult males, Tully, Jack, an elderly Adam, Simon, Peter, Bob, Charles, Tom, May, a younger Adam; six women, Dill, Nance, Rose, Sal, Sarah, Kate; five boys, Pompey, Dave, Sawney, Simon, Polydore and four girls, Nanny, Jenny, Fanny and Rinah.84 How many of them had originally possessed African names and crossed the Atlantic in slave-ships is a matter of guess work. Adam (worth only £15 by 1797) is the most certain candidate. According to family tradition this was the name of Patrick’s first slave (perhaps a choice reflecting the Presbyterian love of the Old Testament).85 It seems to have taken some 16 years to build up a group of as many slaves, but in the next seven years the acquisition rate doubled as his holding expanded by 15. These numbers could be explained in part by natural increase. Presumably Adam (£60) was the son of Adam (£15). The second Adam was a shoemaker.86 Skilled slaves were more often Creoles, the existence of carpenter’s tools, the two cotton spinning-wheels, in a family with few womenfolk, a loom and 100 lbs of iron also suggest other artisan activities which could have been carried out by slaves. The boy Sawney (£20) is recorded by John C. Calhoun’s biographers as the future statesman’s contemporary, the two in youth ploughing the fields together. Interestingly both writers of these two detailed, informative and stylistically contrasting works, accept the view of Southern slavery as a paternalistic system, while shuddering with horror at the deeply puritanical standard imposed upon his family by Patrick Calhoun.87 The entry immediately following Rinah’s name is for a bookcase and books. Perhaps this indicates an office where Patrick Calhoun had kept his surveyor’s notebooks for the rest of the inventory, now devoted largely to artisanal materials and tools, mentions ‘surveying instruments’. The penultimate entry is a boat, an expensive item at £30, a price comparable to that of a girl slave. The value of the 26 slaves reaches £1070, almost exactly twice as much as the amount derived from all the inanimate objects listed plus the livestock. Of course this inventory does not represent Patrick Calhoun’s entire estate as it includes neither land nor debts owed to him. In 1841 his eldest son William, the last of the family to draw up his will in the Abbeville area, and by no means the most successful of Patrick’s progeny, owned 70 slaves, 11 of them children.88 Such an expansion springs not only from the Calhoun’s early and vigorous arrival in the region, but from the fact that in the 1790s, when Eli Whitney’s new saw-toothed cotton gin appeared, they were in a position to shift immediately into the production of that crop.


Those who failed to make this transition quickly found it increasingly difficult to compete with those who had. It seems likely that Patrick Calhoun began building his slave workforce in the decade after the Long Canes Massacre. Again his office as surveyor seems likely to have provided him with the opportunity to do so, for at this time Henry Laurens, Charleston’s largest slave trader, was busy acquiring land at Abbeville.89 In the mid-1760s Patrick Calhoun married Jean Craighead, daughter of Alexander Craighead, an intellectual emigrant Presbyterian minister of contentious and forward looking theological views, who owned three plantations and a slave workforce. As Craighead had three wives and a varied and sizeable family, it is unlikely that Jean brought her husband a dowry of slaves. But in her short married life, before she died giving birth to twins, she spent much time alone on her husband’s plantation as he moved about in his multiple roles as deputy surveyor, militia captain and incipient Regulator.90 That she supervised the workforce and that the slaves, their day laid out in task work, were able to run farming operations in their master’s absence, seems inevitable. A similar pattern is reinforced by the arrangements revealed in Patrick Calhoun’s 1784 will. By then he possessed five plantations. His wife, Martha Caldwell Calhoun, was to receive a third of his property and the right to choose which she would reside upon.91 On her chosen plantation (the one where the inventory was taken in 1797) she lived with her two youngest sons. At the time of her husband’s death, the elder of them John C. Calhoun was 14. At this stage neither of her other two sons, William and James gave up their jobs, one clerking in Charleston, the other shopkeeping in Augusta, to return to the countryside. Patrick Calhoun had described one of his five properties as ‘a neat little farm’, its comfort secured by the presence of a Negro girl Modesty trained as a house slave.92 The impression by 1784 is one of a main dwelling plantation and four other small, scattered agricultural operations, in which the wife and slaves were quite capable of management and production. It is a picture which fits in with recent work on American slavery which stresses not only the prevalence of task work but the existence of small, isolated plantation units, virtually run by slaves where the day to day contact with whites was minimal.93 Perhaps the peculiar combination of ‘low country’ and ‘up country’, dense African population on the coast and small scattered units on the piedmont, helps to explain why South Carolina possessed the most severe slave code in the 13 American colonies and the United States. Pierce Butler, as the last born and wealthiest of these three emigrant slaver holders, has left behind a much more detailed record of his attitude to slaves and slavery. During his 19 years of marriage he lived a life divided between Charleston town houses and surrounding Bull/ Middleton plantations. Then, for his last 30 years, he chose to live in Philadelphia purchasing one of the city’s grandest mansions, a mansion paid for by borrowing against his Georgian plantations. On the outskirts of town he owned a more modest,

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rather rambling farmhouse and eventually built another house, Butler’s Place. These properties were staffed by slaves from his southern plantations, for he always maintained his status as a sojourner in Pennsylvania, a citizen of South Carolina. Adoption of Pennsylvanian citizenship would have meant that any slave he brought to Philadelphia would have been able to claim his or her freedom in six months.94 While the Fugitive Slave Act, which he had pioneered in 1787, ensured that any runaway could be apprehended as if he/she were in Georgia or South Carolina. On the issue of runaways Pierce Butler remained consistent in his emphasis on the importance of preventing escape, spending money to retrieve slaves who had succeeded in fleeing as far afield as Nova Scotia, the Bahamas and St Croix.95 In the years during which he settled into Philadelphia, he was expanding and intensifying his plantations in Georgia. The plantation later known as Butler’s Island was in fact a series of islands River Island, Little St Simon’s Island, Great St Simon’s Island and Sea Island, not all of them exclusively Butler territory, a two hour boat journey separating the two farthest points. On his properties he grew rice, cotton and sugar. He also employed his slave workforce on building banks to reclaim land. In this way his cultivation on River Island was doubled and, as he acquired more fertile land, he bought in more slaves. While his slaves did grow provisions and keep livestock, the staple of their diet was grain brought down by boat from Philadelphia.96 But in one important respect the plantations were self-sufficient. Pierce Butler did not use white tradesmen. Out of his 600 slaves he kept 40 to 50 craftsmen, carpenters, mechanics, ditchers, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, masons, brickmakers, sailmakers. He was proud of their skill and competence. ‘My carpenters require no white man to enable them to erect as good a house as I would desire to occupy. They glaze also. My ship’s carpenters have built me two sea vessels without any white person directing them. I make all my own cotton machinery – We never ginn by hand.’97 He introduced sugar and expanded its production when the price of cotton fell. A local planter watched 60 Butler slaves employed in harvesting, crushing and boiling sugar, the last a particularly skilled job, and remarked admiringly, ‘In better hands it could not be placed’.98 This impressive achievement was part of an epochmaking change, feeding cotton textile manufacture in Britain, seen by some as the source of selfsustaining, continuous economic growth which started the industrial revolution and created the modern world. But all this production and efficiency was bought at a price – African arrivals bewildered and enraged running off to hide in the mangroves swamps or trying to canoe back home, hunted down and caught by those already acultured to slavery. Black drivers extracting obedience with the lash, and establishing their dominant right to women and rum, white overseers, similarly asserting their power, taking the driver wives while denouncing the licentiousness of the Africans around them.99 The women suffering from prolapse of the womb and back pains,


the babies dying of lockjaw, everybody wracked by venereal diseases, dysentery, worms and rheumatism, this last a speciality of working on the wet soil, growing rice, sea cotton and digging drainage ditches.100 For such work Pierce Butler ordered meat and set the task at 300 cubic feet a day per slave, condemning a neighbour who demanded twice that. ‘Their reasonable and rational comfort, happiness I would not term it, is near and dear to me,’ he wrote.101 His most trusted overseer, closed in his office, composing his weekly Sunday letter, often somewhat apprehensively, to Philadelphia, expressed similar moderate sentiments on the subject of slave management. ‘I find rum and Beef is better than the Cowskin to git work done, though they are all good in their place.’102 By 1798 it was Pierce Butler’s declared intention to discover and employ an overseer who would make it unnecessary for him to play an active role in plantation management. But, like Charles Carroll II, before him, he recognised that his habit of planning and control prevented him from carrying out his avowed intention of complete retirement.103 Letters of detailed direction continually flowed from the mansion on Chestnut Street to the Altahama estuary. Most years he made a visitation to his plantations. Though he never erected a large house there, he did possess a ‘box’ where he could stay for months at a time. However, in 1802 he appointed an overseer whom he did regard as capable of running his extensive operations. Rosswell King was from Massachusetts. He had moved south to Georgia in order to try his fortune as a commission merchant supplying planter needs. He enjoyed some success and married locally. Both King and his wife claimed Irish roots, King traced his descent from the Kings of Mitchelstown and Roscommon, the Roches’ aristocratic proteges. His wife Catherine Barrington had been born upriver in Georgia but her parents had emigrated from Ireland. Major Butler liked her ladylike manners and her Irish connections, but a decade later when the relationship began to sour Butler blamed Mrs King for dominating her husband and encouraging him in ambitions beyond overseeing.104 For Butler and King in fact it was a mutually advantageous relationship. The correspondence between the two shows King as active and determined to execute Butler’s interest, showing respect perhaps even fear of his employer. At the same time King did succeed in forwarding his own ambition. After leaving Butler’s employ he went on to establish two textile towns, Rosswell and Lebanon. Thus he showed himself an industrial pioneer, setting out to manufacture the cotton which he had once grown and baled to send to Britian, but an industrialist southern-style for he took with him, to work in his new venture, a number of the slaves he had purchased while an overseer.105 On breaking with Roswell King the father, Pierce Butler appointed his son of the same name as overseer. He still held this post in 1838 when Fanny Kemble arrived on the island to note with shock the number of slaves resembling the Roswell Kings, senior and junior.106 Together Butler and Roswell King sr supervised the expansion of the plantation. King furnished advice

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which Butler was often prepared to follow as for example in King’s preference for the purchase of African rather than Virginian slaves. Pierce Butler was no more interested in converting his slaves to Christianity than the Carrolls, but by 1809 Rosswell King was worried about the destabilising effect of religion upon the workforce. He warned Butler that there was too much preaching among the slaves and suggested the purchase of a dozen fiddles (cheap at two dollars each) to divert them from this potentially dangerous activity.107 In seeking to reconstruct life from the slaves’ point of view, historians have argued about the issue of the isolation of plantation life. Supporters of the isolation theory see slavery as made possible by the construction of an enclosed artificial unit, its involuntary inhabitants knowing nothing of the outside world, trained under the threat of brutal punishment to becoming living components in a dehumanising system. Such an interpretation, originally stimulated by thoughts about the workings of twentieth-century concentration camps, draws on slave evidence, for example Frederick Douglass’s description of the extensive Lloyd plantation in Maryland.108 Because the Butler operation was also extensive, it too can provide an example of such isolation. The Butler slaves did not socialise with slaves on surrounding estates, moving instead between their master’s various settlements. The unit even possessed its own Botany Bay, Experiment plantation.109 On the other hand Roswell Kings’ account of mounting religious fervour shows that such isolation was not impenetrable. The invasion by the British during the war of 1812 when King, to his indignant fury, discovered men and women he had worked with for years, obsessed with the prospect of freedom and determined on flight, again reflected a vital consciousness, if not a knowledge, of the outside world. King gave a vivid description of the departure, ‘I tried to reason with some of the most sensible of the Negroes not to be so foolish and deluded as to leave their comfortable homes and go into a strange country where they would be separated and probably not half of them live the year out. I found none of the Negroes insolent to me, they appeared sorry, solemn, often crying, they appeared to be infatuated to a degree of madness. While endeavouring to reason them out of their folly, some said they must follow their daughters, others their wives. I found my reasoning had no effect on a set of stupid Negroes, half intoxicated with liquor and nothing to do but think their happy days had come.’110 (The very words King uses recall the Anglican criticism of the Presbyterian emigration nearly a century earlier.) It was this dramatic incident which soured and signalled the end of the Butler, Roswell King sr relationship. King was so disgusted by slave disloyalty that he said he could not bear to look at Negroes any more. Pierce Butler felt that King should have been more active and percipient, removing the slaves to safety on a plantation beyond the reach of the British.111 Pierce Butler’s decision to live in Philadelphia and his Anglo-Irish contacts on the other side of the Atlantic meant that he was far more exposed to


anti-slavery sentiment than most plantation owners in the deep South. In Philadelphia he employed Dr Benjamin Rush as a family physician. One of those who had worked to make Philadelphia the cradle of anti-slavery was Dr Rush, but nevertheless he and his wealthy patient lived on congenial terms, for Rush shrank from the thought of anything but the most gradual emancipation for Negroes depraved by slavery.112 Pierce Butler was well aware that the anti-slavery campaign on the other side of the Atlantic was reaching new levels of moral enthusiasm. On occasion he dealt with this culture clash by resorting to downright hypocrisy ‘I ardently wish I had never had anything to do with such property’ he assured Weedon Butler, his son’s Chelsea headmaster, at a time when he was busy acquiring as much of it as possible.113 In 1794, stimulated by the pamphleteering ethos of the times, his friend John Leckey, a landed neighbour from Carlow, wrote with queries about the legitimacy of the trade. Pierce Butler responded by agreeing that such commerce should be abandoned, while putting forward traditional arguments about the superiority of conditions on the American plantations to daily life in pagan Africa.114 Pierce Butler’s contacts with Ireland were not all epistolary. On at least one occasion he made a visit home to Ballin Temple in the mid 1780s and, a more common experience for the successful emigrant, he received overtures from a younger generation. Pierce’s brother, the fifth baronet had died in 1772. His young nephew, the sixth baronet, entering parliament for county Carlow in 1783, was rich enough for the administration to expect him to be beyond control, with one possible weak spot, ‘might be obliged by a provision for his brother’.115 With primogeniture that was, of course, the eldest son’s perennial problem, how to settle his younger siblings. Two of Richard Butler’s brothers, Thomas and Edward, looked hopefully towards America. Thomas seems to have done so without actually going there, entering into a financial venture with his uncle, which eventually featured a debt, a shipment of rice and the elder Butler’s displeasure. Edward Butler sold his army commission and emigrated to South Carolina intent in following in his Uncle Pierce’s footsteps. Perhaps he was less lucky, or the timing was against him. The end of the war saw many of the low-country planters deep in debt. Perhaps he lacked his uncle’s panache. Anyway, his fortune hunting came to nothing.116 Like another hopeful Irish nephew some 80 years earlier, James Carroll, Edward tried speculation in slaves but here again his venture failed. An enraged Pierce declared that his nephew had ‘bought some Negroes injudiciously … . against my repeated advice’ and ‘without my knowledge’. But in fact it was more complex than that. Edward had lived with Pierce for three years, and been given the right to act as his uncle’s agent. £900 had been expended upon the slaves and Pierce was, in some degree, implicated in the transaction.117 Eventually Pierce decided that his nephew was rascally, withdrew the encouragement that he had originally given and Edward decided to return to Ireland. Pierce Butler repelled relations from County Carlow, while Charles Carroll strengthened his dynasty by incorporating new arrivals from Tipperary. Yet

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despite the difference of time frames, personalities, and of religion, the two had much in common. Neither is easily recognisable as an Irish emigrant, their starting points too privileged, their stories highly individual. To see them as typical of their rival religious groupings is not simple either. Perhaps Charles Carroll should be viewed as a wild goose, blown off course by transatlantic winds. The Anglo-Irish Pierce Butler was carried abroad as part of a rising emigrant wave of army officers and younger sons, absorbed increasingly in the nineteenth century by service in India, from which they would die or return perhaps as often to a London club as to Irish acres. In search of a direct substitute for those acres, by the late nineteenth century a discernible band set out to replicate gentry estates in Australia. It is class which links these two men together. Both of them came to America to preserve their upper class status, exerted themselves to become great landowners and did so. Both dynasties confirmed their success in later generations by aristocratic transatlantic marriages. In 1825 Charles Carroll’s great-great-granddaughter Mary Ann Caton, one of trio of beautiful and adventurous sisters, known in Britain as the ‘American graces’ married Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, viceroy of Ireland, her Catholicism a publicly accepted fact, years before the Duke of Wellington, her Prime Minister brother-in-law shifted his ground and agreed to Catholic emancipation.118 In 1906 Alice Leigh (1874–1965), great-great-granddaughter of Pierce Butler married Sir Richard Pierce Butler, (1872–1955) the eleventh baronet of Cloughgrenan. Alice Leigh’s mother, Frances, was the daughter of Pierce Butler II and Fanny Kemble, and it was Frances who had unwillingly sold off the last remnants of the Georgian plantation in1908.119 In all this the Calhouns emerge as different. They were typical Irish emigrants of their day. While Charles Carroll and Pierce Butler found colonial society reasonably familiar because of the gentrified ethos of the level at which they entered, the Calhouns, like other ethnic groups who brought their own society with them, struggled to replicate it in the New World. The Promised Land was elusive. The log cabins they inhabited were no better, perhaps worse, than the structures they had lived in at home. The social life provided by the fairday and the weekly sermon disappeared. At first the wilderness and its inhabitants seemed to overwhelm their efforts, though of course in the end they proved to be part, indeed the cutting edge, of the winning side. In spite of the Presbyterian frontier hardships, the careers of all three emigrants had much in common. They all illustrate that the more you could take with you from the Old World, the easier it is to prosper in the New. This is true even for six year old Patrick Calhoun arriving as a paying passenger with his family around him. Office holding, whether as clerk to the Maryland land office or as deputy surveyor in Long Canes/Abbeville, South Carolina, was vital to Carroll’s collection of his 48,000 acres and to Calhoun’s accumulation of 22,000. The heiress factor was experienced by all


three dynasties; for the Carrolls and Butlers it came in the first, to the Calhouns in the second generation, when John Ewing Colhoun, Ezikiel’s son, became a Charleston lawyer, changed the spelling of his name and forwarded his resources and political career by marrying into a rich low country family, the Bonneau’s. Then John C. Calhoun brought together transatlantic entrepreneurial expertise and traditional Presbyterian endogamy by taking John Ewing Colhoun’s only daughter Floride Bonneau Colhoun as his wife, a match which made him a rich slave holder.120 Like all the Irish who came to New World these men understood its politics as a replica of the Old and asserted themselves variously as Proprietorial supporters, paramilitary Regulators and legislators to play a vigorous political game in their transatlantic surroundings. In this respect they were quite unlike their African and German contemporaries who, feeling themselves enclosed by an alien and incomprehensible polity, concentrated their prodigious strength on agrarian labour and communal survival. Arriving as Catholic, Dissenter and Anglican, the Irish trio died as Americans, dedicated to enriching themselves, building their new country and working determinedly to establish slavery more firmly than before. Though they suffered financial upheaval none of these three dynasties were ruined by the emancipation of the slaves which they had so dreaded. Like most of the very wealthy everywhere, they had sufficiently diversified resources to prevent disaster. Maryland, its urban sector growing, its tobacco in decline for decades before the Civil War, had reduced the size of its unfree African population by selling slaves to the new cotton states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Alternatively they hired them out in local towns and ports, an urban situation which enabled some slaves to amass enough money to buy their own freedom. When war was declared Maryland chose to remain within the union. Today the city of Annapolis remembers the Carrolls as educational benefactors rather than planters. The Butlers similarly lived outside the South; permanently resident in Philadelphia, where they possessed considerable property. After the Civil War they were in a position to decide whether or not they would return to Georgia and try to revive their plantations. Even the Calhouns, cushioned by railway investment, family reputation and recourse to heiresses, weathered the storm they had helped to unleash, their continued greatness symbolised by the Calhoun Mansion, an immense red and black brick, late Victorian pile on Charleston’s Meeting Street, its soaring interior embellished with walnut panelling, painted ceilings, ceramic tiles and stained glass, built and lived in by George Williams, wholesale grocer, cotton factor, commission merchant, founder of the Carolina Savings Bank and father-in-law to Patrick Calhoun, great-grandson of the emigrant. What they could have expected if they had stayed in Ireland can be traced in the experiences of their families and social groupings there. In the nineteenth century the Butlers lost their seat in parliament but retained their

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landed wealth still controlling 6538 acres in 1876.121 The first decades of the twentieth century, with compulsory land purchase diminished this resource. In 1919, while Alice Leigh was eleventh baroness, the big house at Ballin temple, Ardattin, Tullow, was burnt down together with all the family papers. The Butlers however continued to keep a home in Carlow, attending horticultural shows and gracing golf tournaments. Then in 1970 the Baronet emigrated to New York.122 To trace a titled family with the basics clearly inventoried in Burke’s Peerage is easy. The Carrolls and Calhouns are a different matter, so here only an impressionistic account is possible. In the nineteenth-century Tipperary, a county with a high proportion of rich land, was the scene of considerable agrarian violence. It possessed a class of Catholic strong farmers (Carrolls among them) who formed the backbone of O’Connellite nationalism. Later political and economic developments on the whole bolstered their power and prosperity. In the late twentieth century such thriving families (Carrolls still to the fore) could be found sending their sons to the Catholic public schools in England, Ampleforth and Downside, those successors to the continental establishments, run by regulars, which Charles Carroll, I, II and III had all attended more than 200 years before. Possibly Antony Carroll’s descendants belonged to this category. Today there are only a few Calhouns in east Donegal, though there are quite a number over the border in Co Londonderry. Perhaps partition encouraged them to make that short move but possibly they had originally settled more heavily there in the seventeenth century. They are apparently absent from the Presbyterian churchyard at Convoy. It was not established until a hundred years after old Patrick set out for Pennsylvania, but it does contain modern headstones for Nobles and Ewings. As British forces occupied Charleston in 1780 and forced the Presbyterians of the piedmont into active support for Patriots or Loyalists, the reverberation of the American Revolution produced an enthusiasm for volunteering among the Presbyterians of Ireland’s northwest. But, in the next decade, their support did not easily transfer to the United Irishmen and there was no ‘98 rising in this area. In the nineteenth century when the Famine struck the Presbyterians of east Donegal, a community outside the culture of poverty, largely escaped the worst of the catastrophe. In the early twentieth century, unlike the Butlers, they would benefit from compulsory land purchase. In America the Calhouns became rich and politically prominent but it was bought at a high price – the violent deaths of the Catherines Calhoun, grandmother and granddaughter, James Calhoun and possibly Ezikiel, the disappearance of Mary Calhoun, the twofold trauma of Ann Calhoun, the hazards and brutalities of the Regulator disturbances, the physical force inherent in the running of slave-based agriculture, the bitterness and chaos of first the revolutionary and then, worse still, the civil war. If the Calhouns had remained in Convoy they would have lead a more frugal but a more peaceful life.

10 Anti-Slavery Literature, Mostly Imaginative

As with tobacco colonies, the Irish could be found among the forerunners in this developing region. It was the Dubliner and Trinity College graduate, Thomas Southerne (1659–1746) who transformed Mrs Aphra Behn’s novel Oronooko into a popular London stage play, maintaining the tragedy, adding in some comic lines and ensuring that the sufferings of the princely slave remained in the public eye throughout the eighteenth century. In these early days, when African colouring, rather than slave status, excited the European artistic world, another Trinity College graduate gave vent to his feelings in Latin and English versification – In Laudem Aethiopissae: In Praise of a Negress What shape I have, that form is all my own, To art a stranger and to modes unknown; To paint or patches, perfum’d fraud, no friend, Nor know what stays or honey-water mend: My softer skin with the mole’s velvet vies, Ah! Who will on these altars sacrifice? But if I please less in the sultry day, My colour with the candles dies away,1 Stimulated by the works of Alexander Pope, fond of rhyming and congenial company, James Delacour (sometimes De La Court) began publishing poetry in the 1730s. Most of his life was passed in Munster. He was born in Kilowen, near Blarney, and as curate of Ballinaboy (1744–55) rose into alcoholic prophesy, so that he became known locally as ‘the mad parson’. He ended his days in Cork in the 1780s and is buried in Shandon churchyard. Whether he was stirred by the sight of an actual Negress or drawn into fantasies by literary references, it seems at once fitting and ironic that this praise should have been produced at a time and in place where African labour was making such an economic impact. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were, however, relatively innocent days for writers, when the 230

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African could be celebrated, where useful and in passing, as excitingly exotic. Later generations would confront a more serious task. Throughout history people have always been sorry for slaves as they have for dying children, unrequited lovers, bereaved wives and mothers, slain warriors, drowned sailors, all subjects written about in order to express and hopefully assuage grief. It was however the philosophers of the enlightenment, struggling with the concepts of natural law and the rights of man, who first came to perceive slavery not as one of the inevitable hazards of human existence but as an avoidable social evil. In the early and mideighteenth century as they reasoned their way towards the establishment of this truth, they realised also that the Atlantic slave trade was increasing. This unpalatable contradiction could hardly be ignored, particularly in an age when growing wealth, much of it produced, directly or indirectly, by the plantation economies of the New World, was leading to freer circulation of ideas and a steadily expanding reading public. Anti-slavery was thus in origin very much the product of the literary culture of the age: literary production fed social and political action and vice versa. The foundation of the movement was laid by pamphleteers publishing in the 1760s, 70s and 80s, in America, the Quaker schoolteacher Antony Benezet, in Britain, Granville Sharp the philanthropic civilservant and Thomas Clarkson, an evangelical Anglican clergyman, all of them synthesisers of facts, figures and philosophical ideas. The aim of anti-slavery writers was to show that natural law abhorred slavery and that that law applied to Africans as much as any other section of mankind. If pamphleteers laid the foundations and stocked the stores of anti-slavery propaganda, imaginative writers were required to spread the word to an even wider audience. Anti-slavery, as its proponents understood, was rooted not only in the rationalism of the enlightenment, it strove also to build a better world by the cultivation of the sensitivities, reform of manners, the removal of offences against indelicacy, and the appeal to the evangelical conscience. Poets, novelists, authors of that new genre, children’s fiction, were all welcome, some producing work spontaneously, other commissioned to do so. The real outburst of anti-slavery writing in Britain came in 1787 when the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, determined to concentrate on the elimination of the trade, in preference to the wider and even more daunting issue of slavery itself, and to pursue their aim through a parliamentary ban. But the link between the constitutional and the poetic sphere had been established more than a decade earlier when the Somerset Case/Mansfield Judgement gave rise to the production of the first major anti-slavery poem. The Mansfield Judgement was in itself something of a literary fiction. A court case, where the judge had simply ruled that it was illegal for a slave brought into the country by his master to be deported against his will, was interpreted by its reporters as having declared that slavery in England and Ireland was illegal. A year later (1773), newspaper


revelations showed that this ban had been tragically breached. An African, planning to receive baptism and marry a white woman, was kidnapped by his master and thrown onboard ship for America. Determined to avoid a second enslavement, he committed suicide by stabbing himself. On reading this report John Bicknell, a gentleman of comfortable fortune and literary interests, composed a relatively short poem in which the slave, with rhetorical sensitivity, bade farewell to his beloved, describing the miseries of his early life and the ruin of his late and unexpected joys. Bicknell then rushed off to show this work to his friend, Thomas Day. Day, an ardent follower of Rousseau, relishing the opportunity to exalt the noble savage and call down retribution on civilised society, set about adding some 264 lines to his friend’s composition. In later editions Day changed the poem so that the slave’s death became less a gesture of despair and more of an act of resistance, thereby strengthening its anti-slavery message. This dramatic and exciting poem achieved poignancy by drawing upon a common human experience, unexpected happiness followed by disappointment.2 Another early and seminal example of anti-slavery poetry, published before 1787 opened the flood gates of propaganda, can be seen in two poems which appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine: Morning or The Complaint (December, 1783) and The Lovers, an African Eclogue (March 1784). The author was Hugh Mulligan, a gentlemanly Irishman living in Liverpool. To a degree Morning or The Complaint, was begotten by a political event – the defeat of Britain in the American Revolutionary War. Like many Irish Protestants, Mulligan both understood the feelings of the indignant colonists, while suffering unease about the possible collapse of the British Empire. This caused him to query the credentials of the newly emergent state, which sanctioned slavery and explains his choice of Virginia as a setting for his first anti-slavery poem. But it was Mulligan’s personal experience, as a none too successful emigrant in the burgeoning port of Liverpool, which first stung him into poetic comment. In 1782 he wrote An Epistle to Varro, addressed to his best friend, paying tribute to their friendship and the pleasures of the mind, while complaining about the wealth and vulgarity of the young ‘bloods’ about town – one of whom seems to have been Mulligan’s sexual rival. Another especially annoyed him by making a pious display of religion, quoting scripture in defence of the slave trade. Where e’er I turn that trade I trace Which marks Britannia with disgrace; Suburbean gardens feast the eyes And blood cemented villas rise.3 The allusion to Liverpool being built with Negro blood, is said to have been hurled from the stage by a drunken actor in mid-century. It would become a hackneyed jibe but in 1782 it still possessed some novelty,


particularly when juxtaposed with the elegant Georgian houses developing to the south and east of the busy docks. In his Morning or the Complaint, Mulligan follows Day in endorsing the noble savage theme with enthusiasm, describing a simple life enriched by family affection and the excitements of hunting, presented though the voice of an African male speaking dignified English. The moral superiority of such an existence is stressed: Oh guiltless hours! Our cares and wants were few. No arts of luxury and deceit we knew.4 But where Day’s is a fierce poem, rising in passionate crescendo, Mulligan’s is gentler. His slave Adala is in Virginia, which is painted in the clear light of the pastoral. Bright on her fields the ripening rays descend And rich with blushing fruit the branches bend. To those who ne’er must freedoms blessing taste Tis barren all, tis all a cheerless waste. Adala is brave and stoical, a message driven home by the repetition of a couplet stressing his present suffering and his unquenchable love of liberty. Lift high the scourge, my soul the rack disdains. I pant for freedom and my native plains.5 But he is also confused, a man caught between two cultures. He notes the behaviour of a friend, with a good master, who has established a home and family and become Christian. But for Adala that is impossible; he cannot forget his lost wife and children in Africa. But he rejects suicide, uncertain that his spirit would return to Africa. Here Mulligan, unlike Bicknell and Day, sets out to grapple with a widely held assumption that the slave trade could be defended because it removed Africans from a pagan to a Christian culture. He makes it clear that the good master is atypical and that the horror of enslavement can make the most admirable African deaf to the Christian message. So Adala seeks comfort in imaginings, as Mulligan himself did, to escape from his disappointments in love and his pecuniary difficulties. Adala dreams of his life in Africa, embracing his wife, kissing his babes. An alternative comfort (on which the poem closes) is to imagine the eventual discomfiture of his enemies. According to their own ‘Prophets laws’ they will eventually suffer the enslavement they have dealt out to others. Bid Discord flourish, civil crimes increase Nor one fond wish arise that pleads for peace


Till with their crimes in wild confusion hurled, They wake to anguish in a future world.6 Thus in his concluding stanza Mulligan combines Day’s device of calling down African retribution on European society with the threat of punishment for the guilty in the next world. This threat of eternal damnation was to become a staple of anti-slavery verse in the next half-century, at first levelled at slave traders, later extended to MPs who voted against Wilberforce’s motions and eventually to consumers of sugar. The second of Mulligan’s poems to appear in The Gentleman’s Magazine was published three months later. The Lovers, an African Eclogue is based on an actual event reported in the newspapers, when an attack by Africans on a slave-ship in the river Volta caused the vessel to explode, destroyed by its own gunpowder.7 Mulligan’s imaginary Lovers, Bura (male) and Zelma (female), describe this happening as they look back at the ship, from which the hero has just rescued the heroine, seeking her out to prevent her rape and enslavement. They see a ‘warlike chief’ launch an attack to free their companions, at which point the gunpowder explodes and the ‘pallid monsters’ (i.e. the slave-traders), meet their just and dramatic deserts. (Reality was rather different, more than 300 Africans died, while the ship’s captain was able to take to a boat and start recovering what he could in the way of his human cargo.) In the poem Bura and Zelma return to their happy lifestyle. Bura ‘The barren beach ye sons of rapine prize, Yes, fertile fields and groves shall meet our eyes. Say, what are all your treasures brought from far But vice, intemperance and a rage for war? Then, Zelma, haste to distant wilds we bend; Content and Peace shall on our steps attend.’8 Of course it is Africa as it never was, but then such a criticism applies to the pastoral form used to describe seventeenth or eighteenth-century England, or, presumably, classical Greece, another slave-owning society. When imagining Africa, Mulligan was certainly influenced by Chatterton, one of his favourite poets, who had written three African Eclogues. The use of a conversing couple, the descriptions of exotic scenery and the pleasures of the successful hunt, all present in Chatterton, resonate in Mulligan’s work. (Using African narrators, Chatterton makes disparaging reference to Europeans and their climate, their sun is faint, languid, feeble, their race pale. ‘Fear with a sickened silver tinged their hue;/ The guilty fear when vengeance is their due’)9 Chatterton’s first eclogue tells the story of a warrior who has lost his wife and children to white slavers, but the other two are not concerned with such themes. For Chatterton feels no need to deliver an


anti-slavery message, he uses Africa as topographically dramatic, a backdrop of desert, mountains, caverns and torrents, an area of sexual excitement where gods are deployed, classical style, to pursue their own desires in the heavens while they quarrel over their protégés or progeny on earth. Africa, for Chatterton, above all is a land of warriors, a view which Day shared, presenting the white slave traders as man stealers, who carry off their prey by deception rather than force. Mulligan, on the other hand, sees Africa as a peaceful region disturbed by bellicose Europeans. Chatterton uses the phrase ‘wild confusion hurled’ to describe an African torrent, Mulligan uses it to describe the state to which erring Europeans will fall if they do not give up their evil trade.10 It was Mulligan’s view of Africa which would become a staple theme of anti-slavery poetry. The strength of Mulligan’s poem as a propaganda work lies in his ability to tell dramatic stories in simple language, or simple language according to conventional poetic standards before the publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Very little is known about Hugh Mulligan, neither his birth date, exact death date (sometime in the 1790s) or when he arrived in Liverpool. He had certainly written poetry before 1783 but probably it had never been printed, circulating instead in manuscript form among his social circle, often targeted at the women with whom he was in or out of love. To have two substantial poems published in the Gentleman’s Magazine was therefore a considerable triumph. Three years later the explosion of interest caused by the activities of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with its campaign to awaken national sensitivities on the issue through meetings, lectures, sermons and petitions, gave Mulligan the opportunity to publish his collected works, Poems, chiefly on Slavery and Oppression, 1788. This little book opened with four Eclogues, American, Asian, European and African. The first and last were the poems which had appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Morning or the Complaint being re-titled An American Eclogue. The inclusion of the other two, probably written about the same time, reveals that his concern in the early eighties had been more general than a dislike of the slavery. Taken together the four eclogues and the Epistle to Varro suggest nostalgia for the immediate past, a dislike of the way the world had developed since the end of the Seven Years War. Imperial expansion had led to corrupting wealth, which not only turned rulers into despots, but the newly rich into ‘petty tyrants’. In his Asian eclogue, set in India, drawing on the mounting parliamentary criticism of Burke, he bitterly condemns the Company’s growing wealth and expansionist wars. Like Africa, he presents India as a peaceful country disrupted by avaricious outsiders whose exploitation unleashes famine and death. Again he uses the dialogue but this time both his protagonists are women, one a princess, the other the daughter of a Brahmin priest; they take refuge under a holy tree after seeing their fathers slaughtered by the Company soldiers. Here Mulligan’s religious relativism appears far more clearly than in his anti-slavery poems, as he denounces the British for the


desecration of temples and their lack of respect for Hindu law. The poem ends with the blunt announcement that the soldiers have arrived and the conversationalists have been raped and murdered.11 The European eclogue, set in the west of Ireland, is the only pastoral to contain actual shepherds and internal evidence suggests that it may have been written as early as 1779. Morar and Caril, father and son, discuss past experiences and the future of their family. The message is conveyed, that recent decades have wrought undesirable changes; the father declares that when he was young, old established ways prevailed, simple rural living was the order of the day. ‘Hibernia claimed her rights and tyrant rulers were abashed.’ When Morar returned after 20 years soldiering on the continent he found all this changed. Royal power had increased, but so had the demands and the wealth of absentee landlords who exploited the poor. The result was deforestation and depopulation. The son, Caril, suggests solving his problems by emigration to the New World where an American patriotism is challenging Europe. The father counsels against this, pointing to American oppression of the native peoples and natural hazards; he declares that many Irish who emigrated regret they ever left. In the end, seeing the smoke rising from their cottage, they go home to eat, deciding to wait for better times. Although the arms of Commerce now are bound, Our country’s genius prostrate on the ground. The trembling tear now dims her down cast eye. Though now from want her sons are forced to fly, And toil for scanty bread on distant plains, And feel the poignant jest of richer swains A time will come when trade, Europa’s pride Shall in our bays bid lofty vessels ride. Industry shall mark each busy face And churlish lordlings sink in just disgrace.12 This verse both reflects Mulligan’s immigrant experiences in Liverpool and his hopes for the removal of commercial restrictions on Ireland by Westminster (1779). Like the parliamentary Patriots and the merchants of Dublin, Cork and Belfast, Mulligan saw free trade as issuing in general prosperity. When all four eclogues are read together, in conjunction with the extensive factual notes provided to accompany them in his collected work, Mulligan emerges as a critic of the irresponsible expansion of a new economic order, which he sees as having increased the inequalities of mankind. His Irish background and his Liverpool situation worked together to encourage him to take a wide ranging view of the British Empire. As an anti-slavery poet Hugh Mulligan was of course part of a Liverpool circle. Thomas Clarkson was surprised and impressed at finding anti-slavery supporters in such a place. While on one level it can be seen as dissident and


dangerous to hold such views in Liverpool, on another it appears a natural progression for those with literary interests. Alive to what was happening nationally, indeed internationally, they were eager to contribute to this change in sensitivity and, just because of local involvement, felt the subject peculiarly their own. Bristol also reflected the presence of the trade among its writers – Chatterton, Anne Yearsley and Southey form a loose and varied cluster rather than an anti-slavery circle, while Coleridge gave lectures condemning the trade to a Dissenting audience in St Mary’s Redcliffe. The Liverpool poets were more clearly in contact with one another. One of those who welcomed Clarkson was William Roscoe, wealthiest of the group and the best remembered, both because of the varied nature of his literary output and the fact that he eventually became an MP and voted for abolition. Connected with Roscoe and also producing anti-slavery poetry were a Scottish doctor, James Curries, Dissenting minister William Shepherd and Edward Rushton. One of Clarkson’s informants, Rushton had gone to sea at 11 and as a young man had contracted opthalmia on a slave voyage to Dominica, which left him blind. He and Mulligan were close friends and in the 1780s it is possible to see them as influencing one another’s work. In an early poem, The Dismembered Empire (1782), Rushton expresses his sympathy for the American colonists, coupled with fears for Britain’s imperial future, and the next year Mulligan’s American-based Complaint appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. (Over a decade later Rushton would write a letter to George Washington, who did not reply, criticising America’s combination of slavery and freedom.) In 1787, just before Mulligan published his collected works beginning with the four Eclogues, Rushton, drawing upon his memories of the trade and the tropics, published five anti-slavery eclogues set in Jamaica. In the 1790s, the decade of his death, the depressed Mulligan seems to have fallen silent; while Rushton, converted to republicanism by the French Revolution, emptied his Liverpool bookshop of customers.13 After 1798 he took to writing on Irish themes, mourning the United Irishmen and producing three poems on Mary le More, the female figure, driven to madness by rape and massacre, who had emerged to symbolise the horrors inflicted upon her nation. In contrast Rushton’s poem, On the Death of Hugh Mulligan, is a gentle and tactfully informative tribute to an unhappy fellow practitioner, whose work was sadly forgotten and unappreciated.14 Except for Mulligan, all the Liverpool group published their anti-slavery verses after the setting up of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave trade in 1787. Now numerous poets, impelled by conscience, commissioned by the committee, excited by the work of others, faced the problem of how to write about a people and a region, whom most of them had never seen, in such a way as to arouse the sympathies of their fellow citizens. The challenge produced a flood of invention, sometimes drawing on the early pioneers, sometimes determinedly rejecting their legacy. Two


evangelicals, the gentle, whimsical and depressive William Cowper, and Hannah More, adamantine and intellectual, were immediately approached by the Committee. Cowper’s Negro’s Complaint was considered by contemporaries to be the most successful anti-slavery poem, first distributed through the post nationwide as a Subject for Conversation at the tea table, then set to music and sung in the street as well as the drawing room. Continuing to make use of the African as spokesman, he went for a shorter line, a shorter poem and direct reference to physical difference: Day, Bicknell and Mulligan had been poetically restrained on the issue of colour. Mulligan mentions ‘dusky’ once in his American and ‘sable’ once in his African Eclogue. Bicknell makes reference to ‘Afric’s sable beauties’, Day’s noble savage describes the European leader as ‘unlike his features to our swarthy race; And golden hair play’d round his ruddy face’.15 Cowper deliberately linked visual difference and shared humanity. Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit nature’s claim; Skins may differ but affection Dwells in black and white the same16 (1787) Blake too would employ this method, in his Little Black Boy, brief, melodious, directly focused on colour contrast. My mother bore me in the southern wild And I am black but oh my soul is white (1789) For late twentieth-century readers, this became the most famous, enigmatic and acrimoniously debated of the post-1787 poems.17 By the early nineties, another move to make the African more real was introduced; still the spokesman of his own cause, he now occasionally used Creole rather than dignified English. But this was not an easy option and even admirers of such works fought shy of attempting it themselves. Most of those with a fluent grasp of Creole were, like Cpt. Hugh Crow, supporters and participants in the trade. More widely used was the device of avoiding the African altogether; making use of abstraction and analogy, urging the audience to anti-slavery activism by pressing upon them the pleasure to be gained through benevolence, the high of a clear conscience, perhaps a place among the great, certainly a reward in the next world. This approach inevitably sacrificed the exciting story line element and the result was often less easily accessible than the poems of Day or Mulligan. On the other hand it was very popular with women, who felt that it enabled them to tackle strong subjects while avoiding indelicacies seen as unsuitable to their sex. Mrs Barbauld and Mary Leadbeater both showed a fondness for this solution.


Hannah More, though not its chief exponent, was attracted by it. Her commissioned work, Slavery, a Poem, was a long exercise; some 295 lines, in which she begins and ends by personifying Liberty, comparing the fortunate state of Britain with the unfortunate state of Africa. Like Cowper she links physical difference and shared humanity. Does the immortal principle within Change with the casual colour of the skin?18 She points out that pride, dismissed in slaves as stubborn and vengeful, would have been commended as heroic in Romans, stresses that physical pain is something experienced by all, and describes the ravages committed on African family life by white slavers, whose behaviour besmirches Christianity. She makes literary references to Oronooko (Southerne not Mrs Aphra Behn) and historical reference to the depredations of Cortes and Columbus, commends Cpt Cook and William Penn and occasionally adds further factual material in footnotes. But she remains uneasy with her subject; Africa which Chatterton found exotic, Day noble and Mulligan pastoral, is for her distressingly pagan. While she argues determinedly that it is unchristian for Christians to deprive pagans of their liberty, she cannot take pleasure in the state of savagery. She is happiest perhaps in the final 30 lines, where she pushes herself upwards into a higher sphere, calling upon British patriotism in personified terms to bring an end to the oppression of the trade so that ‘FAITH and FREEDOM’ can spring from Mercy’s hands, thus tentatively introducing the prospect of conversion.19 It was this poem which most clearly influenced Mary Birkett, when she set out to write her attack on the slave trade. The intended length (which proved only to be Part I) was to resemble More’s. The seventeen-year old Dubliner had digested More’s arguments (‘we to the Romans were what to us Afric now’).20 At her most ornate, she used soaring poetic forms to draw her reader from scenes of darkness to scenes of light, from what was to what might be, calling upon the Muse of Pity and the Muse of Fancy, personifying Misery, Oppression, Virtue, Innocence, Liberty in a style, clearly influenced by More’s dictum that women writers should strive after the beautiful. Like More, and Mulligan, she accepted the necessity for combating the most popular prejudices against change. Intellectual, well informed on theological and economic matters, full of youthful confidence, she did so with a vigour unrivalled by her elders. But most original of all was her appeal to her own sex. The idea for doing so sprang from her Quaker experience of the Women’s Meeting, where female members testified before a female audience. To this she brought her dedication to the non-consumption campaign, at once a Quaker speciality in regard to sugar but also a well tried Irish expedient. Mary Birkett (1775–1817) had actually been born in Hardshaw near Liverpool. The first Birkett to settle in Ireland had arrived in 1750 but Mary’s


parents did not venture there until 1784, when she was nine and already writing poetry which expressed her fears about moving west to a foreign and barbarous land. In Dublin her father established himself as a tallow chandler and soap boiler and eventually seems to have been able to achieve suburban retirement at Killester, but Mary’s African Slave Trade was written in the family’s home and business premises in Jervais Street. Originally she produced some 390 lines of verse (published as Part I), then encouraged by the enthusiasm of her audience she added another 539 (published as Part II). Eager to provide her readers with answers to the questions most often posed by the uncommitted or openly hostile, she explained why the African should not be condemned for his paganism and why God had allowed an evil trade to thrive so successfully and so long. She pointed out that enslavement did not bring Africans into contact with Christianity as Britain, unlike the Turks or the Spanish, did not convert her slaves. And she tackled economic matters, reproducing Clarkson’s belief that legitimate trade with Africa could be established easily.21 These facts were strewn at intervals through her very long poem. It was, however, never Mary Birkett’s intention to be concise. She sought not only to inform her own sex, but to touch their feelings. Her ‘juvenile attempt’, as she describes it, opens in the drawing room among ‘the giddy and the gay’, but shifts swiftly to focus upon the African. She does employ the analogy (at the end of Part II, she spends some time comparing the savage to a block of marble yet to be sculpted). But in the early stages in her attempt to convince her female audience of the humanity of the Negro, she chooses to follow the fortunes of a youthful male, showing him as strong and brave, a hunter who lives in a simple ‘turf built shed’, supporting his aged parents, attached to his wife and children, leading a happy, active existence until he is caught by ‘Christian traders’. Torn from his native land and facing the horrors of chains, disease and brutality on the sailing ship, the humiliation of the slave auction and the rigours of plantation life, he and his fellow Africans react with ‘just fury’ and stoic strength. Her African male, designed to appeal to herself and her female readership, owes much to Thomas Day’s noble savage, but evangelical standards demanded that he finally emerge as Clarkson’s educable African. Having followed the male hero from slave ship to plantation, she discards him and returns to Africa. Dismissing the possibility of Britain’s commercial loss, she looks forward to the new era after the abolition of the slave trade. Africa must be reconstructed and Christianised through European involvement. Stimulated by the recent publicity given to the Sierra Leone scheme, an evangelical attempt to combine Christianity and legitimate commerce, and eager to see Ireland share in west African trade, she commits herself eagerly to missionary and imperial endeavours. Plant there our colonies and to their soil Declare the God who formed the boundless whole.


Improve their manners, teach them how to live To them the useful lore of science give. To make this great change possible by rescuing the African from the corruption and suffering of the slave trade, she calls upon her fellow country women, ‘Hibernia fair’ to live up to their established reputation for philanthropy and renounce the luxury of sugar. To you galled mercy seldom pleads in vain Oh let us rise and burst the Negro’s chain! This stirring call is underwritten by a reminder of the complicity in evil, which had so disturbed and attracted Mary Leadbeater, and the assurance that women must and should play their part in its eradication. Say not that small sphere in which we move, And our attentions would vain and fruitless prove We have a most important share. Even if the slave trade does not collapse immediately, some Africans will benefit. (Here she is reflecting William Fox’s argument that 21 months of abstention from sugar and rum by a family of consumers would save one fellow-creature from murder. Alternatively, every pound of sugar eaten, equalled two ounces of human flesh.)22 No daughters of Ierne, you will give The self denying proof and let them live.23 Part II of Mary Birkett’s poem records a marked and unexpected change. In the preface she explained that she has written more because of the enthusiasm with which her first effort was received and within the text itself she attributes that encouragement to her female audience, ‘Daughters of Ireland’. However, she soon turns away from them to address the sister kingdom; while declaring respect and love for ‘Albion’, she sadly admits the necessity of reproof and embarks on it with vigour. Having described Britain’s iniquities over the slave trade, she declares that Ireland had never engaged in such commerce. She then details her country’s superior moral position: Ireland is just, virtuous, innocent, generous, brave, a true lover of freedom. In Part I she had delivered the conventional threat of heavenly retribution to the slave trader; this time she applies it to Westminster MPs and follows it by the equally unpalatable suggestion that Britain would soon stand shamed before the rest of Europe, the more so because ‘France has kindled now the generous flame’. At this point, she reverts from reproof to encouragement, enthusing over what could be achieved if the right course was adopted.


When British learning shall its light impart Dispel the Chaos of the Negro heart Diffuse fair knowledge, scientific lore And to the rights of man their souls restore When gospel truths shall dart an heavenly ray, And slaves enfranchised own a Saviour’s sway.24 Again the ending of the trade and conversion are linked. The sense of nationalism erupting in Part II of this poem reflects the rising temperature of Irish revolutionary hopes in the 1790s and Mary Birkett’s growing confidence that she could expect a sympathetic audience for such views. And in expressing that nationalist consciousness, she strengthened it in a then novel manner, with her picture of Ireland as a worldwide friend of the oppressed, in sharp contrast to exploitative England. In the 1830s, Daniel O’Connell would promote it as she did by drawing upon the antislavery issue, suggesting that this commitment could be traced back to the days of St Patrick. The idea of Ireland, as a lover of the oppressed everywhere, had permanently entered the nationalist psyche. Only in the final stanzas of her poem did Mary Birkett turn again from that English other, the iniquitous slave trade supporter, to directly addressing her own sex, this time speaking to Albion’s daughters. But here gender overrode national affinity, for what she had to say was as relevant to Irish as English middle and upper class women and sprang from her increasing experience as a female anti-slavery propagandist. Hence she advises women taking up the abstentionist cause on how to cope with their menfolk. The punchbowl, as well as the tea table, is acknowledged as a focus for reform. Having assured her own sex that brothers, husbands, sons and friends would surely react favourably to a ‘just request/when urged with meekness yet with warmth expressed’, she admits that a sensitive woman can find herself in a difficult position. Or dread your Epicurean jests to meet, With laughter loud, unmeaning roar replete.25 Some men, she acknowledges, will remain incorrigibly wicked, but remember, that however recalcitrant a man appears, he may repent. At least you have given him the chance to do so and if you have tried God will reward you. This burgeoning sense of women as the moral conscience of society once again reveals the clever 17 year old’s commitment to the evangelical message, along with more apparently secular revolutionary ideals, a short lived combination but one not uncommon in the 1790s. Altogether, the most remarkable thing about this tortuous, rushing, lurching, rambling work, is the number of political trends it articulates that would come to dominate the nineteenth century and reverberate into the twentieth: anti-slavery, feminism, nationalism,


evangelical religion, imperial expansion and educational reform. Unlike Hannah More’s Slavery, it is a percipient poem packed with interest for the historian. Also stimulated by the desire to give political support to anti-slavery, Mary Leadbeater had written The Negro; addressed to Edmund Burke (1789). The author’s intention was not simply to pay tribute to the famous orator’s support for Wilberforce but to secure his continued efforts in the cause. To do so she adopts the device of minimal mention of the protagonist of the title, though his spiritual equality with his oppressors is firmly stated at the outset and reiterated in the closing lines. The main thrust of the poem is devoted to a parade of those who had achieved fame through benevolence. The list begins with Woolman, the Quaker pioneer of anti-slavery, praised as a man possessing virtue uncommon in his own time, who would have rejoiced in the greater freedom and sensitivity by the 1790s. The succeeding stanzas focus on a varied selection of Burke’s contemporaries, Leopold of Tuscany, the most enlightened of European princes, particularly dear to Mary Leadbeater for his abolition of the death penalty, Lady Arbella Denny, patron of Dublin’s Foundling Hospital and founder of the Magdalene Asylum, Raikes, the father of the Sunday schools movement, and Howard the prison reformer. Finally, the poem circles back to the anti-slavery issue by praising a newly emergent hero, Clarkson. There Burke, thy lov’d, hono’rd name shall stand And add new splendour to the godlike band. At this point, the closing verses take off into the empyrean, picturing the eighteenth-century philanthropists joining the Patriarchs, Apostles and Martyrs and discovering the naked Negroes among them.26 The poem was a cleverly constructed amalgam of flattery and encouragement enticing Burke to assume a leading role, or at least to maintain a firm stance, on the antislave trade issue and give it as much attention as he was devoting to India, (‘Let either India echo back thy name’) for Mary Leadbeater tended to see the East Indies as the deathbed for British soldiers and Ballitore boys rather than a region of philanthropic endeavour. Despite the difference between Mary Leadbeater’s more traditional private approach to Burke in 1789 and Mary Birkett’s novel and public appeal to her own sex in 1792, both women shared not only the same cause but used the verse form to promote it. They did so because it was familiar to them, accepted by society as suitable for their gender role. But in choosing poetry, they did not see themselves as forced into an inferior medium. Rather they and the literate world perceived it as the highest literary form available.27 Like anti-slavery this was a standard which survived the upheavals of counter-revolution. In April 1806 Mary Birkett, now beset by business worries and motherhood, once more took up a political pen. Thrust back on the


traditional personal appeal, she produced An Address to Hans Hamilton, M.P. on behalf of the injured African offering encouragement for the current antislave-trade motion. When the motion did pass, after two decades of endeavour, Mary Leadbeater, celebrated the occasion with Lines written on a Joyful Event in the metre of Erin go bragh.28 In 1808 her book of poems, collected over more than three decades, was published. Among them were her Lines to Edward Rushton on the Recovery of his Sight, an event, at once fortuitous and symbolic, which had taken place in the year of the abolition of the trade. But now the film is drawn aside. Thy heart’s fond prayer is granted thee. Then bless the light so long denied For thou behold’st the negro free.29 Shared interests (anti-slavery and the writing of poetry) created cultural contacts between Ireland and Liverpool, an unexpected descant upon the dominant throb of commercial links. In Ireland itself anti-slavery poetry had quickly spread beyond its Quaker base. In 1792 the Civic Eclogue, a radical pamphlet, written in satirical verse and supporting Napper Tandy (another old Ballitore boy) and the United Irishmen, opened with a fusillade of anti-slavery propaganda. The Irish Cherokee (a nickname for young, obstreperous dandies) is taking tea with a group of friends and acquaintances, an activity which immediately calls for a comment on the sugar boycott. From sugar I have not refrained Though shunned as if with blood disdained. (Thus the author shows himself as acquainted with and approving of the Fox pamphlet.) Prejudice against the Negro is voiced by the most unpleasant members of the group. Miss Tab: Such hideous forms, can they be men? Or subjects for the modish pen? The Cherokee announces that Negroes are ugly, low born and have no souls. This, together with criticism of the United Irishmen, unleashes a debate on privilege, which the Cherokee, who comes from a titled family, clearly possesses but does not deserve. It is one of the women who tells him, I fear your powers are on the wane And recommend you read Tom Paine.30 After the defeat of radicalism and revolution, evidence of an interest in anti-slavery among the working class can be found in the publications of the


weaver poets. Literate artisans, their taste for composition had sometimes been fostered in the singing schools, a basic form of education found throughout the countryside where children came together to learn to sing religious music. However, the rehearsals (like the West Indian field calypso) often included spontaneous comments on the immediate situation, which allowed an apt rhymer to discover and develop his talents. James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry (1770–1816), first came to poetry in this way. A county Antrim weaver, as a young man he joined the United Irishmen, escaped to America in 1798, disliked it and returned after a few months.31 In the early nineteenth century he wrote at least two anti-slavery poems. Typical of the genre, they were both stimulated by a political event. Toussaint L’Overture’s Farewell to St Domingo denounces Napoleon’s imprisonment of the black hero, a popular theme on which Wordsworth had written a sonnet. The Dying African, draws on now well-established conventions, a slave approaching death hopes that his spirit will return to Africa, which he describes in pastoral terms. But this poem also is politically topical; like Mary Birkett, Orr sees the return of a new Whig ministry in 1806 as signalling the abolition of the trade. The poem opens with the slave declaring that Africa’s friends are Albion’s glory Fox, their chief, in death I bless. And closes with the hope that, with the support of the ‘God of white and black’, victory may be gained.32 Another early nineteenth-century weaver poem by James Hope re-echoes the indignation of Mulligan and Rushton at America’s contradictory commitment to liberty and slavery. The topic of Jefferson’s Daughter sprang from the revelation that the much admired President had a slave mistress and slave family. An extension of this allegation was the belief that the President’s daughter had been auctioned in the New Orleans slave market. It was a claim with immediate appeal to the imaginative writer and in the mid-nineteenth century would reach its most memorable expression in Clothilde, the first novel to be penned by an African American, William Wells Brown. Disappointingly, though perhaps prudently, the Irish poet chose the formula of personification, historical reference and minimalisation of the central figure, who is reduced to little more than ‘the sound of her chain as it clanks’.33 ( Jefferson’s real slave daughter, Harriet, pale enough to pass for white, was allowed to become a successful runaway.) Besides being a rhyming weaver, Jemmy Hope was a well known political figure involved in both the 1798 and the Emmet rebellion, the only working man to leave an account of his revolutionary activities. In later years, he lessened his frustrations by writing a considerable amount of poetry, much of it taking the form of satiric attack upon the popular division into orange and green. By the nineteenth century the work of these Irish writers shows


that an established formula had emerged which made for easy participation in the anti-slavery genre. On the aesthetic level anti-slavery poetry was not a success. No antislavery poem found a place in the literary canon. The great poets who tackled the subject – Blake, Burns, Cowper, Coleridge, Southey, the reluctant Wordsworth – were not at their greatest when they did so. Nor was there any anti-slavery equivalent of The Burial of Sir John Moore, a work by an outsider, Charles Wolfe, achieving sudden popularity and lasting reputation. Later generations dismissed the genre as didactic, moralising and sentimental, deservedly ephemeral because it served a political cause rather than the great verities of truth and beauty. Recent work, aimed at taking a more serious interest, on occasion seems to reinforce the traditional point of view; as, for example the discovery that Southey’s forgotten soliloquy, by a guilt-stricken sailor who had taken part in the trade, stimulated his friend Coleridge, to produce The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, by letting his mind bound free of the anti-slavery theme. Nevertheless these new studies reveal that anti-slavery poetry was considerably more than ‘verse and worse’. It was a varied body of work reflecting, in many cases, the standards of romanticism which stressed the need to experiment in subject, language and form in order to express emotion.34 Particularly when sung, Cowper’s Negro’s Complaint still carries with it a period charm and, armed only with the information from the brief newspaper account which Bicknell read in 1773, it is possible to recover the sense of sorrow, indignation and excitement which carried the Dying Negro to instant fame. There is no poetic equivalent of Turner’s masterpiece, Slavers throwing out the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on but that seems to be more the result of chance than to the strangulation of literary genius by the grasping hand of propaganda. As propaganda, anti-slavery was a triumph. Poetry played an indispensable part in producing a generation which believed the slave trade was wrong and was prepared to question slavery itself. It could appeal to those with evangelical enthusiasm and to those without. The conversion of the poets to the cause was one of the great successes for the anti-slavery philanthropists in the 1790s. The premier cultivator and guardian of the sensitivities was now enlisted on their side. Even recalcitrant poets found themselves pressurised by the literary climate. Wordsworth had not initially been attracted by the agitation, an inclination reinforced by the attitude of his patron Sir James Lowther, a tobacco magnate who possessed West Indian estates. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s pro-slavery policies made it possible to combine patriotism with the defence of the Negro’s full humanity, he wrote two sonnets expressing such attitudes. When at last the trade was abolished in 1806, he conquered his reservations about the ‘moral steam engine’ Clarkson, sufficiently to write a congratulatory poem.35 Not only poets, but all imaginative writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, felt the potent influence of anti-slavery on the literary


world. Foremost among those whose work can be seen to have been shaped by such pressures was the Anglo-Irish author, Maria Edgeworth. Like Wordsworth she was originally unmoved by the cause, but eventually, found its existence impossible to ignore. It was in fact enmeshed in her family life and social contacts. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, county Longford, landowner and the father who fostered and dominated Maria Edgeworth’s literary talent, returned to Ireland in 1782, after prolonged educational experiences in Britain and Europe. By now a convinced Utilitarian, he was moved to give up his absentee activities by the introduction of free trade and the emergence of a more independent Irish parliament, of which he eventually became a member. Behind him in England he left his best friend and fellow traveller Thomas Day, author of The Dying Negro. Surrounded by a growing family in Edgeworthstown House, Richard Lovell and his second wife set out to design a new non-classical, child-centred system of education. Foremost, among the necessities demanded by the project, was the production of entertaining and moral reading material for the young. Thus it was a request from Edgeworthstown, that he contribute to their new venture, which provoked Day’s most famous literary work, Sandford and Merton, a tale of two contrasting boys, one thoroughly English and manly, the other a spoilt West Indian Creole. The work contains a clear anti-slavery message, articulated by a Negro beggar (possibly the first black to appear in children’s literature) who plays a dramatic deliverance role, saving brave Harry Sandford from being gored by a bull and successfully eliminating the racial prejudices held by the flawed Tommy Merton.36 In the years when Maria Edgeworth served her apprenticeship as a writer, making use of her swift, clear hand and eager intelligence to help her father and his agent record the collection of rents, and inventing stories and plays to entertain her family, she was aware that Sandford and Merton was among her siblings’ favourite books. On her first emergence as a children’s author, her work was promoted by Mrs Barbauld, an ardent supporter of Wilberforce, already famous as a writer for juveniles, for whom she had produced hymns carrying an anti-slavery message. Yet Maria Edgeworth remained immune to the cause. When she wrote the moral fables, incorporated in the Parent’s Assistant (1796), to back up her father’s educational theory, she felt under no compulsion to introduce anti-slavery to the nursery. Noble savages, slave trade horrors and missionary endeavours were all alien to her witty, domestic and rational spirit. On a more directly political front, she also resisted. In 1792, when the non-consumption of sugar campaign was at its height, the Edgeworths were in Bristol. Maria was taken to visit a slave ship and saw ‘the dreadfully small hole in which the slaves are stowed’. The family made friends with Dr Thomas Beddoes, physician, and anti-slavery activist, who would later marry one of Maria’s younger sisters. As always, Maria found her father attracted by the prospect of reform and eager to investigate its practicalities.


But when he tried to discuss the possibility of the substitution of honey for sugar with her, she dismissed the subject, making gentle fun about having to worry about the bees.37 On the visit to the slave ship Maria had been accompanied by her brother Richard, her only full brother and the eldest of Richard Lovell’s 22 children. As a little child, Maria had been left at home in England with her ailing mother, while her brother had accompanied Richard Lovell and Thomas Day to France, where he was reared according to Rousseau’s principles which eventually, his father concluded, produced an undisciplined youth. As a child of nature, the New World seemed a suitable theatre for him. He had emigrated to America by 1788, buying land on the Pee Dee River on the South Carolina/ North Carolina border, Calhoun backcountry where cotton was entering its period of expansion.38 In 1792 and 1795 he visited his father both times departing with at least £1000, which, if he invested it in his farm, must have in some degree gone towards the purchase of slaves. Possibly thoughts of her brother, who died in 1796, turned Maria’s mind to the problems of planters and she was enabled to think about them in an informed and stimulating manner by a recent book. Bryan Edwards’s History of the British West Indies, (first published in London in1792, followed by a Dublin edition in 1793) was a work which she digested to make peculiarly her own. Edwards was a literary and intellectual planter, who, returning to England in1792, called for amelioration of slave conditions which, he protested, the better planters themselves had already begun in Jamaica. He also warned against any attempt to hurriedly change a difficult situation (i.e. the immediate abolition of the trade) which might produce more harm than good. As the daughter of an improving landlord, Maria Edgeworth read Edward’s descriptions of the correct running of sugar estates with keen interest. Most of all she was attracted by his description of his slave workforce. Edwards wrote about the Negro fondness for loquacious and digressive speeches, coupled with a contrasting ability for the apt and succinct. ‘I have been surprised by such figurative expressions, and (notwithstanding their ignorance of abstract terms) such pointed sentences, as would have reflected no disgrace on poets and philosophers.’39 Here was a trait which Maria Edgeworth immediately recognised; in her Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she drew a direct comparison between the characteristics of ‘the lower Irish’ and the West Indian slaves.40 For the twenty-first century reader, the striking parallel is of course between the attitudes of the Edgeworths and Bryan Edwards to their workforce and fellow islanders, at once amused, appreciative, affectionate, condescending, critical and condemnatory, encapsulating the internal conflicts of the colonial intellectual. As a keen observer of different social groups, Maria Edgeworth relished Edward’s African material portraying the varying characteristics of Mandingo, Cormantine and Ibo and she was fascinated by his descriptions of obeah (African religious practices) which would enable her to introduce a gothic element into her stories, normally forbidden ground for a convinced utilitarian.


But her enthusiasm for this book drew on yet another root. In his introduction Edwards included some autobiographical material which revealed that on a personal level he and Maria Edgeworth had much in common. He had left England at 16 after an unhappy and disturbed boyhood, to find himself in a society he enjoyed and in the company of an uncle for whom he developed a deep, filial gratitude. He approved of slavery and he liked Africans. Maria Edgeworth, arriving in Ireland in her teens, also left a miserable childhood behind to move into a happier stage of her life, and she came to like the Irish. Both paid tribute to these youthful affections in literary form. Their manner of doing so was dictated by gender. Edwards wrote a poem, The Sable Venus, while Maria Edgeworth narrated Castle Rackrent, in the voice of Thady McQuirk (in real life John Langan) her father’s agent.41 Another planter problem, about which Edwards wrote, was that of revolt, by this time an issue impinging dangerously upon the Edgeworths. Richard Lovell was actively involved in politics. In 1785 he had attended a Volunteer convention supporting parliamentary reform. He declared his sympathy for Catholic emancipation and inveighed against the corruption of the Dublin legislature, while on his estate he showed no partiality towards Protestant tenants. When the government ordered landlords to form yeomanry corps to protect the country and secure law and order, he admitted Catholics into the service. All this made him deeply unpopular with the less liberal gentry by whom he was surrounded. In the autumn of 1798 the family in Edgeworthstown House found themselves in the path of General Humbert’s invading force, and fled into the heavily garrisoned Longford. The French army and their Irish supporters (including many of the ex-Longford militia) marched passed the gates of Edgeworthstown leaving the estate undisturbed. To the forces gathered in Longford this appeared highly suspicious. Richard Lovell was publicly accused of collusion with the French and almost fell victim to a loyalist bullet. Though he eventually refuted all such accusations satisfactorily, it was an embittering moment and in its aftermath he seriously considered removing back to England. However, in the end his natural vigour asserted itself and he stayed on to become an MP. In 1800 it was he, ingenious and decisive, who led the anti-union members out of the House of Commons so that they did not have to stay and watch the annihilation of their own legislature.42 Maria Edgeworth thus had first-hand knowledge of the fears and moral decisions faced by those encountering a violent revolutionary situation. In its wake, she was assailed by the pressures produced by her developing reputation as an author. Up to this point she had written and published Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), a plea for an education for women aimed at the cultivation of the rational intellect, The Parent’s Assistant drawing on lore acquired while educating the siblings from her father’s second and third marriages, and Castle Rackrent, which John Langan, alias Thady Quirk ‘seemed to stand by me and dictate’.43 On its enthusiastic reception, she set


herself to work on Belinda, a society novel, and a set of short stories, Moral Tales designed for that group which would be described in the late twentieth century as ‘young adult’. The scope of both of these projects forced her, for the first time, to move well beyond her own personal experience. In doing so she drew on two main sources, stories of her father’s youth (Richard Lovell was a robust raconteur, enthusiastic, opinionated, consistently skirting the bounds of indelicacy, or, in the bosom of his family, probably journeying directly into it) and her wide general reading. Here Bryan Edwards’s History of the British West Indies, played a formative part. In Belinda she deals with London society by peopling it with vivid characters from her father’s youth, highlighting contrasts with the countryside represented by the Percevals, an idealised and dull version of her own intellectual and idiosyncratic family.44 Wishing to enliven the cast by the introduction of outsiders without employing the Irish, she introduces two Jamaicans, a Creole planter and his black slave. Both draw on favourable stereotypes. The slave, Juba, is obedient, musical, fearful of the powers of obeah, and devoted to his master. The master, Mr Vincent, who possesses a ‘noble West Indian fortune’, is darkly handsome, vivacious, low on rationality but strong on feeling, benevolent towards his slave.45 Both characters play important roles in articulating the main theme of the novel, the correct recipe for choosing a mate and achieving a happy marriage. Juba is used to illustrate the point that virtue should count for more than outward appearance. He successfully courts and marries a serving girl on the Perceval estate; originally fearful of his blackness, on closer acquaintance she comes to value him as hardworking and ingenious. (His benevolent master makes the union possible by setting the pair up in a small farm).46 On the issue of colour, Maria Edgeworth clearly and easily endorses the enlightened idea of the equality of mankind. Yet her attitudes are not those of an anti-slavery supporter. The scrupulous Belinda, who reads Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (the publication in which he first expressed his abhorrence of slavery) to strengthen her rationality, accepts the source of Mr Vincent’s wealth without question.47 It is not a matter which concerns her when she agonises as to whether or not she should accept him as a suitor and a husband. The slave trade is mentioned only once in the text, then in passing as a contrast to Mr Vincent’s treatment of Juba and a suitable subject for tea table conversation. There follows a disquisition on the poetry and character of Thomas Day, during which it appears that Mr Vincent has introduced Belinda to The Dying Negro. No irony is intended here, in a scene where the slave owner reads aloud from the antislavery text. The dying Negro is not allowed to speak; lines, eventually quoted from Day, come later and belong to quite another poem dealing with love betrayed, stressing the actual subject of this scene which involves the return of Belinda’s first suitor, whom she had mistakenly rejected as faithless.48 The task Maria Edgeworth had set herself, of providing a guide to


the choice of a marriage partner, at a time when novels were seen as an evil influence on the youthful mind in such matters, was a daunting one. She herself was to have only one proposal of marriage, which she had not yet received and Richard Edgeworth, truly modern in this respect for his class and time, took an ardent interest in his daughters’ intellectual development and very little in their marriage prospects. To blend sensitivity of feeling and utilitarian rationality, while telling an entertaining and lively story required great skill. Belinda is vivid, amusing and convincing when concerned with the portrayal of an unhappy society marriage, but the young heroine’s emotional pilgrimage is leaden and tortuous, as she picks her way through a complicated and arbitrary plot. At its close the attractive Creole fiancé, is suddenly removed by the unexpected revelation that he is a secret gambler so that Belinda’s first love, Clarence Hervey, diverted many chapters earlier into an encounter with a Rousseauesque educational experiment, clearly abstracted from the life of Thomas Day, can return and win the bride.49 Before this dénouement, Maria Edgeworth had developed reservations about her admirable and prudent heroine, a feeling which the vivacious Creole, viewing his beloved’s calm and philosophic behaviour, had been allowed to express, ‘Mr. Vincent … .could not help thinking, that if Belinda had more faults, she would have been more amiable.’50 Compared to the popularity of the slim and cryptic Rackrent the reception of the three volume society novel was disappointing. Belinda was not seen as an exemplary heroine, but as lacking in suitably virginal commitment to her first love when she accepted Mr Vincent as her suitor. In 1809 Mrs Barbauld asked if she could republish the book in her British Novelists Series and Richard Lovell decided this offered the opportunity for a rewrite. Sections were now expunged or changed to show that Belinda had never encouraged the Creole’s advances or considered accepting his proposal, even that she was prepared to see him as a sort of Caliban. But if the new version showed less approval of the planter class, it also cut out the endorsement of racial equality. Juba was no longer allowed to marry the serving girl and a white man was installed in his stead. Richard Lovell had explained that many gentlemen found such liasions disgusting and Maria retreated in maidenly horror, saying she understood nothing of such subjects. She feared that the rewrite would not improve her work but that was on aesthetic grounds.51 Moral Tales written, or prepared for publication, at the same time as Belinda makes Maria Edgeworth’s equation of Jamaican planter and Irish landlord even more obvious. The Good Aunt revolves around the relationship between the orphaned Charles and his aunt, Mrs Howard, an alter ego for the author with her enlightened educational system, quick sense of humour and propensity to toothache. The story is set in England but Miss Howard is the granddaughter of a Jamaican planter and the inheritor of his estate. She had lived on the island as a girl and before selling her property, she ordered her agent there to free elderly slaves and provide the rest with provision


grounds. Little Charles reads Bryan Edwards and is entranced by his description of the contrast between Cormantine and Ibo slaves. At school he is friendly with a West Indian Creole, a good child, who like Charles is bullied by an unpleasant older boy, Augustus Holloway. Holloway’s father looks after Mrs Howard’s financial affairs and to impress her, Augustus starts to write a Latin poem on a suitably modish topic; the lady’s benevolence over manumission and the provision grounds. However the poem is never finished because Mrs Howard loses her fortune and is dropped by the Holloways. Thus Maria Edgeworth highlights the foolishness and hypocrisy, which she saw as a frequent adjunct to the fashionable anti-slavery cause. After a time spent in reduced circumstances, Mrs Howard’s fortune is retrieved for her through the help of little Charles, an honest sailor and a grateful mulatto woman, one of Mrs Howard’s freed salves, rescued from destitution by a kind gardener. Those who cheated the good aunt are revealed to be the Holloways, a Jewish business man and a sea captain.52 There is a picaresque element to this tale, the plot moving relatively quickly through shipwrecks, stage coach chases, schoolroom quarrels, great house visits, gambling at billiards, and involving a wide range of characters and numerous coincidences. The West Indies is used to produce offstage action, resulting in violent changes of fortune onstage, a device which would remain popular with authors well into the nineteenth century. But while the Jamaican material is integral to the plot, as well as adding colour and interest, neither slavery nor anti-slavery is central to the story’s moral theme. The main intention of the tale is to show that the orphan Charles, grows up to be an admirable man, because of the rational education provided for him by his loving aunt. Thus he emerges as her intellectual equal and friend. Some years later, however Maria Edgeworth did focus directly on an antislavery or slavery theme, again propelled to do so by a challenging target she had set herself. She designed Popular Tales (1804) for ‘the respectable and useful middling classes of merchants, manufactures and farmers, for whose entertainment few books have been professedly written’.53 Certain subjects seemed necessary targets, the awful results of alcoholism, gambling, debt and procrastination are paraded. Irrational behaviour and thoughtless prejudice are condemned, this last theme being illustrated by provincial English/Irish misunderstandings, which she brought to a positive resolution. While industry and initiative are constantly commended, gratitude and loyalty glow with particular strength. To hold the attention of these middling and artisan classes, she felt it necessary for the first time to feature exotic locations: of the 11 Popular Tales, four were set overseas, in India, the Middle East, China and the West Indies. Intimate acquaintance with Bryan Edwards’s History made the move to Jamaica easy and slave society offered an admirable social laboratory for the moral truths she wished to assert and the opportunity to tell a dramatic story.


The central drama is a slave rebellion and the main moral of the Grateful Negro is that the planter who manages his estate in a humane and financially sound manner escapes unscathed, while his bad planter neighbour narrowly escapes death and is reduced to penury. The good planter, Mr Edwards, keeps a close eye on all aspects of estate management. The bad planter, Mr Jefferies, debt ridden and cheerfully drunken, leaves everything to his brutal overseer, whose vicious behaviour provokes a revolt. The rising is organised by Hector, an impressively strong and bloodthirsty Cormantine, and the whole island is expected to rise except for Mr Edwards’s slaves who are thought to be too loyal to be safely involved in the conspiracy. The situation, however, is complicated by the fact that Caesar, Hector’s closest friend, fellow Cormantine and slave ship companion, has just been purchased along with his wife by Mr Edwards from Jefferies in order to save the couple from a sale, which would have separated them. As Hector represents revenge, Caesar represents honesty and gratitude. Much play is made with the efforts of the conspirators to persuade Caesar to join them but he stalwartly refuses. In the end he escapes from the toils of the obeah woman and alerts Mr Edwards to the planned insurrection. The slaves from Mr Edwards’s plantation then support their master in suppressing revolt before it can spread throughout the island. Thus benevolent treatment by the planter and the consequent faithful reaction by the slaves produces an accommodation between two opposing groups. The resonances from Ireland here are obvious. A responsible proprietor must choose his agents carefully and always be available to his dependants himself. Benevolence on one side and gratitude on the other will produce accord between two potentially opposing groups. A paradigm between Britain and Ireland, now in a state of union, is also laid down. Despite the title, the good planter is more truly the hero of Maria Edgeworth’s tale than the grateful slave. Mr Edwards is, of course, Bryan Edwards; he had died in 1801 and the story can be seen as a tribute to him. In its opening section the ameliorative measures which he has introduced to make his slaves prosperous and happy are described (provision gardens, remunerated task work, good accounting to keep away the spectre of bankruptcy and slave sales) with a utilitarian love of practical detail. Later in conversation with Mr Jefferies, Mr Edwards denounces the slave trade, declares that it should be terminated and commends free labour. Finally he even queries the existence of slavery, exclaiming ‘the instant a slave touches English ground he is free. Glorious privilege! Why should it not be extended to all her dominions’?54 This was not a realistic portrayal of Bryan Edwards who, in the 1790s, had emerged as the slave trade’s most plausible defender in the Westminster parliament. But the fact that Maria Edgeworth chose to give publicity to this popular anti-slavery interpretation of Lord Mansfield’s judgement in the Somerset case, shows the strength of anti-slavery as a literary convention and could be said at last to mark her capitulation to the cause.


Like Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth was drawn towards an anti slavery stance as Napoleon’s behaviour made it more acceptable politically. She seems to have felt that the cultivation of patriotism was particularly necessary among the classes she aimed at in Popular Tales. The book was quite widely read, but to what extent it reached those for whom it was intended it is impossible to say. It was certainly consumed by intellectuals; John Stuart Mill remembered it as part of his juvenile reading and Richard Jefferies, editor of the Edinburgh Review endorsed it with enthusiasm.55 As the years passed Maria Edgeworth found it pleasant to be regarded as an anti-slavery sympathiser. She found herself a welcome visitor at the house of William Roscoe, the successful Liverpool businessman, poet and anti-slavery activist. The Birmingham Female Anti-slavery Society presented her with an embroidered work bag produced from Eastern textiles, a chosen recipient along with such illustrious persons as the King, Princess Victoria, Mrs Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry.56 In the late twentieth century, anti-slavery writing has presented difficulties for literary critics seeking to revise its place in romanticism. Its value for post-colonial theory, so important in Irish literary criticism, is equally problematic. The concept of ‘the other,’ (the most accessible and attractive element in the post-structuralist, post-colonial methodology) is difficult to apply to antislavery. Day and Mulligan, Cowper and Mary Birkett (Part I), are presenting the African as ‘us’ and the ‘other’ as the white slave trader. Ireland’s weaver poets, constructing their anti-slavery verses, are clearly operating within a hegemonic discourse imposed upon them by the bourgeoisie literary ethos, but this is a matter of class not colonial status. Similarly Mary Birkett’s pursuit of the beautiful and Mary Leadbeater’s dedication to personification and abstraction, spring from a desire to adhere to the conventions of gender prevalent in their age. So far, unsurprisingly, these authors have escaped the post-modernist trawl. The same is not true for such canonical figures as Maria Edgeworth and Edmund Burke. In Maria Edgeworth’s case, the search for post-colonial (or anti-colonial) perceptions in her works, is akin to reading the early hagiographies for glimpses of everyday life in seventh-century Ireland; the overt authorial intention is bypassed in order to retrieve insights of another kind. Thus for example Rackrent has been deconstructed in order to claim that it is not a conte about the entertaining weaknesses of the Irish, both as landlord and servant, but rather an indictment of the pernicious failure of English colonisation in Ireland.57 It is difficult to see Maria Edgeworth’s forays into anti-slavery as so multilayered and inviting of analysis. The lively insights in Belinda and The Good Aunt are all domestic. The Grateful Slave is a heavy handed utilitarian parable constructed in a colonial setting and endorsing enlightened attitudes. In spirit it is closely related to Burke’s Negro Code, that list of ameliorative measures presented in the belief that ‘the cause of humanity would be far more benefited by the continuance of the trade and servitude, regulated and reformed, than by the


total destruction of both or either’.58 Among these Irish critics and supporters of empire, who tackled the anti-slavery issue, only Hugh Mulligan devotes a significant proportion of his work to the African, two out of his four eclogues in the slim volume of his collected works, Poems chiefly on Slavery and Oppression. A more marginalised figure as an Irish immigrant in Liverpool, than Burke in London and Berkshire, he is aroused to greater interest in the dislocated experience of the slave. However his strongest anti-colonial statement is made in his Asian Eclogue. And of course this is also true of his famous contemporary. Finding in India a surrogate Ireland, Burke describes the Company officials in a resonant and impressive burst of anti-colonial fury. ‘Animated with all the avarice of age, and the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.’59 Though Declan Kiberd has reacted strongly to the indignant voice of Achebe in Nigeria, post-colonialism thrives more easily in the Orient.60 Like Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, the post-colonialists are particularly excited by the east. Nor is it surprising that they understood the unease of Edward Said, loving, and building career success, from a language, which his political beliefs forced him to recognise as an agent of his people’s oppression. Anti-slavery evolved in another direction, a Western invention flourishing in a transatlantic ethos. The English speaking North American colonists, organised a colonial revolt which allowed them to emerge confidently as an independent nation over 200 years ago. This success gave them the strength to dispossess and overwhelm the original oral and nomadic culture of the Native Americans. Such a situation does not resonate with literary opportunities for post-colonial literary theorists. So, in the United States, they exist in a clearly subaltern role, scratching a living from the concept of hybridity and the internalisation of post-colonial identity in a nation presently bidding to become perhaps the greatest imperial power in history. In the United States the Irish have worked hard to promote a slaveholding republic and a world power. This connection, coupled with their still more ancient European identity, has enabled them to emerge as successful citizens of the Western world, members of the modern aristocracy of the twenty-first-century global economy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery had triumphed in imaginative literature in Britain and Ireland. It was still possible for the next half century to publish pamphlets, articles, memoirs and historical works defending slavery but for poets, novelists and the authors of children’s fiction, the guardians of sensitivity and feeling, it was no longer respectable. This was an important victory, most significant perhaps in nurturing hereditary anti-slavery commitment and the spreading of a general public


consciousness that the trade and the system itself should be combated. But it occurred at the very time when the cotton gin was invented, the United States spread west into rich hot lands of Louisiana, the mills of Lancashire (and, for a time, Belfast) imported more and more bales; while Britain drove the slave and sugar frontier forward in the Caribbean, her capital pouring into her new colonies of Trinidad and Demerara and priming the take-off into similar expansion in Cuba and Brazil. Economic development and consumer demand produced more poetry, more novels, more sweetmeats, more cotton goods and more slavery.

Part III Emancipation


11 Daniel O’Connell and Anti-Slavery

From 1801 to 1833, from the passing of the Irish Act of Union to the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire, within the Westminster parliament, the issues of Catholic emancipation and African slavery were closely linked. Both were reforms, unlike many others, which were not extinguished by the continuation of war with France until 1815. At the turn of the century both were favoured by Prime Minister William Pitt and then abandoned by him in the face of royal intransigence and cabinet misgivings. In the post-war era they were reforms in which Daniel O’Connell would emerge centre stage. O’Connell frequently claimed a long anti-slavery tradition for Ireland, quoting the Council of Armagh 1171 which prohibited Irish trading in English slaves and stressing the duty of every Irishman to remain true to this heritage.1 He also announced that the one benefit brought by the Union was the anti-slavery attitudes of Irish MPs from all parties; their presence enabled the English to abolish the trade in 1807, slavery itself in 1833 and apprenticeship in 1838.2 Irish MPs arrived in the house in 1801, not carrying guns as Samuel Watt in Barbados, had hoped, but uneasy about their surroundings. Their style as orators was unappreciated, their accents despised and their lack of support for the slave trade suspected by its supporters and enemies alike. The West India lobby organised the publication of a pamphlet An English country gentleman’s advice to the Irish members of the imperial parliament on the subject of the slave trade. It purported to be a speech written, but never delivered, by a member of the House of Commons. In fact it was probably the work of the Irish Alexander Knox, (1732–1810) ex-colonial agent, government adviser and experienced pamphleteer, who had already written on the regulation of the slave trade and, then as now, pressed its uses as an entry for Africans into Christianity.3 Wilberforce, sharing Knox’s view that Ireland possessed few self-interested West Indians, had deferred his introduction of yet another abolition bill until the new members should have taken their seats in the house. In May 1802 he called upon Castlereagh and Foster to try and recruit their support.4 Neither of them were natural sympathisers for an evangelical 259


and humanitarian cause, but they remained for the moment equivocal, while Wilberforce found his plans delayed by the illness of his young family and the miseries of his Yorkshire textile worker constituents, thrown into unemployment by a wartime slump. Then, as the anti-slavery leader readied himself once more for action, the Emmet rebellion intervened. Now Wilberforce feared criticism and defeat if he brought his motion, as being unsuitable, given ‘the state of the country’, and ‘all the Irish members headed by Castlereagh, would pledge against us for time to come’.5 With Pitt back as Prime Minister and war with Napoleon renewed, he bided his time, reorganising the London Anti-slave Trade Committee which, like Dublin’s Catholic Committee, had been disbanded in 1793. And in May 1804 his tactful handling of the Irish paid off. Edward Lee, an ambitious barrister sitting for Waterford and Sir John Blanquiere, sociable, first generation Anglo-Irish immigrant, with 27 years experience of managing members in College Green, were persuaded to take up the cause.6 They brought the bulk of the Irish members (some 33 or 34) then in London to a dinner. There the diners toasted Wilberforce and marched back to the Commons where, lubricated by ethnic camaraderie, they voted en bloc to abolish the trade. The result was a triumphant abolitionist victory; their vote was more than double that of the opposition (124 to 49), an impressive result which Wilberforce hoped would help to pressurise the Lords.7 But there were still two more readings to get through in the House of Commons as well as the more intransigent Upper Chamber to tackle. On the second reading Castlereagh (now a secretary of state) spoke against. (‘What a cold blooded creature’, Wilberforce commented.) Sir Laurence Parsons, well trained in his Patriot Dublin days, sought to smother the motion in delaying parliamentary tactics.8 An opponent of the Union to the last, Parson’s sympathy for the West Indians sprang, not from any memory of family connections with Montserrat, but from his determination to make the best of his situation in Westminster by proving himself a useful government supporter.9 The voting shrank to 100 and 42 respectively. Fearful of an embarrassingly reduced third reading, Wilberforce appealed to Edward Lee to rally Irish support but it proved useless; the after dinner glow had long faded. By late June the Irish were either going home or having second thoughts. The abolitionist vote slipped to 93 for, 33 against, and the motion launched in the House of Lords had to be abandoned due to the lateness of the session. In February 1805 when parliament reassembled again Wilberforce was determined to get off to a quick start, but before the end of the month he received an unexpected shock. On its second reading the bill failed with 70 votes to 77.10 ‘The Irish members absent, or even turned against us’ he noted in his diary.11 After 1805 Wilberforce relinquished the hope, kindled with the Union, that the arrival of 100 MPs and 17 representative peers would solve the problem of the slave trade. One of the factors, which mitigated against the Irish making a particular contribution to abolitionist objectives, was their desire to feature as

Daniel O’Connell and Anti-Slavery 261

government supporters in order to make themselves eligible for official positions in the gift of the Dublin administration.12 From its first introduction in 1789, through to 1805, the abolition of the slave trade had never been an official government measure. Pitt had supported it as an individual, not as Prime Minister, for he headed cabinets where the majority of members agreed with the King that the trade was necessary to the sugar colonies and that the wealth generated by the sugar colonies was vital to the national interest. On Pitt’s death early in 1806 this situation changed. The most prominent members of the new government were his rivals, Charles James Fox and Lord Grenville. They were critical of Pitt’s abandonment of traditional Whig attitudes and eager to mark their arrival in office by a new war strategy and the resurrection of reform measures. Neither Fox or Grenville belonged to Wilberforce’s evangelical lobby; both were attracted to antislavery through secular enlightenment views about liberty and progress. Fox, with his love of liberty, was well known as a denouncer of the trade. Grenville, equally committed was more cautious, conscious that this ‘Ministry of all the Talents’ contained experienced ministers who had in the past opposed or avoided reforms which he and Fox supported. Now Wilberforce and his brother-in-law James Stephen, lawyer and evangelical, were able to design an approach which appealed to Grenville as practical. Stephen’s plan grew out of the war situation; the initial attack should focus on the ‘foreign slave trade’, the commerce through which British captains sold slaves to French and Spanish colonies, thereby fuelling the enemy economy. A ban on this section of the trade now appeared as patriotic, disarming much of the opposition and allowing the measure to pass in houses where both attendance and moral rhetoric were minimal. Encouraged by this success, Grenville was ready to try a second motion to produce a total ban. As the session came to a close Fox, elderly and ill, was unleashed in the Commons calling parliament to commit itself in the name of justice and humanity to a ban in the next session.13 The motion passed but Castlereagh was among those who spoke hotly against it, protesting that to give up the trade was ‘throwing it into the lap of Napoleon’.14 However the recent naval victory at Trafalgar made that argument less potent than it would have been earlier. When parliament returned in February 1807 Fox was dead. Wilberforce and Grenville, confident enough that they could get their way with the Commons, now worried about the Lords, fearful that the titled names in cabinet would still give a lead against the motion. There was only one Irish peer in the cabinet, the Earl of Moira, whose support Wilberforce had originally considered dubious. Moira was important not only because of his position but because he was friendly with the Prince of Wales. The abolitionists understood the need to bringing round the Court; back in 1804 no less than four royal dukes had voted against abolition. Pressure from Grenville had resulted in Moira supporting the abolition of the foreign trade and by 1807 he appeared to have warmed to the cause, declaring that the 1806 legislation


had shorn away two-thirds of the trade, so that Britain and her merchants had little to lose by withdrawing from the remaining third.15 To the last however an indignant Irish voice was raised from the floor of the upper house. The Marquis of Sligo, half paralysed by a stroke, his heavy form helped into his seat by servants, protested vigorously about the preamble to the motion as ‘a gross calumny’ when it declared the trade to be ‘counter to justice, humanity and sound policy’.16 Grenville had been uneasy about the preamble and about the inclusion of penalties and regulations for the actual suppression of the trade in the bill itself, thinking it might be safer to leave that for a separate act at a later date. As the legislation began its successful passage, Wilberforce congratulated himself on determinedly pressing both these issues on Grenville. A long drawn out approach would not have served for the days were numbered for Grenville’s administration. ‘The moment the ministry began to venture the country’s happiness on a Popish foundation, they found the ground cut from under them.’17 ‘The Popish foundation’ Wilberforce referred to was of course Maynooth, for which Grenville was trying to produce an increased grant. From the time of their arrival at Westminster the Irish MPs had found themselves faced by ministries made and unmade by the Catholic question – Catholic emancipation, ‘as it is called’ Wilberforce noted in his diary for 7 February 1801.18 Unable to persuade the King to agree to the promise, that emancipation would follow the Union, Pitt had felt obliged to resign and a ministry headed by Addington, (later removed to the Lords as Viscount Sidmouth) made peace with Napoleon and studiously avoided both the Catholic and the abolition issue. By 1804 Pitt returned to office in a reconstituted Cabinet, in which situation he disappointed both Catholics and abolitionists by his failure to taken action on their behalves. The French revolution and the present war had put parliamentary reform off the agenda, so when Grenville and Fox laid aside old differences to create a reforming government, it was well understood that they intended to tackle both the Catholic question and slave trade abolition. As with the slave trade, Grenville proceeded cautiously, working first on plans for further military reform pleasing to Catholics, devising a scheme for an increased Maynooth grant, considering readjustment of the tithes. As Wilberforce pressed him towards less cautious behaviour on abolition, so the Catholic Association played the same role seeking to spur the Prime Minister into greater endeavour with their own more far-reaching demands couched in a petition, envisaging the right to sit on corporations and to take up seats in parliament. Just as the Irish MPs varied in their attitudes to the slave trade, so too they exhibited diverse views on the Catholic question. Indeed as many as half of them may have felt it prudent to express themselves sympathetically on Catholic matters. The diminution of the 300 MPs attending the Dublin parliament by more than two-thirds was not the only change to Irish representation. The assembly on College Green had largely represented boroughs


not counties, often boroughs in complete control of the landlord. Now of the 100 MPs, 64 sat for counties and it was in the counties that the Catholic 40 shilling freeholder had been enfranchised in 1793. So without admitting Catholics to Westminster seats, lower down the social and electoral scale, they had achieved a degree of influence which of course varied according to the county. 75 constituencies were suspected of being in some degree influenced by the Catholic vote while, in 56 of these, Catholic voters predominated.19 The Marquis of Sligo, with his family’s electoral interest firmly based in the west, was prepared to support further measures of emancipation. The Marquis corresponded with Denys Scully, author of Statement of the Penal Laws (1812) and an active member of the Catholic Association. In 1805 Sligo calculated nine of the representative peers were prepared to vote in favour of Catholic claims and only seven against, though the addition of the four spiritual peers would have put a majority of them in opposition.20 Back in 1801 Castlereagh was shocked when he found that Pitt’s promises on emancipation were not to be acted upon. An attempt to couple Union with an appeal for Catholic support appeared to him logical. If Ireland was to be governed on the garrison principle, he considered that the Dublin parliament was by far the best bulwark for such an operation.21 On the two reforms projects which had managed to survive the wars with France (Catholic emancipation and slave trade abolition) Sligo and Castlereagh therefore showed more interest in Catholics than Africans. John Foster and Sir John de Blanquiere on the other hand apparently favoured abolition not emancipation. As Irish of every kind could be found everywhere, Edward Lee tremulously favoured both reforms, as did Herbert of Kerry. Sir John Newport, a Waterford MP from a banking background, who had been at Eaton with Grenville, was consistent in his commitment to both reforms.22 An examination of voting figures helps to explain why Grenville was able to abolish the slave trade but failed in his equally cautious moves to secure Catholic relief. In 1804, at the height of his success, backed by the Irish contingent, a total of 173 MPs cast their votes for and against abolition. In the disappointing votes following, participation was smaller, 142, 126, 147. In May 1805, when Pitt was Prime Minister, Fox in the Commons and Grenville in the Lords, brought motions supporting the admission of the Catholic Association’s Petition for emancipation. In all 460 MPs voted, 124 for and 336 against.23 While slavery possessed deeply convinced groups, for and against, Catholic emancipation was a matter of concern to many more. Educated and evangelical opinion growing in enthusiasm for abolition could permeate the ranks of the bishops, something which Catholic emancipation could hardly hope to do.24 The war had helped to produce a situation which allowed anti-slavery enthusiasts to promote their cause through clever politicking. The Emmet rebellion did not make the government feel that emancipation would make their hold on Ireland stronger. Trafalgar (confirming British control of the seas) was seen as making it safer for Britain to


abolish the trade without compromising her national interests. If the Irish MPs had been swept away on the magic carpet of counterfactual history and landed back in their house on College Green, the abolition measures of 1806–7 would still have succeeded. When the issue of banning the trade moved beyond parliament into the complex currents of actual enforcement, the course to be followed fell into the firm and unenthusiastic grasp of an Irishman, Castlereagh. During his last ministry Pitt had promised that the slave trade to Britain’s latest wartime prize Guiana would be stopped by Order in Council, thus avoiding a parliamentary vote on the issue. However, procrastination had ensured that nothing was done. Wilberforce commented on the change when Castlereagh became Secretary of State; ‘chiefly through his habits of business, though an anti-abolitionist, the cultivation of new lands in Guiana was stopped. This is preventing the importation of a vast number of poor creatures, who would otherwise, as in the last war, have been the victim of our great capitalists.’25 While the war lasted, Britain’s control of the seas, applied through an assertive right of search, put her in a position to prevent the export of Africans across the Atlantic. (The navy did not withdraw orders to capture foreign slavers until 1817, by which time an embarrassed Foreign Office was declaring that they had never sanctioned the seizure of slavers belonging to friendly foreigners.)26 But peace brought with it the problem which the antiabolitionists had always foreseen – their country’s renunciation of the trade would simply result in its passing into other hands. Warned by the Prime Minister Liverpool that the government was unsafe if it ignored the demands of Wilberforce and his Saints to include an international ban as part of the peace negotiations, Castlereagh set off as plenipotentiary to Paris. He planned to bring anti-slavery into the heart of the concert of Europe by persuading the other powers to ban the trade and secure enforcement by setting up an international squadron to patrol the west African coast. This was rejected and the best he could secure at Vienna was the general declaration by the powers that the trade was wrong and should eventually be abolished. Historians have commented diversely on this outcome, some hailing it as an important first step towards the creation of a more humane international order; others have seen it as part of a congress system which failed to fit Europe for a new age. For the practically minded Castlereagh, it could have meant little other than a sop to the importunate Saints at home, whom he already knew to be far too astute not to see it as such and complain accordingly. Having accepted anti-slavery as part of his remit, he continued by other means. The problem lay with France, still a great power, defeated only by the combination of the four others great powers, who found it difficult to cooperate with each other now they were no longer being threatened by the aggressive and revolutionary Bonaparte. Tallyrand and Castlereagh, experienced diplomatists from aristocratic backgrounds, understood one another well enough. Tallyrand was sympathetic to the view that Castlereagh


had to propitiate the influential anti-slavery lobby at home. Castlereagh took onboard protests from the Ministry of Marine and the west coast ports that the nation’s war torn economy could not possibly be rebuilt without this valuable commerce. He accepted that crude attempts to enforce distasteful policies on a defeated France, would result in the rejection of the restored monarchy as a puppet of the allies.27 After Napoleon’s 100 day reappearance, Louis XVIII was prepared to agree that France would abolish the trade, but took no steps to implement this policy. Governors in France’s African colonies ignored the arrival of slavers from Bordeaux and Nantes and the suggestion that the British squadron should have the right to search suspicious French ships was indignantly rejected. France would supply her own naval patrols, which she did not do until after 1830. However France’s official agreement was important; failure to agree to a ban, would have raised the hopes of Spain and Portugal, two experienced and eager slavers, with Spain hungry for labour to expand sugar production in her colony of Cuba and Portugal committed to a similar role in Brazil. So in 1817 and 1818 Castlereagh negotiated bilateral treaties with these countries committing them to stop slaving north of the Equator, making arrangements for British rights of search, setting up mixed commission courts in Sierra Leone, Havana and Rio de Janerio and paying British subsidies to cover loss of profits sustained through renunciation of the trade. By the time he cut his throat with a penknife in 1822, while suffering from a bout of depression, Castlereagh had designed a system which Palmerston would extend and sharpen in the 1840s and 50s. Bilateral agreements and subsidy systems would be negotiated with African chiefs. In 1850 broken treaty obligations would be invoked to launch a blockade of Brazil, a resort to gunboat diplomacy which reduced enthusiasm there for the illegal trade. In 1865 the British squadron took its last slaver off the West African coast. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, Europeans are said to have bought some 11 million slaves in Africa and landed some 9 million of them in the Americas. How many of these crossed the Atlantic after Britain’s ban in 1806/7 set the course for an international condemnation of the trade? Of necessity the assessment of numbers carried illegally is tentative, but the general conclusion of historians to date stands at just under 2 million. It is easier to calculate figures for those caught by the authorities: under 200,000 captives were apprehended. But these ‘liberated Africans’ were never returned home, being employed instead as indentured labourers by their rescuers.28 While Britain led the world in the condemnation of slavery, her commitment to freedom of trade, and therefore free circulation of capital, resulted in economic developments which actually encouraged the spread of slave labour. There was Lancashire’s consumption of US cotton. After the removal of the sugar duties in the 1840s, the import of cheap Cuban and Brazilian sugar improved the living standards of the British working class, and caused Britain’s own sugar islands, with their declining soils and


post-emancipation labour problems, to embark upon even steeper economic decline. Simultaneously British investors supplied money for railways in Brazil and Cuba to make the opening up of plantations possible. Such plantations required slave labour. Cheap cottons purchased from Britain formed an important item as goods of exchange in the slave trade between Africa and Brazil.29 Even while Britain prided herself on giving a moral leadership in raising the profile of the Atlantic slave trade as incompatible with Christianity and civilisation, other countries viewed her efforts differently. Her demands for right of search in the Atlantic were seen as an attempt at maritime domination, a step to making herself the world’s policeman. Her claim to be the foremost anti-slavery activist was viewed as a means of establishing an exclusive control in Africa, so that it might become as much a part of her empire as India. Certainly her territorial adventures there give credence to such an interpretation. Anti-slavery activities illustrated that it was not easy to do good on a global scale. Castlereagh, retaining a place in history textbooks on international relations, remains unforgiven in Ireland for the Union and in England for the repression of the Six Acts after Peterloo. In that western corner of the European Union, his native county Down, he is largely unremembered; visitors to his Mountstewart mansion, more interested in its early twentieth century gardens, replete with topiary shamrocks and an evergreen Red Hand of Ulster, than in the chairs from the Congress of Vienna, upon which the arbiters of Europe had once sat and which, in accordance with aristocratic habit, he had taken home with him as a souvenir from a prestigious event. It was a sign of the growing importance of anti-slavery that both Castlereagh and O’Connell, so opposed in character, political beliefs and their attitude to their Irish identity, should have become involved in this crusade. O’Connell made his entry later than Castlereagh. Time twinned once again, anti-slavery and Catholic emancipation embarked upon fresh initiatives in 1823, each of which have been hailed as marking the arrival of modern mass politics. In the case of anti-slavery the parliamentary leadership had come to the conclusion that the West Indian planters unwillingness to institute a proper register of their slaves, in order to put an end to the possibility of smuggled Africans arriving in British colonies, coupled with their lack of respect for missionary activity among their workforce, showed that the abolition of the trade was not producing either ‘improved’ or expiring slavery. Wilberforce, who 35 years earlier, had hung back from such a radical reform, now declared himself in favour of slave emancipation. At the same time feeling the effects of age, he handed over the leadership of the parliamentary lobby to Charles Fowell Buxton, a philanthropic East Anglian landowner and brewer, with Quaker connections, who had been educated at Trinity College Dublin, in the false expectation, that he would inherit an extensive Irish estate. It was Buxton who persuaded parliament to pass a


resolution declaring that slavery was a sin, goaded Canning into producing his policy of amelioration and launched the Society for the Amelioration and Gradual Abolition of Slavery. It was in the same year, 1823, that Daniel O’Connell, putting the veto controversy behind him, launched the Catholic Association with its Catholic rent. Organised by the church, the movement drew upon the agrarian discontent which was seething in Munster and Leinster, as agricultural prices fell, emigration rose and potato famine struck more frequently, arousing Whiteboys, Rockites, Terry Alts and others to millenarian fervour. A Liverpool Quaker, James Cropper, now came forward with the suggestion that the problems of West Indian slavery and Irish poverty, could be brought together to produce a solution.30 Cropper was a successful business man who had made money importing Irish provisions and entered a stage of his life where he could spend more of his time on philanthropy than commercial activity. Long a supporter of anti-slavery and a critic of his city’s West India connections, he was a convinced free trader and had already used the loosening of the East India Company’s monopoly to develop trading links with the Orient. The existence of trade regulations, imposing heavy customs duties on East Indian sugar, in order to protect the West Indian planters from competition, both restricted his Indian ventures and aroused his moral indignation. As he saw it, the planters, the spoilt children of the empire, were being subsidised to produce sugar immorally, to the disadvantage of Indians employing free labour. The introduction of freer trade in sugar would undermine West Indian slavery, while simultaneously increased trade with India could be used to solve Ireland’s poverty. Her sickly cotton industry, currently unable to keep up with Britain’s expanding production, would find a new market there.31 Cropper set off for Ireland to persuade its businessmen and landowners to invest in cotton manufacture and help pressurise Westminster for the reduction of duties on East Indian sugar. Philanthropically motivated and economically ingenious, the practicality of this scheme was very questionable. Forty years earlier, when England’s cotton industry was much less developed and water rather than steam still the chief agent of manufacturing power, the attempt by the Irish parliament to aid investors in cotton had failed to produce significant take-off. The rest of the nineteenth century was to prove that the Indian market was not in need of cheaper and coarser articles from Ireland, as decade after decade it absorbed increasing amounts of Lancashire’s output, to the detriment of its own domestic industry. Impractical though his ideas were, Cropper was well received in Ireland’s town and cities, though of course there were those who opposed him such as Cork’s leading West Indian merchant, Seward. Enthusiasm was aroused for another sortie into cotton (itself a slave-grown product, coming now from the United States) and one project founded by Malcolmson of Clonmel actually rooted and prospered until the 1870s.32 Yet the anti-slavery aspect of Cropper’s plan did have an impact, for his attempt


to aid the ailing Irish economy attracted Daniel O’Connell’s interest. He incorporated Cropper’s proposals in resolutions of the Society of the Friends of Ireland, which he had founded in England, and he joined the anti-slavery society. It brought him into useful contacts with radicals and helped to authenticate his position as a liberal Catholic. O’Connell was genuinely moved by the plight of the Negro; a master of words himself he was strongly affected by the description of the oppression of the slaves. The position of the Jews, also currently adopting the term emancipation, culled from the Irish example, to describe their requirement for full citizenship, never appealed to him as intimately, though he recognised their need for civic equality and sometimes proposed it. His commitment to anti-slavery was nurtured by the exciting atmosphere of political reform which erupted as the decade came to its close. In 1828 O’Connell stood and triumphed in a Clare by-election against a popular proemancipation Protestant, Vesey Fitzgerald. But in the present state of Ireland, simmering with agrarian unrest channelled into the organised protest of the Catholic Association, the Tory government, headed by the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, old stalwarts in the stand against Catholic emancipation, recognised that they must prepare to suppress rebellion by force or give way and change the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, so that O’Connell could take his seat. Thus they passed the long-delayed measure, buying peace in Ireland at the price of party unity, for the Tories now split. This brought the Whigs into government and the issue of parliamentary reform onto the agenda. Struggling to eliminate rotten boroughs, equip hitherto unrepresented towns and cities with MPs, and to prudently expand the franchise to the respectable, the Whigs succeeded in producing a bill which admitted the industrial middle classes to some degree of political power, while retaining as much control over government for the landed interest as possible. The reform agitation lasted from December 1830 to May 1832. By splitting the Tories in 1829, Catholic emancipation had opened the door to the emancipation of the slaves. Conscious that they had many problems to cope with at home and in Ireland, the Whigs’ possessive preference with regard to slavery would have been to retain the Tories’ possessive amelioration policy. But the reform struggle raised anti-slavery demands. In 1831 those who felt discontented with Buxton’s commitment to gradual emancipation set up the Agency Committee of the Anti-Slavery Society, dedicated to immediate slave freedom, a policy first suggested in a pamphlet by the female Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick and taken up by several Ladies Anti-Slavery Societies. In December 1831, encouraged by reports of reform upheaval in England, the slaves in Jamaica rose in revolt frightening the Whigs into appointing a Select Committee of the House of Commons to report on measures for the extinction of slavery in British dominions, compatible with the safety of all classes in the colonies. The summer of 1832 brought the elections for the reformed parliament, which met for the first time in February 1833.


Anti-Slavery supporters, worked to make secure the success of emancipation at Westminster, seeking pledges from candidates themselves to vote for emancipation, and, if it were an Agency committee stronghold, for immediate emancipation. Back in the Kerry election campaign of 1831 O’Connell had stood on a platform of parliamentary reform and the abolition of slavery.33 The 1832 election made clear that Ireland was involved in anti-slavery enthusiasm. In Belfast this election on the new, extended franchise produced the town’s first sectarian riot and a row between two anti-slavery candidates, one giving his pledge for gradual, the other for immediate emancipation. In Cork and in Dublin anti-slavery enthusiasts also pressed their view on local candidates.34 In 1833 as the government was forced by Buxton’s threat to produce his own bill, into committing themselves to work on legislation, it reached a point where MPs found themselves impeded in the corridors by paper mountains of petitions. From 1830–33 more petitions were received on the subject of slave emancipation than on parliamentary reform itself. In May 1832, at an annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in London, O’Connell called for female petitions.35 This Wilberforce had thought unsuited to the female role which, he felt, should be restricted to collecting signatures, eschewing the door to door method. Once the Whigs put forward their bill and the abolitionists and West Indians renewed attempts to amend it, O’Connell was always on the most radical side, supporting Agency Committee demands. Thus he spoke out against both compensation for the planters (why should they be compensated for something parliament had declared a sin?) and against apprenticeship. At one stage some indignant abolitionist MPs felt that he should replace the more moderate Buxton as their parliamentary leader.36 In the end the parliamentary struggle produced a compromise conclusion, but one surprising to many parties. The government accepted the reduction of the years of apprenticeship (from 12 to 6) in return for a grant, rather than a loan for the planters, and at £20 million, reaching a figure which the Cabinet had not expected the house to endorse. The original Whig proposal, made by these property owners and protectors, par excellence, had been a loan of £15 million. In many ways this piece of legislation stood in contrast to next year’s equally famous reform – the New Poor Law of 1834, which abolished the old Tudor system based on outdoor relief and replaced it with the workhouse. For the government and the rate payers it was a centralising and modernising measure, which produced the desired result of lowering the money spent on poor relief by some 2 million a year, and shifting the rural poor into migration to the cities or emigration to the colonies or the United States. For those who actually experienced its operation, it proved to be to the most hated social reform ever to take place in Britain. It certainly strengthened the view among members of the working class and the Tory radicals that a government concerned about the sufferings of faraway slaves, behaved with callous self interest when faced with the ‘wage slave’ at home. As events were to turn out in the 1840s the Irish would feel particularly bitter about this philanthropic gesture.37


For the moment the anti-slavery movement, feeding on its triumph, remained strong and active, sending out agents to the colonies to report on the workings of apprenticeship. As a result a parliamentary committee, with O’Connell as one of its members, was set up to investigate happenings in Jamaica. Though the final report, as the Whigs had intended, was not unfavourable to the system, revelations about the flogging of women on the treadmill led into a chain of events which eventually brought apprenticeship to an end in 1838, two years before its set date. Once again O’Connell had emerged on the winning side. Meanwhile the campaign against apprenticeship had produced tighter anti-slavery organisation in Ireland. Before the 1820s the only organisation in Ireland taking an interest in anti-slavery work was the Hibernian and Foreign Bible Society. In its Hibernian aspect it was part of the Protestant crusade to convert Ireland from Catholicism and therefore deeply offensive to O’Connell. Its ‘Foreign’ commitment caused the Bible Society to take an interest both in Africa and in missionary work among the West Indian slaves. In the late twenties, reacting to enthusiasm in England, anti-slavery societies were formed in Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Belfast, Youghal and Limerick, while a link with Birmingham Ladies Antislavery Society brought similar groups into being in Dublin and Tralee, thus enabling Ireland’s towns and cities to play a role in the petitioning fervour of 1830–3. Excited to fresh levels of endeavour by visiting lecturers revealing the injustices of apprenticeship, in 1837 the Dublin Negroes Friend Society reorganised itself into the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society (HASS)38 Its three leading members were Richard Allen, Richard Davis Webb and James Haughton. R. D. Webb (1805–72) and James Haughton (1795–1873) were old Ballitore boys, deeply imbued with Shackleton intellectual and philanthropic standards. Haughton was a successful flour miller; his parents had been disowned by the Society of Friends and he himself became a Unitarian in 1834. R.D. Webb, a printer and bookseller, and Richard Allen, a draper, were both Quakers. After the founding of the HASS, the three men travelled to London to present a petition with 75,000 Irish female signatures, pressing parliament for the abolition of apprenticeship. They also succeeded in having an audience with Queen Victoria, a somewhat stressful venture from which Haughton, a Unitarian, withdrew because he could not bear to wear court dress, while the Quakers Webb and Allen, one in borrowed, the other in hired silk stockings, had their hats removed by palace officials.39 In 1840 when the world’s first international slavery conference was held in London, the three Dubliners, reinforced by other relatives, formed the nub of the Irish delegation. They had already met with O’Connell in a Dublin context, back in 1830, when they had worked together to undermine trade union activity. Now in London they found themselves again in alliance. At the London Convention a small number of American female delegates had expected to sit in the main body of the hall and to make speeches, but


their British hosts and some other Americans were horrified at such a precedent. The women however were immediately supported by William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the most outspoken anti-slavery newspaper, the Liberator. Garrison had spent the previous decade persuading Americans in the northern states to give up schemes of colonisation (freeing the slaves to send them back to Africa) and move towards the creation of a national American Anti-Slavery Society on the British model, creating a wide association of groups working to finances and execute pamphlet and lecture campaigns. Garrison’s intention was to eschew politics and convert the South through moral suasion. A deeply religious man, he had a horror of established institutions which included the churches and the American constitution itself, a situation which not only shocked his fellow Americans, but many of his fellow American abolitionists, who were finding it increasingly difficult to stomach. As a result they had already arrived in London split into those who belonged to the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or Garrisonians and anti-Garrisonians. On the issue of women’s seating the Hibernian Society sided with Garrison. His aversion to traditional churches held no horrors for these Quakers and Unitarians. Socially they had already been charmed by his fervour and friendliness, and by a sense that like themselves he was a stranger in a strange land, a formidable but marginal figure on the British anti-slavery scene. Thus the HASS contingent migrated with the Garrisonians up into the gallery.40 The 1830s was a halcyon decade for O’Connell’s anti-slavery experiences. As his Catholic emancipation strategy triumphed, he was able to employ his new legislative strength to bear first on parliamentary reform then, even more prominently and dramatically, on anti-slavery itself so that his affection for the cause increased. On other fronts success seemed to bring less soluble problems. The hope that repeal of the union could be made to follow on naturally from emancipation proved illusionary, as did those of the mass of his supporters who in millenarian enthusiasm had looked forward to the enactment of Pastorini’s prophecies which had foretold the extinction of Protestantism. The appearance of cheap potato ground was equally absent. Entering the Lichfield House compact in 1834 (support for the Whigs in exchange for reform in Ireland) produced long drawn out and difficult negotiations over tithes, which, in the end were adjusted somewhat without, as O’Connell had intended, diverting some of the wealth from the Church of Ireland into the maintenance of the Catholic clergy and Irish education. The triumph represented by the disappearance of Negro apprenticeship was interesting and welcome. But in fact anti-slavery in general and O’Connell’s fortunate connection with it, was about to go into decline. The problems of success had set in. Hitherto the cause of free trade and anti-slavery had been one, the planters receiving protective treatment for their sinful means of production. Now


they were producers of sugar through free labour, the only islands in the Caribbean to do so. But it was Cuba, Spain’s most successful colony, a new St Domingue, an island as big as Ireland, cultivating virgin land with smuggled slaves, brought in by shippers ignoring the fact that Spain had signed bilateral treaties with Britain agreeing to stop the commerce and had received subsidies for doing so. The success of Cuban production caused free traders to raise the cry of tariff reduction to provide the hungry masses with cheap food. In 1841 when Lord John Russell decided in favour of cheaper food for the British proletariat rather than protection for sugar producers using free labour, Daniel and his son, John O’Connell, another anti -slavery enthusiast, were faced with a problem. Should they betray their anti-slavery principles or remain true to them and deny cheaper sugar to the people of Ireland? In their need to square this circle, O’Connell voted for the Whig measure to be congratulated by the Freeman’s Journal for doing his best for the people of Ireland. When it came to a Tory vote in 1846 he complained of a headache and paired with another MP, both absenting themselves from the vote.41 The slashing of the sugar duties, which Britain’s planters discovered was far more economically injurious to them than the ending of slavery, did not come until Peel’s free trade budgets in the mid-forties. As the gems of Britain’s slave empire dulled into ruinate plantations and deserted quays in the Leewards, Windwards and Jamaica, critics of anti-slavery rose to the occasion, reaching literary crescendo with Thomas Carlyle’s The Nigger Question (1849), bemoaning past white endeavours and calling for the return of the lash. While Charles Fowell Buxton’s scheme, endorsed by O’Connell in Exeter Hall, to stop the illegal slave trade by penetrating its African source, resulted in the disastrous Niger expedition, another own goal for moral fervour and humanitarian action as the venture disintegrated in disease, death and African plantations run by slave labour. In Bleak House Charles Dickens deplored its domestic impact, writing about women who neglected their families for faraway Bougliebouagh. The course of benevolence never ran smooth. ‘The generous gesture of an entire nation’, Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, had said of emancipation, making the best of a difficult situation, into which he had been forced by evangelicalism in spate. But now the nation was disillusioned that their £20 million had not metamorphosed slaves and apprentices into happy, grateful and industrious wage labourers. In the 1840s anti-slavery was no longer in the public or parliamentary ascendant. And, in the last years of O’Connell’s life, so far from bringing him triumphs, it gave him endless trouble. As the decade opened this did not seem so. Rather it appeared challenging and exciting. The fall of the Whigs and the appointment of Peel’s Tory government caused O’Connell to turn again to extra parliamentary activity in Ireland establishing the Repeal Association, seeking his aim through peaceful and formidable mass meetings, at which iconography now appeared recalling anti-slavery propaganda, placards referring to him as Moses preparing to


lead his people out of bondage into freedom. At the end of 1840 an incident in Limerick seemed to indicate that in Ireland anti-slavery and repeal could be one and the same cause. In Jamaica the ending of slavery had made the assembly eager to encourage white immigration; the successful planter Hamilton Brown from County Antrim, friend of Samuel Watt and founder of Brownstown, recommended Ireland as suitable source. In November 1840 the Robert Kerr sailed into the Shannon seeking some 200 emigrants by offering free passage to Jamaica and good wages and accommodation when they reached their destination. Recruiting proceeded enthusiastically until a correspondence in the Limerick Reporter aroused suspicion and political interest among Repealers and anti-slavery activists. By 9 December the Freeman’s Journal headlined ‘Emigration to Jamaica, “Is Ireland to be a Slave Market?” ’ A large public meeting, attended by John O’Connell, was held in Limerick’s city courthouse on 23 December, followed up by Christmas Day sermons denouncing the scheme. On Stephen’s Day ‘thousands’ marched passed the ‘fatal ship’ denouncing its sinister nature by their deadly silence. By January 1841 Daniel O’Connell had emerged as chairman of a Watch Committee, established in Dublin, to collect information about other ‘slave ships’ and warn the peasantry accordingly.42 Other occasions offered which allowed O’Connell to use his anti-slavery enthusiasm to promote the Repeal agenda. At the end of one evening meeting ‘a Negro stepped onto the platform and made a little speech – I am very glad to see Massa Dan O’Connell, for he save the life of black people (cheers and laughter). I hear of him when no bidder than that (placing his hand within a foot of the surface of the table), and though I was brought up a Protestant, I am now a Catholic, and will die in that religion for the sake of Massa Dan O’Connell (loud laughter in which the Liberator heartily joined followed this burst of eloquence.’43 In America, Garrison declared himself a Repealer. In Dublin, Haughton joined the association though Webb and Allen did not. But the Garrisonian links were prospering. With slavery and apprenticeship both abolished so that moral momentum remained high, it was logical for the British anti-slavery movement to acquire new international goals. Targeting slavery in the United States was an obvious move. But in the case of Ireland this move on the American mainland raised particular resonances. In the late 1830s R.R. Madden, escaping from the indignities of his stipendiary magistracy in Jamaica, travelled home via the United States where he was impressed with the political power of his countrymen and horrified at their racial prejudice. He could not understand how, in the light of their own past, they failed to sympathise with the position of the Negro, and particularly the slaves, treated as strangers in the land of their birth. On return to Ireland he pressed the Catholic church to explain to the people that slavery was a sin, thus arming them against racial prejudice and suggesting to them that they become the van of the anti-slavery movement.44 O’Connell read and was impressed by Madden’s views. Simultaneously Garrisonian pressures


were at work urging similar moves. After the London World Convention, a black abolitionist delegate, Remond, had visited Ireland and the HASS had prepared an Irish Address, signed by 60,000 Irish men including O’Connell. The address asked for the support of the Irish Americans for the abolitionists cause. Launched in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in January 1842, it immediately provoked complaints by Bishop Hughes of New York and the Repeal associations of Baltimore and Louisiana.45 As a large, noticeable body of new fledged Americans, the Irish Catholic community did not wish to be associated with the abolitionists, a group criticising the constitution and institutions of the country in which they were seeking to become citizens. It was in the twenties and thirties as the black population, slave and free, continued to burgeon that the phrase ‘white man’ began to be inserted in the voting regulations in the northern states. The Irish taking over jobs which had once been dominated by urban blacks (domestic servants, washer women, labourers, long shore men and, in some cases, skilled artisans) were eager to claim the advantage conferred by their skin colour. The Democratic Party (a compact between northern working men and southern slave holders) looked after their interest and secured their votes. The Irish roots of Presbyterian politicians like John C. Calhoun and later, James Buchanan, were hauled out to win support. Britain’s role, as an abolitionist and philanthropic power, so admired by American anti-slavery activists, seemed, to many of the Irish, gross hypocrisy. In Boston the English abolitionist George Thomson was mobbed as American Repealers registered their dislike for anti-slavery. Repealers at home pointed out to O’Connell the damage he was doing to the campaign in the United States by his support for transatlantic abolitionists. He was endangering funds for the cause, or if he took them, he was attracting odium upon himself because he had averred that he did not want money besmirched with Negro blood. O’Connell distanced himself from the Garrisonians, describing them as ‘new organised’ abolitionism. He pointed out that he paid an annual subscription to the British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society in London, linked to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a more moderate body which, unlike the Garrisonans, was not given to public attack on the US constitution. He continued to accept money from the South, but equally kept on reiterating his anti-slavery principles. As he declared 1843 Repeal Year, with his monster meetings swelling, the government moving to ban such gatherings and eventually bringing charges which would result in his imprisonment, O’Connell was receiving letters from Association in the United States defending slavery.46 In August 1843 a letter came from Cincinnati Repealers which, he told the Repeal Association, needed a full and suitable reply. He proceeded to write one telling the Irish Americans they should work for full civil rights for free blacks as well as for emancipation of the slaves. They should be on the side of liberty and enter their names on ‘the brightest page’ of the chapter of benevolence in


American history. The letter was printed and distributed by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. Webb, who did not like O’Connell, suspicious of him as a self-serving politician, was astonished that he could compose ‘so long, so minute and so accurate a document a few days after the Clontarf proclamation’.47 The Quaker printer came to the conclusion that O’Connell did so as a diversion from his troubles. In this Webb was right, but the same criticism could also be applied to HASS activists, including Webb himself. In England, despite its diverting aspects, burgeoning in the 1820s and 30s into children literature and sexually resonant tales of suffering, anti-slavery was a social orthodoxy. The disillusioned criticism of the forties was the fruit of the movement’s widespread success. Anti-slavery ideology had been accepted by the educated classes and all the Protestant churches. By the twenties, the spearhead of its campaign had passed from the Quakers, small and influential, to the Methodists, the most numerous nonconformist sect in an age when the Church of England awoke to the danger of nonconformity’s numerical challenge. Increasingly respectable and business like these were the people, in the new industrial towns and cities, whom the Whigs were enfranchising, and these were the people who put themselves behind the Agency Committee, with its call for emancipation now. Though the Whigs had a long tradition of protecting Dissenters, such sects could not normally dictate in politics. Rural Methodists paid tithes to the Church of England until the 1930s; but by the mid-nineteenth century, in most urban centres, it was counter-productive to try and collect church rates from such people though the payments were not officially abolished. The Methodists were able to lead a popular anti-slavery cause to triumph in parliament because the government had enemies within its gates, evangelical Anglicans like Wilberforce and Buxton in the legislature, civil servants appointed through their influence to the Colonial Office, aristocratic cabinet ministers like the Prime Minister’s son, Lord Howick, converted to the cause by the findings of the House of Commons Committee appointed in 1832. In nineteenth-century Ireland anti-slavery was a diversion, a foreign import for intellectuals who thrilled to feel themselves as part of the world’s most moral cause, confronting the greatest problem of the age. None of the churches really liked it. The Quakers, after the splits and disownments wrought by revolutionary times, feared anti-slavery as an agent of division, pointed out that their beliefs prevented them for working with non-Quaker institutions such as the more generally-based anti-slavery societies. Webb was sharply conscious that his co-religionists looked on him with suspicion and dislike and eventually in 1851 he left the sect, though the more tactful Allen managed to remain. In Belfast the Quaker William Bell produced the Irish Friend (copying the Scottish example) but it was not supported by the Meeting in his own town and he had to publicise the fact that the ideas expressed in it were his own, not those of his fellow worshippers.48 Also in Belfast, the Presbyterians, not normally a people easily deterred by threats of


schism, remembered the bitter arguments and division caused by the pledging in the 1832 election, while their strong links with South Carolina further deterred their enthusiasm for the cause. Anti-slavery for them remained the subject of the occasional rousing sermon, often delivered by an interesting visiting speaker, making the flesh creep with a sense of the awful sinfulness of man and its firey rewards. For Methodists it was much the same. The leadership in Dublin launched collections for pamphleteering on the subject and for missions in Africa. But the Methodist rectangle, constructed by spiritual refugees from the Church of Ireland irregularly placed across Lord Belmore’s Fermanagh estates, was far removed from the burgeoning social and political confidence rising in the huge stone and brick tabernacles of northern England.49 Ireland’s Methodist historian has understandably dismissed antislavery in Ireland as a cause for faddists and oddities along with cruelty to animals and pacifism.50 The existence of Ladies anti-slavery societies in Ireland highlights the enormous importance of this movement to women – in America it was women trained in anti-slavery who first launched an organised demand for votes for women and rights over their own property for married ones. But the Irish groups were tiny, based upon individuals or families, exclusive and particular contacts. In the linen hamlet of Moyallon, Co Armagh, the Ladies Society seems to have sprouted in Moyallon House, seat of Quaker relatives of William Bell. More curiously, in Killarney a Ladies Anti-Slavery Society was promoted by its travelling treasurer Catherine Croker, who possessed inspirational contacts in Birmingham, the founding centre for Britain’s Female Anti-slavery Society.51 Still tiny, but firmly rooted, was the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society; like the Friends of the Infirmary, and the Ragetta (though smaller than either), it was accepted in the nineteenth century as part of the Protestant institutional scene. Even outside Ireland the relationship between Catholicism and anti-slavery was a complex affair. Rooted in the enlightenment, nineteenth century antislavery was very much an evangelical transatlantic affair. Protestant evangelicals, with their stress on biblical-based, personal study, were obviously doctrinally opposed to Catholicism. Granville Sharp for example founding his Province of Freedom (later Sierra Leone) in Africa where London’s black poor could prove to the world the equality of the Negro with the white man, banned Catholics from the settlement. Bishop Porteous, from his see in Chester, was the first Anglican bishop to speak out against the slave trade, unintimidated by his propinquity to Liverpool. On the other hand, the presence of many Irish within his bishopric, caused him theological worries and he published a pamphlet warning his flock against the heretical and seductive influence of Catholicism. Among themselves, the committed abolitionists in parliament often disagreed over Catholic emancipation. Some saw it as a danger to be sharply resisted. Others supporting it, arguing that a wellorganised Protestant crusade would in time wipe out Catholicism.


As the mid-nineteenth century increasingly focused anti-slavery interest on the emancipation of the slaves and the means for doing so, British supporters began to speak enthusiastically of the manumission arrangements made in Catholic colonies. In the United States, the law discouraged the freeing of slaves; in Virginia a freed slave had to leave the state within the year. In countries such as Brazil there was a long tradition of greater personal generosity – masters freeing old or loyal slaves. But the institutions also decreed it; a slave who produced money to purchase freedom and was refused could apply to the authorities to have the decision overruled. However Irish Catholics attracted to anti-slavery were thin on the ground, mostly like O’Connell and R.R. Madden, Catholic liberals who had encountered anti-slavery through their professional lives. Even for committed activists religion posed problems. O’Connell and Garrison, united in anti-slavery, found one another’s religious attitudes ridiculous and could not resist saying so publicly, which at times strained their relations. Richard Robert Madden, travelling in the Middle East and later in Jamaica, regarded the Protestant missionaries as simple, good hearted men, but as his Catholic piety revived in Cuba, he found them increasingly irritating, treating him to proselytising lectures and demanding that he use his official position, as protector of liberated Africans, to free their consignments of Bibles, confiscated by the Cuban authorities on grounds of heresy.52 O’Connell was wrong when he claimed that the Irish MPs had played an important role in the parliamentary decisions to end slavery. In the matter of the trade they could have been important, but they vacillated and lost the plot. An analysis of the voting patterns in the 1833 emancipation shows clearly that it was the developing towns and cities of Britain which carried the reform through.53 (O’Connell himself, when attending the international Slavery Convention in 1840, did so as a delegate for Glasgow.)54 In 1838 the British Emancipator published a list of the Irish MPs voting against the early abolition of apprenticeship and O’Connell was taken aback to discover just how many had done so.55 The sign of a strong healthy movement or institution in Ireland was its organisation on sectarian/confessional lines. In the case of temperance there were Protestant and Catholic temperance societies, societies to relieve the poor, reform fallen women, provide care for the orphaned, the deaf, and the blind. There were no Catholic anti-slavery societies. The church did not think it necessary to follow up Madden’s suggestions or build on the papal condemnation of the slave trade and slavery issued in 1838. Ireland’s greatest contribution to the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century was Daniel O’Connell. First he forced open the reform door with his Catholic Association agitation in 1829 and then he added his status as an international figure to the American cause.

12 Frederick Douglass and the ‘Antieverythingarians’

Though the numbers involved in Irish anti-slavery societies would never be large, the country’s close involvement with America always secured them a degree of public interest. The image of Africans in the Irish mind was changing. In the 1790s they had appeared as slave servants, drummer boys and the little red-capped symbol of liberty carried high in political procession. Now the equation of blacks and the United States was firmly establishing itself through the medium of entertainment and theatre. From 1829–31, Ira Aldridge, an African American actor, toured Britain but found himself particularly popular in Ireland. His performance range was extensive; he played Othello, put on politicised sketches (Liberty and Equality or the American Slave Market), sang minstrel songs, Jump Jim Crow, Lucy Long, and best received of all, Opossum up a Gum Tree, which is said to have elicited more applause than Othello in Dublin’s Theatre Royal. By the 1840s the minstrels themselves had appeared, white men with ‘blacked up faces’ their programmes promising ‘sports and pass times of the Virginia Coloured Race, through the medium of Songs, Refrains and Ditties as sung by Southern slaves’. Criticised as vulgar and inauthentic in their utopian representations of plantation life, these shows also included portrayals of free, urban blacks. Zip Coon, Dandy Jim and Count Julius Caesar Mars Napoleon Sinclair Brown, capered and strutted across the stage, providing a bizarre and pretentious display of clothing and vocabulary, an interpretation drawing on the blacks’ desire to share in American social mobility and the whites’ desire to claim it as their exclusive prerogative. In the shape-shifting world of the theatre curious opportunities for advancement could be found. By the 1860s an Ira Aldridge troop had been formed playing to Philadelphia audiences and caricaturing Irish Americans.1 In the thirties and into the forties the leaders of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society held weekly, public meetings on a variation of morally uplifting topics in the Royal Exchange, once the scene of speeches by the United Irishmen. Allen, Webb and Haughton intended these occasions to be attended by Dublin’s working class. At a time when anti-slavery in England 278

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was increasingly seen as the preserve of the middle classes, a philanthropic vent for employers who disregarded the sufferings of their own operatives, a venue where only the well dressed could feel comfortable, the Royal Exchange was often crowded with working men. But R. D. Webb astutely noted that, the audience came mainly to hear about conditions in America, which would help them to assess their own prospects across the Atlantic. If they contributed to anything, he believed, it would be the Repeal fund, not the anti-slavery coffers.2 The anti-slavery group could also draw upon the taste for Negroes as entertainment. Immediately after the International Convention in London, a black abolitionist Remond, arrived in Dublin, feeling himself at home there among Garrisononian friends and satisfactorily filling anti-slavery halls and churches. Then in 1845 the most famous runaway slave in American history, left the United States for the first time and came straight to Dublin, where Webb had been chosen to print his best selling book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, for distribution in Ireland and Britain. Douglass had first shot to fame on the strength of his presence as a lecturer on Garrisonian platforms and then, like Equiano half a century earlier, on the success of his autobiography. His writings told not only of his family’s sufferings as slaves and his own determination to escape to freedom but of his regeneration through literacy. His family came from Maryland, where Frederick’s owner and probable father, was an overseer for the Lloyds, neighbours and social equals of the Carrolls. He grew up in a period when the tobacco plantations were flagging and slaves (among them his aunt and uncle) were being sold to the cotton and sugar growing lands of the deep South. Simultaneously for those who did remain in Maryland, changing economic conditions, were resulting in the growth of an urban black population, a development which was invariable accompanied by the expansion in the numbers of free Negroes. Baltimore, long a port of arrival for Irish emigrants, was receiving more and more ‘African Americans’, thus pushing up the competition for labouring jobs.3 It was as a lad on the docks at Baltimore that Douglass recorded a significant encounter with the Irish – two labourers asked him if he was a slave, spoke of the availability of freedom in the North and thus planted in his mind the possibility of running away there. In this quest he was helped by his marriage to a free black woman and by the existence of ‘the underground railroad’. When he reached Ireland at the end of August 1845 Douglass was in his late twenties. He had been living in New England for some seven years and was in the anomalous position of being both an emerging public figure and a fugitive slave. On arriving in Dublin he entered the busy and familiar public world of Allen, Webb and Haughton. The philanthropy of these Dublin businessmen was no way restricted to the fate of the slave. Their dissenting consciences called them insistently to what they saw as progressive and moral reform. Opposed to capital punishment, war, protective tariffs, opium


trading, consumption of alcohol and slavery, they were dubbed the ‘Antieverythingarians’ by the conservative Dublin Evening Mail.4 While their concerns ranged world wide, their greatest enthusiasm was reserved for temperance and anti-slavery, in Allen and Haughton’s case probably in that order. Temperance, a distinctively nineteenth-century development, was yet another movement usually said to have arisen in North America and to have spread across the Atlantic. It is seen as a phenomenon of the industrialising world. In peasant society, always close to subsistence conditions and dominated by seasonal and therefore variable work demands, drunkenness was not strongly deplored nor was the opportunity to become an alcoholic extensively available. Industrialisation changed this. The demand for a regular working day, a continuously unbroken working year, often spent among dangerous or expensive machinery, placed the sober worker at a premium. Yet easy access to supplies of alcohol, the opportunities to support the craving by thievery and to display its bad affects as a public nuisance, was far more prevalent in urban conditions than in the countryside. In a world of spiralling commerce and expanding industry, opportunities for gainful effort were obvious, while the sight of the inebriated poor was seen as proving the existence of some measure of economic surplus among the lower orders. (Fredrick Douglass remarked that the beggars in Ireland drank whiskey.)5 Viewed in this way, temperance could be seen as a potential for transforming society, riding it of violence and want. Ireland was still overwhelmingly a rural society though its reputation for alcoholic intake was high. The new fashion for moderate drinking and the discussion of the possible advantages of total abstinence, quickly penetrated the middle classes, business and professional, in the 1820s and 30s. Quakers and other nonconformists could be said to the first pioneers but the most spectacular manifestation was in Cork, where a Capuchin priest, from a gentry background, Father Theobald Mathew launched a temperance initiative from the church in Blackamoor Lane. By 1840 it had mushroomed into a popular crusade, producing larger audiences than the initial Repeal meetings so that O’Connell at this stage cheerfully endorsed it. Temperance, unlike anti-slavery, adapted easily to Irish mores; there were processions with bands and emblems and mass tea parties, drawing on patterns and wakes. Journeying long distances to take the pledge, which was seen as most efficacious if administered by Father Theobald Mathew himself, receiving the society’s medal, contemplating the picture on the Temperance card, all recalled elements of pilgrimage.6 But like Pastorini or Catholic emancipation, temperance promised a total change in life in this world. The card illustrated domestic transformation; one side showed a drunken, ragged man grabbing his wife by the hair and beating her with a hammer, while on the other a well dressed and fed family sat reading books. And in his sermons, surveying an even wider field, Father Mathew conjured up a new Ireland for his


hearers. ‘No employer will inquire of what creed the man is whom he is about to engage: no landlord who may be going to let his land, will trouble to find out what sect or party a person offering to take it may be. His only question will be, is he a teetotaller? … . All creeds and classes will live together in unity and harmony, and, in a word, as Christians should live.’7 Such a vision was one which Haughton and Webb understood. They appeared in Father Mathew’s platform party and he became a visitor to their homes in the centre of Dublin, where they lived above or beside their places of work, attending the counter, checking the ledgers, keeping an eye on their employees, making their way to their business and philanthropic meetings through the streets busy with customers, traders, labourers and beggars. In their belief in the transforming nature of temperance, crusaders on either side of the Atlantic stressed drink as the great enslaver. Garrison, urged on by personal experience (his violent father had been an alcoholic) embraced the cause. Douglass was equally convinced of its importance. In his autobiography he presented alcohol as an agent of social control, strategically administered by the slave holder to keep the Negro thoughtlessly servile. He first spoke in public in Ireland not at an anti-slavery rally but on a temperance platform at Celbridge.8 Some days later he attended a one thousand strong Father Mathew rally at Booterstown. In Cork Father Mathew organised a soiree for him, some 250 people attending; Douglass took the pledge and received ‘a beautiful silver medal’ a version usually reserved for clerics.9 His own services to temperance continued and he wrote home excitedly that he had addressed a temperance meeting ‘in the very prison where O’Connell was put’.10 Douglass also attended a Repeal meeting where he and O’Connell spoke on anti-slavery. For Douglass it was an exciting occasion and Webb was disgusted at the abolitionist’s enthusiasm for O’Connell. However it was Webb who organised Douglass’s most populous appearance acquiring the Music Hall free for three nights. It was packed to its capacity of 3000 and Webb was delighted by the loud applause, noting with satisfaction that the poor were always the heartiest clappers. He was less pleased that Douglass, reacting to his populous and nationalist audience made reference to the hypocrisy of Methodist planters in the United States, thus offending that denomination, who thought it very unfair that he had ignored the Catholic church’s bad record in regard to anti-slavery. But in general the Dublin reception of the black abolitionist was enthusiastic. To Webb’s surprise, the Quakers opened their meetinghouse to him. He was also invited to address the Dublin lord mayor and aldermen, an occasion on which toasts were drunk which upset Haughton but not Douglass.11 The existence of the temperance and repeal movements introduced Douglass to mass Catholic culture, something Equiano had never experienced. While in the capital, Douglass stayed with the Webbs who disliked him. They found the tall, handsome African American, with high cheek bones suggesting Indian ancestory and pale skin, vindicating his indignant claim


that he had been fathered by his master, prickly and proud. His visit to Cork was much happier, where he settled down with his host family, the Jennings, father, mother, and eight grown up siblings, five of them female.12 His meetings were well attended and he spoke warmly of Ireland and the exhilarating experience of living in a society free of racism; no one here refused him entry to buildings on account of his colour or wrinkled up their noses at the possibility of encountering ‘Negro funk’.13 Dressed as a gentleman, he was accepted as one. Webb had printed 2000 copies of the Narrative, 500 had been sold by the time Douglass left Cork, 250 in Cork city itself.14 Perhaps it was here, where Isabel Jennings became his particular confidante, that he first tasted one of the greatest pleasures and complications of freedom, the friendship of an intellectual white woman. Douglass was an exciting speaker his heart rending description of slave sufferings, swerving off into irony, mimicry and very occasionally song. Making his Cork speaking debut at the Courthouse on the 14 October, he called upon his audience to put moral pressure upon the US slaveholder, ‘circle America with a girdle of anti-slavery fire’. He then went on to dramatise that well tried anti-slavery trope pointing up the unchristian nature of white Christians in their dealings with Africans, by preaching a slave holders sermon. ‘You servants, to what was this whipping traceable? To disobedience, and if you would not be whipped, and if you would bask in the sunshine of your master’s favour, let me exhort you to obedience. You should also be grateful that God in his mercy brought you from Africa to this Christian land.’15 And while Douglass disapproved of minstrel shows and black burlesque as inauthentic and vulgar, he enriched his performance by drawing upon that genre, with the inclusion of faithful Sambo, naive and vernacular, ‘Me hear a good sermon today, de Minister make ebry thing so clear, white man above a Nigger any day.’16 Ignoring the offence he had given in Dublin, he raised a laugh from his large nationalist and populist audience by saying that his own master had been a Methodist class leader. Initially Garrisonianism suited Douglass because it criticised institutional religion. But unlike Garrison, Douglass was not a deeply religious man. He claimed that he had learnt to read by studying the newspaper and enlisting the help of the white boys he played with in Baltimore. However it was impossible for any black American of Douglass’s generation to have educated himself without encountering evangelical religion. As a young man Douglass had attended camp meetings and his Biblical knowledge was extensive. (Indeed in rebutting his Irish Methodist critics, he claimed membership of that sect.) And hostility to Catholicism which, Protestant style, he saw as superstitious and militating against individual endeavour, was balanced by his admiration for O’Connell and Father Mathew. And his American background meant that he found nothing alien in the Irish cat’s cradle of sectarian division. So when he moved on to speak in Cork’s nonconformist churches, the most typical sites for anti-slavery meetings,


Douglass adjusted his technique and stressed the American slave plantation as a field for missionary zeal. There were cries of ‘hear, hear’, when he asked the audience in the Independent Chapel in St Georges Street to teach the slave to read the bible.17 In early November he left Cork for Limerick where the Anti-Slavery Society was not Garrisonian, but supporters of the more orthodox British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.18 Here Douglass, having spoken reprovingly of an Irish actor for misrepresenting the American Negro by imitating the minstrel shows, ended his lecture on a blood curdlingly, theatrical note. The Limerick Reporter described this climax with gusto. Douglass ‘proceeded to exhibit some of the implements used in torturing the slaves, among which was a collar taken from the neck of a young woman who had escaped from Mobile. It had so worn into her neck that her blood and flesh were found on it (sensation). After showing the fetters used in chaining the feet of two slaves together, he exhibited a pair of hand-cuffs taken from a fugitive slave who escaped from Maryland into Pennsylvania. He knew the man well. He was brought in custody to his master’s constable – he saw a sharp rock before him, and with one mighty effort he raised his hands, and striking the handcuffs against the stone, broke them, and at the same time his left wrist (sensation). He fled and was overtaken but with the unbroken hand he drew a dirk from his breast, and cut down his pursuer (cries of “bravo”)’… (Scott had left a permanent imprint on Douglass, who had his culled his surname from Black Douglas in The Lady of the Lake.) ‘Mr Douglass then went on to exhibit a horrid whip which was made of cow hide, and whose lashes were as hard as horn. They were clotted with blood when he first got them. He saw his master tie up a young woman of eighteen years of age, and beat her with that identical whip until the blood ran down her back … (cries of “horrible”).’19 After this enthusiastically received and grisly display, Douglass moved on via Dublin to Belfast, where he had arranged to give seven lectures. Douglas’s contacts in Belfast (now with a significant Catholic proletariat working in the mills, and a small emergent Catholic middle class) was overwhelmingly Protestant, and, interestingly for one well acquainted with evangelical America, he found the town remarkable in the intensity of its piety. ‘I attended church today. Tis no sin in itself. Everybody I meet here seems full of religion, drinks wine, and prays.’20 (Belfast appeared to have remained true to its tradition; its first temperance movement having emerged early in the 1820s, before teetotalism became popular, aimed at eliminating the drinking of whiskey.) He met Maria Webb, R. D.’s cousin, who unlike the Dublin family, was delighted with him. His lectures, delivered from churches and meetinghouses, were well attended, as he brought a degree of African American drama to Quakers, Presbyterians and others whose nonconformist religion forbade them to enter the theatre and share in the uproarious delights of ‘Opossum up a gum tree’.


But here he discovered a Presbyterian issue, which brought him to the attack. It was James Stansfield, chairman of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Committee and a member of the Independent Church, who alerted Douglass to the importance in Belfast of the views of Dr Chalmers and the Free Church of Scotland. In Scotland there had recently been a split in the established Presbyterian Kirk. Chalmers had set up the Free Church, complaining that the Presbyterian establishment was neglecting the urban poor, that missionising fervour should be applied to alleviating their miseries and bringing them to Christ. In pursuit of funds for his new church and his benevolent campaign, he had appealed to America only to find that almost all the money he received came from South Carolina, where Ulster’s Presbyterian slave owners, generously contributed, eager to prove their benevolence towards the wage slaves, who lacked the paternal care they bestowed on their property. Casting himself in the role of a black O’Connell, Douglass denounced the reception of polluted funds, punctuating his performance before the Presbyterians with the rhetorical and repetitive roar of ‘Send back the money’. Local reaction against such criticism was sharpened by the presence of the Rev. Thomas Smyth, a recent emigrant from Belfast to Charleston, back on a visit to his homeland to collect a legacy. As a result Douglass rose one morning to find that in the night the town had been placarded with the message, ‘Send back the Nigger’. Nevertheless Douglass left Belfast in good spirits, having collected testimonials from a number of clergymen, which to the Quaker Webb’s disgust, he insisted in having printed as the preface to the second Irish edition of his autobiography.21 In America Douglass had already completed his journey from plantation slave to urban black, from skilled artisan to anti-Slavery speaker. In Ireland, illuminated by the sparkle of the chandeliers at Cork’s Anti-Slavery Society’s reception, he had felt himself free to burgeon as a bourgeois intellectual. (‘He is the very first intelligent slave who ever visited Cork’, Isabel Jennings had declared.)22 In Britain this process would continue, confirmed in a very practical manner when admirers in Newcastle-upon -Tyne collected the money to purchase his freedom so that he could return to America with the adjective of ‘fugitive’ obliterated.23 Before departing for the United States late in 1846, he had added Irish dialect and Irish jokes to his repertoire. Stereotypical Pat, like stereotypical Sambo, could be depended upon to lighten the darkness after a long passage through suffering. So he called English anti-slavery supporters to strong action by recommending a vigorously Irish approach – ‘As Pat, entering a Tipperary row said, “Wherever you see a head, hit it”,’24 And raised a laugh in Coventry by quoting an Irish comment on his own performance – ‘Faith, an if half a Naigur can make a speech like that, whut could a whole Naigur do?’25 The Irish trip had done much to promote Douglass’s sense of self-worth, but on another level it had been profoundly disturbing, so disturbing as to make him wonder if he should be there at all. He had come of course to


further the cause of anti-slavery by collecting money to pay his own expenses and to bring back funds to America. For some years the HASS had been proud of its contribution to the Garrisonian Boston Bazaar, where needlework produced by the Irish Ladies Societies had become a valued item. In organising the black abolitionist’s tour, Webb had based it upon a circuit through areas inhabited by Boston Bazaar supporters, who might be expected to respond generously. At home Douglass was quite accustomed to fundraising, but now he was shaken, unprepared for the extreme poverty he found around him. Before he left the United Stated, he thought the American press exaggerated the misery and wretchedness of the Irish people to malign British philanthropists, now (though still suspicious of press intent) he did not doubt Irish misery.26 ‘I cannot allow myself to be insensible to the wrongs and sufferings of any part of the great family of man.’27 He was confronted first with urban poverty, horrified by the contrast between the architectural beauty of Dublin and its streets alive with beggars, ragged and often physically deformed, and, haunted far into the night by unattended children. By the time he reached Limerick in November, he was clear that conditions were no better in the countryside. The peasant huts, with middens at the door, were heated by only a few smouldering pieces of turf and devoid of furniture, though often displaying a religious picture. ‘Men and women, married and single, old and young, lie down together, in much the same degradation as the American slaves … . I see here much to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I must be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.’28 He could of course make a contribution to social improvement, as his hosts assured him, drawing attentions to skeletal, whiskey drinking beggars, by his support for temperance. Thus he accepted that ‘The immediate, and it may be the main cause of the extreme poverty and beggary in Ireland is intemperance’, an ‘antieverythingerian’ view, which chimed in with Garrisonian thinking. In Irish temperance he could see analogies with American anti-slavery, a cause aimed at freeing the oppressed led by pioneering individuals, neglected by religious institutions. ‘A great part of the Roman Catholic clergy do nothing, while the Protestants may be said to hate the cause.’ Many of them told Douglass to keep away from temperance for it would injure anti-slavery.29 It was scarcely surprising that Douglass should have been impressed by the scale of Irish poverty, for although neither he nor anyone else then realised it, he had arrived in Ireland at the onset of the Great Famine. Like Douglass, the blight, originally known as ‘the American potato cholera’, was a newcomer from across the Atlantic.30 As Douglass landed in Dublin, its first Irish manifestation was discovered in county Fermanagh on 28 August 1845. By 10 October, as Douglass moved on to Cork, the Lord Lieutenant was beginning to express serious concerns about crop failure. By the time


Douglass left Ireland in December some one-third of the crop was lost, but no deaths were said to have occurred as a result. The harvest of oats (before the shift to the protein rich potato, the staple diet of the peasantry) had been exceptionally good and Peel, foreseeing that the greatest hardship might be expected in the spring of 1846, had ordered in £100,000 worth of maize from America.31 Immensely talented as a speaker, Douglass had briefly made abolitionism a mass attraction in Ireland’s urban centres, but he could not be expected to conjure the HASS into a mass movement. He left it as he found it, of interest to O’Connell and Madden and the ‘antieverythingerians’. On a wider spectrum his appearance can be seen as another factor strengthening Irish awareness of the existence of the Negro in the United States. Back home the problems of his own position and society enclosed him. His old dislikes and suspicions revived, further encouraged by the rising tide of famine emigrants and Democratic promises of fast track citizenship for the Irish, in the decade of the Dred Scott case, when the Supreme Court declared that blacks were not citizens, nor had the founding fathers ever intended that they should be so.32 In such circumstances it was difficult for Douglass to remain sensible to the ‘wrongs and sufferings’ of the Irish peasantry as ‘part of the great family of man’. Running his own paper, he denounced Irish Americans as former slaves riddled with prejudice and corrupted by the church.33 The almost miraculous success of Father Mathew of which he had once written, retreated into another world. No longer the lionised exotic in a foreign country, but an indignant and frustrated black in his self-consciously white homeland, he turned upon ‘Pat, fresh from the Emerald Isle, requiring two sober men to keep him on his legs, enter and deposit his vote for the Democratic candidate amid the loud hurrahs of his fellow citizens’.34 Back in Ireland, HASS leadership, Allen, Webb and Haughton, were increasingly beset by the fear that Irish anti-slavery would prove to be yet another victim of the Famine. Like O’Connell, the three middle aged philanthropists, believed in the economic orthodoxy of the age – they saw the principles of laissez – faire and free trade as promoting peace and social improvement, moral doctrines which should provide weapons to attack evil. Confusingly they did not always seem to do so. The HASS leadership (again like O’Connell) was worried by the lowering of the sugar duties as this free trade measure would privilege the cheaper slave-grown product against that produced by Britain’s freed African labour force. Unlike O’Connell, they did not have to make a very public profession on the issue and contented themselves with signing a petition to Lord John Russell drawing attention to it.35 As the Famine worsened they remained, like the Whig government and the Treasury, committed to the operation of the free market. The old policy, which the eighteenth-century Lord Lieutenant and parliament on College Green had invoked in times of recognised crises (to what affect it is difficult to assess) of banning the export of grain and/or ordering the reduction of its


supply to breweries and distilleries was now viewed as dangerously inappropriate. Its resurrection was pressed in Westminster by the Tory leader, Lord George Bentinck and vociferously espoused by Smith O’Brien. This son of Dromoland Castle and thousands of crowded acres in Clare, expressed it so vehemently that he was led off to do so from a cell beneath the House of Commons. As the ‘antieverythingerians’ struggled with the moral demands of sugar duties and the appropriate design of relief schemes, they worried about the future of the HASS While contributions from the British Caribbean were heartening – £144 raised by ‘the Negroes of Antigua’ from ‘their own scanty resources’ and donations from Jamaica (£2000), Barbados (£2000) and British Guiana (£3000) involving all sectors of society.36 But they perceived moral dangers in other quarters. American generosity would, they feared, make the people of Ireland uncritically grateful of the donor – their attempt to recruit their country into the ‘circle of anti-slavery fire’ had always been uncertain, now it trembled on the verge of extinction. At a Meeting of the Irish Confederation in Dublin, James Haughton, condemned the acceptance of £1300 from Maryland and £1200 from Charleston as donations from ‘women whippers and cradle plunderers’ and was met with cries of ‘Three cheers for America’ and ‘no slave lectures here’.37 In the Nation, Young Irelander, John Mitchel with indignant sarcasm, denounced those who asked the starving peasantry of Skibereen to contribute to the relief of ‘fat Negroes’. Then to their disbelief and chagrin, the Garrisonians wrote telling the HASS that they should concentrate on distributing the American donations rather than questioning where they came from.38 Actually in spite of all the agonising, the lecturing and letters to the press setting out their reservations, that is what they had been doing, for it was moral fervour that had taken them into philanthropy in the first place. And while they felt compelled to draw attention to sin where they saw it, Allen and Webb, as men of business, recognised the impracticalities of sending back contributions which came in the form of cargoes of food from America. What was an immoral source? – New Orleans was a centre of slavery but the vessels sailing from that port might have collected their cargo upriver in free states? And, if uncritical gratitude to the United States could stifle Irish antislavery, so too would a reputation for hindering the relief of the Irish poor. As a result Allen and Webb, both on the Quaker Central Relief Committee in Dublin, did not press home their objections to money from Maryland and Charleston, although the idea of refusing a donation because of its origin was well understood by their fellow Committee members, resulting in the rejection of £70 collected from an English theatre audience.39 As always both men gave practical support. They used their anti-slavery connections in the United States to raise money. In 1847 Webb journeyed to Galway and Mayo to assess need and in 1848 he made a similar trip to Erris.40 Later he printed and helped to edit the 480 page Transactions of the Central


Relief Committee written by his friend Jonathan Pim.41 In Cork, Isabel Jennings was busy organising food distribution. When the Jamestown arrived from Boston with a cargo of aid, she considered asking the captain about his anti-slavery views but decided he was too busy. However she could not resist telling one of the startled officers that the North should secede from the Union rather than remain yoked to the immoral South, a tenet of Garrisonian belief which Frederick Douglass had refrained from stressing during his lecture tour.42 In Belfast the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society to which Maria Webb belonged turned all its efforts into The Belfast Ladies Association for the Relief of Irish Distress, which unlike Dr Edgar’s (Ulster’s first apostle of temperance) extensive famine relief operation was never accused of proselytising.43 Haughton was not a Quaker and so had no place on the Relief Committee and his role as a miller also exposed him to the criticism that he had made money from high grain prices in 1847. He did however have a connection which Allen and Webb did not possess. He was a supporter of Repeal and as that movement dissolved into disputes between Old Ireland and Young Ireland, under the humiliation of Clontarf, the elderly Unitarian, joined the Irish Confederation, expressing sympathy with Young Ireland’s position. At times exciting amusement and ridicule, his commitment to nationalism and temperance provided him with a reputation which still excited respect. But Temperance too was in the doldrums. The heady days of Father Mathew’s crusade had a passed. Like Repeal, the Famine did much to quench it, but even so it was on the wane, another grand scheme which had failed to reform society. It had however taken firm roots, drawing strength from its denominational support. A later generation would pursue it through legislative controls, demanding closing hours for the serving of intoxicating liquors. While local societies connected to the various churches would remain in existence, expanding in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the burgeoning youth movements as Bands of Hope and Pioneers. Both Allen and Webb had always felt that Quaker fears of close involvement with non-Quakers prevented the sect from playing as active a public role in support of temperance and anti-slavery as these great reforming, moral causes demanded. They were well aware that their co-religionists often looked askance at their behaviour. By 1851 Webb felt himself so disapproved off by the Society of Friends that he withdrew from its membership. The timing was ironic for Quaker efforts during the famine (£200,000 distributed in 1847 and fifteen Quakers dead from diseases caught among the starving poor) had raised the reputation of the sect. And public perception viewed anti-slavery as a Quaker speciality and therefore worthy of respect. So, in spite of mounting Irish gratitude for American money, the HASS emerged from the Famine much as it had been before, the enthusiasm of the determined few with an ability to draw larger audiences for an interesting speaker.


After the death of O’Connell it was even more exclusively Protestant than ever. The vigour of the movement was attested to by its internal disputes between Garrisonians (now abandoned by Frederick Douglass) and the more moderate American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which raged on. The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin aroused interest in Ireland’s reading public and in 1853 Mrs Stowe visited Britain and to the great disappointment of the Ladies Societies, of Cork, Dublin and Belfast, did not extend her triumphal tour to Ireland. However a large meeting was held at the Rotunda to honour her work and make use of her reputation to bring in new recruits.44 Numbers (middle class and Protestant) were rising and the societies were in a position to build on this and reorganise themselves, when the outbreak of the Civil War in America provided them with further excitements, political relevance and publicity. For Allen, Webb and Haughton, firmly based in Ireland, interest in antislavery had been a matter of choice, an energising and expansive commitment, undertaken first in the triumphant days of emancipation in the Caribbean. Anti-slavery in the United States, with its burgeoning slave population, had always been a more dangerous affair. The moral fervour and sentimental rhetoric might be the same, but riot, racial hatred, women’s rights, regional divisions and threats of constitutional disruption meant that physical violence was ever present. In the fifties and sixties three very different Irishmen, from the pacific linen draper and the two old Ballitore boys, would enter this American arena, though originally they had no interest in leaving for the United States. The leading revolutionaries of 1848, Meagher, Mitchel and O’Brien would all find themselves entangled in the bitter conflict between slavery and anti-slavery.

13 Famine and War

The horror ship of the eighteenth century is the slave ship, the horror ship of the nineteenth century is the ‘coffin ship’ of the Great Famine. The slave ship preparing for its two month voyage, collecting its cargo over as long a period, the crew sickly and abusive, shackling their numbered cargo, stowing the male portion down below, bringing them up for feeding with firearms trained on them to discourage revolt, which nevertheless often took place. The awful moment when the ship sailed, the Africans howling and clashing their chains below decks, stories circulating in the foetid darkness that they were to be eaten by these white cannibals, their bodies skinned to make shoes, then squeezed into oil, their blood drunk as red wine, their bones ground for gunpowder. Stormy passages where the necessary tubs overflowed and the decks grew slippery with vomit, faeces and bloody mucus; becalmed voyages where food and water ran low and the sick were thrown overboard for insurance purposes. Attendant sharks often followed such vessels for days on end. At the close of the voyage the slaves would be washed, oiled, encouraged to dance, have their anuses corked to disguise the presence of dysentery. In the eighteenth century it was the British and French who brought transatlantic trade to its most horrifying, extensive and efficient; the Portuguese who began it in the fifteenth century and tenaciously and illegally plied it on into the late nineteenth, called their ageing slave ships tumbas (coffins). The classic Famine coffin ship appeared in 1847 the worst year of the Famine. Elderly vessels, some of which had originally been used to carry timber across the Atlantic and bring back passengers as ballast, were brought out of rotting retirement to transport the desperate numbers clambering out of Ireland. Knowing that if they carried their sick, tight packed and impoverished passengers to popular emigrant ports like New York and Boston, they would be turned away under penalty of fines and head taxes, they sailed for Canada, to the quarantine station at Grosse Isle, downstream from Quebec.1 Here many of the 2000 tenants from the Palmerston estate in Sligo and the 1000 from the Mahon estate in Roscommon arrived on their landlord 290

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assisted passage.2 But the majority bound for Canada had somehow pulled together their own fares, often managing to move as families, hence the large number of children reaching the quarantine station as orphans. Neither shackled, mutinous or thrown overboard while alive, these people did not see themselves as voluntary emigrants, fleeing as they did from the threat of eviction and starvation. Stormy weather could mean that they were confined below decks, provisions promised as part of their fares might never appear, and officers and crew offered physical and verbal abuse with impunity.3 But disease was the greatest danger. Given their state of malnutrition and lack of hygiene facilities at the outset of their journey, they were an easy prey for dysentery and typhus during what should have been a fiveweek sailing voyage, but which often took much longer. Ships arrived in Grosse Isle, their decks black with ragged human beings too weak even to crawl, corpses had to be winched out from below decks. From the time of Columbus until 1820, it has been calculated that four times as many Africans as Europeans migrated to the New World.4 However their demographic impact there was limited by the fact that most of them went to the Caribbean (42 per cent) or Brazil (38 per cent), where they did not attain natural increase. Only the 5 per cent going to the North American mainland achieved that, doing so in the early eighteenth century, a generation after the white settlers. Between the opening-up of the Atlantic slave trade by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, until its closure in the nineteenth, over 11 million Africans left that continent and some 9 million were landed in the Americas. As with migration from Europe the rate of loss was largely the result of shipboard disease, worse outbreaks occurring on vessels which had spent a prolonged period collecting their slaves in Africa. During the seventeenth century one out of ten emigrants leaving England died on the voyage; in the case of the slave trade it was one out of seven or eight.5 Slave exports peaked in the eighteenth century with more than six million Africans loaded as cargo, the most populous decade was the 1780s which accounted for over three quarter of a million.6 In the decade 1845–55 two million emigrants left Ireland, around 1.5 of them going to the United States7 In Black 1847 the mortality rates on ships from Liverpool stood at 1 in 14, and from Cork at 1 in 9. Of the 97,000 Irish, who sailed for Canada in that year, a third died at sea or shortly after landing.8 Before the Famine and after 1850, Irish shipboard mortality was lower than that of the two million slaves carried across the Atlantic in this age of slave trade suppression. By then the African death rate was higher than it had been in the eighteenth century as most of the slaves were making a longer journey, from Angola and even East Africa, than that followed by previous generations.9 Another statistical comparison between these two traumatic movements can be made. The demographic impact of Famine on Ireland is well known; the numbers of dead and emigrated meant that population shrank from


over 8.5 in the early 1840s to 6.6 in 1851; the well established chain migration was drawn tighter in the late seventies by the opening up of the prairies, which simultaneously reduced the income of Europe’s peasantry and provided cheap steam transport for those prepared to emigrate across the Atlantic. Leaving for America had become a part of Irish life so that the population continued to shrink reaching 4.4 million in 1901. From being in the vanguard of Europe’s demographic growth at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by its close Ireland was unique among European countries in possessing a falling population. The demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa has raised sharp controversy. The area affected was much larger and very sparsely populated compared with eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland. The catchment region, from west Africa southward into Congo and Angola, has been estimated as possessing some 25 million people in 1700 and 20 million by 1850.10 Another school of thought however believes that in spite of depredations made by the slave trade, the population rose in this period, perhaps by a million per half century.11 One of the reasons suggested for this is the introduction of new crops, cassava and maize from America, which like the potato in Ireland provided a better food supply and therefore demographic expansion. What is certain is that in the last decades of the century the population graph rocketed and maintained this course through colonisation and decolonisation. So, in matters of time and space, the African slave trade and the Famine emigration were very different. The slave trade was long drawn out and geographically diffuse on both sides of the Atlantic. In Africa it certainly caused the rise and fall of states and kingdoms down the centuries. But evidence about its effect on society is more elusive and fragmentary. Was it a continuously expanding, invasive cancer or contained in certain areas or groups? Experts disagree. The very sharpness of their differences makes the picture unclear. The basic questions (who exactly was sent across the Atlantic? were certain groups immune from this pressure?) are difficult to answer. In the case of Ireland this is now known, county by county, class by class. The Irish experience was focused and intense, recording itself immediately in literary impact and taking place in a world of regular sailings and postal communication. Among the greatest inequalities of history are matters of timing. The problems of one generation can be more serious than those preceding it or succeeding it. Readers of European history count themselves lucky that they have happened to avoid the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, the trenches of the First World War. The Irish are glad to have missed the Great Famine, Americans the Civil War. As with those who lived through the First and Second World Wars, a particularly ill-starred generation can encounter two milestones of disaster; it was quite possible for those becoming Irish Americans to have left Ireland during or soon after the Famine and to have

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experienced the Civil War. Though short life expectation among fresh immigrants might have intervened to prevent it, Irishmen could have survived the coffin ships to die at Gettysburg or Bull Run. Where such individuals existed, we have no diaries and no letters home to tell the tales. As always it is the literate middle and upper classes who leave personal records. One emigrant family, of the Famine generation, to arrive in America and find themselves deeply embroiled not only with the Civil War, but with the preceding debate on the issue of slavery, was the Mitchels from Newry, County Down. Whenever the writing of the history of the Famine is discussed John Mitchel’s name appears. His picture of Ireland as a land of plenty, with supplies of food sailing out of its ports while the population starved, is said to have entered the minds of later generations and articulated their attitude to successive British governments. By 1848 he was seen as Ireland’s most radical revolutionary, quarrelling with fellow Young Irelander, Gavan Duffy, in his determination to use armed Confederate Clubs, not only as a threat to prise independence from Westminster, but as actual guerrilla fighters. He also crossed swords with the aristocratic Smith O’Brien, on the issue of landlordism, which Mitchel declared must be extirpated from Ireland and replaced by proprietorship for the peasantry. His egalitarian views embraced the development of trade unions and he denounced the ‘antieverythingarians’ belief in social improvement through the introduction of laissez-faire and free trade, as cant and hypocrisy devised as a veil for exploitation.12 He further infuriated the Westminster government by cooperation with the Chartists in England to achieve a radical, democratic agenda through violent revolution. As a result he was tried, convicted and deported for 14 years, some months before Smith O’Brien actually attempted a rising in 1848. Three years earlier, Mitchel, a refugee from bank clerking in Derry and his solicitor’s office in Banbridge, had moved to Dublin to embark upon a career as a journalist. His view of the Famine, as a government conspiracy to lower Irish population, is no longer accepted by historians, but his assessment of Britain’s handling of the unexpectedly, long drawn out crisis (1846–9) is still vehemently debated. The works which made Mitchel the historian of the Famine were both published in the United States. His Jail Journal first appeared in serial format in his New York newspaper the Citizen followed by its publication in book form, with an introduction containing a denunciation of the government’s handling of the Famine.13 In 1860 his other influential book The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), containing the much quoted adage ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine’, was also published in New York. However it had been printed two years earlier in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a series of letters addressed to Alexander H. Stephens, Senator for Georgia, who in February 1861 would become Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy. These letters appeared in Mitchel’s second American newspaper venture, the Southern


Citizen, a pro-slavery newspaper, launched to publicise the necessity of re-opening the slave trade.14 Mitchel’s attitude to slavery was deplored in Ireland, not only by those with whom he had quarrelled, such as Gavan Duffy and Smith O’Brien, but also by his closest friends and political confidantes from his home county of Down, his boyhood companion John Martin (they had joined the Newry Repeal Committee in 1840) and his favourite Irish correspondent, Mary Thompson, ‘Eointhe’ of the Nation.15 Even Father Kenyon, another vivid critic of O’Connell, who saw no harm in slavery, was shocked by Mitchels’s proposal to re-open the trade. For those in Ireland Mitchel’s behaviour was difficult to understand; for those in America it was an unusual but understandable apotheosis. Always an inflammatory writer, in Ireland he had appeared as a radical, in America he emerged as the supporter of a conservative cause. The apparent contradiction sprang from his deeply held racist assumptions. Back in Ireland Mitchel’s interest in slavery and anti-slavery had been limited to occasional outburst of indignation occasioned by Britain’s reputation as the global arbiter of philanthropy and improvement, a reputation in which her emancipation of the slaves took pride of place. Such a claim, in the face of government failure to secure the Irish against death from starvation, naturally drove him into fits of denunciation. The ideas and prose style of the literary practitioner he most admired, Thomas Carlyle, furnished him with an excoriating mode of expression. On parole in Australia, living in a state of physical comfort and political frustration, he considered the issue of US slavery more generally. It did not, in his opinion, prevent the United States from being admired for its just government and institutions. ‘It is a refuge for hunted and denounced men; and even for the Negro slavery I have no virtuous indignation – the grandest states and best nations have been slave holding states and nations.’16 He was of course making reference to Greece and Rome, but his thoughts had been drawn there by news from America. In New York, an Irish group, formed to collect money for revolution in Ireland, was discussing how to apply these monies in post-1848 conditions. Having considered the possibility of church building or relief of orphans, they decided on an alternative proposal to fund the freeing of the Australian political exiles. Mitchel eagerly took advantage of the offer, which resulted in an exciting escape via Tahiti, San Francisco and the Caribbean to settle in Brooklyn. His mother, brother and two sisters had already emigrated there, finding life in post-1848 Dublin and Newry no longer congenial. On arrival in New York late in 1852, Mitchel was feted by the leaders of the Irish community and funded to set up, what would turn out to be, the first of his three American Citizens. His intention was to provide his Irish reading public with information about their homeland, to see what he could do to use the Crimean War now in progress as an English difficulty to provide Irish opportunity and to defend the Irish community against rising ‘KnownNothings’ nativist sentiment, triggered into political action, at street and

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electoral level, by the arrival of so many immigrants. He always blamed James Haughton for disturbing this scenarios and introducing difficulties into his life by raising the issue of the Negro. Haughton, as determinedly dedicated to his causes and as fond of newspaper coverage as Mitchel, had written an open letter to the Young Irelanders, who had reached the United States, asking them to use their influence to recruit the Irish community in support of anti-slavery. Mitchel was enraged by Haughton’s letter because he knew that, from exchanges in the Nation, Haughton was well aware that he, Mitchel, was opposed to the cause. So he reacted by writing in the Citizen saying that he would welcome an Irish republic with plantations; that he himself would like nothing better than ‘a good plantation, well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama’.17 These views released upon Mitchel the wrath of Henry Ward Beecher, brother to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Mitchel described as a very clever book. Henry Ward Beecher was a fellow Brooklyner, minister of a Congregational church and possessor of as vitriolic a pen as Mitchel himself. It was ridiculous of Mitchel to blame Haughton for his ensuing difficulties in New York. Since 1850 the temperature on the slavery issue had been rising, spiralling well beyond anything the abolitionist groups could have achieved. The problems unleashed by the possibility of slavery spreading westwards, which had so exercised John C. Calhoun, brought ‘the free soilers’ (settlers who wished to open up the new lands without competition from slave holders) into the equation. As before the admission of new states into the Union, as slave or free, proved politically explosive. In 1850 California, huge, rich and stretching far south, was admitted as a free state and in compensation for this disappointment, southern Congressmen extracted a new Fugitive Slave Law. Improving in detail and severity on Major Butler’s sixty-year-old provision, it aroused apprehension and unease among northerners. Then in 1854 the need to plan for the admission of two newly settled states, Kansas and Nebraska, as slave or free raised the issue of ‘popular sovereignty’ (the will of the majority of settlers), a mechanism for choice which the South deplored. As a newspaper man Mitchel could not avoid comment on this vital constitutional issue, nor did the Citizen try to do so. Simultaneously an abolitionist cause celebre rocked Boston, and illustrated that anti-slavery was entering a more aggressive phase. Under the new Fugitive Slave Law, a runaway, Antony Burns, was apprehended and handed back to his Virginian master, after days of public protest and rioting which claimed one life, that of a constable. The dead man, Bachelder, was Irish and, reporting in the Citizen, Mitchel wrote indignantly that the Irish were hated because they were a law abiding people, faithful to the constitution. He added that the abolitionists and the Know Nothings were one and the same, a charge which some of Frederick Douglass’s latest work could have been used to substantiate. ‘Hard times those for my poor countrymen in America … . There seemed to be developing in this people a lawlessness and brigandage, and how long such a country might be tenable I had doubts.’18


By now Mitchel was launched on a pro-slavery crusade, seeking to confute Henry Ward Beecher by proving the Biblical base of slavery and clothing his argument in heavily moralistic Carlylean prose. ‘Liberty requires new definitions. The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, to walk thereon: to learn or to be taught what work he was able for: and thus by permission, persuasion or even compulsion to set about doing the same. This is the true blessedness, honour, liberty and maximum of well being! The right of man – the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser.’ At this point he embarked upon the clear statement of slavery as a superior moral system. ‘Thus the ideal of the slave holder’s position is a true patriarchate. He is the father of a family. And how much higher are his duties and responsibilities than those of a mere employer for money wages between whom and his labourer the whole nexus is cash payment.’ Now he moved into lighter vein, drawing from Father Kenyon’s 1847 musings on slavery – ‘We are all slaves in a thousand ways. Slaves to time, place, circumstance: to the habits of our great grandfathers, on either side, and the whims of our maternal ancestors in all their nonsensical generations.’ Finally he added his own personal experience, explaining that he had not risen against England out of a principle of liberty. ‘My principle was simply that Irishmen were fitted for a higher destiny and sphere and that they ought to feel British domination as intolerable as I did.’19 So back in 1848 he had named his paper The United Irishman as a call to revolutionary action, but without interest in their belief in the universality of man. Thus he helped prepare Irish nationalism for the nineteenth century, a romantic nationalism, stressing cultural characteristics and ethnicity, the love of race, ensuring his popularity and republication by Arthur Griffith who, in the early twentieth century, would write without embarrassment about the antiblack element in Mitchel’s thinking, something which his first biographer, William Dillon, who had lived through the rise of anti-slavery and the Civil War, would find impossible.20 In general the Irish community in New York was in sympathy with Mitchel’s view of the Negro, but some among its leadership were not pleased at his eagerness to hurl himself into such enthusiastically pro-slavery politics. Most serious of all, Mitchel had quarrelled with Archbishop Hughes over happenings in Italy, thus revealing himself as anti-clerical. The readership of the Citizen was falling. The Irish leaders withdrew their financial support in disgust and, without this subvention, it was impossible to keep the paper going.21 Announcing that problems with his eyesight required his retirement from journalism, John Mitchel turned to the South. His proslavery stance obviously ensured him a welcome there, but it was his indignant rejection of urban America, a romantic surge towards the simplicities

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of rural life, that caused him to take his wife and five of his children into the depth of the Tennessee mountains. This log cabin existence did not last for long. By the first winter Mitchel had embarked on a lecture tour to supplement the meagre income produced from his attempt at farming. He then moved down into the nearest town of Knoxville and, in autumn 1857, into partnership with its mayor, William G. Swan. Together they set up a newspaper the Southern Citizen. Initially this venture was also funded by a loan from Maunsel White, described by Mitchel as ‘a princely old planter’.22 White had arrived young and impoverished from Tipperary at the beginning of the century, and was now the owner of four sugar plantations; one in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, contained 192 slaves.23 An active, hardworking and talented businessman, nevertheless White belonged to a generation which had found it much easier to move from penniless beginnings overseeing slaves to possession of them. The Irish had been so noticeable in this respect that Wilbur H. Cash, in his classic Mind of South, chose them as typical of this upward mobility, the South’s ‘one-generation aristocracy’.24 By the 1850s, the steep rise in slave prices over the past decade meant such new wealth was now almost impossible to achieve. Back in New York, while Mitchel had praised the institution of slavery, he had not recommended the break up of this ‘great country’ into two rival republics, arguing that such a move would enable England to make trouble between them and thus assert her power.25 Once among southerners, he forgot his own sensible advice. He quickly came to equate the southern desire to break from a stronger and overweening partner to pursue independence and nationhood with Ireland’s struggle against Britain. He was also immediately and characteristically attracted by the most extreme expression of the pro-slavery agenda – the re-opening of the slave trade. Such an insult to Britain’s role as global power and philanthropic leader could not fail to excite him. It was also the case that he had much in common with those Americans who favoured this contentious notion. They tended to be young (Mitchel was always popular with this age group) and intellectual, eager to push the defence of slavery beyond Calhoun’s paternalistic and socially stabilising institution into a logically argued, unassailable moral cause. If slavery was civilising, the removal of more Africans from Africa was obviously desirable. Also, like Mitchel, these young intellectuals were upholders of slavery, who could not afford to buy slaves. Such hopefuls felt that their literary services to the cause might result in making the rise to planter possible. Mitchel’s career, though never reaching such heights, did benefit from new sources of income as when he attended the Southern Commercial Convention in Knoxville in 1858 and was appointed paid secretary to next year’s convention in Montgomery, Alabama.26


The re-opening of the trade was of course a divisive issue among southerners themselves – it was obviously not in the interests of border states such as Maryland and Virginia, who profited greatly from the sale of their surplus Negroes southwards. Also problematic was the reaction of ‘mean whites’ who might see slave imports as constituting economic competition rather than lowering prices to facilitate their upward mobility. When secession actually took place, the constitution of the Confederate States continued to ban the trade, not only out of fear of its internally divisive nature, but because of the need to court the goodwill of its best customer and chief creditor Britain, a mutually satisfactory relationship which Mitchel chose to ignore. The campaign for the re-opening of the African trade had been launched in 1853 by the editor of the Charleston Standard, Leonidas Spratt, in an exciting and flamboyant piece entitled ‘The Destiny of the Slave States’, the content and style of which was just the type of journalism which Mitchel admired. He took his family to Tennessee via Charleston where he had an interview with Spratt.27 Public support for re-opening the trade was confined to a small number of southern fire-eaters but in the years of this agitation, they made a vigorous contribution to another wider southern grouping – those who wished to leave the Union, rather than secure concessions for their region from the Federal Government, those who were prepared, indeed eager, to go to war. Though he became an American citizen in 1860, Mitchel’s main aim in the States always remained to fight for Irish independence, a cause which he believed would only succeed if Britain were to become involved in some more general conflict. While this was his paramount interest, he was inherently stirred by the thought of conflict. His cry of ‘Give us war in our time, O Lord’ remained green.28 Like most Young Irelanders, he favoured the American filibuster, the extension of territory into Texas, adventures in Nicaragua, suggestions for annexing Arizona and Cuba, all fine regions for slavery. Ever attracted by the threat of hostilities, he was unworried by the possible link between his journalist activities and the deterioration in relations between North and South. Mitchel’s arrival in the South coincided with the Democratic presidential candidacy of James Buchanan, son of a Donegal Presbyterian, who was working hard to hold the Party in North and South together, declaring his intention of pushing through legislation favouring the Irish for fast-track citizenship and snubbing the ‘Know-Nothings’.29 In Knoxville, and later when he moved his Southern Citizen to Washington in an effort to improve its influence and circulation, Mitchel worked against the continuing unity of the Democratic party, in other words he worked against the continued political link between the region he inhabited and that inhabited by the vast majority of Irish Americans. He opposed the candidature of Senator Douglas, a National as opposed to a Southern Democrat intent on keeping the South within the Union, in favour of the secessionist candidate. And he congratulated himself on his role, declaring that he ‘did service in blowing up Douglas’.30 The result of the split in the Democrats was the election of the Republican, Lincoln, which led directly to secession and war.

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As far as the Negro was concerned Mitchel always remained the Carlylean wordsmith rather than an investigative journalist. Before arriving in America, he accepted slavery as a respectable institution and retained these views when confronted with the reality. The first blacks he ever saw did produce a mild degree of interest. On the day he reached Bermuda, the warship transporting him lay offshore awaiting the arrival of a pilot; presently a boat approached rowed by mulattoes: the pilot himself ‘an utter negro’, so the blackest man had the best job, a first glimpse confirming Mitchel’s belief that the notion of the African as victim was nothing but hypocrisy and cant.31 A closer encounter with a Negro came a few days later. He was sitting aboard the Tenedos drinking toddy and reading Livy, when the ship’s doctor came to tell him that he was to be moved to more secure accommodation. The doctor delivered himself of this unpleasant information apologetically and produced a Negro to carry Mitchel’s books and other luggage.32 By the time Mitchel reached America four years later, interest in such encounters had subsided. In his first years in New York he wrote dismissively of the Negro publicly and privately declaring in the Citizen there are questions of more importance (a conclusion history would not endorse) and to Mary Thompson, who had hurt his feeling by criticising his pro-slavery attitudes, that he had no time to give her proof of the satisfactory workings of slavery, southerners were no more cruel than northerners. ‘And now enough of the blacks.’33 In another private letter he declared, ‘To enslave them is impossible or to set them free either; they are born and bred slaves.’34 In the Southern Citizen he depicted Africa as a continent inhabited by petty kings, depravity, squalor and cannibalism.35 In 1859, when the Mitchels were living in Washington, Smith O’Brien arrived for a three month visit to the United States Despite their disagreement over the abolition of Irish landlordism, Mitchel and O’Brien, linked by the experience of Australian exile, enjoyed one another’s company. As a possible influence on the Irish American vote, all shades of Democrats paid polite attention to O’Brien and he received invitations to stay with leading planter politicians in Georgia and South Carolina. Mitchel was delighted, feeling that O’Brien could not fail to be disabused of anti-slavery notions when he encountered the actual workings of the paternalistic institution. In particular he was eager that O’Brien should stay with Maunsel White in Louisiana, where he hoped the sugar planter’s well run estates and desire for ‘plenty more Ashantees’ would also convert O’Brien to the idea of re-opening the slave trade.36 In making this tour O’Brien gave the workings of plantation slavery more study than Mitchel was ever to apply and did indeed accept that the institution appeared very different from abolitionist accounts, but his conclusions were not as Mitchel had hoped. Impressed by the behaviour of the slave workforce, O’Brien could not see why the Negro would not thrive in a state of freedom.37 During his brief spell as a farmer in Tuckaleechee Cove, Tennessee, Mitchel worked the land with is own hands, like his neighbours, and was horrified at


their poverty and stupidity. Down in Knoxville, while he still could not afford to own a slave, he consorted with those who did and lived a socially and politically busy life. When he moved the Southern Citizen to Washington his experiences were very similar. Possibly, he came closest to the slave population during the war from 1863–5. Then he was rejected as a soldier because of his short sight, so in 1863 he joined a ‘committee of Richmond gentleman’ who formed an ambulance corps.38 Here for the first time he actually experienced the slaughter he had so often called for and did not flinch from it. His descriptions involved multitudes of casualties, severed limbs, ghastly wounds and work with surgeons and soldiers. Historical records show that in the task of sorting the wounded from the dead and conveying them back to hospital, the heavy work was carried out by slaves, but Mitchel does not mention them. In New York in the 1850s the language which he employed, when he wrote about slaves, often reflected southern paternalism. He referred to Antony Burns as a ‘poor fugitive’, his fury reserved for the abolitionists.39 In defending the re-opening of the African slave trade he proposed to rescue Africans ‘out of the most miserable and abject of human conditions, to the comparative happiness and dignity of plantation hands’.40 After the war, back in New York, he used yet another newspaper venture the Irish Citizen to attack the policy of Reconstruction. Commenting on the phrase, ‘Irish Radicals,’ he declared ‘These two words do not go well together.’ Radicalism was not an attitude assumed by the ‘Irish race’ who did not want to force ‘the black barbarians as fellow citizens upon the already more than sufficiently humiliated community.’41 The nineteenth century was an age of expanding nationalism and empire in which racist prose flourished. The term ‘race’ was casually and enthusiastically bandied about to describe small groups and large, people of the same and of differing skin colour, inhabitants of long-established states and members of acephalous societies. It was a time of growing knowledge, eager scientific and pseudoscientific definition and categorisation. While Mitchel dismissed the newly emancipated slaves as barbarians, the New York Times, in the wake of the 1863 draft riots, described the Irish as barbarians, ‘brutish’ and ‘animal’. The New York Tribune (which in 1854 Mitchel had despised for its ‘philanthropy and balderdash’) called the rioters a ‘savage mob’, a ‘pack of savages’ and a ‘mob of incarnate devils’.42 Historians have pointed out that the Irish themselves were targets of racist abuse in the United States and in Europe, dismissed as barbarians who could not be civilised, compared to Negroes, depicted in cartoons as dark skinned and simian featured. On the Philadelphia stage Ira Aldridge and his free black troop satirised them, while back in Britain, Carlyle, Mitchel’s literary mentor and hero, stabbed them with his racist prose. Fittingly, John Mitchel, this restless exile, whose writings were to exert such an influence on later generations of Irish nationalists, would die at the family home in Newry, as MP. for Tipperary.43 Long before that he recognised

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that his children had become Americans. It was borne in upon him in France. He had rushed off there in 1859 in the belief that Napoleon III was about to go to war with Britain over the Italian question. Though this hope was disappointed, he impulsively moved his wife and four youngest children to Paris and, almost simultaneously, his mother’s Brooklyn household decided to try life in London. These changes pleased his sister in County Down who wrote to him suggesting that, as a family, the Mitchels’ American adventures were over. John replied sharply. ‘Neither England nor Ireland is very habitable to those who have been a few years in America, and I know well that neither William nor Mary nor Henty will ever feel at home till they set foot in the United States again. Or Disunited States – it is all the same.’44 Within weeks of writing this, his two eldest sons were in uniform preparing to fight for the Confederate cause for the young Mitchels were not only Irish Americans, they had become southerners. Their very first experience of the United States had introduced them to that way of life. On arrival in America the Michel family had been attracted to Brooklyn because they had cousins there. Dr John Haslett, from John Mitchel’s maternal Derry connections, was a surgeon in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but for such an appointment he was unusually rich. Born in South Carolina, it was generally believed that he drew on plantation resources to fund his southern style carriages, splendid horses and elegantly appointed mansion on the corner of Clinton Street and Joraleman Avenue, ‘The family entertained with lavish southern hospitality … a regiment of negro servants was always at hand.’45 (If still officially a South Carolinian resident, like Major Butler’s Philadephian entourage, these domestics could have been slaves.) The sixteen-year-old John Mitchel Jr, a bright boy with a taste for mathematics, was close in age to his cousin Sullivan Haslett, the pair of them embarking on careers as civil engineers. Haslett would continue his studies in Europe, while John, went railway-building in Alabama. Meanwhile in Washington the eldest Mitchel daughter, Henty (Henrietta) became particularly friendly with two girls from Maryland. As a result of this association, Henty expressed a desire to convert to Catholicism, also explaining to her father that she felt it was impossible for a non-Catholic to be a true Irish nationalist.46 Mitchel thought her too young as yet to take such a step, but his own father’s attitude to freedom of choice in matters of religion made him respect her desire. Later in Paris, as she turned 19, Henty was received into the Catholic church. But within the year she fell ill and died in the Sacre Coeur convent. Though deposited there by her roving and impecunious family, rather than by plantocratic parents, with its transatlantic crossing and French convent schooling, Henty’s adolescence curiously resembled that experienced by the children of Maryland’s successful Catholic slaveholders in past generations. This was financially a testing time for the Mitchels. From 1859 to 1862 John Mitchel earned his living in France by writing for Irish and American


papers. After a visit to Paris, John Martin wrote that his old friend, was ‘kept prisoner providing for his family’.47 The mainstay of Mitchel’s income came from the Charleston Mercury and the success of the northern blockade meant that this arrangement was no longer reliable, so he decided to return to America. His youngest son Billy, just turned 18, insisted on accompanying him, determined to join the Confederate army like his brothers. Jenny, with equal determination, soon made up her mind to follow, leading her remaining daughters to Richmond, Virginia, through blockade and shipwreck. By this time John Mitchel jr was an officer in the South Carolina Palmetto Corps, the first foreign-born to achieve such a position. When the South Carolinians became a part of the Confederate States Army he was commissioned as Captain, recommended among others by William Lowdnes Yancey and Robert Barnewell Rhett, prominent supporters of the plan to re-open the African trade. He was also able to benefit from his family contact with more moderate southerners. James Lawrence Orr, former United States Speaker of the House, wrote him a letter of recommendation to President Jefferson Davis, drawing attention to the fact that John Mitchel jr was ‘socially a gentleman’. When his name appeared in despatches and newspapers, he was always described as ‘son of the Irish Patriot’ a phraseology employed to strengthen the South’s claim to be fighting for its national freedom. His mathematical abilities made him a much needed artillery officer. Present at the attack which drove the Federals from Fort Sumpter and started the war, he later became Sumpter’s commander, hoping for preferment from captain to major, as he organised its defence against the daily pounding from Union guns. He was constantly engaged in repair work, calling for deliveries of sand bags to be brought in under cover of darkness. More soldiers and labourers were killed by collapsing walls than by direct hits. The Negroes, who formed the labour force, complained that he drove them hard and cared little for their exposure to Federal fire.48 James, the second son, had been in Washington helping with the Southern Citizen until his father’s departure for Paris. Then he moved on to an insurance office in Richmond, Virginia where he helped recruit for the volunteer Richmond Montgomery Guards by appealing to the name of his father and calling on all who loved freedom and Ireland. His position in the early days was more hazardous than John’s. He was the first of the Mitchels to be wounded, hit in the thigh and losing two fingers from his right hand at Bull Run.49 He was still recuperating when Billy arrived from Paris and joined the First Virginia Regiment (D Company) as a private. As they fought to save slavery, all three young Mitchels lived closely with Negroes. There was John’s responsibility for his labourers but more intimate was the relationship of soldier and personal servant, which as commanding officer at Fort Sumpter, he must have experienced. We do not know who looked after James in Virginia but a description survives of him in camp on a November evening in 1863, booted and spurred, sitting at a blazing camp

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fire with other officers while ‘two or three Negro servants’ cooked supper.50 Billy shared the attentions of Ned, body slave to his friend John Dooley. Ned looked after Dooley, Mitchel and another young private, erecting a mud and wattle hut for them to sleep in if the Company stayed long enough in the one place. If not, the three young men slept exposed to the wintry elements, closely spooned together to make best use of their four blankets. Ned rolled himself in his blanket and lay down in the warm ashes of the fire.51 In the summer of 1863 General Lee led his troops into the North to attack the Union army at Gettysburg. John Dooley was wounded and taken prisoner. Billy Mitchel died in the battle, though his body was never found and for months his mother hoped that he would emerge from a northern POW camp. In July 1864 Cpt. John Mitchel, thorough and active in the performance of his duties, went up on the ramparts of Fort Sumpter to the lookout sentinel to judge the effectiveness of the trajectory of his guns, and was hit by a fragment from a mortar shell, which tore into his left leg. He died four hours later. The men who nursed him reported that he said, ‘I die willingly for the South, but oh! That it had been for Ireland.’52 Like the majority of those who fought in the Confederate Army to defend the South’s ‘peculiar institution’, the Mitchel brothers did not own any slaves. Only 350,000 out of 6,000,000 whites in the South were slaves holders in 1859, and John Mitchel worried that the cause would be betrayed by these men, less dedicated to the cause than the wealthy planters.53 Jenny Mitchel had assimilated to American life to a degree which her husband had not. As a wife in the South, organising a non-plantation household, she had direct work contact with blacks. With the exception of the year in the Tennessee mountains, which she found intolerable, Jenny had had servants all her life. Settled in the more congenial society of Knoxville, she observed slavery with interest. In particular she was struck by the treatment of an elderly female slave on a friend’s plantation, supplied with food and carried out to sit in the sun. Remarking, as so many others had done, on the greater security available to slave dependants in old age as compared with the free labour force, she surmised that in England or Ireland, this old woman would have been sent to the workhouse. But she told James Stephens, who had came south in 1857 to try and recruit her husband’s support for the newly organised Fenian movement, that, despite the benevolent aspects of the system, she never wanted to own a slave.54 It was not a temptation to which her husband’s earnings ever exposed her. When the war ended Jenny Mitchel mourned the ‘the loss of our dear South’, for which she blamed the English and the rest of the world, who had supported the northern cause, declaring that without such support the Confederates would have quickly defeated the Yankees. She thought Union officers rough and coarse and approved of southern ladies who would have nothing to do with them. As for the emancipated slaves, they were footloose


and ‘helping themselves to any little pickings left by the army’. Apparently she was not intimidated by them for she predicted they would disappear from the face of the earth as they could not manage on their own.55 However, accompanied by her shattered family, she was pleased by the thought of leaving war-torn Richmond for New York. Given the generation in which they became Americans and the standards of masculinity set by their home life, the Mitchels’ sons were condemned to become soldiers. Had their father assumed a different attitude to slavery, they might have been members of the Union army. Perhaps their careers also illustrate Kevin Quinlan’s point that the Irish who fought for the South possessed a greater feeling for the cause, than did the larger number who fought for the North.56 When Jenny Mitchel died in New York, after 20 years of widowhood, she had like her children become an Irish American, her grave in Woodlawn cemetery, Fordham, bearing a Celtic cross She had wished her husband’s grave back in Newry to be similarly marked, but by 1875 the Newry family thought such a headstone would be dangerously provocative in the Unitarian graveyard and persuaded her to withdraw her request.57 In quitting the North for the South in 1855, John Mitchel had left behind the main Irish American community in the United States. In New York, by that date, one quarter of its population had come from Ireland and by 1861 of all foreign-born New Yorkers 87 per cent were Irish.58 The leadership of that community belonged to the American born Charles O’Conor, son of a poverty stricken United Irishman from Connacht. As a wealthy lawyer, Charles O’Conor fought to make it possible for newly arrived Irishmen to be admitted to the bar before the acquisition of citizenship permitted them to do so. Promoting his own people, he was determined to keep blacks in their subordinate place, taking a number of cases which he hoped would further reinforce the Dred Scott decision. But even more influential than O’Conor was Archbishop Hughes, an emigrant from County Tyrone who had at first worked in Pennsylvania as a labourer before finding his way to clerical greatness through the network of America’s Catholic church, short of manpower and offering opportunities for the impoverished but studious, on a scale unknown in Ireland. Accepting of slavery, wary of free blacks, Hughes was in these matters typical of the community he led. Even before he had to cope with the flood of famine emigrants, the Catholic church had enough poor of its own without seeking to missionise the Negro. Nor would it have been a rewarding task. The free blacks, a product of North America’s Protestant culture, were eager to set up their own churches, ministered to by their own clergy. When John Mitchel landed in New York in 1852, he found another prominent Young Irelander among his official reception party. Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher had first met dressed in green Volunteer uniform at ‘82 Club dinner in the Rotunda in 1845; on that occasion Mitchel had taken

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an immediate dislike to Meagher because he had an English accent, acquired during his Stonyhurst education. They soon became friends, revolutionary firebrands and eventually fellow exiles in Australia. In New York, Meagher cut a dashing, hard drinking figure but, on the subject of slavery, he was much more circumspect than Mitchel. Training for the law and active in journalism, he was also a recipient of Haughton’s open letter, but he took refuge in his position as a recent arrival to simply assert his loyalty to the constitution. In 1856 Meagher published an affectionate description ‘Glimpses of the South’ after an enjoyable visit to the region. Labelled by some of his fellow Irishmen as pro-slavery he declared his reservations, ‘It would be well if America could get rid of slavery. But we can’t in our time, …’59 Meagher had arrived in America, trailing shreds of revolutionary anti-clericalism, but his behaviour in this matter and in others recommended him to Archbishop Hughes. They worked together, pillars of the Democratic Party, committed to the protection of slavery in the Old South. The splitting of the party into National and Southern Democrats, which Mitchel in his Southern Citizen had worked to secure, faced Meagher with a crisis of conscience. No enemy to slavery, he was a supporter of the Union. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumpter, solved his emotional dilemma and he set himself to raising a volunteer force from among his New York community. By the autumn of 1861 he had transformed this into the famous Irish Brigade, their green banner glittering with gold, their motto Faugh-a-Blagh (clear the way) confirming their link with the continental wild geese who had fought at Fontenoy in 1745. Eventually the Brigade comprised the 63rd, 69th and 88th New York, the 28th Massachusetts and 116th Pennsylvania regiments. Most of the soldiers were either first or second generation Irish. Meagher’s decision caused consternation in the South. In Charleston, a volunteer corps, the Meagher Guards, had to hurriedly change their name. Thomas McMahon of Charleston addressed an angry open letter to Meagher, as the head of the Irish Brigade, demanding how he could be ‘blind to the singular inconsistency of being an “Irish refugee,” who in the sacred cause of Ireland rebelled against England’s tyranny and oppression on the mother land – but now buckles on the armour of Exeter Hall’s fanaticism to strike down the liberties of a people contending only for the inalienable privileges of self-government’.60 Fighting on both sides, and thus shooting each other down, the Irish achieved a reputation for bravery, often taking high casualty rates. In all, some 38 Union regiments had the word Irish in their names and perhaps as many as 170,000 recruits had been born in Ireland.61 On the Confederate side similar reference were made to an historic past by ‘Sarsfield Southerns’ and ‘Emerald Guards’, with banners entwined with shamrocks and gilded with harps. John Mitchel stated that although overall more Irish fought for the North, a greater proportion of the Irish emigrants to the South served in the Confederate army. David T. Gleeson, twenty-first-century


historian of the Irish in the South, has revised Mitchel’s figure of 40,000 down to 20,000 but accepts the proportionate claim as accurate, with some 70 per cent able bodied Irishmen in 11 seceding states donning the blue and grey uniform.62 In the Union army, Irish emigrants were the most underrepresented group, compared to the population as a whole.63 They joined up for pay, they joined up to save the Union, which Lincoln had told them was the purpose of the war. In 1863 when he changed the war aim to the abolition of slavery yet kept asking for more men, the Irish produced draft riots in Boston and still more famously New York where Irish rioters hanged Negroes and burnt down the City’s Coloured Orphan Asylum in Fifth Avenue, an assault on the weakest of society, which went down in America’s history of most infamous deeds, along with the Presbyterian Paxton Boys murder of the Indians in the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Poor House in 1763. Both groups, acting a century apart, saw themselves as inhabiting dangerous front line positions in their adopted country, exploited, rather than supported by, the authorities. In spite of the fact that average life expectancy for an immigrant was short (some historians have placed it at six years) among those who fought and died in large numbers at Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, First and Second Bull Run (plus the fatalities among the mixed gender crowds who rioted in New York), there must have been those who had experienced the stench of the potatoes festering in the ground, dysentery and typhus, starvation and panic, the family tears, quarrels and farewells. One known example emerged as a Confederate hero. Patrick Cleyburne, dubbed ‘the Stonewall Jackson of the West’, rose to be a Major General in the Army of Tennessee and fell in battle there. A Protestant from a gentry background, he was a serving soldier during the Famine and as such had memories of protecting landlord property against hungry crowds. In 1849, his family impoverished by the Famine, sailed from Cobh and settled in Helena, Arkansas, where he succeeded in becoming a lawyer. Convinced, like Mitchel, that the South’s situation in regard to the North resembled that of Ireland and England, he joined up as a private to fight for Southern independence. By 1864 he could see military defeat looming. Focused on nationhood rather than slavery, he put forward the view that young male slaves should be emancipated and recruited in order to win the war, a dangerous suggestion which made him suspect among his military inferiors and superiors and prevented further promotion, though death in battle would secure his position as a hero.64 Two years earlier, in the summer of 1862, the Union army withdrew into northern Virginia making their way back through battle-scarred countryside. Coming upon burnt homes and derelict villages and the emaciated corpses of children abandoned by the roadside, Captain Conyham of the Irish Brigade was reminded of the Famine.65 John Mitchel, on his ambulance duties, did not falter and complained that Jefferson Davis did not sufficiently use reprisal within Union territory.

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Historians in general have reached the conclusion that Irish participation in the Civil War helped to make this group acceptable in the eyes of America as a whole. This was certainly very important in the north-east, where their numbers were large and urban and the society they encountered determinedly Protestant and church going. In the south the situation was rather different. Their numbers were small for the presence of slaves had of course restricted the opportunities for poor immigrants. Only in New Orleans did they come to form a significant urban presence. Here and elsewhere they were used as labourers in dangerous jobs, canal and levee building in unhealthy conditions, considered by their owners too hazardous for valuable slaves. White Southern society was rife with Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians, and many possessed Ulster backgrounds, predisposing them to regard Irish Catholics as superstitious and lazy. But here in America, they were not politically dangerous. Political danger now came from the blacks and their Northern supporters. The Irish emigrants for their part, despite the horrors of the free labour market, endorsed their new home as a land of opportunity, seeing themselves as superior to slaves and free blacks. By keeping a check on immigrant numbers and casting the black firmly in the position of ‘the other’, slavery made Irish absorption easy. In 1865 when the Confederate War department was desperate for troops, it tried to recruit Union prisoners to the service advising that ‘Catholic Irish be preferred’ as with the right training they could become ‘faithful soldiers’, this from a region where the leading state South Carolina, a century earlier had been scouring Europe for ‘poor Protestants’.66 Irish enthusiasm for the war effort simply completed a process already well underway. In Gone With the Wind, the great historical romance of the Old South, Margaret Mitchell’s heroine, Scarlet O’Hara, is the daughter of a hospitable and paternalist planter, who is also an Irish Catholic emigrant; the plantation next door is owned by the McIntoshes, mean spirited and money grasping Scots Irish, but the stereotypical difference here, though remembered and recorded, is a matter of local, not racial, colour. Early in the Civil War, Archbishop Hughes, at his government’s request, journeyed to Dublin to call upon would be emigrants and others to support the Union. From his home in County Limerick, Smith O’Brien warned Irishmen to avoid joining the American conflict on either side. Discussion in Ireland of US problems, enlivened the anti-slavery societies without changing the nature of their membership. The founders of the HASS were growing old. While some of the children of the ‘anti-everythingerians’ retained a commitment to good causes, most of them rejected the life of philanthropy, living comfortably on the income which their fathers’ careful business habits had ensured. Haughton’s son-in-law Professor William Neilson Hancock of Trinity College, Dublin (grandson of Samuel Neilson, United Irishman and friend of Equiano), founder member of the Irish Statistical Society, took some interest in anti-slavery, though he pooh-poohed the


notion put forward by his colleague, Professor Sullivan, that Ireland could avoid Cuba’s slave-produced sugar by growing sugar beet.67 It was from this academic circle that Ireland’s most respected pro-Union propagandist emerged. John Elliott Cairnes (1823–75) came from a brewing family in County Louth. From 1856–61 he held the Whately Professorship in Trinity College Dublin, a five year appointment awarded by examination. In 1859 he was appointed to the chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at Queen’s College, Galway. His health was poor (he died at he age of 51) and he never took up residence there, discouraged by the western city’s lack of indoor privies. But it is for his Galway professorship that he is remembered. In part this is due to his commitment to that wilting plant, Irish non-sectarian education; a radical liberal who believed in female suffrage and Negro rights, Cairnes used his influence to ensure the defeat of the Irish Universities Bill (1873) which produced the resignation of William Gladstone’s first and epoch making Liberal administration. More positively however in an age, in Ireland and beyond, when the academic world saw economics as an appurtenance to law, Cairnes devoted himself solely to the newer discipline. His writings gained the attention of a wide audience, among them John Stuart Mill who sought his opinion when developing his thoughts on economic problems.68 When the Civil War broke out Cairnes delivered a set of lectures on the cause of the conflict to his students in Trinity College, Dublin. The subject excited him deeply. It was a topic of global importance, a welcome change from Ireland’s peculiar problems. It allowed him to use his professional skill to explain to the public the importance of economics in shaping the course of history. John Stuart Mill eagerly encouraged his friend to expand these lectures into a book. Cairnes never visited the United States but the picture which he drew of the South in The Slave Power, Its Character, Career and Probable Designs, was in many ways very like the region portrayed by Mitchel; a power with a need to expand aggressively westwards and southwards into regions suitable for slave agriculture, a society in which a group of intellectuals called vigorously for the re-opening of the slave trade and ‘mean whites’ offered a shocking example of laziness and ignorance. Yet not only was Cairnes a critic of slavery, as Mitchel was its apologist, Cairnes had been propelled into writing his book by a fear at which Jenny and John Mitchel would have scoffed. Cairnes, urged on by his friend and fellow liberal John Stuart Mill, was very worried that neutral Britain, sympathised with, and was in danger of recognising, the Confederacy. In Britain, while anti-slavery societies praised the Northern stance and urged the Federal government to turn the war to preserve the Union into a war against slavery, the press and politicians saw it differently. Britain’s addiction to free trade meant that it was seen as a tariff war – the North importing British manufactured goods and starting to produce its own, favoured a higher customs duties; the agricultural South, wishing Britain to purchase as much of its cotton as possible, wanted low duties. By

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the second year of the war the Times and the Edinburgh Review were vigorously denouncing Lincoln’s attempt to conquer the Confederacy.69 Though the British public was not sympathetic to Irish nationalism, British liberals sympathised with other national struggles in Europe and had no bother in accepting the South’s claim that it was a very different society from the North and thus entitled to its own separate identity. Cairnes noted, with distress, that the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, in Palmerston’s Liberal government (a government formed to promote the nationalist struggle in Italy) had acknowledged this.70 John Bright, Quaker, anti-slavery enthusiast, radical liberal and suspicious government supporter, saw Gladstone (Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer) as possessing pro-Southern tendencies springing from his youth as the son of a West Indian slave owner. In Liverpool, which had so unwillingly relinquished the still profitable slave trade half a century earlier, ships were being illegally built to provide the Confederates with armed vessels to run the Northern blockade. The disappointing economic performance of Britain’s West Indian colonies since emancipation, and the generally ungrateful behaviour of non-whites throughout the empire, further discouraged sympathy for the plight of slaves in the South. Cairnes’s book (the first shorter version published before Lincoln turned to emancipation as a war aim, the second longer edition coming out the year that he did so) was aimed at turning the public and official mind to firm support of the North.71 He showed the North as democratic and progressive, the South as oligarchical and aggressively imperialist. And in doing so he drove home the argument that the South’s claim to be different, to the possession of a national identity strangled by the North, was based on slaveholding.72 Slavery was not only immoral but economically retrograde – a potent initiator of economic development, it soon became a force for agricultural decline and a strangler of industrial growth.73 As further reading, Cairnes warmly recommended R. D. Webb’s, The Life and Letters of John Brown.74 Cairnes was friendly with Webb, making use of his bookshop and his print works.75 Like Webb, Cairnes developed stimulating epistolary contacts in the United States. His favourite correspondent in America was an abolitionist, Mrs Susan Shaw. In July 1863 when Billy Mitchel fell at Gettysburg and the Irish rioted in New York, her son Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of the first black regiment, was killed leading his troops at the storming of Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Cairnes was deeply shocked at the young man’s death and named his own baby son for the fallen officer. However he himself was never a doctrinaire abolitionist, recommending that if the South were shorn of its western states, slavery would die a natural death.76 Thus his final solution very much resembled Smith O’Brien’s pre-war suggestion that, if slavery could be removed from the border states, the institution would in time wither away in the Old South. Contemporaries and historians have endorsed the importance of Slave Power, attributing waning British support for Southern aims to Cairnes’s


argument. His influence on later scholars of slavery from Eugene Genovese to Fogel and Engerman has also been acknowledged.77 It is a book which, even when dealing with emigration, does not focus on Ireland. Yet at the time of writing it, Cairnes was already influencing John Stuart Mill to shift his liberal, free market views sufficiently to allow for state intervention to secure Irish peasant proprietorship, a move which Mill made by 1865.78 Cairnes, like O’Connell and the ‘antieverythingerians’, found in slavery a morally compelling international cause, its attractions increased by the fact that it lay outside the confines of their own island. When it came to producing solutions for the ending of slavery, Thomas Francis Meagher, Archbishop Hughes, Smith O’Brien and John Elliott Cairnes all held somewhat similar ideas. It could be tolerated in some degree, and would probably decay in the fullness of time. It was those of more extreme persuasions who sought war and therefore brought the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ to an end. The Irish supporters of this uncompromising rivalry were R. D. Webb and John Mitchel. Secession was a foolhardy act and there Mitchel was an expert. The main practical and physical impact of the American Civil War in Ireland was on the north. The shortage of raw cotton produced slump and hardship in Lancashire’s textiles towns and raised the demand for linen goods as a substitute. The sixties boom made Belfast the largest linen producing centre in the world by the close of the decade.79 Not many new mills and factories were built but existing premises were greatly extended. Growth mushroomed in the countryside where employers could pay lower wages and make use of the railway network to send the finished product to Belfast for sale and export. Between 1862–8 the number of powerlooms in Ulster’s linen industry rocketed from almost nil to 4108, the majority of them in small towns or hamlets.80 In the same period the number of linen operatives in Ireland increased from 33,500 to 57,000.81 In county Armagh and in the valley of the upper Bann, where Mary Leadbeater had holidayed in adolescence, R. D. Webb had been born and the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Moyallon had launched its petition, the Quaker community invested in this development and rose from competence to riches. Their female operatives, and young persons below 18, were restricted by the 1844 Factory Act to a 12-hour day, but until 1870 on the bleach greens, where the employment was heavily male, men and boys worked 14 hours or more, as this was considered a healthy outdoor environment. The wages from all this were largely expended on rent and on supplies (oatmeal for stirabout, tea, sugar and potatoes) often purchased from a Company shop. The houses, built by the employers, straggling between the mills, along the river and railway line, a mixture of rows of thatched cabins and urban style, whitewashed brick dwellings with slated roofs, some of them back-to-backs, most without yards or garden, to keep hens, a pig, or grow potatoes. (Shopping and sanitary facilities were recorded in long-remembered rural rhymes – ‘I live in the row/ I deal in the Co. (Company store)/I shit in the forty acre.’)

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For themselves the owners built in a varied, modern manner, absolutely new turreted castles, or added to Georgian residences, once squarely austere, now freshly fronted with huge sash windows and Grecian style porticoes, sometimes topped with additional stories, sometimes spreading out into servants’ wings. Backed by old stable yards and new walled gardens, encircled by evergreen shrubberies and swept up to by chestnut lined avenues, these mansions were nevertheless approached through, and looked out upon, mill chimneys, the workers’ row and green fields, striped white with bleaching linen like some giant’s washday. The railways brought in the coal for steam power and even some brown linen manufactured in England and Scotland for Irish bleaching, all imported through the port of Belfast. They took away the finished bales to Belfast where, in the case of the most successful families, like the Richardsons of Armagh and Down, increasingly quitting Quakerism for the Church of Ireland, the product would still be handled by the manufacturer. Large sections of the Georgian terraces which had grown up around the White Linen Hall in Waddell Cunningham’s time were now being demolished to make way for Italianate palaces, the commercial offices and warehouses of the big linen firms. Some rose in firmly restrained classical style (Moore and Wineberg, present premises the Linen Hall Library) but more popular was flamboyant Venetian Gothic, the most lavish of all (present Marks and Spencers) created by Richardson and Owden, the original Ulster drapers augmented by Liverpuddlian expertise. By 1871, 21,000 of the town’s entire commercial and industrial workforce of 50,000 were engaged in making or dealing in textiles and dress.82 As the shawlies clattered their way, early and late, through the redbrick streets to the redbrick mills, observers drew comparison between Belfast and the textiles towns of New England (Lowell and Lynn) where employers and workers (many of them Irish) worried about the disruption of cotton supplies and increasingly denounced the hostilities with the South. Thus the ebb and flow of slavery and anti-slavery, famine and war, confirmed the growing importance of the burgeoning Atlantic world.

14 A Special Relationship?

Slavery as a metaphor had a widespread appeal and a long pedigree. Love, as the strongest of emotional bonds, was an obvious subject. In eighteenthcentury London, James Boswell, white and pro-slavery, employed it whimsically to describe male subjection to female attraction; in nineteenthcentury Philadelphia, Sarah Forten, a black contributor to her city’s antislavery bazaar was charmed by a local effusion employing the same technique.1 In Ireland this playful, heterosexual approach was less in evidence but the analogy with religious experience echoed down the ages from St Patrick’s declaration that he was a slave of Christ to the eighteenthcentury Presbyterian and nineteenth-century evangelical assertion that Irish Catholics were enslaved by Popery. By this time however the changing political world was producing an array of direct comparisons, as well as the continued use of implicit analogies, between black bondage and Irish conditions. By the 1790s anti-slave trade agitation and war with France, increasingly focused public attention on the West Indies. In 1793, an Irish emigrant to the continent warned those seeking French help to be careful lest they should end up finding their country ‘swopped for some sugar island’.2 A year earlier James Mullalla’s pamphlet and Edward Byrne’s call for a Catholic Convention highlighted the analogy between slave freedom and Catholic emancipation. When the county assizes took place at the end of that summer, from all over Ireland high sheriffs and grand juries published indignant denunciation of Byrne’s message accusing the wealthy sugar baker of snubbing parliament, encouraging riot, French democracy, popish democracy and a full scale return of the Penal Laws.3 In 1800, Peter Burrowes, lawyer, defender of the United Irishmen and Patriot MP, writing in support of emancipation, also condemned comparisons between Irish Catholics and slaves. ‘I think that those who persuade themselves that Catholic discontent and disaffection is informidable because there are so many instances of the physical force of a country being kept in galling subjection by a few, confound matters totally dissimilar. In Ireland the Catholic body form a part of the 312

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effective government itself. Can the same be said of the blacks of Jamaica?’4 Burrowes obviously intended his question to be rhetorical. Part of the pro-and anti-slavery debate concerned a comparison between the condition of the New World slaves and the lower orders in the Old World. In defence of the trade, Admiral Heathfield had stated that an African on a slave ship had as much cubic air to breathe as a British soldier in a tent.5 While Wilberforce was MP for Yorkshire, the largest and most populous county seat in England, where the 40 shilling free holder constituted a wide franchise, a downturn in the woollen industry, dislocated by the French Wars, caused widespread distress among the workers. (Later Yorkshire would burst into Luddism, with as many troops stationed in the county to protect the mills and new machinery as there were fighting under Wellington in Spain. Parliament would make machine-breaking punishable by death.) But Wilberforce was puzzled by the suggestion that the collapse of their livelihood put these Yorkshire operatives in a position analogous to the slaves. However great their economic hardships they were living in their own society, with parliamentary representatives, the operation of the poor law, the philanthropy of the gentry and the church to offer them relief. (He was particularly anxious that the church appear as the font of charity.) In the subsequent decades as both the anti-slave trade movement and industrial revolution gathered strength, the comparison between black bondage in the West Indies and the ‘wage slaves’ at home was increasingly to the fore. By the 1820s complaints were raised that while the hours of slaves were limited by parliament, those of workers were not. A cartoon appeared showing a fat black man cheerfully eating bananas under a tree, while an unemployed white labourer wept, his head sunk between his hands on an empty table, his emaciated wife and child looking on. (This type of representation blossomed in Ireland into Mitchel’s remark about fat Negroes and starving peasants in Skibereen.) In the 1840s, a Scottish weaver visiting the United States, commented on the opulence of slave life, ridiculing well dressed girls in Sunday best, aping white manners as well as white fashions. Nor, he explained, did the flogging and selling of slaves particularly disturb him, familiar as he was with working class Scottish families, who had to watch their young disappear into far off mills, where cruel corporal punishment was meted out to factory children.6 Back in the 1790s, the elderly John Greg, living in the home counties, more than a quarter of a century after he had left Belfast, argued that the English poor were much worse off than the West Indian slaves.7 There was, however, no shortage of specifically Irish analogies. SK in his Cork pamphlet remarked unfavourably on the peasant habit of living in the same house as their animals. The West Indian slaves would put livestock into the squalid cabin inhabited by the natives of Tipperary; their own huts were decidedly superior. However later mention of slaves dying because overseers were too careless to distribute supplies, accounts of ‘cruel whippings’,


mutilation in the workplace and suicide, diluted the reader’s notion that Antiguan slaves led a more favoured existence than the Irish.8 In 1802 Lady Nugent, whose husband had served in Ireland through the 1798 rebellion, and emerged as Governor of Jamaica, treated her house servants (‘the blackies’) to beef and punch, remarking that ‘I only wish the poor Irish were half as well off’.9 In 1804 Samuel Watt explaining to his brother James that slaves were much more comfortable in Barbados than in Africa added, ‘and I assure you much happier than the labourers and lower orders of people in our part of Ireland.’10 To compare and evaluate misfortune, comes naturally to mankind. There are historical means of tackling a comparison other than collecting those made by contemporaries. The daily diet laid down as sufficient in the Jamaican slave code of 1792 (eight plantains or three pints of maize meal, plus one herring) was probably comparable to that of an Irish peasant consuming his potatoes and buttermilk.11 Working on nineteenth-century material and using sophisticated methods of calculation, cliometric experts have calculated the West Indian intake at 2500 to 3000 calories per day, with that of the Irish male labourer at 2500 to 3168 a day.12 (A 1839 survey of Clare, Limerick and Tipperary, all Munster dairying regions, assessed the male labourers daily diet at 13 lbs of potatoes and three pints of buttermilk, which would come out at a calorific count of over 4000.)13 Such calculations apply to normal times not disaster, which lurked near the surface in both societies. The labour demands on both were different. Sugar cultivation was heavier, but it did have a high point in its harvest when the liquor was being boiled and most of the workforce had access to the sweet, running liquid, a time, the diarist Thomas Thistlewood recorded, when the human libido rose and wife beating increased as the Negro men accused their women of sexual betrayal.14 But the potatoes, consumed in a temperate climate, secured a rising population which slavery and sugar did not. Slave life also differed according to crop, climate and timing. The expanding sugar frontier produced the highest rates of slave mortality. In the eighteenth century, wars between Britain and France caused serious disruption of food supplies which could result in the starvation of slaves on the Caribbean islands. By the early nineteenth century the Old South, as manifested in Frederick Douglas’s Maryland, was a mature plantation system where tobacco was going into decline and cotton did not always provide a ready substitute. Both Maryland and Virginia were selling slaves into new lands further south and west, but those who remained lived in a well-established society, more affluent than rural Ireland, where slaves did acquire clothes and shoes and social habits (attendance at church, camp meetings and barbecues, a thirst for literacy) far removed from European notions of slave poverty and toil. But the laws which banned them from turning their economic improvement into civil rights and upward social mobility remained. In the first four


decades of the nineteenth century, as substantial localised potato failures appeared as a recurring factor (1801, 1817, 1822, 1831, 1835–7, 1839, 1842), it became clear that cottars and labourers were in far more hazardous conditions than slaves in the United States.15 ‘In America the slave is called a slave – he is black and is flogged: in Ireland he is called a labourer – he is white and is only starved,’ wrote Mary Leadbeater’s brother, Ebenezer Shackleton, in bitter irony to the Freeman’s Journal, 26 August 1840.16 Five years later, after encountering Dublin’s beggars and North Munster’s rural poor, Frederick Douglass wondered if he had any business collecting for the anti-slavery cause in Ireland. Particularly in eastern Europe famine would remain a factor in peasant life until the twentieth century. Historians have compared European peasant life, including conditions of serfdom in eastern Europe, with US slavery, and concluded that, outside the threat of famine, peasants were in a much superior position. Such discussions tend to revolve around the existence of advantages in regard to ‘community,’ ‘autonomy’ and ‘cultural traditions’. Peasants came from long established societies, where a landlord or serf owner was continually reminded of traditional rights and methods and breached them at his peril.17 Though lacking in privileges, these tillers of the land were incorporated into the institutions of church and state. Above all a people with a sense of place, they possessed their own long rooted and extended family and village networks. Slaves in contrast had no recourse to the courts except when dragged there as malefactors. Their African religious rituals were punished, with very little in the way of effective conversion to Christianity being supplied for at least a century and a half. Their family life and mores were annihilated by transportation across the Atlantic, but their determined attempts to adopt new patterns in the Americas were undermined through sale and sexual harassment by whites. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some startling comparisons were made between Irish landlords and tenants and American slave holders and their human property. In 1859 Smith O’Brien wrote to his wife Lucy from the United States, ‘You know how anxious I am to cultivate the kindly sympathies of our tenants and labourers but I confess that I am outdone by the barbarous Slave driver of the South.’ He made this comment after visiting a slave estate with Alexander Stephens, leading Southern politician to whom Mitchel had addressed the Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). O’Brien declared that if he had to find fault with this ‘champion of the slaveholders’ it would be more on the grounds of his ‘excessive indulgence’ towards the Negroes than towards his ‘severity’.18 Describing Irish society some 80 years earlier Arthur Young wrote, ‘A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant or cottar dares refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but unlimited submission. Disrespect or anything tending towards sauciness he may punish with his cane and his horsewhip with the most perfect security; a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the


country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters; a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people must live …’19 How far should such statements be taken at their face value? Obviously O’Brien’s hosts were very conscious of being on show to the aristocratic and influential Irish visitor. Leading southern planters felt it incumbent to try to live up to the paternalist pro-slavery ideology which the antebellum South had produced in response to abolitionist criticism. In Arthur Young’s case the comment about ‘knocking down’ seems unexceptional. It reflects the greater power of the landlord and the greater poverty of the tenantry in Ireland; the obverse side of the apparent acceptance of ill treatment was the presence of communal agrarian violence. Also in England the decline in the use of physical violence to discipline employees and other social inferiors was a developing trend from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and doubtless varied from locality to locality. Young’s remark about the treatment of women is more unusual. It could of course be an untruth, the product of hubris generated by class, gender and alcohol. If not, it certainly represents the wielding of power to produce sexual gratification, which St Patrick had condemned so stoutly in the fifth century. However the Táin suggests that such behaviour was countenanced in an earlier age, when the high esteem of King Conchobar is driven home by the statement that ‘Any Ulsterman who gave him a bed for the night gave him his wife as well to sleep with.’20 Were the husbands and landlords of County Cork adhering to ancient tradition? Was it a case of the coloniser preserving and exploiting those customs of the colonised which worked to his advantage? (Of course there are historians who regard this twelfth century text of the Táin as a satire, in which case it is the art form, not the wife sharing, which is here revealed as a venerable Irish tradition.) Writing about the first half of the eighteenth century Charles O’Hara described the cottar tenants of Sligo as ‘the lowest species of slaves’ paying their rent in kind and reduced in numbers by graziers (among whom would be numbered his own sought after ‘gentlemen farmers’) from some 6000 to 4000 by the 1750s.21 Here O’Hara equates lack of rights to property as constituting slavery. In 1818 Maria Edgeworth published her father’s memoirs, illustrating them with drawings by her sister. One of these depicted a labourer who referred to himself as a slave. On carefully considering his reaction, Maria Edgeworth, who had seen analogies between Ireland and Jamaica, came to the conclusion that the self-dubbed slave was not actually ‘enslaved’.22 It is understandable that the Irish should at times describe themselves as slaves, or be so described by social observers. Poverty and powerlessness made the term appear all too applicable. R. R. Madden noted that Jamaican blacks and the Hibernian peasantry shared a way with words.23


Later commentators have seen the resort to wit as the hall mark of an oppressed people, adding Jews to the Irish and the African Americans.24 Irish historians have argued vigorously as to whether or not conquest and plantation removed Ireland from the European norm in regard to the continued existence of traditional practices and reciprocal loyalties between peasantry and the upper ranks of society. Whatever the answer, Irish peasant life possessed a continuity lacking from that of Africans transported across the Atlantic. Despite linguistic change, place names and personal names were strong survivals; folk religion, patterns (visit to the saint’s shrine on his or her day) and festive wakes lived through penal times to be thoroughly overhauled by the resurgent Catholic church in an age of ultramontane enthusiasm. The connection of the peasantry to their church in the eighteenth century is shown by reverence for mass houses and mass rocks, the payment of clergy and popular participation in the clerical quarrel over the interdict in the parishes around Mitchelstown. The profession of soldier (impossible for the slave) remained open, the Catholic gentry recruiting for continental armies and by the close of the eighteenth century for the British. But most vivid of all the existence of a degree of peasant autonomy and a vibrant community life was signalled by the unflagging persistence of agrarian unrest – Houghers, Whiteboys, Oakboys, Steelboys, Rightboys, Ribbon Men, Rockites, Shanavests, Whitefeet and Terry Alts. Presbyterians or Catholics, these habits of combination would serve the Irish well as they transformed themselves into Regulators, Corkonians, Fardowners and white trade unionists in the New World.25 Until the French revolution produced the disintegration of colonial St Domingue, Caribbean slave revolts had been volcanic, uncoordinated and immediately suppressed with extensive torture and slaughter. While on the American mainland, slaves, living in scattered units, a permanent minority among the whites, could only hone their low key resistance by running away, breaking tools, lying, thieving, feigning stupidity, going slow. When it came to the existence of autonomy and community the Irish peasantry inhabited a different ethos from that of the slave. All positions of authority, all situations of economic exploitation, have something in common. Poverty intensifies oppression as everyone seeks to avoid the bottom rung. In the early 1840s the Devon Commission was told ‘again and again how labourers were oppressed by farmers’. Made ‘dependent as slaves’, ‘more wretched than the fellahs of Egypt or the blacks of Cuba’, ‘Every class in this country oppresses the class below it, until you come to the most wretched class … . There is no exaction practised by their superiors that they do not practise upon those below them.’26 This situation could be found throughout the intense and subtle gradations of Europe’s peasant villages, with the landless serf, like the Irish cottar and labourer, at the bottom. Slaves were not an undifferentiated group, their conditions varied geographically and from crop to crop. There were house slaves, drivers, artisans, urban slaves, as well as field slaves. But the field hands were by far


the majority, the reason for the existence of the rest. The upwardly mobile slave was better known to his master, more directly exposed to his whims, kept obedient not only by the menace of the whip but by the threat (so vividly chronicled by Frederick Douglass) of being returned to the field. The Famine emigrants arrived in the years of the antebellum South, when proslavery voices were at their most articulate. Less well known emigrants than John Mitchel contrasted the paternalism of the planter with the callousness of the Irish landlords – no planter would ever starve his slave.27 Of course the behaviour of both groups was dictated by economic interest. The tenant who could not pay the rent was of no value to the landlord. A slave holder who hit hard times, could at least feed himself by selling his property and realise capital to relocate into another business. It was because the slave was unfree that he was valuable. Maunsel White, arrived from Tipperary, had no hereditary bondsmen. His extensive workforce was acquired through his business acumen. His good treatment of his slaves was noted not only by Mitchel and Smith O’Brien but by African Americans, giving evidence to the Louisiana writers’ project in the 1930s.28 His letters to his many overseers reveal concern for his workforce. When measles broke out on one of his cotton plantations he reminded the overseer that the health of the slaves should be the foremost consideration ‘let what may happen the crop’.29 Personally, a man who tried to treat both slaves and paid employees with consideration (which many did not), he perceived such practice as being consonant with his economic well being. Similarly as an expanding estate owner with access to rich development land, he favoured the re-opening of the African slave trade as in his business interest. By crossing the Atlantic the average Irish emigrant ceased to be a poor peasant and became a ‘wage slave’ in the cities and on the spreading building network of projected canals and railways. Garrison and the American abolitionists saw things as Wilberforce had done 60 years earlier; poverty was a misfortune and a hardship against which the free man must and could struggle. But slavery was an evil. ‘Far better to have been one of the starving poor of Ireland whose bones had to bleach on the highways than to have been a slave with the curse of slavery stamped upon yourself and children,’ wrote Harriet Jacobs, a slave girl from small town North Carolina, who had spent seven years hiding in the roof space of her grandmother’s dwelling, rather than return to the service of her sexually predatory master, the local doctor, and his vindictive wife.30 The planters in Jacobs’s generation countered directly with the theory of positive good; slavery, the guarantor of civilisation in the ancient world, had emerged in America in the modern age based upon a race designed by nature for loyalty and hard labour. Pro-slavery propagandists in the antebellum South argued that slaves were better fed and enjoyed a more comfortable lifestyle than the Northern labourer, particularly the recent immigrant, something which it was not difficult for the Irish to believe. Largely dismissed in the wake of the Civil


War, the outcome of which proved the economic superiority of the industrial North over the stagnant agrarian South, elements of the proslavery argument have surfaced into a wider, recently revived debate. Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross followed by Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract has used cliometrics to argue that under slavery the South was a vibrant and expanding economy and that slaves, often employed on task work rather than in labour gangs, organising the plantations to an extent that kept them out of contact with the white man and receiving substantial rations of pork and maize, possessed a lifestyle and diet which could be favourably compared with that of the North’s urban poor. The disadvantages of free labour were most chilling and vividly recorded by Frederick Lee Olmsted, Northern observer and critic of slavery, describing the work situation of the Irish in the South. Here Irish gangs were employed on unhealthy projects, draining damp malaria areas or in dangerous work situations. In Alabama, Olmsted travelled by river boat from Mobile along the Tomabigbee. At the village of Cliaborne, they stopped to take on cotton. The store in which the bales had been collected, stood on top of a bluff some 150 feet high. The vessel anchored immediately below and planks were put in place to make a slide from warehouse to ship’s deck. The heavy bales tumbled down the plank with a fearful velocity, their course impossible to control exactly so that passengers ran for cover and the rails of the vessel splintered under the impact of a rogue bale bouncing off into the river. The recklessness of the whole operation struck Olmsted as typically south-western, a frontier scene. But he noticed that the men throwing down the bales from on top of the bluff were black slaves and those on deck receiving and stowing them were Irish. The ship’s mate on being questioned about this division of labour explained ‘The niggers are worth too much to be risked here: if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody looses anything!’31 Here the Irish not the slaves are dismissed as non-people, Irish freedom is more dangerous than black bondage, extreme poverty annihilates liberty. Like the position of the Redlegs after slave emancipation, this is a vivid example of how the poor white could fall below the blacks, a terrifying prospect against which the Irish fought with vigour. A convenient weapon in their armoury was American racism. Thus John Maginnis, Young Irelander and immigrant to New Orleans, wrote to a fellow countryman, with satisfaction about the status of the free blacks surrounding them. They might own property but ‘one thing you know they cannot do [:] d – m them {,} why [they] can’t vote. Dye mind that.’32 The seventeenth-century Barbadian experience and the nineteenth century are analogous, what is clear is that Irish and slaves were together at the bottom of society and that the white group overall had more chance of upward mobility. The people who emerged as Americans from these experiences took different attitudes to the United States; African Americans feeling that it has not been kind to them, the Irish, on the whole, reacting positively to their new native land.


Just because they inhabited contiguous layers at the bottom of society, Irish and Africans at times can be found in close, indeed affectionate relationships. Such evidence stretches from the woods and thickets of seventeenth-century Barbados to revolutionary Boston where John Adams recorded mulattoes and Irish teagues rioting together against the British. Seventy-five years later the same groups could be found consorting together in the New York gangland at Five Points.33 In the expanding urban underworld of the early nineteenth-century cities they were brought together by alcohol. In the North this was simply part of unrespectable life. In the South it could produce court prosecutions; a readiness to convict female Irish saloon keepers for illegally serving liquor to slaves was strengthened by the suspicion that more intimate relations existed between the parties involved.34 In Maryland, in the decade of Charles Carroll’s arrival, Lord Baltimore’s Irish maid servant, Nell Butler, fell in love with Major Boarman’s ‘saltwater’ Negro slave, Charles, and determined to marry him. When warned against this step, and told that by doing so she would enslave herself and her children, she replied that ‘She had rather Marry the Negro under them circumstances than to marry his Lordship with his Country.’35 Our knowledge of Nell Butler is vivid but momentary, in the case of Mary ‘a native of Ireland’ who in 1805 married John Jea, a Methodist lay preachercum-ship’s cook and an ex-slave from New York, we have indirect but chronologically extended information. Deciding to missionise in Ireland, John Jea landed in Limerick where he remained for two years in spite of the fact that his preaching attracted the fury of Catholic priests, and Calvinists, the former threatening to murder him.36 Mary agreed to become the third Mrs Jea, apparently undaunted by his colour, stormy Irish career or the disasters encompassing her predecessors (Maltese Charity, briefly the second Mrs Jea, had died far from home in Amsterdam, while Elizabeth, the first Mrs Jea,’of the Indian colour’ had taken against religion and committed infanticide for which, in her husband’s view, she had been deservedly executed.)37 John and Mary sailed from Cobh for Halifax but, through illness and misadventure, she ended up in Plymouth, he in a French prison at Paimpol, a victim of Napoleonic privateering. It took him three years to extricate himself from France but on returning to Plymouth he found Mary waiting for him among the port’s ‘brethren in Christ ‘and they settled down together, the marriage remaining childless, whether through infertility or infant mortality, we are not told. He attempted to establish a place of public worship in a small house in Hawk Street and, perhaps in the hopes of generating funds for his venture, published The life, history and unparalleled sufferings of John Jea, the African preacher (1815).38 Picaresque and horrific, this work depicts the African American search for self-worth and upward mobility through Christianity and shows just how dubious were the rewards. Having set out upon one of the few aspirational avenues open to blacks in this age of slavery and evangelical enthusiasm, John Jea’s autobiography


reveals a life of poverty, insecurity, restless movement and spiritual obsession. That any woman would struggle to maintain such a partnership over a prolonged period of time suggests deep affection, or the absence of any better prospects back home in Ireland or, possibly, some combination of both. As Nell Butler’s story shows working in domestic service bought Irish women and blacks together. More competitive conditions in the nineteenth century did not change this. African Americans remained a presence in every field of manual labour, so that white domestics could encounter them in and outside the home. ‘It’s a fine city in truth it is … .barrin the nagurs’ wrote one Irish girl of New Orleans.39 But as the role of servant (like the role of slave) in a small establishment could be very isolating, others found comfort in such company. Mary Harlon, probably left Ireland in the mid-1850s, her nearest remaining contacts there, her two brothers and her parish priest. Her fare was paid from a female emigration fund, the brainchild of Vere Foster, County Louth landlord and philanthropist. At first she worked in New York but the shortage of servants made it possible for her to bargain over wages and change her job if an employer proved uncooperative. In 1864, in answer to a newspaper advertisement, she travelled to Florida to take up a position doing ‘ginrel housework’ for a small family. She kept in touch with Vere Foster and described her latest situation in Key West, ‘and I am alone out here. I have no person but a Colard man that dos the housework around the place and I read to him when I have time and he is very glad to here me read to him. He wants me to let him have my Books so I lend thim to him.’40 The situation of the Irish, eager to improve their own perilous or disadvantaged position by exploiting racism, yet understanding many of the difficulties faced by the socially despised, laid them open to contradictory feelings and behaviour. The two most famous anti-slavery texts by black abolitionists furnish examples. Just before Equiano describes how Captain Doran’s took him aboard The Charming Sally to sell in Montserrat, the autobiographer explains how unexpected his misfortune was in the light of earlier good treatment on the Aetna. In particular he stresses happy times and kindness from a man listed in the ship’s pay books as ‘Daniel Quinn, able sea man’ who, in Equiano’s view, was ‘very well educated’, helped with his reading and taught him how to dress hair. ‘Indeed I almost loved him with the affection of a son … . He used to say, that he and I never should part; and that when our ship was paid off, as I was as free as himself and any other man on board, he would instruct me in his business by which I might gain a good livelihood.’41 Other than his name (which Equiano transcribed as Queen) there is nothing to indicate Quinn’s Irish background yet the juxtaposition with the subsequent paragraph detailing Doran’s menacing behaviour inevitably raise thoughts of the Irish duality towards black bondage, sympathetic at one level, harsh on another. If this is an overimaginative interpretation of The Interesting Narrative, Frederick Douglass in his


first autobiography, directly confronts the janus-like reaction of the Irish towards slavery. Describing his experiences as a boy, awakening to an understanding of the existence of an abolition movement, he refers to an incident on the wharf at Baltimore, Maryland; ‘and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, “Are ye a slave for life?” I told him I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He said it was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to the north, that I should find friends there and that I should be free. I pretended not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters. I was afraid that these seemingly good men might use me so but I nevertheless remembered their advice and from that time I resolved to run away.’42 Throughout his life Douglas’s ambivalent attitude to the Irish remained. In youth he had been stirred to pursue his freedom on reading Arthur O’Connor’s 1793 speech in support of Catholic Emancipation. Later he had praised Protestant habits of hard work and abstinence and condemned Ireland’s Catholics as lazy and unprogressive, yet in old age when faced by the Home Rule crisis, he unwillingly declared in favour of Parnell’s Party as the champion of a just cause. Such apparent oscillation was no personal quirk on Douglas’s part but represented an African American dilemma which was passed on to the next generation. In March 1921 the black leader W.E.B. Du Bois published an article in support of Irish independence declaring that, ‘No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro’. But later in the article he went on to say ‘No people in the world have in the past gone with blither spirit to “kill niggers” from Kingston to Delhi and from Kumasi to Fiji’ than the Irish. While they also, ‘provided the back bone for the AFL [American Federation of Labour] policies of excluding Negro workers’.43 Thus African Americans and the Irish shared mutually ambivalent attitudes to one another. The Irish often felt empathy for blacks, but it was usually against their social and economic interest to let it reign supreme, hence their group identity as racists. Kinder feelings belonged to the private not the public sphere. The combination of Irish and Africans at the lower levels of society with the added presence of the Irish as slave owners, overseers and traders makes the existence of ‘black Irish’ inevitable. Such people however are not easy to trace, as for centuries those with recording power had no wish to mention them. One of the earliest attempts to uncover this past was made by a Jesuit, Father Joseph J. Williams. Working in Jamaica in the early twentieth century he was struck by the number of Irish names he encountered among the


school children and set about an historical investigation. This provided him with the letters about Henry Cromwell’s boys and girls, but while the intention to acquire them had entered official records, there is no evidence as to whether or not they actually arrived. Again official records spoke generally of servants from Barbados moving to Jamaica at the time of its conquest, but no names were collected. The first list Father Williams found was for property holders in 1670; of these 717 names he judged some 10 per cent to be Irish, pointing out that such a list obviously eliminated those in the servant class.44 Only one of the names he gives from 1670 corresponds with the names of the nine little boys he photographed around 1920, two of them share a name (Collins) present on the 1670 list. The others (O’Hare, McCormack, Kennedy, Walsh, McKeon, Mc Dermott, Burke and Mackey) are absent. In the end, rather disappointed, he could only come to the general and well-balanced conclusion that ‘from the earliest days of the English occupation of the Island, there was a large proportion of Irish, both Catholic and non-Catholic, in that make up of the population and that not only Irish names but Irish blood is widely diffused throughout the Island today’.45 By concentrating on the seventeenth century, he was perhaps looking in the wrong place. The statistical likelihood of seventeenth-century Irish servants and African slaves making a significant contribution to the next generations of Jamaicans given the high adult death rate, coupled with black female infertility and infant mortality, was small. In the case of the white servants it was further inhibited by departure to healthier North America. As regards the proportion of Irish in the community, an analysis of the names Williams mentioned when recounting the anti-Catholic crisis in 1729 shows some 15–20 per cent of the 39 assembly men with Irish names. As non-people slaves had not possessed surnames; after 1833, as free men they were expected to adopt them. Mostly they choose something familiar. It is generally supposed that they took their ex-owner’s name. How far the black people now bearing those names carry a genetic imprint from the original holders, it is impossible to say. In Montserrat, three light skinned ‘black Irish’ families, Gibbons, Sweeneys and Allens, claim descent by legal marriages dating back to the eighteenth century. Before the recent volcanic eruptions, when Montserrat’s population numbered some 12,000, nine of the ten most popular names in the phone book were Ryan, Lee, Daly, Meade, Tuit, Fenton, Farrell, Allen and White. These do not correspond to those of extensive slave holders in 1833. So the telephone book suggests that with emancipation, traditionally important Irish names took on a new lease of life.46 The most common names today in the Jamaican telephone directory are Shaw, Brown and Williams in that order, followed by Smith, Johnson, Campbell and Thompson. The Brown of course could indicate those owned by Hamilton Brown from Antrim or Peter Howe Browne from Sligo, but like the rest of the highest scorers it is not in itself a distinctively Irish name. One


of the richest eighteenth-century Jamaican sugar families was the Beckfords, some of their slave property certainly stretching through to the nineteenth century, but today there are seven times as many Shaws, Browns and Williamses as Beckfords on the island. Equal with the Beckfords are Blakes, Dalys and Dillons. Lees, Burkes, Kellys, O’Connors and Roachs follow well behind. As Father Williams recognised, names are an important indicator but an inexact measurement. What the Black Irish illustrates is the reality of the ‘black Irish’ presence, coupled with extreme difficulty of establishing their identity in societies where the racial divide recognised only colour, white and black. Recorded evidence for specific individuals is sparse. But Jamaica furnishes several examples. In the 1780s, high in the mountains, in east of the island, a sojourning Roscommon family carved out a sugar plantation. It was established by a Dr Lyons who returned to Dublin, handing over the management of the estate to his nephew Garret Forde, who died on the property and was buried beneath his own sugar cane. Forde left behind an ailing financial venture, a mulatto concubine, at least two daughters and a son. The son was sold off as part of a complex chancery suit, but the daughters were simply left behind (whether slave or free is unclear) in a decaying house in the inaccessible obscurity of the disputed and ruinate plantation. There in 1834 they revealed their existence and told their story to their startled, white cousin R. R. Madden.47 Also from Jamaica in 1775, 19 year old Charles Fitzgerald, naval officer, brother to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and third son of Emily, Duchess of Leinster wrote to his mother exclaiming, with literary flourish, that ‘the jet black ladies of Africa’s burning sands have made me forget the unripened beauties of the north’. A few months later he followed this up with the news that she would soon have a ‘copper coloured grandchild’.48 From the North American mainland a ‘black’ Samuel Burke appears, born in South Carolina around 1755, reared in Cork, returning across the Atlantic as servant to Montford Browne, Governor of West Florida, just in time for the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This event eventually re-routed master and servant to New York where Burke used his fluency in Irish to recruit dock workers to a Loyalist regiment, which he himself joined. Fighting on the Southern campaign, he hoped to emerge as a plantation owner in South Carolina, endowed from rebel property, but defeat and evacuation with the British army from Charleston in 1782 took him, like a growing band of blacks, to poverty in London where he applied to the government for a pension.49 The crisis over slavery and abolition in the mid-nineteenth century United States produced some records. Lewis Leary, a black abolitionist, was shot to prominence by a catastrophic moment in America’s history; the John Brown raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, designed to provide arms for slave rebellion in the South. Leary, free, university educated, whose grandfather had taken part in the revolution, was captured alive in the streets of the town.


The runaway slaves who joined in the raid were imprisoned but Leary, being free was, like John Brown himself, hanged as a traitor. Another black Irishman whose political activities took him into the historical record was Mississippi’s first black congressman under Reconstruction, John Roy Lynch. His father, Patrick Lynch, an immigrant from Dublin, became an overseer in Louisiana. There he fell in love with Catherine White, a slave on the plantation, introduced her openly as his wife, though the slave code of Louisiana did not recognise such unions. He established a family and died while still working to amass their purchase price.50 The career of a third black Irish man of the same generation, Edmund Kelley of Columbia, Tennessee recorded an early life not unlike that of Frederick Douglass. Kelley, the son of a slave woman and an Irishman, was from an early age was hired out by his female owner as household slave to a schoolmaster, where he learnt to read and write. This advantage enabled him to develop a ‘conversion experience’ into career activity. By 1843, he emerged as the pastor of a black Baptist Church in Columbia, though still a slave, paying over a proportion of his earnings to his owner. However in 1846 she found herself faced with bankruptcy and fearing that a less cooperative master might put an end to Kelley’s clerical career, she arranged his escape to the north. However he had left behind a wife and four children in Tennessee. His attempt to purchase them plunged him into debt, a situation which he resolved by producing a slave narrative A Family Redeemed from Bondage (1851) and by going on an abolitionist lecture tour to Britain. When an anti-slavery newspaper in England queried his veracity and condemned his methods of fund raising he left for Ireland, where his visit proved financially successful.51 Perhaps the closest and most extensive examination of ‘black Irish’, who succeeded in drawing on their European roots, is that of the Healys. Michael Healy was an Irish immigrant of the same generation as Maunsel White. He died in 1850 owning 61 slaves on his Georgia plantation, so that he fits into Cash’s category of ‘one generation aristocrats’. Like Patrick Lynch, Michael Healy took a slave ‘wife’ in a state where such a union could not be legalised and in Georgia the growing severity of race legislation made it illegal for him to free his slaves even in his will. So the nine surviving children (six sons and three daughters) borne by the pale skinned mulatto, Eliza, were ineligible for manumission. Michael Healy attempted to side step this difficulty by sending his children to the North to be educated, beginning with a liberal Quaker establishment in New York and then switching to the Jesuits in Holy Cross College. Only baptised in their teens, officially illegitimate, suffering insult (at least two of them seem to have been darker skinned than Harriet Jacobs Frederick Douglass), fearful that the new Fugitive Slave Law would be used to remove them south, the Healys emerged from their education as enthusiastic Catholics. Two of the Healy girls became nuns and three of the Healy boys entered the priesthood. The eldest, James became bishop of Maine and


the second, Patrick, the head of Georgetown College where he presided over changes which helped turn it from an institution used largely by the sons of Southern planters, into one dominated by upwardly mobile Irish American Catholics. A third brother rose to be the head of a New England seminary and Eliza Healy II, emerged as a mother superior. In 1850 when his father died, James Healy felt that he might be the object of re-enslavement if he returned to Georgia, however he was a good businessman and administrator and, as an absentee planter, saw to the hiring out of the family slaves. In 1853 he sold them off at a highly satisfactory price. Like his father’s ethnic group, which he and his siblings had worked hard to enter, he did not care for abolitionists. The success of the Healys’ integration into white America was marked by their uneasy reaction in the 1950s, when a sympathetic biographer, Irish American and Catholic, set out to research and publish a life of the Bishop of Maine entitled Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste. For the Healys, like so many upwardly mobile blacks in the age of slavery, enthusiastic participation in religion had helped them in their aspirational ascent.52 The above sparse and scattered examples suggest Protestant or Catholic roots. But the Presbyterians, creating their own ethnic group, spreading a web of kinship over the southern states (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi) where they were becoming slave holders and overseers must have led to the genetic fusion of Scots Irish and African Americans. The career and nomenclature of Charles Waddell Chestnutt suggest just such an experience. Chestnutt was born free in Ohio in 1858; like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, he was a pale skinned mulatto, with literary enthusiasms. His recorded family names resonate with Ulster Presbyterian links. His mother’s maiden name had been Sampson, his own names and that of his father, Andrew Jackson Chestnutt, doubly endorse the same connections. After the Civil War, his paternal grandfather, Waddell Cade, a wealthy white merchant, set the mulatto family up in a grocery store in North Carolina. It was a state in which the name Waddell was well known. Moses Waddell, (whose emigrant father James came from a less prosperous branch of Waddell Cunningham’s county Down lineage) was a minister, schoolmaster and intellectual. He married Catherine Calhoun, daughter of Patrick and sister of John C. She died young and childless, but such was the enthusiasm for her vice-presidential brother, the father of secession, the defender of slavery, that the Waddells liberally scattered his famous name among the next generation, male and female. As well as being brothers-in-law, John C. Calhoun and Moses Waddell were pupil and teacher. Moses had established a log cabin boarding school, the first of its kind in the region, in which the sons of southern planters led rough hewn lives studying Ovid and Euclid. Spartan though it undoubtedly was, it was serviced by slaves. Inheriting his middle name from his paternal grandfather, Charles Waddell Chestnutt worked in the family grocery store in Fayetteville, near


the Cape Fear River and attended Howard School. (So unlike the Healys, a generation earlier, he attended a black educational establishment.) At 21 he was appointed principal of the State Colored Normal School for teacher training. Clever, ambitious, well educated and pale enough to pass for white, he was determined not to desert his black status but to put it to the test to discover if someone with ‘talent, wealth and genius’ could ‘acquire social standing and distinction’ in the post-bellum United States. The experiment was not a success. Though he eventually settled in his native state of Ohio, running a thriving legal stenographic business, buying property and sending his two daughters to Smith College and his son to Harvard, he was critical of his own social milieu and furious at the government’s abandonment of the South. He corresponded with Booker T. Washington making it clear that he disliked his conciliatory approach. His literary career, which he pursued with vigour from the late 1880s until 1905, was aimed at producing a fiction which would help to create a moral revolution persuading whites to move beyond ‘the unjust elevation of caste’. To this end he wrote frequently about North Carolina society, liberally employing the vernacular and using black ‘conjure’ tales in his narrative. His increasingly direct attack on white racism in his full length novels may have detracted from their creative power, but the message was not popular with the white reading public. The books sold poorly, he could see no return on his efforts and surrendered his literary ambitions a quarter of a century before his death. Though he did achieve public recognitions, among them an honorary LLD from Wilberforce University in 1913, he remained an angry man.53 The most famous black American writer to seek to breathe life and historical veracity into his ancestral past has claimed Ulster Presbyterian roots. In chapter 116 of Roots, Alex Haley, having spent over 650 pages tracing his mother’s family back to eighteenth century Gambia, mentions his father’s family. When Bertha Palmer (direct descendant of Kunta Kinte, a Muslim Mandingo) introduced her future husband to her parents and near relatives, they were made uneasy by his ‘very nearly high-yaller complexion’.54 Simon Haley accounted for this condition by explaining that both his parents were the offspring of slave women and Irishmen. His father’s father had been an overseer called Jim Baugh who apparently made little impact on the family memory. (Not currently much in evidence in Ireland, the name may have been another version of Pogue/Paugh, as borne by John Gregs’s partner in Charleston, while the Jamaican telephone directory reveals as many Baughs as Burkes). But Alex Haley’s paternal grandmother claimed to have been a house slave and daughter of a Civil War veteran, Col James Jackson of Marion County, Alabama, the son of an immigrant father, also James Jackson, a United Irishman who had fled his country in the wake of the 1798 rebellion. The United Irish credentials of this Jackson family, substantial farming and linen producing Presbyterians from Ballybay, County Monaghan, is well


authenticated. James Jackson’s sister, Eleanor, was married to Oliver Bond, United Irishman, Dublin woollen draper and one of Equiano’s Irish subscribers. His uncle Henry Jackson, a successful iron founder, was commissioned in December 1792 to cast cannon for a projected volunteer unit, based on the Dublin United Irishmen, their chosen uniform modelled on that of the French National Guard.55 Henry Jackson and Oliver Bond were arrested together along with 11 others, in Bond’s house, on 12 March 1798; they were meeting as members of the Leinster provincial committee to plan the forthcoming rising. These arrests meant that Lord Edward Fitzgerald, alerted to approaching danger by his black servant Tony, made his escape to become the effective leader of the movement.56 The conspirators were imprisoned in Newgate, where Bond died mysteriously. When the rebellion had been completely crushed, Uncle Henry and nephew James left to join relatives already established in business in the Philadelphia. From there James Jackson moved to the frontier town of Nashville, Tennessee where he became a successful store keeper, who helped to finance the early military activities of his fellow townsman, Andrew Jackson, slave owner, Presbyterian descendant of County Antrim linen weavers and future president. Thus the new arrival entered and added to the network already established by Ulster Presbyterians in America. Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Creeks opened up rich territory in Alabama, and exploiting his financial relationship with the Indian fighter, James Jackson acquired a substantial land grant establishing a cotton plantation worked by a hundred slaves at Cypress Forks. When Alabama entered the Union he was elected to the new state’s senate. Here was a United Irishman after John Mitchel’s own heart. Alex Haley located the birth of his paternal grandmother Queen, on the Jackson plantation, the Forks of Cypress. Working on a book about his mulatto grandmother and his white roots, Haley publicly claimed kindred with the Jacksons, a claim accepted by some of their descendants.57 Queen was not published until 1993, some 17 years after Roots, and a year after Haley’s death, completed or ghost written by David Stephens, who had involved himself with its research. Though it was given considerable publicity and speedily committed to film, it could not have the impact of Roots, a heterogeneous phenomenon bursting out in the bicentennial year, drawing on Haley’s lecture tours, his travels in Africa and research in 51 libraries, a project exciting widespread belief and several law suits for plagiarism. Queen starts in Ireland, and then settles down into the plantation novel. Like Roots it bulges with historical research and real and imaginary characters. An element, at the end of both books, is a quick survey of the Palmer/Haley family in the twentieth century, accounts which somehow appear bleak compared with the horrors and excitements of more removed eras. To discover a great, great, great, great grandfather a Muslim marabout (holy man) from an important tribe recorded in the memory of the village griot (professional oral historian) in Gambia, and a great, great,


grandfather as a youthful Irish revolutionary, seems something of a stroke of good luck for a writer turned ancestor hunter. Yet the aim of the authors and reader is to investigate a world which was not directly recorded. The existence of two Irish ancestors, both apparently Ulster Scots, in this part of the United States at the turn of the century, is in tune with ethnic emigration patterns. Where there are planters, overseers, slaves and a surrounding white society, there will be mixed-race children. Laws against miscegenation discourage adequate recording of the paternal input rather than sex itself. Blacks in the United States tend to be paler than in Haiti, where Dessalines, who declared independence from France in 1804, eliminated all the whites from the system which Antoine Walsh had worked to build. Though it is frightening for professional historians, where people feel that a subject is deeply interesting to them but the records have failed, they often try to recall the past by moving into the realms of imaginative possibility. Despite the facts that both blacks and Irish preferred endogamy, as more and more Irish reached the New World, the number of ‘black Irish’ must have risen. To add this terminology to a history already thick in hyphenated people – Gaelic-Irish, Hiberno-Norman, Anglo-Irish, Scots-Irish is, on one level, quite ridiculous. With the exception of the Loyalist, Samuel Burke, about whose parents we know nothing, they cannot be said to be culturally Irish. In English-speaking, slave-owning, colonial society and in the new American republic, whatever their colour, (brown, ‘yellow’ was popular description of mulattoes on the mainland by the early nineteenth century, ‘tawney’ in the Caribbean) they were legally and socially ‘black’. The irritable reaction of historian Howard Fergus to the celebration of Montserrat as an Irish island, is understandable. Yet to declare the ‘black Irish’ a non-category is to deny human interest in history. People have always searched the past for their forbearers, sometimes for practical, aspirational reasons, sometime purely from intellectual curiosity. Once it was only kings, aristocrats or, at the least the rich, who could indulge such interests at length. In the twenty-first century ordinary people, in the affluent West, can now join in. Technological change, from computer data bases to genetic testing techniques make lost trails easier to follow. The expansion in the proportion of elderly in the community provides more and more manpower for such projects; researching the family history is an obsession which often blossoms with age. Social change and technological progress make such research viable, so too does political change. What was unthinkable in the 1950s is now politically correct. The discovery of a mixed-race past may not be welcome to a particular family or individual, but is becoming fashionable. Such a situation raises comparisons with the literary enthusiasms of the late eighteenth century and adds an intriguing twenty-first century dimension to the famous anti-slavery query ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ In 1999 a Radio Telefis Eineann (RTE) documentary, focusing on the Irish diaspora, featured a black Barbadian, Edwin O’Neal; he explained that the


name had appeared on the island in 1688 and traced his own line back some five generations to an O’Neal, described in official records as a ‘gentleman’ and therefore, given nineteenth-century standards, almost certainly white. Pointing to the career of the island’s national hero, Dr Charles Duncan O’Neal, founder of the Barbados Progressive League and forerunner of the Island’s Labour Party, he closed his interview with the statement that ‘The Irish legacy is the fight for social justice.’ Thus Edwin O’Neal, reiterated the claims of Mary Birkett and Daniel O’Connell and endorsed a sentiment often accepted, without historical questioning, in the post colonial world.58

15 Conclusion

The development of black slavery in the Americas illustrates the inexorable power of economics. The number of Africans who were exported across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century suggests that the abolition of the trade was ineffective, that as long as the expanding plantation system required slave labour, that labour continued to arrive. However as the nineteenth century progressed, the amount of land suitable for plantation crops began to shrink and, as in other societies in other ages, the disadvantages of slavery began to outweigh its benefits. It is arguable that revulsion against the trade kept the wider issue of the emancipation of the slaves in view, encouraging states and governments in the Americas and the Caribbean to seek other methods of securing a labour force. Thus by the 1880s slavery, a firmly rooted and expanding institution at the beginning of the century, had been dismantled. Since the 1940s professional historians have worked hard to investigate how and why slavery shifted from being a respected and expanding institution into becoming a morally reprehensible and embattled one. Their findings have made it possible to try and assess the Irish role in these developments. Coming from varied social backgrounds and assuming a variety of positions in the New World, the Irish behaved according to the European norm; as far as the slaves were concerned, they were indistinguishably white. But, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the Irish can be said to have been distinctive in several ways. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, first in the Caribbean, then on the North American mainland, they were socially important in providing and replenishing a high proportion of that layer of white society immediately above the slaves. They also made a significant contribution to the shaping of politics in the 13 North American colonies / United States which produced an expanding, slave holding republic. Because this book has attempted to look at slavery and anti-slavery from St Patrick to the American Civil War, of necessity it leaves many important issues insufficiently investigated. Would it be possible to use Irish sources to help to explain the apparent decline of European slavery from the twelfth 331


century onwards? Could fresh research reveal sufficient material to produce a more detailed study of Irish indentured labour in the Caribbean 1640–1725? The presence of Irish soldiers and sailors in the Black Atlantic is well documented, but this investigation has ignored them in favour of planters and traders. Of the British West Indian possessions, as yet only Montserrat has been thoroughly researched from an Irish angle. While stressing the importance of St Domingue, this study deals with French and Spanish territory only in passing. Deeper excavation into Caribbean records might reveal an Irish treasure trove – there are Parnells in the Jamaican telephone book and de Valeras in Cuba; rumour has it that these descendants of nineteenth-century slave holders and twentieth-century property owners, now faring badly under Castro’s regime, have taken to writing hopeful letters to Ireland. To adopt a wider geographical spectrum, the comparison between slaves and wage slaves, conjured up by indignant white contemporaries, commented on briefly by Marx and Engels, invoked by Fogel and Engrman, could surely be discussed further. The only area already well served by historical publication on Hiberno / African relations is the United States and even here the ‘black Irish’ still remain a little known quantity. British historians have argued vigorously whether or not the slave trade and the slave plantations played a key role in creating the Industrial Revolution. French historians have debated whether or not similar mercantile wealth, accruing in Bordeaux and Nantes, or tropical riches, creating a febrile ‘Creole court’ around Louis XVI, produced political instability and revolution. Successful revolt by the American colonists can be traced back to growing planter strength in the South and the stimulus which the Northern ports experienced from slaving, provisioning the West Indies and importing sugar and rum. This book has tried to show that Ireland was also part of this Black Atlantic world, which helped to produce change in town and countryside and impacted on the course of politics. These eighteenth-century developments, did not result, as the United Irishmen and Quakers had hoped, in the sweeping away of old divisions, but then neither did later global changes, such as steam power, electrification, the internal combustion engine, the First and Second World Wars, and admission to the European Union. Today Ireland is a receiver rather than a dispenser of poor immigrants. In an era of mounting racist incidents and inclusive St Patrick’s Day parades, in which it is now possible to include home grown ‘black Irish’, the future seems finely balanced. Will the arrival of new groups into an old equation deepen traditional divisions, help to wipe them out or leave them as before? Is Ireland’s emigration experience and her image as ‘a lover of the oppressed’ of any help in finding answers to twenty-first century racial tensions?

Notes Introduction 1 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993); James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London, 2000).

1

Slaves and Scholars

1 Robin Blackburn, ‘Slave Exploitation and the Elementary Structures of enslavement’ in M. L. Bush (ed.), Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (Harlow, 1996), p. 165. 2 Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 22, 115; John K. Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2nd edn 1998), p. 107. 3 Myles Dillon (ed.), Lebor na Cert: The Book of Rights (Dublin, 1962), xvi quoting from the Lecan text. 4 Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1995), pp. 10, 17, 41, 46, 126–7, 103, 137, 138. 5 The Táin; transl. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1979), p. 133. 6 Ibid., pp. 55, 169, 114. 7 Kelly, Early Irish Law, pp. 115–16. 8 Ibid., p. 99. 9 Ibid., p. 135. 10 Ibid., pp. 11, 33–5. 11 Táin, pp. 126, 159, 218, 219, 222. 12 Seán Connolly, ‘Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae’ in Journal of the Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland, 119 (1989), pp. 15, § 7; 17, §16. 13 Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Farming (Dublin, 1997), p. 438 quoting from Betu Brigte. 14 Ibid., p. 439; Donnchadh Ó Corrain, ‘Ireland c. 800: Aspects of Irish Society’ in Daibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland, vol. i (Oxford, 2005), pp. 662–4. 15 Táin, p. 117. 16 Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, pp. 80,116; quoted in Poul Holm, ‘The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries’ in Peritia, 5 (1986), p. 338. 17 Táin, pp. 68–72. 18 Kelly, Early Irish Law, p. 95. 19 Táin, p. 100. 20 Kelly, Early Irish Law, p. 96. 21 Ludwig Bieler (ed. and trans.) ‘B. Tírechán’ in The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979), pp. 151 §36; Poul Holm, ‘The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries in Peritia, 5 (1986), p. 332. 22 Kelly, Early Irish Law, p. 223. 23 B. G. Scott, ‘Iron “Slave-Collars” from Lagore Crannog, Co. Westmeath’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 78C (1978), p. 213–30. 24 Kelly, Early Irish Law, pp. 19, 173. 25 Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba, transl. Richard Sharpe, (Middlesex, 1995), pp. 188–90 [II, § 39]. 333

334 Notes 26 ‘Confessio’ in D. R. Howlett (ed.), The Book of Letters of St Patrick, the Bishop (Dublin, 1994), p. 63. 27 Ibid., p. 63. 28 Ibid., p. 65–7. 29 Ibid., p. 87. 30 Ibid., p. 81. 31 ‘Epistola ad milites Corotici’ in Howlett, The Book of Letters, p. 31. 32 Ibid., p. 33. 33 Ibid., ‘Confessio’, p. 85; ‘Coroticus’, pp. 27, 31, 33, 39. Elizabeth McLuhan, ‘Ministerium seruitutis meae’: The Metaphor and Reality of Slavery in Saint Patrick’s Epistola and Confessio’ in John Carey, Máire Herbert and Pádraig Ó Riain (eds), Studies in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars (Dublin, 2000), suggests that Patrick’s immersion in the bible caused him to feel an affinity towards St Paul’s employment of slavery as a metaphor to describe the Christian experience. 34 T. M. Charles–Edwards, ‘Brigit’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. vii, p. 652. 35 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Ireland c. 800: Aspects of Irish Society’ in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland, vol. I (Oxford, 2005), p. 564. 36 Elva Johnston, ‘Munster, saints of’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004), vol. xxxix, p. 789. 37 ‘A. Muirchú’ in Ludwig Bieler (ed.) The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979), pp. 77–82, 1 §11 § 10 and 1 §12 §11. 38 Ibid., pp. 101, 1 §29 §28. 39 Adomnán, St Columba, pp. 188–90 [II, §39]. 40 Howlett, Book of Letters, p. 53. 41 Clare Stancliffe, ‘Patrick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004), vol. xliii, p. 73. 42 Seán Connolly and Jean-Michel Picard, ‘Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit: Content and Value’ in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 118 (1987), p. 27. 43 Adomnán Life of St Columba, p. 186 [II, §37]. 44 Connolly, ‘Vitae Prima’, pp. 47–8 § 125. 45 Holm, ‘Slave Trade’, p. 330 n. 38, quoting from the Annals of Ulster. 46 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Ireland c. 800: Aspects of Irish Society’ in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland vol. i (Oxford, 2005), p. 577. 47 Adomnán, Life of St Columba, p. 51. 48 Kelly, Early Irish Law, pp. 96, 266. 49 Translation of Vita Findani by Christine J. Omand in R. J. Berry and H. N. Firth (eds), The People of Orkney (Kirkwall, 1986), pp. 284–7. 50 Holm, ‘Slave Trade’, p. 323. 51 Patrick F. Wallace, ‘The archaeology of Ireland’s Viking Age Towns’ in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland, vol. i (Oxford, 2005), p. 837. 52 Ibid., pp. 334, 341. 53 David Wyatt, ‘The Significance of Slavery: Alternative Approaches to Anglo-Saxon Slavery’ in Anglo–Norman Studies, 23 (2000), p. 331, from Vita Wulfstani Three Lives of the Last Englishmen. 54 Howlett, Book of Letters, p. 33. 55 Wyatt, ‘Anglo-Saxon Slavery’, p. 377. 56 Giraldus Cambrensis (trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin) Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland (Dublin, 1978) pp. 18, 69–70. 57 Wyatt ‘Anglo-Saxon Slavery’, p. 329. 58 Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London, 2000), pp. 4–5.

Notes 335 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

2

A. H. M. Jones and Elizabeth Monroe, History of Abyssinia (Oxford,1935), pp. 26–7. Holm, ‘Slave Trade’, p. 331. D. Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200 (London, 1995), pp. 268–9. Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Farming (Dublin, 1997), p. 438. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge,1990); Edward Reynolds, Stand the Storm, a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1985); John Iliffe, Africans: the History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995), Chapter 7; James Walvin, Black Ivory, A History of British Slavery (London, 1992), Chapter 19. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 135–53. J. D. Fage, ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History’ in Journal of African History, x, 3 (1969), pp. 399–400. Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of African History (Middlesex, new edn, 1995), p. 90. Walter Rodney, ‘African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the African Slave Trade’ in Journal of African History, vii, no. 4 (1966), pp. 431–3. John K. Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (2nd ed. Cambridge 1998), pp. 75–6. Ibid., pp. 108 and 91, n. 73. Lovejoy, Transformations, pp. 11–14. Rodney, ‘African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression’, p. 441. Iliffe, Africans, p. 75. Sierra Leone, the colony established in 1786 by British slave trade abolitionists intent on civilising and Christianising Africa, abolished the institution of slavery in 1928. Ethiopia, the only African state to remain independent during the colonial period, abolished the institution of slavery in 1942. Kelly, Early Irish Law, p. 66. See chapter 10, Literature, mostly imaginative. J. H. Todd (ed.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, Rolls Series (London, 1867), pp. 42–3.

Servants and Slaves: The Seventeenth Century

1 Joyce Lorimer (ed.), English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon 1550–1646, Hakluyt Society (London, 1989), p. 263. This invaluable collection brings together English, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish documents dealing with the northerners’ activities upon the Amazon and providing a clear, concise commentary upon them. Lorimer reprints all the documents dealing with the Amazon published by Aubrey Gwynn in his ‘Documents relating to the Irish in the West Indies’ Analecta Hibernia, No. 4, October 1932. However Gwynn’s paper read to the Royal Irish Academy, see note 6, still contains much of interest. 2 Ibid., pp. 428, 303, 304. 3 Ibid., p. 157. 4 Ibid., p. 244. 5 Ibid., p. 157. 6 By the mid 1620s the northern Europeans on the Amazon amounted to anything between 250 and 400. The Irish at this time claimed their numbers had gone beyond 70 with their native clients ‘twenty-two Indian families’, amounting to 10,000 people. (Ibid., p. 84, Note 2,: Aubrey Gwynn, ‘An Irish Settlement on the Amazon’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin), Vol. Xli, Section C, No. 1, (July, 1932).

336 Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Lorimer, Amazon, pp. 76, 78, 251. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., pp. 69, 246, 257. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., pp. 303–4. Gwynn, ‘Amazon (1612–1629)’ in P. R. I. A., pp. 48–9. Lorimer, Amazon. Chillan’s memorials, pp. 398–412; O’Brien memorials, pp. 263–8, 300–4, 414–31. Ibid., p. 402. Ibid., p. 422. Ibid., p. 263–8. Ibid., p. 400–1. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (London, 1993), p. 10. Dunn, Sugar, p. 52. James Horn, ‘British Diaspora: emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’ in W. R. Louis (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998) vol. ii, p. 30. Hilary Beckles, ‘Irish Servants in Barbados, a “Riotous and unruly lot” ’ in William and Mary Quarterly, vol. xlvii, Oct. 1990, p. 506; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, the Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. (North Carolina, 1972), p. 52. Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, pp. 508–9. Ibid., p. 513. Dunn, Sugar, p. 69. Jill Sheppard, The ‘Redlegs’ of Barbados, their Origins and History (New York, 1977), p. 14. Dunn, Sugar, pp. 40, 54. Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 511, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal 25 Aug 1792; Aubery Gwynn, ‘Indentured Servants and Negro Slaves in Barbados (1642–1650) in Studies, vol xix, June 1930, p. 288; Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados; the ethnic cleansing of Ireland (Kerry, 2000), pp. 89–96. Hilary Beckles, ‘Black Men in White Skins’: The Formation of a White Proletariat in West Indian Slave Society’ in The Journal of Imperial and Common wealth History No. 15, 1986, p. 6 Beckles gives figures for the number of white servants in 1652 at 13,000 and the figures for total white population three years later in 1655 as 23,000 and black slaves at 20,000. For 1684 he can provide figures for all three categories illustrating the fall of the white population overall, the much sharper decline of the servant class and the steep rise in slaves numbers. Year 1684 – whites, 19,568: white servants, 2317: black slaves, 46,602. Vere Langford Oliver, Caribbeana, 6 vols (London, 1909–11), vol. ii, p. 55. Beckles ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 517. S. K., A short but particular and impartial account of the treatment of the slaves in the island of Antigua (Cork, 1789), p. 68. Windthrop D. Jordan, White over Black, American Attitudes towards the Negro 1550–1812 (North Carolina, 1968). Thornton, Africans, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1998, 2nd ed.), pp. 322–28. James Walvin, Black Ivory, Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2001) pp. 156–7. Thornton, Africans, pp. 254–62. Redemptionists, servants who had arranged with the captain that they would acquire their own master on landing and then repay the price of their passage.

Notes 337 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57 58

59

60 61

62 63

Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 521. Ibid., p. 513. Gwynn, Anelecta Hibernia, p. 234. Caribbeana, vol ii, pp. 76, 320. Ibid., vol iv, p. 56. (Colonial State Papers, 1693–96, p. 647; 1696–97, p. 52; 1697–98, pp. 296–98.) Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 517. Ibid., pp. 508–9. Ibid., pp. 515–16. Sheppard, The ‘Redlegs’, p. 24. Beckles, p. 521; Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World, (Liverpool, 1997), p. 142. Colonial State Papers, 1693–96, p. 647; 1696–9, p. 752; 1697–98, pp. 296, 298 in Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen (Colorado, 1939), p. 52. Joseph J. Williams, Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica (New York, 1932), p. 54. Dunn, Sugar, p. 160. Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 520–1. David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade 1660–1807’ in W.R. Louis (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998) vol. ii, p. 459. Of the 77, 689 entering Jamaica 33,179 (42.7 per cent) are recorded as being exported, probably to the Spanish colonies under the Asiento. Figures for Jamaican whites from Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘The “Hub of Empire”: The Carribean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century,’ Ibid., vol., i, p. 224. Sheppard, The ‘Redlegs’, p. 18. T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 London 2003, p. 28. R.B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, an Economic History of the British West Indies 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974) 236; A.D. Chandler, ‘Expansion of Barbados’ in Barbados Museum and Historical Society Journal, nos 3 and 4, (March-October 1946), p. 114. Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation’, in Studies, vol. xx, June 1931, pp. 614–5. Ibid., p. 614, Robert Cann, Robert Yate and Thomas Speed, p. 615, Henry Hazard and Robert Inmans, all of Bristol. Also Robert Lewellin of London, p. 617, Joseph Lawrence, no port specified, p. 618, David Selleck of Boston, John Netherway of Bristol, p. 619, John Mylan, no port specified, p. 620, Charles Andrews and Mathias Browne of Dublin. Henry Cromwell, major-general of the forces in Ireland to Secretary Thurloe, 11 September 1655, vol. 4, p. 23 in John Thurloe, Collection of State Papers 1638–1660 (London, 1742) 7 vols. Ibid., Henry Cromwell to John Thurloe 18 September 1655, vol iii, p. 40. Ibid., Broghill to Thurloe, 15 June 1855, p. 41 vol. v, on the 23 June 1656 Broghill informed Thurloe that the troops were ready to sail (86) and on 14 October Henry Cromwell said his had been sent off, p. 494. The State Papers do not contain any further mention of the Irish girls and boys. Chandler, ‘Expansion of Barbados’, p. 114. Figures for those leaving quoted in Sheppard, Redlegs, 25. Sheppard describes the estimate of 10,000 as ‘generous’. Exact ratio has shifted over the years and according to the calculator, but in Barbados there seem to have been two or three blacks to one white as against ten blacks to one white in Jamaica or St Domingue.

338 Notes 64 I am grateful to Dr Cecily Jones, Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at Warwick University, for this suggestion. See C.Jones, Engendering Whiteness: Gender, Race and Class in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865 (Manchester, Spring 2007). 65 Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers) 15 November–16 August 1837–8, xlviii, Jamaica, uncontested claims, pp. 10, 47, 184, 200. Jamaica litigated claims, pp. 66, 69. 66 Beckles, ‘Riotous and unruly lot’, p. 519. 67 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 171. 68 Akenson, If, p. 85–8. 69 Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (New York, 1965), p. 342. 70 Akenson, If, pp. 104–16. 71 Results of 1678, Irish: 26 per cent on Antigua: 23 per cent Nevis: 10 per cent St Kitts (Dunn, Sugar, p. 130). 72 Burns, History of the British West Indies, pp. 342–6. 73 Ibid., pp. 117, 123. 74 Ibid., p. 347. 75 Ibid., vol. i, p. 54. 76 Oliver Caribbeana, vol. i, pp. 52, 54. 77 Ibid., vol. i, p. 56. 78 Akenson, If, pp. 123–4. 79 Ibid., pp. 42–5. 80 Burns, History of the British West Indies, p. 287. 81 Akenson, If, p. 45. 82 Ibid., pp. 99–102. 83 Ibid., p. 74. 84 Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade 1660–1807’ in W. R. Louis (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998) vol. ii, pp. 442, 456. 85 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 178; Akenson, If, p. 91. 86 Akenson, If, p. 155 shows that in 1729 there was a population of 1155 whites and 6063 slaves and by 1775, there were 1314 whites and 9834 slaves. Dunn Sugar, p. 127 shows that in 1678 there were 2682 whites and 992 slaves; p. 141 shows that in 1708 there were 1545 whites and 3570 slaves. 87 L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Nicholas Canny (ed.) Europeans on the Move, Studies in European Migration 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), p. 127. Canvas was the cheapest type of textile imported into the Caribbean, and was generally distributed as slave clothing. 88 Rosario Sevilla Soler, Immigracion y Cambio Socio-Economico en Trinidad (1783–1797) (Seville, 1988), pp. 188–9.

3 1 2 3 4 5

Creoles and Slaves: The Eighteenth Century Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 175. Ibid., p. 182; Caribbeana, vol. iv, pp. 303–11. Thomas, Slave Trade, pp. 237–8, 643, 780. Ibid., pp. 76, 148. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America (Bristol, 1986), vol. i, p. 129. Slaves consigned to Skerret for sale by Abell Thomas, master, October, 1726.

Notes 339 6 Howard Fergus, Montserrat, History of a Caribbean Colony (London, 1994) p. 61. 7 National Library of Ireland D116,274, nos 5, 6; MS 14,165, fols 39, 40. 8 Genealogical Office, Dublin, MS 160, fol. 112: MS 162 James Roche of Martinique claiming descent from Roches of Fermoy, sought and acquired arms in 1725, MS 162, fol. 28 shows a Pierce Kirwan leaving Galway for Martinique, 1652; fol. 29 Joanna Lynch of Martinique, daughter of William Lynch of Martinique, grand daughter of Edmund Lynch of Galway, married to a Michael Kirwan who acquired arms in 1745. 9 Burns, British West Indies, pp. 391–3. 10 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, pp. 444–5. 11 Hugh Fenning (ed.), ‘The Mission to St Croix in the West Indies:1750–1769; Document from the Archive of San Clemente, Rome, in Archivium Hibernicum, 25, 1962, p. 76. 12 Philip C. Yorke (ed.) The Diary of John Baker, Barrister of the Middle Temple and Solicitor–General of the Leeward Islands (London, 1931) p. 62. 13 Akenson, If, p. 115. 14 Howard Fergus, Montserrat, p. 53. 15 Akenson, If, p. 177. 16 Fenning (ed.), ‘St Croix’, p. 79. 17 Ibid., pp. 86, 94, 102. 18 Ibid., p. 120; Caribbeana, vol. vi, p. 60. 19 Fenning (ed.), ‘St Croix’, Ibid., pp. 85, 117. 20 Ibid., pp. 86–7. 21 Ibid., p. 102. 22 Ibid., pp. 117, 119–22. 23 Ibid., pp. 84, 99. 24 Ibid., p. 105. 25 Ibid., pp. 114, 120. 26 Ibid., p. 119. 27 Ibid., p. 121. 28 Yorke, Baker Diary, p. 62. 29 Fergus, Montserrat, pp. 26, 68. 30 Yorke, Baker Diary, pp. 10, 51, 83, 86, 88, 89. 31 Ronald Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, Planter in Maryland (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), p. 176. 32 Baker, Diary, p. 152. 33 Fenning , ‘St. Croix’, p. 84 footnote 4. 34 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, p. 182. 35 Yorke, Baker Diary, p. 30. 36 Ibid., p. 10. 37 Ibid., pp. 20, 41–5. 38 Ibid., p. 69. 39 Yorke, Baker Diary, pp. 63, 69. 40 Richard Pares A West Indian Fortune (London, 1950) pp. 6–9, 171–3, footnote 8, p. 356.; Tobin Papers, Liverpool Public Record Office, Hq 920 TOB Annals of the Tobin family of Liverpool and the Isle of Man typescript compiled by R. C. Reid, 1940, p. 2. See also James Tobin, A Short Joinder to Mr. Ramsay’s Reply (London, 1785) and Cursory Remarks upon the Rev. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay (1787). 41 Joseph J. Williams, Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica (New York, 1932) p. 66; Lewis Namier and John Brooke, History of Parliament, House of Commons, vol. xi, (London, 1964) p. 26; Oliver, Caribbeana, vol. v, pp. 260–1.

340 Notes 42 Yorke, Baker Diary, pp. 26, 62; Oliver Caribbeana, vol. vi, p. 62. 43 Richardson, ‘The Atlantic slave trade’, vol. ii p. 451. 44 Vincent Caretta (ed.), Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (London, 1995) p. 95. 45 Ibid., pp. 93–4. 46 Oliver, Caribbeana, vol. v, p. 106. The family probably continued to hold property there into later generations. In 1807 Gabriel Doran of Montserrat had a will proved. (Caribbeana, vol. iii, p. 119). 47 Carretta, Equiano, Narrative, p. 99. 48 Douglass, Narrative, pp. 62–3. 49 Carretta, Equiano, Narrative, pp. 99–101, 104, 124. 50 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black, American Attitudes towards the Negro (North Carolina, 1968) p. 140. 51 Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London, 1989), pp. 84, 195, 210. 52 Carretta, Equiano, Narrative, pp. 104–10. 53 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 54 Ibid., pp. 127–30. 55 Ibid., p. 135. 56 Ibid., pp. 138, 144. 57 Akenson, If, p. 155. 58 Carretta, Equiano, Narrative, p. 119. 59 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 117; Equiano, Narrative, pp. 121–2. 60 Michael Mullin, Africans in America, Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831 (Illinois, 1998) pp. 219–21. 61 Carretta, p. 164. 62 Mullins, Africans, p. 121. 63 Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 281. 64 John Martin, ‘Martin, Samuel (1694–1776)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) p. 976; R. G. Thorne, (ed.) History of parliament, vol. cxi, p. 114; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, pp. 300–3; G.E.C. editor of complete peerage, Complete Baronetage, (Exeter, 1906) vol. v, 1707–1800 p. 269. 65 British Library, Additional Mss. 41,349, Letter Book of Samuel Martin (hereafter ML), Martin to Richard Oliver, 25 May, 1758, fol. 42. 66 Ibid., Samuel Martin to Samuel Martin jr,14 June, 1756, fol. 7; Martin to Eburne, 30 May, 1757, fol. 21; Martin to Richard Oliver, 29 May, 1758, fol. 44 , 41, 350, Martin to George Martin, 2 March, 1766, fol. 5. 67 R. G. Thorne, (ed.) History of parliament (London, 1986) vol. iv, pp. 555–6. 68 M. L., Martin to Bulmer, 12 June, 1756, fol. 9: Martin to Forfar, 12 June, 1756, fol. 10; Martin to William Whitman, 26 October, 1756, fol. 14. 69 Ibid., Samuel Martin to Richard Oliver, 20 February, 1757, fol. 19–20. 70 Ibid., Martin to Codrington and Miller, 6 January, 1758, fol. 37; Martin to Codrington and Miller, 25 April, 1758, fol. 42. 71 Ibid., Martin to Richard Oliver, 25 April, 1758, fol. 42. 72 Ibid., Martin to Thomas Warner, 17 March, 1761, fol. 95; Martin to Thomas Warner 26 April, 1775, fol. 37. 73 Ibid., Martin to Sam Martin jnr., 20 November 1761, fol. 124; MS 41,351, Martin to Charles Baldwin, 22 February, 1776, fol. 65. 74 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 361. 75 Ibid., p. 379; R. Reingold, Nature and society, later eighteenth-century uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (Sussex, 1978).

Notes 341 76 77 78 79 80 81

ML. S. Martin to William Martin, 25 May, 1758, fol. 43. Ibid., Negroes on the Plantation of Samuel Martin, 1 May, 1771, fol. 171. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, p. 485. Add. MS 41, 351, ML, Martin to Mrs. Henry Martin, 9 June, 1774, fol. 90. Ibid, Martin to Rev. Dr. Wharton, 21 June, 1774. D. C. Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery, 1830–1860’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1975) p. 35. 82 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (Hereafter P.R.O.N.I.) Belmore Papers, D.3007/G/45, Lord Goderich to Belmore, 18 Feb, 1832, fol. 27. 83 Oliver MacDonagh, The Hereditary Bondsman, (London, 1988) p. 154.

4 Sojourners, Slaves and Stipendiaries: The Nineteenth Century 1 Alan L Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake 1740–1800 (London, 1992), p. 4. 2 Oliver, Caribbeanea, vol. i, p. 54. 3 P.R.O.N.I., Papers of Watts of Ramelton (henceforth WP), Mic 135, Samuel Watt to James Watt, 31 March, 1815, fol. 35. 4 WP, Mic 135, George Young to James Watt, 7 February, 1799, fol. 107. 5 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 30 September, 1803, fol. 11. 6 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 12 April, 1801, fol. 2. 7 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 30 November, 1802, fol. 6. 8 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 7 July, 1806, fol. 19; 6 March, 1807, fol. 21. 9 Ibid., 13 April, 1805, fol. 16. 10 Ibid., 6 July, 1802, fol. 5. 11 Ibid., 27 December 1802, fol. 7. 12 Ibid., 31 July, 1804, fol. 12. 13 Ibid., 30 September, 1804, fol. 13. 14 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt sr, 10 September, 1808, fol. 26. 15 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 30 November, 1802, fol. 6. 16 Jamaica Gazette, 1823, pp. 103, 113, 126. 17 W. P. John Watt to James Watt, fol. 86 (27 December, 1824) pp. 92, 103. 18 T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815, (London, 2003), p. 231. 19 Karras, Sojourners, p. 176. 20 W. P., Samuel Watt to James Watt, 10 September, 1810, fol. 31; 14 July, 1888, fol. 32: 3 September, 1811, fol. 33: 28 February, 1812, fol. 34. February 1812, fol. 34. 21 Ibid., 19 January, 1816, fol. 37. 22 Ibid., 21 May, 1816, fol. 39. 23 Ibid., John Watt to James Watt, nd 1822, fol. 83. 24 Douglas Hall (ed.), In Miserable Slavery, Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750–1786 (London and Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 71–2. 25 Ibid., p. 218. 26 WP, Robert Watt of Montego Bay to Crookshank and Johnston, St John’s, New Bruswick, 4 July, 1825 fol. 47: Hamilton Brown to George Carter, New York, nd July 1825, fol. 48. 27 Ibid., Samuel Watt to James Watt sr., 6 July, 1806, fol. 20. 28 Ibid., Will of Samuel Watt of McDowell, Watt and Cramsie, Kingston, Jamaica, proved 1829, fol. 81. 29 Ibid, John Watt to James Watt, nd 1829, fol. 91. In 1835 James McDowell, William Cramsie and John Watt claimed compensation from the British government for

342 Notes

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

5

37 slaves. In 1837 the claim for £736-3-0 was paid. Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers) 15 Nov–16 August 1837–8, xlviii, Jamaica, uncontested claims. Mary Reckord, ‘The Jamaican Slave Rebellion of 1831’ in Past and Present, No. 40, July 1968, p. 121. Peter Howe, Marquis of Sligo, Jamaica under Apprenticeship by a Proprietor (London, 1838). Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers) 15 November–16 August 1837–8, xlviii, Jamaica, uncontested claims. Geoffrey H.White, The Complete Peerage (London, 1953) vol. xii, part1, pp. 24–27l; Inez Knibb Sibley, Dictionary of Place Names in Jamaica. P.R.O.N.I., Belmore Papers, D.3007/G/45, Lord Goderich to Belmore, fol. 27. Richard Robert Madden, A Twelve Months Residence in the West Indies, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), pp. 13–16. Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ p. 52. Blair Papers, P.R.O.N.I., D717/24, Accounts, 30 June 1793. B. W. Higman, ‘The West India “interest” in parliament, 1807–1833’ in Historical Studies, vol. xiii, No. 49, October 1967. p. 12; Parliamentary Sessional Papers, xlviii, British Guiana. Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers), 15 Nov–16, Aug 1837–8, xlviii, Montserrat, uncontested and litigated Claims for Slave Compensation.

The Trade

1 Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade (London, 1998) p. 349; Bill Rolston and Michael Shannon, Encounters: How Racism came to Ireland (Belfast, 2002) p. 8. 2 Frances Wilkins, Manx slave traders, a social history of the Isle of Man’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade (Kidderminster, 1999), p. 10. 3 David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth–Century Slave Trade to America, vol. i, The Years of Expansion 1698–1729 (Bristol Record Societies Publications, vol. xxxviii, 1986), pp. 53, 94, 111, 120, 123, 126, 135, 139,151, 162, 166,169,174, 184,189. 4 Ibid., pp. 121, 136, 149, 159, 171. 5 Ibid., pp. 96,103, 113,118, 132, 146, 154,157,165. 6 Ibid., pp. 49, 63, 74, 89, 104, 166,141. 7 Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade From 1785–1807’ in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 1990, vol. cxl, pp. 111–14 Behrendt’s survey covers 224 captains working from 1785–1807: 213 from Liverpool and 11 from Bristol: 27 drowned, 5 killed by the French, 3 by slave revolts, 3 when the vessel caught fire and blew up. He considered the death rate of 27 per cent provided by these figures to be an underestimate. At least 45 captains became Liverpool merchants. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade From 1785–1807’ in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 1990, vol. cxl. 8 David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth–Century Slave Trade to America, vol. iii, ‘The Years of Decline’, Vol. iii, (Bristol Record Societies Publications, vol, xlii, 1991) pp. 123, 132, 135, 147, 168, 170, 174, 203, 211, 172 173, 182, 189, 132, 190, 103. 9 Another possible Irish name could be Lougher. Between 1721 and 1745 Walter and Richard Lougher sent out 33 ships, 19 of them after 1730. David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth–Century Slave Trade to America, vol. i, The Years of Expansion 1698–1729 (Bristol Record Societies Publications, vol. xxxviii, 1986)

Notes 343

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

pp. 93,100, 102, 107, 115,120, 128,135,152,156, 162,170, 178, 182; vol. ii, The Years of Ascendancy, 1730–1745 (Bristol Record Societies Publications, vol. xxxix, 1987) pp. 4,7,8,21,31,34,54,63,81,93,95,105,111,118, 120, 125,126,135,143. Steve Bherendt, Liverpool’s contribution to the slave trade Unpublished conference paper Liverpool and Transatlantic slavery, 13–15 October 2005. Behrendt, ‘Captains’, Tables C, D, E, pp.128–31. Steve Bherendt, Liverpool’s contribution. The Scots participated enthusiastically in the slave trade, but like the Irish they did so outside Scotland. See Douglas J.Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005), p. 99. Tuohy Papers, Liverpool Public Record Office (LPRO), 380 TUO 4/1 Bill of lading for the snow Betty and Peggy, Master Philip Nagle, 8 June 1753. Tuohy Papers, LPRO, 380 TUO 4/2 James Clemens to Captain (Cpt.) William Speers, 3 June 1767; Ibid. 4/3 James Clemens to David Tuohy, 30 June 1768. Ibid., 380 TUO 5/10 Thomas Trant to David Tuohy, 9 May 1780. Ibid., 380 TUO 5/37 David Tuohy to Stephen Fagan, 28 August 1771. Ibid., 380 TUO 5/43 David Tuohy to Luke Mann, 5 April 1774. Ibid., 380 TUO 5/15 David Tuohy to Owen Harris, 8 April 1780: David Tuohy to Robert Cushin, 11 December 1781. David J. Pope, ‘Liverpool’s Catholic Mercantile and Business Community in the Second Half of the Eighteenth century.’Part 11, Recusant History, 2005, vol. xxvii, No. 3, pp. 407–8. David J. Pope, ‘The Geographical Origins and Socio-economic backgrounds of the Liverpool Catholic mercantile and maritime community in the second half of the eighteenth century’ in North West Catholic History, 2003, No. 30, 35, 45–8. Christopher Butler seems to have come from a local gentry background, with family connections at Stalmines Hall. Ryan had family in Kilkenny. Doran’s father, also Felix, had been sailing out of Liverpool as a captain since the 1740s. Behrendt, ‘Captains’ pp. 112–13. When financial disaster struck, their most famous member, John Forbes, lawyer, Patriot MP and friend of Grattan, was able to secure an appointment as Governor of the Bahamas (1796). He died there in its capital, New Providence, in 1797. Letters to John Forbes 1775–96 in Analecta Hibernica, no. 8, 1938. Behrendt, ‘Captains’, p. 85. Ibid., p.105, Table A, 124–5. Riach, ‘American Slavery’, pp. 7–8. Eveline Martin, Journal of a Slave Dealer (London, 1930 ), p. 26. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 63, 73. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p.108. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p.107. Marcus Woods, Blind Memory, Visual representations of slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester, 2000), p. 35. Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 283.

344 Notes 39 Percy Arland Ussher (ed.), The Midnight Court and The Adventures of a Luckless Fellow, translated from the Gaelic by Percy Arland Ussher, with a preface by W.B. Yeats (London, 1946), p. 76. 40 Wilkins, Manx Slave Traders, pp. 9,19, 25–7. 41 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: an Old Regime Business (Wisconsin, 1979), p.152. 42 Ibid., p. 27. 43 Ibid., pp. 20–3. 44 Richard Hayes, Dictionary of Irishmen in France (Dublin, 1949), p. 309. 45 Jean Agnew, Belfast merchant families in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 1996), p. 40. 46 Thomas, Slave Trade, pp. 252–3. 47 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: an Old Regime Business (Wisconsin, 1979), p. 152. 48 Jean Mettas, Repertoire des expeditions negrieres Francaises au vxiii, vol. 1. Nantes (Paris, 1976) vol. ii. Ports autre que Nantes (Paris, 1984) Irish names, Walsh, Sheill (O’Sheil), Lynch, Rirdan (O’Riordan), Eustace, Mills, Archer, White, Roche, Clark, Ellis, Brown, Woulf, Trant, Creagh, Murphy: Vol. ii, Quin, from Bordeaux; Donovan from L’Havre. 49 Stein, French Slave Trade, p. 153. 50 Hayes, Dictionary, pp. 307–9, 262. 51 Mettas, Repertoire, vol. i., pp. 212, 1728/5: 275, 1733/4 52 Ibid., p. 504, 1744/7. 53 Ibid., p. 285, 1734/7. 54 Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite risings in Britain 1689–1746 ((London,1980) pp. 241–45: Hayes, Dictionary, p. 307: Mettas, Cpt. Richard Butler (RB), St Malo, 26/3138, 1726/3: RBSt Malo 37/3148, 1729/2 unnamed Cpt. Butler 1725–9; three voyages from L’Orient, could probably be the same person. 55 Mary Ann Lyons, ‘The emergence of an Irish Community in St. Malo 1550–1710’ in Thomas O’ Conner, (ed.) The Irish in Europe 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 119, 124. 56 Stein, French Slave Trade, pp. 28–9; Thomas Slave Trade, p. 252. 57 Mettas, Repertoire, vol. i., p. 518, 1748/4 58 Ibid., p. 445, 1742/2. 59 Stein, French Slave Trade, p. 28. 60 Thomas, Slave Trade, pp. 251–2. 61 Hayes, Dictionary, p. 307. 62 Mettas, Repertoire,vol. i; Hayes, p. 35. 63 Hayes, Dictionary, p. 262. 64 Mattas, Repertoire,I, Mathias Roche et cie, vol.i., p. 361, 1739/13 : 391, 1740/12: Roche Freres (RF) p. 413, 1740/34: Francois Roche et Freres (FrFF) p. 458, 1742/15,: FrF F548, 1742/15: RF. P.475, 1743/14: Nicholas Roche (NR), 552, 1749/26: NR 618, 1752/8: NR,640, 1752/30: NR 723, 1755/10 this is the one taken by the English: NR724, 1755/11. 65 Eamon O Ciosain ‘A hundred year of Irish migration to France 1590–1688, in Thomas O’ Conner, (ed.) The Irish in Europe 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), p. 98. 66 Genealogical Office (GO), Dublin, MS 160, fol. 62. 67 GO MS 60, fol. 111. 68 Landsdowne MS, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Rep. 6, App. 1877, 241. 69 Mettas, Repertoire,vol. i, p. 492, 1743/29. Perhaps Paul had a relative who was a captain in the slave trade vol. ii, Pierre Creach (Peter Creagh?) Bordeaux, La Levrette d’Argenton, 44/1480, 1748/1. 70 G.O.MS 103 pp.119–20, this shows that Paul Creagh had a brother Pierce. No Peter Creagh is recorded, T.M.Truxes (ed.) Letter Book of Greg and Cunningham 1756–57, p. 66.

Notes 345 71 PRONI Blair Papers, D717/20, Quinton Hamilton’s account with James and Lambert Blair, 10 May 1790. 72 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 27–30 November 1784. 73 David Dickson, Old World Colony; Cork and South Munster (Cork University Press, 2005), p. 425. 74 From [email protected] 11 April 2002. 75 Martin Lynn, ‘Trade and politics in nineteenth century Liverpool: the Tobin and Horsfall families and Liverpool’s African trade,’ in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1992, vol. cxlii., p. 104. 76 From [email protected] 11 April 2002. 77 Tobin Papers, LPRO Hq 920 TOB Annals of the Tobin family of Liverpool and the Isle of Man typescript compiled by R.C.Reid, 1940, pp. 21, 31.

6

Protestant, Catholic

1 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 2. 2 Ibid., p. 28. 3 James A. Rawley, ‘London’s Defense of the Slave Trade, 1787–1807’ in Slavery and Abolition, vol. xiv, No. 2, August 1993, p. 56. 4 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p.155; J.R.Ward, British West Indian slavery 1750–1834, the process of amelioration (Oxford, 1988), p. 21. 5 Dickson, Old World Colony, p. 16. 6 Gwynn, ‘An Irish Settlement on the Amazon’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin), vol. xli, Section C, No. 1, (July, 1932). 7 D. W. Galenson, ‘Economic aspects of the growth of slavery in the seventeenthcentury Chesapeake’ in B. L. Solow (ed.) Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic system (Cambridge, 1991), p. 267. 8 S. J. Connolly (ed.) Oxford companion to Irish history (Oxford, 1998), p. 544; Truxes, Irish-American trade, pp. 190–1. 9 G. A. O’Brien, Economic history of Ireland, p. 97. 10 Jackie Hill, From Patriots to Unionists (Oxford, 1997) p. 147 footnote 37; O’Connell Papers, University College Dublin (hereafter UCD) 12/2, David Murray to Maurice O’Connell, 11 April, 1782, p. 45. 11 Walkers Hibernian Magazine, February 1775, p. 18. 12 Strain, Charitable society, 62; George Benn, A history of the town of Belfast from the earliest time to the close of the eighteenth century (2 vols, London, 1877), ii, p. 622; Belfast News Letter, 11 January 1785. 13 Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, An duanaire 1600–1900 Poems of the Dispossessed (Mountrath, Portlaoise, 1981), pp. 39, 91. 14 Belfast News Letter, 11 January 1785, 1 February 1785, 16 September 1785; Freeman’s Journal, 9–11 August 1791. 15 L. E. Cochrane, Scottish trade with Ireland in the eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1985), p. 75. 16 F. G. James, ‘Irish smuggling in the eighteenth century’ in Irish Historical Studies (IHS) xii, no. 48 (September 1961), p. 307; George Chambers, Faces of Change: the Belfast and N. Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 1783–1983 (Belfast, 1984). 17 James, ‘Irish smuggling’, pp. 306–9. 18 O’Connell Papers, UCD James Rice to Maurice O’Connell, 12/6/A,7 March, 1758, p. 20; Ibid., John Brock to Maurice O’Connell, 31 March, 1773, p. 49. 19 L. M. Cullen, ‘Value of contemporary printed sources,’ pp. 149, 154.

346 Notes 20 T. B. Costello, Trade Tokens of the County of Galway in the Seventeenth Century (Galway, 1911), p. 14. 21 L. M. Cullen, ‘Economic development 1750–1800’ in T. W. Moody, W. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, iv, Eighteenth-century Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 174–5; Kevin Whelan,’The Catholic community in eighteenth century Wexford’in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (ed.), Endurance and emergence, Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1990), pp. 137–40. 22 O’Connell Papers, 12/2, John Bourke to Maurice O’Connell, 26 February 1793. 23 King MSS, Trinity College Dublin, 750/3/2/147–8, William King to Edward Southwell, p. 2. 24 O’Connell Papers, 12/3/X. Charles Sugrue to Maurice O’Connell, 8 August 1822; William McCarthy [for Charles Sugrue] to Maurice O’Connell, 24 June, 1823. 25 Dickson, Cork region, pp. 523, 435; Dickson, ‘Butter comes to market’ p. 380. 26 G.A. O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland; L. M. Cullen, ‘The value of contemporary printed sources for Irish economic history in the eighteenth century’ in IHS, xiv, no. 54, September 1964. 27 Isaac McCartney LetterBook PRONI, D501/1, McCartney to Henry Caldwell, Ballyshannon, 4 April, 1705, p. 82; 15 September 1705, p.169; 11 February, 1706, p. 268; 12 August 1706, p. 341. 28 Thomas Bartlett, The O’Haras of Annaghmore in Irish Economic and Social History, Vol. 9, 1982, p. 45. 29 PRONI O’Hara Papers T2812/19/1 Survey of the economic development of County Sligo in the eighteenth century by Charles O’Hara of Nymphsfield, p. 9. 30 Ibid., p.154. 31 W. A. Hart, ‘Africans in eighteenth-century Ireland,’ in I.H.S., xxxiii, No. 29, May 2002, pp. 21–2. (The break down for Munster is 23 in Cork, seven in Kinsale and 10 in Waterford. Hart suggests a possible total of some 1000 to 3000 for Ireland as a whole over the half century.) 32 Ibid., p. 24. 33 See Chapter 14, page. 34 See Chapter 5, page. 35 Kinsella, An Duanaire, p. 183. 36 Truxes, Irish American Trade, p. 154. 37 Ibid., p. 151: David Dickson, An economic history of the Cork region in the eighteenth century, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Universtiy of Dublin, 1977), p. 482. 38 Truxes, Irish-American trade, pp. 262–3; Richard Pares, War and trade in the West Indies 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936), p. 288. 39 Pares, War and trade p. 402–4; Derby Shellure, Martinique to John Goddard Rotterdam, 10 January 1745 (PRONI, Shannon papers, D2707/A/1/9/4). 40 Truxes, Irish-American trade, pp. 34, 154, 164–5, 270–1. 41 Dickson, ‘Cork region’, pp. 485, 588–90. 42 David Dickson, ‘The Cork merchant community in the eighteenth century’ in P.Butel and L.M.Cullen (ed.), Negoce et industrie en France et en Irlande au xviii and xix siecles, (Paris, 1980), p. 47. 43 Dickson, Cork region, p. 447. 44 Nano Nagle to Miss Fitzsimons, Cork, early 1770, in T.J. Walsh (ed.) Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters, (Dublin, 1959) Appendix A, p. 347. 45 Alexander the Coppersmith, Remarks upon the religion, trade, government, police, customs, manners and maladys of the city of Cork (Cork, 1737: 2nd ed. Cork 1974), pp. 5–6, 66.

Notes 347 46 Dickson, ‘Butter comes to market’ p. 370. 47 Maureen MacGeehin Wall, ‘The catholics in the towns and the quarterage dispute in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in IHS, viii, no. 30, September 1952, pp. 101–6; Maureen MacGeehin Wall, ‘The rise of the catholic middle class in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in IHS.,xi, no. 42, September 1958, p. 99. 48 T. Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish nation (Dublin,1992), pp. 50, 75–7. 49 Cork Archives Council, Letter Book of a Cork Merchant, Richard Hare, 1771–2 (hereafter Hare Letterbook, HL) fol. 152 Hare to Peter Holme, 19 October 1771. 50 GHD ‘Hare of Stow Bardolph, and the Ancestry of Lord Listowel’ in J.G.Nichols (ed.), The Herald and Genealogist vol. 2 (London, 1865) p. 487. 51 Arthur Edward Vicars, Abstracts of Irish Wills, Index to the Prerogative Wills of Ireland, 1538–1810 (Dublin 1897) p. 217. 52 HL, Hare to Charles Dyer, 24 August 1771, fol. 60: Hare to James Baillie, 21 September, 1771, fol. 103; David Dickson, An economic history of the Cork region In the eighteenth century, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Dublin, 1977), p. 505. 53 HL, Hare to Charles Dyer, 24 August 1771, fol. 60: Hare to James Baillie, 21 September 1771, fol. 103. 54 HL., Hare to John and Henry Simpson, 21 August 1771 fol. 55; Hare to Amsinck and Burmesler, 18 August, 1771, fol. 47; Hare to Jean Marques Baslo, 30 August 71, fol. 72; Hare to Martin and Peile, 6 September, 1771, fol. 84; Hare to Berkoff, September, 1771, fol. 101. 55 H. L., Hare to Hind and Simpson, 16 August 1771 fol. 41; Hare to John Tarleton, 16 August 1771, fol. 43. 56 H. L., Richard Hare to David and Stephen Moylan and Edward Forest, 2 August 1771, fol. 15. 57 H. L., Richard Hare to John Power, 13 April, 1771 fol. 26; ibid., 7 August. 58 L. M. Cullen, ‘The Blackwater Catholics and Conty Cork Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century’ in O’Flanagan and Buttimer, Cork, p. 577. 59 Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, 150th edition (London, 1970), vol. i, p. 1629 (see Listowel). 60 Edith Mary Johnston Lik (ed.) History of the Irish Parliament (Dublin, 2003), vol. iv, pp. 366–7. 61 R. G. Thorne, History of Parliament, the Commons 1790–1820 vol. iv, pp.154; George Ireland, ‘William Francis Hare’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xxv, p. 263. 62 HL, Hare to Richard Watt, 24 August 1771, fol. 63. 63 Colm Lennon, The urban patriciciates of early modern Ireland: a case study of Limerick, O’Donnell Lecture 1999, Dublin, p. 21. 64 Bernard Burke, Landed Gentry of Ireland (London, 1904), p. 517. 65 David Dickson, Old World Colony, Cork and South Munster 1630–1830 (Cork 2005), pp. 487–8. 66 James Roche, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays of an Octogenarian, 2 vols, (Cork, 1851) vol. ii, p. 139. 67 Roche and Crosbie Papers, Co. Cork 1732–1740, British Library (B2), Add. MS 20, 715 fol. 34. 68 Roche family in the city of Cork 1543–1740, BL Add. MS.19, 868. 69 Emmet Larkin, (trans. and ed.), Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland July-August 1835 (Washington D.C.,1990), pp. 87–8. 70 Maurice Lenihan, Limerick: its History and Antiquities (Dublin, 1866), 398–9.

348 Notes 71 National Library of Ireland, MS 827, Kelly Letter Book (KL), Limerick, 1744–48, Peter Pepard, 7 May 1745 and 25 August 5, 24 December 1746. 72 KL, Kelly to Joseph Percival, 8 November 1745, Stephen Schaap, 10 November, 45 LB; see Bernard Burke, Irish Landed Gentry (London, 1958) entry for Roche Kelly of Ballintlea, p. 409–10. Probably Philip Stackpole, the younger, and Stephen Creagh possessed marital connections for they operated a partnership very similar to that of Kelly and Roche. 73 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents illustrative of the Slave Trade (Washington, 1930) vol. ii, p. 26. 74 Vere Langford Oliver, Caribbeana, 6 vols (London, 1909–1911) vol. ii, pp. 117, 199. 75 KL, Kelly to Jonathan Gurnell, 4 December 1745. 76 Roche Papers, BL, William Archdeacon to Robert Dillon, 2 July 1740, fol. 66–7, KL, John Kelly to John Curtin 6 June 1745: Kelly Papers (KP), National Library of Ireland, copies of letters, printed manuscripts and wills for Kelly of Limerick and Roches of Cork c. 1737–1954, completed by T.Kelly with subsequent additions, John Kelly to Sam Martin, 29 January 1737, p. 154. 77 Williams, Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica, p. 66. 78 Ibid., p. 70. 79 BL Add. MS 20, 715, John Archdeacon to Edmond McGrath, fol. 83, 23 January, 1748. 80 Bill Power, Mitchelstown through Seven Centuries (Mitchelstown, 1987), p. 17. 81 KL, Kelly to Jonathan Gurnell, 4 December, 1745. 82 KL, Kelly to Jonathan Gurnell and Co., 13 April, 1745, Kelly to John Curtin, 6 June, 1745. 83 KL, Kelly to Stephen Schaap, 10 November, 45. 84 Roche Papers, William Archdeacon to Robert Dillon and Co., 2 July 1740; William Archdeacon to Messrs Blake and Lynch, 28 July 1740; John Archdeacon to George Fitzgerald and Co., 28 July 1740, Fols 66–7. 85 KL, Kelly to John Archdeacon, 3 November 1744. 86 KL, Jonathan Gurnell, 22 September 1745, JK to John Archdeacon, 17 September 1745. 87 KL, Kelly to John Arcdeacon, 7 April, 1745. 88 KL, Kelly to John Archdeacon, Rotterdam 10 November, 1745. 89 J.V. Kernan, History of the Financial Administration of Ireland to 1817, p. 671. 90 KP, pp. 201, 205, 228; GOMS 103, pp. 119–20. 91 Maurice Lenihan, Limerick: its History and Antiquities (Dublin, 1866) p. 348. 92 Cork Archives Council, Richard Hare, Letter Book, 1771–2, Hare to John Power, 13 April, and 7 August 1771 fol. 26; Lenihan, History, p. 399. 93 J. Carberry, Chronological and Historical Account of some of the Principal Events connected with the Dominican Convent, Limerick (1866), p. 19, quoted in David Lee and Christine Gonzalez, Georgian Limerick, vol. ii, Limerick Civic Trust Publication, p. 294. 94 Lenihan, History, pp. 658, 414. 95 James Roche, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays by an Octogenarian (Cork, 1851) vol. ii, p. 139. 96 Lennon, Patriciate, p. 6: Lenihan, History, p. 624. 97 Toby Barnard, The Abduction of a Limerick Heiress (Dublin, 1998), p. 12. 98 Lenihan, History, pp. 349–53. 99 A.P.W. Malcomson, ‘Sexton Pery and the Pery Papers’ in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal, Vol. xvi, 1974, p. 38. 100 Lenihan, Limerick, p. 346.

Notes 349 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

7

Lenihan, History, p. 363. Judith Hill, Buildings of Limerick (Dublin,1991), pp. 96–7; Lenihan, History, p. 398. PRON I, T/2812/17/7, Stephen Roche to Charles O’Hara, 13 March, 1778. Malcomson, ‘Sexton Pery’, p. 35. William Coppinger, Life of Nano Nagle (Cork, 1794), p. 29. KP, 201, 205, 228; GOMS 103, 119–20. KP, 201. KL, John Kelly to Blake and Lynch, 6 Jan. 1848. BL, Additional MSS. 41, 349, Letter Book of Samuel Martin, Martin to Charles Baldwin, 22 February 1776, fol. 65. Roche, Papers, BL, Add. MS 20, 715. Ibid. Ibid. Rodgers, ‘Black Atlantic’, p. 183. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 27–30 Nov, 1784. Ibid., 18–24 Dec, 1784.

And Dissenter

1 T. M. Truxes (ed.), Letter book of Greg and Cunningham 1756–1757 (Oxford, 2001), p.19; Richard Hare, Letter book 1771–2 (Cork Archives Council) U259 fol. 39, Hare to John Henderson, 13 August 1771: fol. 137, Hare to Galen and Thompson, 11 October 1771: fol. 141 Hare to John Holmes, 17 October, 1771. 2 Jean Agnew, Belfast merchant families in the seventeenth century (Dublin, 1996), pp. 82–5, 140. 3 Truxes, Letter Book, pp. 38–9. 4 Ibid., pp. 43–47: Truxes, Irish-American Trade, p. 93. 5 Truxes, Letter Book, p. 233. 6 Ibid., p. 50. 7 Ibid., pp. 12, 361–2, 367. 8 K. J. Harvey, The Bellews of Mount Bellew, a Catholic gentry family in eighteenthcentury Ireland (Dublin, 1998), p. 118. 9 David Richardson ‘the Atlantic slave trade,’ in W. R. Louis (ed.), The Oxford history of the British empire, vol. xi, pp. 156–7. 10 Harvey, Bellews, p. 122. 11 Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers) 15 November–16 August, 1837–8, xlviii, p. 437. 12 Truxes, Letter Book, pp. 49–52. 13 Ibid., pp. 40–3. 14 Jean Agnew (ed.), The Drennan–McTier Letters 1776–93 (Dublin, 1998) p. 273. 15 A. T. Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence, The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen (London, 1993), p. 132. 16 Chambers, p. 40. 17 HL, Hare to Greg and Cunningham, 11 October, 1771, fol. 136. 18 W. A. Maguire, Absentees, Architects and Agitators: the Fifth Earl of Donegall and the Builders of Fisherwick Park’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, 10 February, 1981, pp. 9–11. 19 Ibid., p.15. 20 W. A. Maguire, ‘Lord Donegall and the Hearts of Steel’ in IHS, xxi, no.84, September, 1979, 364; Stewart, A Deeper Silence, p. 121.

350 Notes 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

37

Maguire, ‘Absentees, Architects and Agitators’, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 15. Maguire, ‘Lord Donegall and the Hearts of Steel’, pp. 355, 358–9, 363, 365, 367. Truxes, Letter book, p. 53. Ibid., plates 2 and 3. Belfast Mercury, 16 March, 1784; Antiquarian Horology, December 2000, p. 664. Chambers, Faces, p. 43. S. J. Connolly (ed.) Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford, 1998). 151; Billy Kennedy, The Scots-Irish in the Carolinas, (Belfast, 1997), pp. 99–104. PRONI, D162/51 Arthur Dobbs to Matthew Gregory, undated c. 1751; ibid., D162/70 Sir Simon Clark to Conway Richard Dobbs and Brice Dobbs, 24 May, 1754; ibid., D162/76 Jonathan Ever to Conway Richard Dobbs, 14 October, 1758. W. H. Crawford, ‘The Belfast middle classes in the late eighteenth century’ in David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (ed.), The United Irishmen, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp. 64–5; Chambers, Faces of change, pp. 84–5. Truxes, Letter book, p. 70. The Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland, vol ii, Part 1 , p. 312, quoted in Antiquarian Horology, December 2000, p. 666. N.E. Gamble, ‘The business community and trade of Belfast 1767–1800’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Dublin, 1978, p. 322. Patrick Rogers and Ambrose Macaulay, Old St Mary’s (Belfast 1984), pp. 26–9. ‘United Irish Family: the McCabes of Belfast’ in Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review, 13 (1997) 6. Jean Agnew (ed.), The Drennan-McTier Letters (Dublin,1999), vol. iii, p. 480.

8

Dublin, Sweet City

30

31

32 33 34 35 36

1 L. M. Cullen, Princes and Pirates: The Dublin Chamber of Commerce, 1783–1983 (Dublin, 1983), p. 20. 2 L. M. Cullen, ‘The Dublin merchant community’ in Paul Butel and L. M. Cullen (eds), Cities and merchants: French and Irish perspectives on urban development 1500–1800 (Dublin, 1986), p. 198; Truxes, Irish American trade, p. 214. 3 Cullen, ‘Merchant community’, p. 198; Harvey, Bellews of Mount Bellew, p.124. 4 L. M. Cullen, ‘Irish merchant communities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Cognac in the eighteenth century’ in Paul Butel and L. M. Cullen (eds), Négoce et industrie en France et en Irlande aux xviiie et xixe siècles (Paris, 1980), p.55; L.M. Cullen, ‘Galway merchants in the outside world, 1650–1800’ in Diarmuid O Cearbhaill, Galway, town and gown 1484–1984 (Dublin, 1984), p.81; Truxes, Irish-American trade, pp. 96, 340. 5 Cullen, ‘Dublin merchant community,’ p. 203. 6 William Urwick, Biographical sketches of the late James Digges La Touche Esq. (Dublin, 1868), pp. 8, 9, 11, 14, 175, 181. 7 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 282–96. 8 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 228. 9 Seán Ó Tuama (ed.) and Thomas Kinsella (transl.), An duanaire 1600–1900: poems of the dispossessed (Mountrath, Portlaoise, 1981), p. 235. 10 National Library of Ireland (NLI), Mary Leadbetters Diaries, 1789, Anecdotes, 136; Edgeworth Beaufort Papers, MS 13176(2) f. 6 Dr D. Beaufort to Harriet Beaufort, 8 August 1796.

Notes 351 11 Limerick Chronicle 17 Oct. 1768; Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 21–23 June 1791 Michael Foy, The sugar industry in Ireland (Dublin, 1876), 8; R. M. W. Strain, Belfast and its charitable society: a study of urban social development (London, 1961), p. 63. 12 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 228. 13 Cullen, Princes, p.18. 14 Cullen, ‘Merchant community’, p. 198. 15 Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 228. 16 L. M. Cullen, ‘Economic development 1750–1800’, p. 182; Cullen, ‘Merchant community’, p. 197. 17 Petition of the merchants and traders of the city of Dublin concerned in the importation and refining of sugar, 30 November 1765 (PRONI, T1060/9/3868); Truxes, Irish-American trade, p. 282–96. 18 An impartial state of the case between the refiners of sugar of Great Britain and those of Ireland, 30 November 1765 (PRONI, T 1060/9/97). 19 Petition of the merchants and traders of the city of Dublin concerned with the importation and refining of sugars, 30 November 1765 (PRONI, T1060/ 9/3868). 20 Coghill Papers, Huntingdon Library, HM28678, Marmaduke Coghill, Irish Chancellor of the Exechequer, 5 November 1718; Maurice Craig, Dublin 1660–1860 (Dublin, 1980), p. 101. 21 T. J. Kiernan, History of the Financial Administration of Ireland to 1817 (London, 1930), p. 267. 22 Sean Reamonn, History of the Revenue Commisioners (Dublin, 1981), p.19. 23 Kiernan, Financial Administration, pp. 262–9. 24 Ibid., p. 136. 25 Chambers, Faces of Change, pp. 73–4. 26 House of Commons Journal, xiv, p. 24. 27 House of Commons Journal, vol. xix, p. 28. 28 Westport House, Co Mayo, a brief history (unpaginated, unsigned, unpublished). 29 See Chapter 5, Note 22. 30 G.O. Sayles, ‘Sketches of the members of the Irish parliament’ in PRIA, Section C, vol i, pp. 234–6. 31 Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland (New Haven and London, 2001), p. 187. 32 Kiernan, Financial Administration, p. 122. 33 Maurice Craig, Dublin 1660–1860 (Dublin, 1980), p. 133. 34 A chronology of American slavery, at http/innercity.org/holt/contents.html, pp. 6,7,12,13. 35 Kiernan, Financial Administration, pp. 158–9. 36 Ibid., pp. 165–79. 37 Parliamentary Register, Fourth session in the Third Parliament, George III, 1781, p. 109. 38 J. Kelly, Prelude to Union (Cork, 1992), pp. 131–2. 39 Eoin Magennis, ‘Coal, Corn and Canals: The Dispersal of Public Monies, 1695–1772’ in D. W. Hayton (ed.), The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century, the Long Apprenticeship, p. 86. 40 Hunt, 42; Ross J.S.Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent, with his letters to the New York Assembly and intimate correspondence with Charles O’Hara 1761–1776 (Philadelphia 1956), p. 335.

352 Notes 41 West India Committee MSS. Minutes of the West India Merchants, April 1769–79 fol. 52–5 quoted in Sheridan Sugar and Slavery, p. 351. 42 Ibid., pp. 351–2; see also Thomas Bartlett, ‘Viscount Townshend and the Irish Revenue Board, 1767–73,’ in R.I.A. Proc, lxxix (1979), sect C, pp. 153–75. 43 Dickson, ‘Cork region’, p. 489. 44 David Lammey, ‘A study of Anglo-Irish relations between 1772 and 1782, with particular reference to the “free trade” movement’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1984), pp. 151–2. 45 Ibid., p. 204; R.V. Gallen, ‘The structure of Anglo-Irish politics during the American Revolution: Sir Henry Cavendish’s diary of the Irish parliament, October 12, 1779 to September 2, 1780; edition of the partial text and critical essay,’ (2 vols, Ph.D. thesis, University of Notre Dame,1973, University Microfilms, a XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan), p. 97. 46 R. V. Gallen, as in Note 45. 47 Malcomson, Foster, 39; Edward Byrne and John Sutton to John Foster, 11 January 1780 (Foster/Massereene Papers, Mic 500/42, D562/8398); Messrs Stewart, Thompson, Bateson, Cunningham, Sinclair, Lewis to Foster, 19 January 1780 (ibid., D562/8440). 48 A. W. P. Malcomson, Foster, 39. 49 Petition of the merchants and traders of the city of Dublin concerned with the importation and refining of sugars, 30 November 1765 (PRONI, T1060/9/3868); Watson’s Dublin directory or the gentleman’s and citizens almanack 1765. 50 Petition from the sugar refiners of the city of Dublin, May? 1780 (Foster Masserene Papers, Mic 500/42, D562/8416A). The names listed in order were Edward Byrne, Thomas Sherlock, Pat. Long, Jos. Green, John Maquay, John Sutton, Peter Galan, And. Maziere, Peter Canier, Pat. Sweetman, Garrett Geoghan, John Taurow, Sam Collins, John Green, George Maquay, John Nairic, John Canier, John Maryland, John Byrne, Bartho. Maziere, Pat Kavanagh, John McMahon, John Morain, William Field, Sam. Canier, Will. Sweetman, Thomas Nowlan, Elias Tardy; R. Dudley Edwards, ‘Catholic Commitee minute book, 1773–93’ in Archiv. Hib., ix (1942), pp. 3–89. 51 J. T. Gilbert, A history of the city of Dublin (3 vols, Dublin, 1854–9), i, pp. 354–5; Wall, ‘Catholic middle class’, pp. 107–8. 52 Bartlett (ed.) Wolfe Tone, p. 235. 53 Edwards, ‘Catholic Committee’, p. 45. 54 Petition from the sugar refiners of the city of Dublin, May? 1780 (Foster/Massereene Papers, Mic500/42, D526/8416A); Allegations of the merchants and refiners of Ireland, relative to the sugar business, undated, 1780; ibid., D526/8420. 55 Hibernian Magazine, February 1775, p. 128. 56 Frederick Jebb, Sugar duties, appendix no. vi, ‘Advice on the sugar business by John Sutton, Bartholmew Maziere and Robert Thompson’, pp. 51–61. 57 Lammey, ‘Free trade’, p. 272. 58 Lammey, ‘Free trade’, p. 274. 59 Hibernian Magazine, 1781, p. 47, 166. 60 Ibid., 275–8; R.V. Gallen, ‘Cavendish diary’, ii, pp. 193–200. 61 Lammey, ‘Free trade’, pp. 79–80. 62 Jebb, Sugar duties, appendix i, pp. 43–5. 63 Ibid., appendix ii and iii, pp. 46–7. 64 Ibid., appendix iv, p. 48.

Notes 353 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105

Ibid., appendix v, pp. 49–51. Gallen, ‘Cavendish diary’, ii, p. 281. Lammey, ‘Free trade’, p. 282. Drennan McTeir Letters, p. 257. Frederick Jebb, Thoughts of the Discontents of the People last year respecting the Sugar Duties, (Dublin, 1781), p. 11; ii, iii, pp. 46–7. Ibid., pp. 41–4. Riach, ‘American Slavery’, pp. 10–11. Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books 1550–1800, Oxford, 1989, pp. 179–81. Hibernian Magazine, 1784, pp. 126–9, 146; July 1782, 341–3. Ibid, Feb. 1788, pp. 57–60, 131–3. SK, A short and particular and impartial account of the treatment of slaves in the island of Antigua (Cork, 1789), p. vii. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 12–21. Ibid., pp. 46–56. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., pp. 63–5. L. M. Cullen, Princes, p. 54. Mary Leadbeater, Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton (London, 1822), pp. 60,76,100. Thomas, Slave Trade, p. 476. Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen (Colarado, 1939), pp. 19,48, 52. Ross J. S. Hoffman, Edmund Burke, New York Agent, with his letters to the New York Assembly and intimate correspondence with Charles O’Hara 1761–1776, (Philadelphia, 1956), pp. 332–41. Wecter, Burke and his Kinsmen, pp. 76–8. Paul Langford (ed.) The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1996), vol. iii, p. 131. Ibid., pp. 340–1. Ibid., p. 687. Edmund Burke, Sketch of the Negro Code, in Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, vol. ii, pp. 173, 185, 196. Ibid., pp. 178–9,191. Ibid., pp. 182–7. Ibid., pp. 192–5 Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., pp. 202–3. Ibid., pp. 192, 203. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., pp. 186, 200–1. Ibid., p. 168. Diaries of Mary Leadbeater, NLI, MSS 9292–9314 (1769–89), 13 vols: MSS 9315–9329 (1790–1909), 15 vols: MSS 9330–9346 (1810–26), 17 vols.; Mary Leadbeater, Poems (Dublin, 1808). John Woolman, The Journal of John Woolman (London, 1895), pp. 81, 184–207. Leadbeater, Poems, pp. 87–92. Rodgers, ‘Equiano in Belfast’, p. 77. Laurence Parsons, ‘Poem on the state of Ireland’ in Bartlett (ed.), Wolfe Tone, pp. 448–9; D. O. Madden (ed.), Speeches of Henry Grattan (Dublin, 1853), pp. 42, 54.

354 Notes 106 William Drennan, ‘Letters of Orellana, an Irish helot, to the seven northern counties not represented in the national assembly of delegates held at Dublin, October 1785’ in Lawless (ed.), Belfast politics, pp. 155–242. 107 J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 76–7. 108 Anon, ‘Addresss to the People of Great Britain, respectfully offered to the people of Ireland, on the utility of refraining from the use of West Indian sugar and rum’ (London 1791: Dublin 1792) reprinted in Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee (eds), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (8 vols, London, 1999) vol ii, pp. 155–165. 109 O’Neill, ‘Peaceful rebel’, pp. 150–52. 110 Leadbeater, Papers, 1, 205; O’Neill, ‘Peaceful rebel’, pp. 147–153. 111 Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London,1997), pp. 72–4. 112 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, (London, 1997). 113 The General Evangelical Society, founded in 1787 was the first Dublin organisation to use the term. Joseph Liechty, ‘Irish evangelicalism, Trinity College Dublin, and the mission of the Church of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1987), 325. Early evangelicalism in Ireland was very much fostered by aristocratic patronage and favoured Calvinist Methodism disseminated by Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, founder of the Huntingdon Connection. From 1773 on she sent preachers to ‘poor wicked Ireland’ who preached at Lady Arabella Denny’s Magdelene Chapel. (David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society 1740–1890 (London and New York, 1992), pp. 15, 131.) 114 James Mullalla, A compilation on the slave trade respectfully addressed to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1792), v–vi, p. 23. 115 Mary Birkett, The African slave trade addressed to members of her own sex (Dublin, 1792), part 1 and 2. 116 Clare Midgley, Women against slavery, the British campaign 1780–1870 (London, 1995), p. 34. 117 The purrings of the city mowzers of Napper, escaped from the man-trap, a civic eclogue exhibiting a choice scrap of tea-table scandal between Tabby, a Cherokee and other illustrious individuals (Dublin, 1792), pp. 3–4. 118 Drennan McTeir, Letters, vol. i, p. 388. 119 Mullalla, Slave trade, p. 29. 120 Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (Yale, 1989), p. 118; William Drennan to Martha McTier, 3 July 1791 (PRONI Drennan Papers, T765/1/303); Bartlett (ed.), Life of Tone, pp. 278–97. 121 L. H. Parsons, ‘The Mysterious Mr. Digges’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (1965), pp. 487–90; C.W. Purcell, Jr, Thomas Digges and William Pearce, An Example of the Transit of Technology’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21 (1964), p. 552. 122 Henry Joy and William Bruce (eds), Belfast Politics (Belfast, 1794), p. 26. 123 Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone:Memoirs, Journals and Political Writings compiled and arranged by William T.W. Tone, 1826 (Dublin, 1998), p. 125. 124 Ibid., pp. 137–40; Bartlett, Fall and rise, p. 129. 125 Robin Dudley Edwards (ed.), ‘The minute book of the Catholic Committee, 1773–93’ in Archivium Hibernicum, ix, (1942), p. 144. 126 Bartlett (ed.), Wolfe Tone, pp. 47, 52. 127 Letter for Beresford Burton from a Brother Barrister in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 25–27 September 1792.

Notes 355 128 Ibid., 169; ‘The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.’ George Washington, 1774, quoted in I. R. Christie, Crisis of empire: Great Britain and the American colonies 1754–83 (London, 1966), p. 91. 129 Bartlett (ed.) Wolfe Tone, pp. 205–6. 130 Ibid., pp. 152, 157. 131 Ibid., pp. 173, 200. 132 Bartlett, Fall and rise, p. 203.

9

Dynasties

1 The idea which stimulated the writing of this chapter, and most of the material within it, comes from two recent, detailed and impressive family studies, Ronald Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, a Carroll Saga 1500–1782 (Chapel Hill and London, 2000); Malcolm Bell jr, Major Butler’s Legacy, Five Generations of a Slave Holding Family (Athens and London, 1987); Hoffman, while drawing a careful and detailed picture of the Carrolls, is sympathetic to their achievement. Bell, though equally careful and informative, is much more critical of the Butlers, finding the major’s legacy a distinctly unpleasant one. Perhaps inevitably this chapter reflects the same attitudes. No similar work has been done on the Calhouns, though R.N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, the Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990) provides an illuminating understanding of the world Patrick Calhoun helped to build. 2 F. A. Kemble, Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838–9 (London, 1961); Butler’s Legacy, p. 335. 3 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, pp. 14–15, 23–25. 4 Ibid., pp. 32–40. 5 Ibid., pp. 44–6. 6 Ibid., pp. 64–6. 7 Ibid., pp. 111, 115. 8 Ibid., pp. 67–73. 9 David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade’, in W.R. Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998), vol. xi, p. 456. 10 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, pp. 76, 111–113. 11 Ibid., p. 72. 12 Ibid., pp. 78–83. 13 Ibid., p. 94. 14 Ibid., p. 103. 15 Ibid., p. 266. 16 Ibid., pp. xxiv–xxv. 17 Ibid., pp. 51–4 18 Ibid., pp. 101–2. 19 Ibid., p. 53. 20 Ibid., p. 84. 21 Ibid., pp. 92–4. 22 Ibid., pp. 271–2. 23 Ibid., p. 56. 24 Ibid., p. 58.

356 Notes 25 Ibid., p. 255. 26 L. H. Parsons. ‘The mysterous Mr. Digges’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 22 (1965), pp. 490–1. 27 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland., p. 256. 28 Ibid., p. 249. 29 Ibid., pp. 54–9. 30 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish, a History (Essex, 2000), p. 7; K. A. Miller’ ScotchIrish’,’black-Irish’ and ‘real Irish’: emigrants and identities in the Old South,’ in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000), pp. 139–40. 31 Kenny, American Irish, p.10. 32 Patrick Griffen, The people of no name; Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764 (Oxford, 2001), p.79. 33 Coghill Papers, Huntingdon Library, HM28678, Marmaduke Coghill, Irish Chancellor of the Exechequer, 5 November, 1718. 34 R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America 1718–1775 (Belfast, 1966), p. 36. 35 Griffin, No Name, p. 172. 36 Billy Kennedy, The Scots-Irish in the Carolinas (Belfast, 1997), p. 90. 37 Griffin, No Name, pp. 99–110, 134. 38 C. M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Nationalist, 1782–1828 (New York, 1944), p. 12. 39 Kennedy, Scots-Irish, p. 108. 40 Wiltse, Calhoun, pp. 13–14. 41 Arthur E. Mitchell, The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina 1799–1981 (South Carolina, 1981), p. 2; Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York, 1998), p. 32. 42 Patrick Melvin,’John Barnewell and Colonial South Carolina,’ in The Irish Sword, (1973–4) vol. xi, pp. 1–6. 43 Eirlys M. Barker, Indian Traders, Charles Town and London’s Vital Link to the Interior of North America 1717–1755, unpublished paper presented to the College of Charleston Program for the Study of the Low Country and the Atlantic World, May 1995, pp. 6–9, 26. 44 Melvin, ‘Barnewell’, p. 15. 45 Ball, Slaves in the Family, pp. 33–9, 287. 46 Mitchell, Hibernian Society, p. 12; E.C. Lynch, Lynch Record, Biographical Sketches (New York, 1925), p. 116. 47 Mitchell, Hibernian Society, p. 12. 48 Ibid., p. 6. 49 Dixon, Ulster Emigration, p. 49–51. 50 R. K. MacMaster, Flaxseed, and emigrants: Scotch-Irish merchants in eighteenth century America (unpublished paper delivered at xiv Ulster–American Heritage Symposium, June 2002, York County, South Carolina) 51 Miller, ‘Scotch Irish’, p. 139. 52 Wiltse, Calhoun, pp. 15–16; Kennedy, Scots-Irish, p. 90. 53 Will of Ezekiel Calhoun, 3 September 1759, proved May 1762; Ezikiel Calhoun and Kenton plantation by Mrs Louise C. Hill, June 1970, Calhoun family papers 1760–1843, South Carolinian Library (SCL), Columbia, South Carolina. 54 R. N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, the Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry 1760–1808 (London, 1990), p. 42. 55 M. L. Coit, John C. Calhoun, American Portrait (Boston, 1950), p. 7. 56 Klein, Unification, pp. 19–20.

Notes 357 57 MacMaster, Flaxseed. 58 Klein, Unification, pp. 47–51, 61–72. 59 Burkes Peerage, 150th edition, vol. i, p. 427; National Library of Ireland (NLI), MS 8008, Copy of an Act of Parliament 1725, 12th of Geo.1, Estate settlement Sir Pierce Butler, 4th baronet and his nephew and heir, James Butler, later 5th baronet, MS 8008, Dublin. 60 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, p. 483. 61 Ibid., p. 24. 62 Ibid., pp. 6–10. 63 Ibid., p. 40. 64 Ibid., p. 122. 65 Ibid., p. 29. 66 Wiltse, Calhoun, vol. i, p. 23. 67 Kennedy, Scots-Irish, pp. 90–2. 68 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, pp. 73, 549, 542. 69 Ibid., p. 79. 70 Ibid., p. 76. 71 Bell, Butler Legacy, p. 74–6. 72 Ibid., p. 79. 73 Klein, Unification, pp. 135, 143–4. 74 Bell, Butler Legacy, pp. 69–70. 75 Ibid., pp. 71, 550. 76 Ibid., pp. 116, 315, 488. 77 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, pp. 236–43, 251–55, 259. 78 Klein, Unification, p. 287. 79 Griffin, No Name, p. 134. 80 Calhoun family papers 1758–43, SCL. Will of Ezekiel Calhoun, 3 September 1759, proved May 1762, SCL 81 Ibid., Inventory of James Calhoun, 1761. 82 Patrick Calhoun, MS 15 May, 1784, SCL. 83 Wiltse, Calhoun, vol.i, p. 23. 84 Calhoun family papers 1758–43, SCL. Inventory and appraisement of the personal estate of Patrick Calhoun, 25 January 1797. 85 Coit, Calhoun, American portrait, p. 284. 86 Calhoun family papers 1760–1843, SCL, Inventory and appraisement at the house of Patrick Calhoun, March 1802, taken on the death of Martha Calhoun. 87 Coit, Calhoun, American Portrait, p. 9; Wiltse, Calhoun, vol. i, p. 25. 88 Calhoun family papers 1758–43, SCL. Will of William Calhoun, 1841. 89 Klein, Unification, p.38. 90 Wiltse, Calhoun, i, pp. 17–18. 91 Calhoun family papers 1758–1843, SCL.Patrick Calhoun’s will, 19 May, 1784. 92 Butler Papers, Report on Private Collections N.L.I 512., pp. 8, 64. 93 R. W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 43. 94 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, pp. 122, 141. 95 Ibid., pp. 158, 181, 562. 96 Ibid., pp. 116–117. 97 Ibid., p. 131. 98 Ibid., p. 125. 99 Ibid., pp. 139, 146.

358 Notes 100 F. A. Kemble, Journal of residence on a Georgian plantation 1838–9 (London, 1961), pp. 75–6, 98, 223, 230, 315. 101 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, pp. 155–59. 102 Ibid., p. 144. 103 Ibid., pp. 154, 168. 104 Ibid., pp. 162–66. 105 Ibid., pp. 531, 559. 106 Kemble, Journal 1838–9 (London, 1961). 107 Bell, Butlers Legacy, pp. 166, 151. 108 See Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery, a Problem in American Constitutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago 1959); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, H.A. Baker jr (ed.) (London, 1992), pp. 47–54. 109 Bell, Butler’sLlegacy, p. 138. 110 Ibid., p. 182. 111 Ibid., p. 187. 112 Ibid., pp. 60, 541. 113 Ibid., p. 48. 114 Ibid., p. 86. 115 E.M. Johnston, ‘Members of the Irish Parliament, 1784–7,’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. lxxi, section C, p. 173. 116 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, pp. 499–500. 117 Butler Letter Book, SCL.Pierce Butler to Frances Butler, 29 April, 1790; Pierce Butler to Roger Saunders, 24 May, 1790. 118 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, p. 390. 119 Bell, Butler’s Legacy, pp. 494–6. 120 Coit, Calhoun, American Portrait, p. 90. 121 John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1879, reprint Surrey, 1971), p. 69. 122 Butler Papers, Report on Private Collections NLI, 512.

10

Anti-slavery Literature, Mostly Imaginative

1 James De-La-Cour, Poems (Cork, 1778) In Laudem Aethiopissae: Thus translated from the foregoing. In Praise of a Negress, pp. 97–8; Journal of the Cork Historical Archaeological Society, vol iii, 1894, pp.270–278. See also Richard Ryan (ed.) Biographia Hibernica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Worthies of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Present Time , vol ii (London 1821); David J., O’Donaghue (ed.), The Poets of Ireland, Dictionary with Biographical particulars in three parts (London, 1892). 2 Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (8 vols, London, 1999), vol. iv, pp. 9–24. 3 Hugh Mulligan, Poems chiefly on Slavery and Oppression (London, 1788), p. 34. 4 Ibid., p. 3: Michael Adanson, A voyage to Senegal, the Isle of Goree and the River Gambia (London, 1759) praises the simple rural life of Africans echoed in Benezet, see also Equiano’s description of Africa, Equiano who makes use of the same phraseology Carretta, Interesting Narrative, pp. 36 and 242. 5 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7 Lillian Ashcraft-Eason, ‘ “She voluntarily hath come”: A Gambian woman trader in colonial Georgia in the eighteenth-century’, in Paul Lovejoy (ed.) Identity in the shadow of slavery (London, 2000) p. 211. notes 33 and 35 description of the New

Notes 359

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

Britannia Cpt. Dean, exploding in the Gambia river in February 1772. Reported in Gentleman’s Magazine October 1773. pp. 512 and 523. Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, vol. iv, pp. 27–9. Ibid., pp. 1–8. Thomas Chatterton, The Complete Poetical Works (London 1906) vol.i, Death of Nicou, pp. 1–4. Mulligan, Poems, pp. 8–15. Ibid., pp. 16–22. Edward Rushton, Poems and Other Writings (Liverpool, 1824) pp. x–xxv. Ibid., pp. 8–10, 11–13, 14–16, 30–32. Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, vol. iv, p.15. Chatterton on the other hand, had used black skin as a sexually exciting image. ‘Black was her face, as Togls’s hidden cell;/Soft as the moss where hooting adders dwell.’ Thomas Chatterton, Works vol. i, ‘Narva and Mored, an African Eclogue’, pp. 8–11. Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, vol. iv, p. 75. Ibid., pp. xiv, 158–60. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 125. Mary Birkett, The African Slave Trade Addressed to Members of her Own Sex (Dublin, 1792), Part I and II. I, p. 13. Ibid., I, pp. 11, 12. Anon, ‘Addresss to the People of Great Britain’, in Kitson and Lee (eds), Slavery, Abolition, vol. ii, p.156. Ibid., I, pp. 13–15. Ibid., II, p. 12. Ibid., II, p. 22. Mary Leadbeater, Poems (Dublin, 1808) pp. 87–92. Even dedicated prose writers felt this. As part of his education John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was encouraged by his utilitarian father James Mill to write poetry because ‘some things could be expressed more forcibly in verse’ and ‘people in general attached more value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it, was, on this account worth acquiring’. J. S. Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1960) p. 10. Ibid., pp. 401–2. Ibid., pp. 395–6. The purrings of the city mowzers of Napper, escaped from the man-trap, a civic eclogue exhibiting a choice scrap of tea-table scandal between Tabby, a Cherokee and other illustrious individuals (Dublin,1792), pp. 3–4. A. M’Dowell (ed.) The Posthumous Works of James Orr of Ballycarry with a Sketch of his Life (Belfast, 1817), p. iii–viii. Ibid., pp. 38–40. R. R. Madden (ed.), Literary remains of the United Irishmen (Dublin, 1887) p. 102. See Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (ed.), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1998). Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, vol. iv, pp. 268–7. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s anti-slavery writings were varied. She had published, with her brother, a dialogue ‘The Master and the Slave’ (1780), Hymns in prose for children (1781), which expressed anti-slavery sentiments and a poem Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the rejection of the bill for abolishing the slave trade (1791) Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery, Abolition, iv, pp. 161–9.

360 Notes 37 A. J. C. Hare (ed.), Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols (London, 1894) vol. i, p. 30. 38 Edgar E MacDonald (ed.), The Education of the Heart, the Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth (North Carolina, 1977) p. 320. 39 Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, 5 vols (London, 1819) vol. ii, p.101. 40 Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 2 vols (London, 1819) vol. ii, p. 495. 41 Bryan Edwards, History of the British West Indies, vol. ii, pp. 180–5, 259–60; Marylin Butler, Maria Edgeworth, a Literary Biography (Oxford,1972), p. 89. 42 Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, vol. ii, pp. 207–30. 43 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (London, 1992), Preface, p. 62. 44 The names of Cork gentry are prominent among the leading characters, Delacour, Pereceval and Freke. 45 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (Oxford, 1994) pp. 353, 218–22, 258. 46 Ibid., pp. 244–5. 47 Ibid., p. 228. 48 Ibid., pp. 347–51. 49 Ibid., pp. 448–9. 50 Ibid., p. 426. 51 Ibid., pp. xxix, xxvi–xxxvi. 52 Maria Edgeworth, Moral and Popular Tales (London, 1878) p. 87. 53 Butler, Maria Edgeworth, p. 287. 54 Edgeworth, Moral and Popular, p. 578. 55 Butler. Maria Edgeworth, p. 239. 56 Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish writing (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 28–9; Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery, the British Campaign 1780–1870 (London, 1995), p. 37. 57 T. O. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices against England in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1999), pp.189–210. See also Tom Dunne, Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind (Cork, 1984). 58 Burke, Sketch of the Negro Code, p. 174 in Kitson and Lee (ed.), Slavery Abolition, vol. ii, p. 174. 59 McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland, p. 180 quoting from P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (London, 1981), vol.v, p. 402. 60 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation (London, 1995) pp. 552–3.

11

Daniel O’Connell and Anti-slavery

1 Freeman’s Journal, 11 May 1843. 2 Nation, 27 April 1844. 3 An English country gentleman’s advice to the Irish members of the imperial parliament on the subject of the slave trade (London, 1802). 4 Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce 5 vols (London, 1838) vol. iii, p. 48. 5 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 88. 6 R. G. Thorne (ed.) History of Parliament: House of Commons, 5 vols (London, 1986) vol. iii, p. 219; vol. iv, p. 400. 7 Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce., iii, pp. 168–70.

Notes 361 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

Ibid., vol. iii, pp. 175–8. Thorne, vol. iv, p. 729. Hansard Debates, first series, vol. cxi, p. 674. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, vol. iii, p. 212. P. J. Jupp, ‘Irish MPs at Westminster in the early Nineteenth Century’ in Historical Studies, Papers read before the Irish Conference of Historians, vii (London, 1969) pp. 71,75. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, 1st series, vol. vii, p. 583. Ibid., vol. vii, p. 589. Ibid., vol. viii, p. 671. Ibid., vol. ix, p.170. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, vol. iii, p. 305. Ibid., vol. iii, p. 2. Tom Bartlett, Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation, p. 296, quoting figures from P. J. Jupp, ‘Irish Parliamentary Elections and the Influence of the Catholic Vote’, in Historical Journal, x, 2 (1967) p.184–5. Brian MacDermot, The Catholic Question in Ireland and England 1798–1822: the Papers of Denys Scully (Dublin,1988), p.110. Thorne (ed.) History of Parliament, vol. v, p. 280. Ibid., vol. iii, p. 219; vol. iv, pp. 400, 663–6. Hansard First series, iv, p.1059. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London, 1972), p. 393. Wilberforce, vol.iii, pp. 216, 230, 234. P.M. Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 63. Betty Fladeland, ‘Abolitionist Pressures on the Concert of Europe 1814–1822’ in Journal of Modern History, xxxvii, (1966), p. 357. Thomas, Slave Trade, p.784. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1777–1848 (London, 1988), p. 413. James Cropper, The Present State of Ireland with a Plan for Improving the State of the People (Liverpool,1823). Kenneth Charlton, ‘The state of Ireland in the 1820s: James Cropper’s plan’ in Irish Historical Studies, xvii (Dublin, 1970–1), p. 326. Ibid., pp. 331–3, 337. Oliver McDonagh, The Emancipist (London, 1989), p. 54. Douglas C. Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery, 1830–1860’(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 44–7. Midgley, Women against Slavery, p. 64. Isak Gross, ‘The abolition of negro slavery and British parliamentary politics 1832–3’ in Historical Journal, xxiii (1980), pp. 77–8. Christine Kenealy Great Famine (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 88–9. Between 1845–9 the government spent over £10 million on famine relief in Ireland, over half of that money in the form of a loan. Private charity produced £ 2 million in relief. Riach, ‘Campaign against American slavery’, pp. 33–7, 56. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 105–9. Ibid., pp. 227–30. Carl Senior, ‘Limerick “slaves” for Jamaica’ in Old Limerick Journal (Limerick, 1986), vol. xix, pp. 35–8.

362 Notes 43 Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘Frederick Douglass: Mask or Maroonage?: Atlantic Sites and the Politics of Representative Identity’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College Cork, NUI, 2002) pp. 94–5. Forthcoming publication, Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass: Mask or Maroonage? Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool, 2007). 44 R.R. Madden,’Address to the Hibernian Anti-slavery Society’ February 1840, printed as an appendix to J.F. Manzano, Poems by a Slave on the Island of Cuba, translated from the Spanish by R.R. Madden with the History of the Early Life of the Negro Poet written by himself (London, 1840), pp. 135–7. 45 D.C. Riach, ‘Daniel O’Connell and American anti-slavery’ in IHS, vol. xx, no. 77 (March 1976), pp.10–12. 46 Ibid., pp. 14–6. 47 Riach, ‘Campaign against American slavery’, p. 206. 48 Ibid., pp. 92, 95. 49 David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London, 1992), pp. 33–5. 50 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 96. 51 Midgley, Women against Slavery, pp. 20, 50; Bill Jackson, Ringing True, The Bells of Trummery and Beyond: 350 Years of an Irish Quaker Family (York, 2005) p. 57. 52 Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Madden Papers, MS.24.0.9, fols. 425, 427–31, 443–63. Also see Nini Rodgers, ‘Richard Robert Madden: an Irish anti-slavery activist in the Americas’, in Oonagh Walsh (ed.) Ireland Abroad, Politics and Professions in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2003). 53 Gross, ‘Abolition of Negro slavery’, pp. 82–3. 54 Maurice J Bric, ‘Daniel O’Connell and the Debate on Anti-slavery, 1820–50,’ in Tom Dunne and Laurence M.Geary, History and the Public Sphere, Essays in Honour of John A. Murphy (Cork, 2005), p. 75. 55 Riach, ‘Campaign against American slavery’, p. 148.

12

Frederick Douglass and the ‘Antieverythingarians’

1 Sweeney, ‘Douglass’, pp. 187–9, 195. 2 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, pp. 340–2. 3 Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years (Baltimore and London, 1980) p. 142. 4 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, p. 336. 5 Sweeney, ‘Douglass’, p. 111. 6 Elizabeth Malcolm, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in NineteenthCentury Ireland (Dublin, 1986), pp. 127–9, 133. 7 Ibid., p. 120. 8 William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York and London, 1991), p. 124. 9 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, p. 291. 10 Sweeney, ‘Douglass’, p. 96. 11 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, pp. 286–90. 12 McFeely, ‘Douglass,’ pp. 120–1. 13 Sweeney, ‘Douglass,’ p. 53. 14 Ibid., p. 294. 15 Ibid., p. 57. 16 Ibid., pp. 225–6.

Notes 363 17 Ibid., p. 58. 18 C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. I, (North Carolina and London, 1985) p. 17. 19 Sweeney, ‘Douglass,’ pp. 222–3. 20 Ibid., p. 97. 21 McFeeley, ‘Douglass,’ pp. 127–30: Riach ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, pp. 297–8. 22 McFeeley, ‘Douglass’, p. 123. 23 Ibid., p. 143. 24 Sweeney, ‘Douglass,’ p. 204. 25 McFeeley, ‘Douglass,’ p. 132. 26 Sweeney, ‘Douglass,’ p. 138. 27 Ibid., p. 104. 28 Ibid., p. 108. 29 Ibid., p. 111, quoting from Douglass to Garrison, 26 February 1846, in Philip Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, i (New York) pp. 138–41. 30 Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics, British Government and Irish Society 1843–1850 (Dublin, 1999), p. 98. 31 Christine Kenealy, The Great Irish Famine, Impact, Ideology and Rebellion (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 34–5. 32 Thomas Kenealy, The Great Shame, a Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New (London, 1998), p. 304. 33 Sweeney, ‘Douglass,’ p. 117. 34 Ibid., pp. 101–2. 35 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ pp. 351–52, 356. 36 Kinealy, ‘Great Irish Famine,’ p. 81. 37 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery’, pp. 361, 365. 38 Ibid., p. 363. 39 Ibid., p. 358. 40 Ibid., pp. 357, 372. 41 Ibid., p. 368. 42 Ibid., p. 369. 43 Ibid., p. 356, Kinealy, ‘Great Irish Famine’, p. 70. 44 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ p. 414.

13

Famine and War

1 Marianna O’Gallagher, ‘The Orphans of Grosse Isle: Canada and the adoption of the Irish Famine orphans, 1847–48’ in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Meaning of Famine, vol. vi, pp. 81–2 in The Irish World Wide Series, 6 vols. (London, 2000). 2 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish, a History (London, 2000), p. 100. 3 Ruth Ann M Harris, ‘Where the poor man is not crushed down to exalt the aristocrat: Vere Foster’s programme of assisted emigration in the aftermath of the Irish Famine’ in O’Sullivan (ed.) Meaning of Famine, p. 173. 4 D.Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, 1984) p. 73. 5 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 129. Well kept Dutch figures for the period 1630 to 1803 put the average mortality at 14. 8 per cent, Iliffe, Africa, p. 136. 6 Iliffe, Africa, p. 131. 7 Kenny, American Irish, p. 97. 8 Ibid., p. 103.

364 Notes 9 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 131. 10 Iliffe, Africa, p. 137. 11 McEvedy, Atlas of African History, p. 90; Fage,’Slavery and the Slave Trade,’ pp. 399–400; 12 James Quinn, ‘John Mitchel and the Rejection of the Nineteenth Century’ in Eire – Ireland, 2003, pp. 95–6. 13 John Mitchel, Jail Journal with an Introductory Narrative of Transactions in Ireland (London, 1983), xxxii–vliv. The appendicies in this 1983 edition contains a reprint of Mitchel’s 1847 description of famine conditions in the west of Ireland. pp. 409–18. 14 William Dillon, Life of John Mitchel, 2 vols, (London, 1888)vol. ii, p. 118. See also Christopher Morash,’Making memories: the literature of the Irish Famine,’ in O’Sullivan (ed.) Meaning of Famine, pp. 40–53. 15 Rachel O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, Young Irelander (Dublin, 1985) p. 24. 16 PRONI, T/413/2, John Mitchel to Miss Thompson, 4 October, 1852. 17 The Citizen, 14 January 1854. 18 Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 370. 19 Citizen, 28 January 1854; L.Fogarty, Father John Kenyon, A Patriot Priest of FortyEight (Dublin, nd), p. 74. (Full text of Kenyon’s letter to the Nation, 19 January 1847, pp. 71–5). 20 Mitchel, Jail Journal, Preface by Arthur Griffith; Dillon, Mitchel, i, p. ix; ii, pp. 114–5. 21 O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, p. 207. 22 Dillon, Mitchel, vol. ii, p. 129. 23 David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South 1815–1877 (London, 2001) p. 122. 24 Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade, the Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (London, 1971?) p. 1. 25 Citizen, 28 January 1854. 26 O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, pp. 226–7, 231. 27 Ibid., p. 214. 28 Quinn, ‘John Mitchel’, p. 104. 29 Kenealy, Great Shame, p. 304. 30 Dillon, Mitchel, vol. ii, p. 160. 31 Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 25. 32 Ibid., p. 41. 33 PRONI, T413/4, Mitchel to Mary Thompson, 24 April, 1854. 34 Dillon, Mitchel, vol. ii, p. 106. 35 Michael Toomey, ‘Saving the South With All My Might’: John Mitchel, Champion of Southern Nationalism’, in John M. Hearne and Rory T. Corish (ed.), Thomas Francis Meagher, The Making of an Irish American (Dublin, 2006) p. 134. 36 PRONI, D1078/M/7B, Mitchel to Matilda Dixon, 10 April, 1859. 37 Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ pp. 466–8. 38 Dillon, Mitchel, vol. ii, p. 171. 39 Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 369. 40 Quinn, ‘Mitchel’, p. 99. 41 Irish Citizen, 9 November 1867. 42 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish, a History (London, 2000), p. 124. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (London, 1995) see race (‘whitenness’ over ‘blackness’) as a social construct, which, on reaching the United States in large numbers in the nineteenth century, the Irish helped to build. He suggests that on their arrival

Notes 365

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

they were friendly with the blacks. Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London, 2004) p. 111–12 takes the view that the Catholic Irish in America had to work hard to become white. But he sees white racism as convenient for Irish assimilation. Quinn, ‘Mitchel’, pp. 107–9. PRONI, D/1078/M/9, John Mitchel to Matilda Dixon, 28 December 1860. O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, p. 185. Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 396. O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, p. 268. Ibid., pp. 295–7. Ibid., p. 268. Dillon, Mitchel, vol. ii, p. 185. O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, pp. 271–3. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, p. 156. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade, p. 65; Dillon, vol. ii, p. 191. O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, pp. 225,234. Ibid., p. 315. Kieran Quinlan, Strange Kin, Ireland and the American South (Louisiana, 2004), p. 95. O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, p. 383 Keneally, Great Shame, pp. 302, 341. Ibid., p. 305. Gleeson, Irish in the South p. 159. Kenny, American Irish, p. 123. Gleeson, Irish in the South, pp. 141, 154. Kenny, American Irish, p. 125. Quinlan, Strange Kin, pp. 88–92. Keneally, Great Shame, p. 366. Gleeson, Irish in the South, p. 151. William K. Sullivan, Manufacture of Beet-Root Sugar in Ireland (Dublin, 1851); W. Neilson Hancock, On the Prospects of Sugar–Beet Manufacture in reland (Dublin, 1851) see ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ p. 351, note 3. Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy p. Foley, ‘Cairnes, Hern and Bastable: The Contribution of Queen’s College, Galway, to Economic Thought,’ in Dairuid O’ Cearbhaill (ed.),Galway, Town and Gown 1484–1984 (Dublin, 1984), pp. 183, 195, 199. D.Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, 1984), p. 245. Tom Boylan and Tadhg Foley (ed.), John Elliott Cairnes, Collected Works, 6 vols (London, 204), vol. ii, The Slave Power, Its Character, Career and Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues Involved in the American Contest, p. 3. Early in 1862 Cairnes published two articles in the Economist, ‘The policy of alliance with the South’ on 8 February and ‘Negro slavery and the American Civil War’ on 1 March. See Boylan and Foley (ed.), Cairnes, Collected Works, vi. Boylan and Foley (ed.), Cairnes, Collected Works, vol. ii, pp. 95–103. Ibid., pp. ii, pp. 64–9. R. D. Webb (ed.), The Life and Letters of John Brown (London, 1861). Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery,’ pp. 510–12. Boylan and Foley (ed.),Cairnes, Collected Works, vol. i, p. 337. Ibid., vol. i, pp. 26–7. Boylan and Foley, ‘Cairnes, Hern and Bastable Cairnes,’ pp. 201–2, 204.

366 Notes 79 W. A. Maguire, Belfast, in Town and City Histories Series, Stephen Constantine (ed.) (Keele, 1993), p. 59. 80 Marylin Cohen, Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down 1690–1914 (Dublin,1997), p. 180. 81 Ibid., p. 110. 82 Maguire, Belfast, p. 59.

14

A Special Relationship?

1 Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, vol. iv, pp. 171–93; Ripley, Black Abolitionists, vol. ii, p. 203. 2 Denis Taaffe in Andrew O’Reilly, Reminiscences of an Emigrant Milesian, vol. ii, p. 227, quoted in Janet Todd, Rebel Daughters, Ireland in Conflict 1798 (London, 2003), p. 165. 3 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, Tuesday, 25 September–Thursday 27 September 1792. 4 Burrowes to Parsons, 23 October 1800 (PRONI) quoted in Bartlett, Rise and Fall, p. 267. 5 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, First series, vol. xxvii, p. 639. 6 William Thomson, A Tradesman’s Travels, in the United States and Canada, in the Years 1840, 41 and 42 from Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (London, 1999), pp. 363–68. 7 English Countryman’s Address, p. 75. 8 Cork pamphlet, SK, pp. vii, 13, 21, 25, 47, 49, 62. 9 Philip Wright (ed.) Lady Nugent’s Journal of her residence in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica,1966), p. 53. 10 PRONI, Watt papers, MIC135/13, 13 September 1804. 11 Edwards, History of the West Indies, vol. ii, p. 209. (SK’s Cork pamphlet, describes diet, pp. 13–17, as 12 pints of maize weekly and six salt herrings for a field worker. The Antiguan diet seems meaner, but the writer may have been expecting the slaves to add to this from provision grounds. The Jamaican calculation applied to slaves without access to such grounds.) 12 R. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, the Rise and Fall of American Slavery (London, 1991), p. 132. 13 Cormac O’Grada, Ireland, a New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1995), p. 85. 14 Hall, Thistlewood, p. 37. 15 K. Theodore Hoppen, Ireland since 1800, Conflict and Conformity (London, 1989), p. 39. 16 Freeman’s Journal, 26 August 1840. 17 Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619–1877 (London, 1995) pp. 109, 148–52, 165. 18 Smith O’Brien to Mrs. O’Brien, 27 March,1859, quoted in Riach Thesis p. 467. 19 Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, vol. ii, p. 54, quoted in Janet Todd, Rebel Daughters. Ireland in Conflict 1798 (London, 2003), pp. 57–8. 20 The Táin, p. 5. 21 PRONI Survey of the economic development of county Sligo in the eighteenth century by Charles O’Hara of Nymphsfield, T/2812/19/1, p. 20. 22 Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, vol. ii, p. 496. 23 Madden, West Indies, vol. ii, pp. 103–6. 24 Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, vol. ii, p. 496. 25 Kenny, American Irish, p. 111.

Notes 367 26 Hoppen, Ireland since 1800, p. 37. 27 Gleeson, Irish in the South, pp. 121–7. 28 Ronnie W. Clayton, Mother Wit: the ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writer’s Project (1990), pp. 178–80. 29 Maunsel White to James N. Bracewell, 17 May 1848, quoted in William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (Louisiana, 1966), p. 71. 30 Letter from Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, 1852? quoted in Jean Fagin Yellin, ‘Texts and Contexts of Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by herself.’ in Davis and Gates, The Slaves Narrative, p. 262. 31 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: a Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, (New York, 1953) p. 215. 32 Gleeson, Irish in the South, p. 139. 33 From John D. Vose tour of N.Y. … … .1850? Graham Hodges ‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’ in Ronald H.Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (ed.) The Irish in New York (Baltimore and London, 1996) p. 113. 34 Gleeson, Irish in the South, p. 124. 35 P. D. Morgan, ‘Encounter with Africans and African-Americans’, in B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan (ed.), Strangers within the Realm (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 172. 36 The life, history and unparalleled sufferings of John Jea, the African preacher (1815) in Henry Louis Gates jr and William L. Andrews (ed.), The Pioneers of the Black Atlantic, Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment 1772–1815 (Washington, 1998), p. 428. 37 Ibid., pp. 399, 401,432. 38 Ibid., p. 438. 39 Gleeson, Irish in the South, p. 127. 40 Harris, ‘Vere Foster’ in Meaning of Famine, p. 192. 41 Equiano, Interesting Narrative, pp. 92–3, 266, note 60. 42 Douglass, Narrative, p. 86. 43 Quinlan, Strange Kin, pp. 74–5. 44 Williams, Whence the Black Irish, pp. 54–55. 45 Ibid., p. 75. 46 Akenson, If, pp. 176, 186. 47 R R. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence in the West Indies during the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship, 2 vols (London, 1835) vol i, pp. 160–71. 48 Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats, Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London, 1995), p. 331. 49 Kerby A. Miller, ‘Scotch Irish’, ‘Black Irish’ and ‘Real Irish’: Emigrants and Identities in the Old South,’ in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Longman, 2000), p. 148. 50 Gleeson, Irish in the South, p. 128. 51 C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1 The British Isles 1830–65, London, 1985, pp. 332–4. 52 Quinlan, Strange Kin, pp. 60–5. Quilan’s work includes an interesting discussion of three books published on the Healys since 1954. Albert Foley, BishopHealy: Beloved Outcaste (New York, 1954), Albert Foley, Dream of an Outcaste (Alabama, 1989) and James M. O’Toole, Passing for White. 53 Joan R. Sherman (ed.), Tales of Conjure and the Color Line, 10 Stories by Charles Waddell Chestnutt, (New York,1995) pp. iii–vi. 54 Alex Haley, Roots (London 1991), p. 661.

368 Notes 55 Elliot, Tone, p. 212. 56 Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald 1763–1798 (London, 1998), pp. 249–50. 57 Alex Haley and David Stevenson, Queen (London, 1993), p. 669. 58 The Irish Empire: A Five Part Landmark Documentary Series About the Irish Worldwide, A Little Bird Café, Hilton Cordell Production, 1999. Part 1 ‘The Scattering.’

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Bibliography 371 R. Dudley Edwards, ‘Catholic Committee Minute Book, 1773–93’, in Archivium Hibernicium, 9 (1942). Bryan Edwards, The History Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, 5 vols (London, 1819). ‘Epistola ad milites Corotici’, in D. R. Howlett (ed.), The Book of Letters of St Patrick, the Bishop (Dublin, 1994). Hugh Fenning (ed.), ‘The Mission to St Croix in the West Indies, 1750–1769’, Documents from the Archive of San Clemente, Rome, in Archivium Hibernicum, 25 (1962). Letter to John Forbes, 1775–96, in Analecta Hibernica, 8, 1938. Aubrey Gwynn in his ‘Documents relating to the Irish in the West Indies’ Analecta Hibernia, 4, October 1932. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica,1750–86 (London, 1989).

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372 Bibliography Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: a Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York, 1953). Seán Ó Tuama (ed.) and Thomas Kinsella (trans.), An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Mountrath, Portlaoise, 1981). Parliamentary Register Ireland, Fourth Session in the Third Parliament, George III, 1781. Parliamentary Sessional Papers (Accounts and Papers) 15 November 1837 to 16 August 1838, xlviii, Claims for Slave Compensation. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, 3 vols (Bristol, 1986). Edward Rushton, Poems and Other Writings (Liverpool, 1824). The Táin, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1979). John Thurloe, Collection of State Papers 1638–1660, 7 vols (London, 1742). Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letter Book of Greg and Cunningham 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast (Oxford, 2001). Percy Arland Ussher (ed.), The Midnight Court and The Adventures of a Luckless Fellow, translated from the Gaelic by Percy Arland Ussher, with a preface by W. B. Yeats (London, 1946). Vita Findani by Christine J. Omand in R. J. Berry and H. N. Firth (eds), The People of Orkney (Kirkwall, 1986). Watson’s Dublin Directory or the Gentleman’s and Citizens Almanack 1765. Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce 5 vols (London, 1838). John Woolman, The Journal of John Woolman (London, 1895). Philip Wright (ed.), Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1966). Philip C. Yorke (ed.), The Diary of John Baker, Barrister of the Middle Temple and Solicitor – General of the Leeward Islands (London, 1931).

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Bibliography 373 Peter Howe, Marquis of Sligo, Jamaica under apprenticeship by a proprietor (London, 1838). Frederick Jebb, Thoughts of the discontents of the people last year respecting the sugar duties (Dublin, 1781). S. K., A short but particular and impartial account of the treatment of the slaves in the island of Antigua (Cork, 1789). James Mullala, A compilation on the slave trade respectfully addressed to the people of Ireland (Dublin, 1792). John Sutton, Bartholmew Maziere and Robert Thompson, Advice on the sugar business (Dublin, 1780). James Tobin, A short rejoinder to Mr. Ramsay’s reply (London, 1785). James Tobin, Cursory remarks upon the Rev. Mr. Ramsay’s essay (1787).

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Bibliography 377 Edith Mary Johnston Lik (ed.), History of the Irish Parliament, 1692–1800, 6 vols (Ulster Historical Foundation, 2002). W. R. Louis (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 6 vols (Oxford, 1998). Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: a History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983). E. C. Lynch, Lynch Record, Biographical Sketches (New York, 1925). Mary Ann Lyons, ‘The emergence of an Irish Community in St Malo 1550–1710’, in Thomas O’ Conner (ed.), The Irish in Europe 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001). Oliver MacDonagh, The Emancipist (London, 1989). Oliver MacDonagh, The Hereditary Bondsman (London, 1988). Edgar E. MacDonald (ed.), The Education of the Heart, the Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth (North Carolina, 1977). Eoin Magennis, ‘Coal, corn and canals: the dispersal of public monies, 1695–1772’, in D. W. Hayton (ed.), The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century, the Long Apprenticeship (Dublin, 2001). W. A. Maguire, Belfast, in Town and City Histories Series, Stephen Constantine (ed.) (Keele, 1993). Elizabeth Malcolm, Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in NineteenthCentury Ireland (Dublin, 1986). A. W. P. Malcomson, John Foster: the Politics of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford, 1978). Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990). John Martin, ‘Martin, Samuel (1694–1776)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of African History (Middlesex, new edition, 1995). William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York and London, 1991). T. O. McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices against England in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1999). Elizabeth McLuhan, ‘ “Ministerium seruitutis meae”: The Metaphor and Reality of Slavery in Saint Patrick’s Epistola and Confessio’, in John Carey, Máire Herbert and Pádraig Ó Riain (eds), Studies in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars (Dublin, 2000). Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland (New Haven, CT and London, 2001). Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery, the British Campaign 1780–1870 (London, 1995). K. A. Miller ‘ “Scotch-Irish”, “black-Irish” and “real Irish”: emigrants and identities in the Old South’, in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000). Arthur E. Mitchell, The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina 1799–1981 (South Carolina, 1981). Christopher Morash, ‘Making memories: the literature of the Irish Famine’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), vol. 6 in the Irish World Wide History and Identity Series, The Meaning of Famine (London and New York, 1997). P. D. Morgan, ‘Encounter with Africans and African-Americans’, in B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan (eds), Strangers within the Realm (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991). Michael Mullin, Africans in America, Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831 (Illinois, 1998). Lewis Namier and John Brooke, History of Parliament, House of Commons, vol. xi (London, 1964). George A. O’Brien, Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1918). Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados; the Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Kerry, 2000). Eamon O Ciosain, ‘A hundred year of Irish migration to France 1590–1688’, in Thomas O’ Conner (ed.), The Irish in Europe 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001). Rachel O’Conner, Jenny Mitchel, Young Irelander (Dublin, 1985).

378 Bibliography Donnchadh Ó Corrain, ‘Ireland c.800: Aspects of Irish Society’, in Daibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland, vol. i (Oxford, 2005). D. Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200 (London, 1995). David J. O’Donaghue (ed.), The Poets of Ireland, Dictionary with Biographical Particulars in Three Parts (London, 1892). Marianna O’Gallagher, ‘The Orphans of Grosse Isle: Canada and the adoption of the Irish Famine orphans, 1847–48’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), 6 vols in The Irish World Wide History and Identity Series, The Meaning of Famine (London and New York, 1997). Cormac O’Grada, Ireland, a New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1995). J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, the Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1995). Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936). Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books 1550–1800 (Oxford, 1989). Bill Power, Mitchelstown through Seven Centuries (Mitchelstown, 1987). Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years (Baltimore, MD and London, 1980). Kieran Quinlan, Strange Kin, Ireland and the American South (LA, 2004). Sean Reamonn, History of the Revenue Commissioners (Dublin, 1981). R. Reingold, Nature and Society, later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (Sussex, 1978). Edward Reynolds, Stand the Storm, a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1985). David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade 1660–1807’, in W. R. Louis (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii (Oxford, 1998). C. Peter Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. i (North Carolina and London, 1985). James Roche, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays by an Octogenarian, 2 vols (Cork, 1851). Nini Rodgers, Equiano and Anti-Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Belfast (Belfast, 2000). Nini Rodgers, ‘Richard Robert Madden: an Irish anti-slavery activist in the Americas’, in Oonagh Walsh (ed.), Ireland Abroad, Politics and Professions in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2003). Nini Rodgers, ‘Making history in Belfast: the tale of Francis Joseph Bigger, Samuel Shannon Millin and Waddell Cunningham’, in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century Unionism (Dublin, 2004). Bill Rolston and Michael Shannon, Encounters: How Racism came to Ireland (Belfast, 2002). Patrick Rogers and Ambrose Macaulay, Old St Mary’s (Belfast, 1984). Willie Lee Rose, Documentary History of Slavery in North America (London, 1999). Richard Ryan (ed.), Biographia Hibernica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Worthies of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London, 1821). William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (LA, 1966). Jill Sheppard, The ‘Redlegs’ of Barbados, Their Origins and History (New York, 1977). R. B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, an Economic History of the British West Indies 1623–1775 (Barbados, 1974). Joan R. Sherman (ed.), Tales of Conjure and the Color Line, 10 Stories by Charles Waddell Chestnutt (New York, 1995). Inez Knibb Sibley, Dictionary of Place Names in Jamaica (Jamaica, n.d.). Rosario Sevilla Soler, Immigracion y Cambio Socio-Economico en Trinidad (1783–1797) (Seville, 1988). Clare Stancliffe, ‘Patrick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: an Old Regime Business (Wisconsin, 1979).

Bibliography 379 A. T. Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence, The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen (London, 1993). R. M. W. Strain, Belfast and its Charitable Society: a Study of Urban Social Development (London, 1961). Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade, the Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (London, 1971). Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade (London, 1998). Hugh Thomas, The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (London, 1997). R. G. Thorne (ed.), History of Parliament, 5 vols (London, 1986). John K. Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2nd edition, 1998). Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740–1832 (London, 1995). Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald 1763–1798 (London, 1998). Janet Todd, Rebel Daughters, Ireland in Conflict 1798 (London, 2003). Michael Toomey, ‘ “Saving the South With All My Might”: John Mitchel, Champion of Southern Nationalism’, in John M. Hearne and Rory T. Corish (eds), Thomas Francis Meagher, The Making of an Irish American (Dublin, 2006). William Urwick, Biographical Sketches of the late James Digges La Touche Esq. (Dublin, 1868). Arthur Edward Vicars, Abstracts of Irish Wills, Index to the Prerogative Wills of Ireland, 1538–1810 (Dublin, 1897). Patrick F. Wallace, ‘The archaeology of Ireland’s Viking Age Towns’, in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ed.), New History of Ireland, vol. i (Oxford, 2005). T. J. Walsh (ed.), Nano Nagle and the Presentation Sisters (Dublin, 1959). James Walvin, Black Ivory, a History of Slavery in the British Empire, 2nd edition. (Blackwell, 2001). James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London, 2000). J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery 1750–1834, the Process of Amelioration (Oxford, 1988). Dixon Wecter, Edmund Burke and his Kinsmen (CO, 1939). Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Community in Eighteenth Century Wexford’, in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and Emergence, Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin,1990). Geoffrey H. White, The Complete Peerage (London, 1953). Frances Wilkins, Manx Slave Traders, a Social History of the Isle of Man’s Involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Kidderminster, 1999). Joseph J. Williams, Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica (New York, 1932). C. M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Nationalist, 1782–1828 (New York, 1944). Marcus Woods, Blind Memory, Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester, 2000). Jean Fagin Yellin, ‘Texts and Contexts of Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by herself’, in C. T. Davis and H. L. Gates (eds), The Slave Narrative (Boston, MA, 1985).

Articles Thomas Bartlett, ‘Viscount Townshend and the Irish Revenue Board, 1767–73’, in R.I.A. Proceedings, lxxix (1979), section C (1979). Thomas Bartlett, O’Haras of Annaghmore, in Irish Economic and Social History, vol. 9, 1982, pp. 34–52. Eirlys M. Barker, Indian Traders, Charles Town and London’s Vital Link to the Interior of North America 1717–1755, unpublished paper presented to the College of Charleston Program for the Study of the Low Country and the Atlantic World (May 1995).

380 Bibliography Hilary Beckles, ‘ “Black men in white skins”: the Formation of a white proletariat in West Indian slave society’, in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15 (1986). Hilary Beckles, ‘Irish servants in Barbados, a “riotous and unruly lot” ’, in William and Mary Quarterly, xlvii (October. 1990). Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The captains in the British slave trade from 1785–1807’, in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxl (1990). Kenneth Charlton, ‘The state of Ireland in the 1820s: James Cropper’s plan’, in Irish Historical Studies, vol. xvii (Dublin, 1970–1). W. H. Crawford, ‘The Belfast middle classes in the late eighteenth century’, in David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen, Radicalism and Rebellion (Dublin, 1993). J. D. Fage, ‘Slavery and the slave trade in the context of West African history’, in Journal of African History, x, 3 (1969). Betty Fladeland, ‘Abolitionist pressures on the concert of Europe 1814–1822’, in Journal of Modern History, xxxvii (1966). Isak Gross, ‘The abolition of negro slavery and British parliamentary politics 1832–3’, in Historical Journal, xxiii (1980). Aubery Gwynn, ‘Indentured servants and negro slaves in Barbados (1642–1650)’, in Studies, xix (June 1930). Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation’, in Studies, xx (June 1931). Aubrey Gwynn, ‘An Irish Settlement on the Amazon’ in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin), Vol. xli, Section C, No.1, (July, 1932). W. A. Hart, ‘Africans in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Irish Historical Studies, xxxiii, 29 (May 2002). B. W. Higman, ‘The West India “interest” in parliament, 1807–1833’, in Historical Studies, xiii, 49 (October 1967). Poul Holm, ‘The slave trade of Dublin, ninth to twelfth centuries’, in Peritia, 5 (1986). F. G. James, ‘Irish smuggling in the eighteenth century’, in Irish Historical Studies, xii, 48 (1961). P. J. Jupp, ‘Irish MPs at Westminster in the early nineteenth century’, in Historical Studies, Papers read before the Irish Conference of Historians, vii (London, 1969). P. J. Jupp, ‘Irish Parliamentary Elections and the Influence of the Catholic Vote’, in Historical Journal, x, 2 (1967). Martin Lynn, ‘Trade and politics in nineteenth century Liverpool: the Tobin and Horsfall families and Liverpool’s African trade’, in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxlii (1992). R. K. MacMaster, Flaxseed and Emigrants: Scotch-Irish Merchants in Eighteenth Century America, unpublished paper delivered at the Fourteenth Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, June 2002, York County, SC. W. A. Maguire, ‘Absentees, architects and agitators: the Fifth Earl of Donegall and the builders of Fisherwick Park’, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C (10 February 1981). W. A. Maguire, ‘Lord Donegall and the hearts of steel’, in Irish Historical Studies, xxi, 84 (September 1979). A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘Sexton Pery and the Pery Paper’s in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal, Vol. xvi, 1974, p. 38. John McCabe, ‘A united Irish family: the McCabes of Belfast’, in Familia: Ulster Genealogical Review, 13 (1997). Patrick Melvin, ‘John Barnewell and Colonial South Carolina’, in The Irish Sword, xi (1973–4). L. H. Parsons, ‘The Mysterious Mr. Digges’, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 22 (1965).

Bibliography 381 David J. Pope, ‘The geographical origins and socio-economic backgrounds of the Liverpool catholic mercantile and maritime community in the second half of the eighteenth century’, in North West Catholic History, 30 (2003). David J. Pope, ‘Liverpool’s Catholic mercantile and business community in the second half of the eighteenth century’, in Recusant History Part 11, xxvii, 3 (2005). C. W. Purcell Jr, Thomas Digges and William Pearce, ‘An example of the transit of technology’, in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 21 (1964). James Quinn, ‘John Mitchel and the rejection of the nineteenth century’, in EireIreland, 2003. James A. Rawley, ‘London’s defence of the slave trade, 1787–1807’, in Slavery and Abolition, xiv, 2 (August 1993). Mary Reckord, ‘The Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831’, in Past and Present, 40 (July 1968). Nini Rodgers, ‘Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth-century’, in Irish Historical Studies, xxxii, 126 (2000). Nini Rodgers, ‘Two quakers and a utilitarian: the reaction of three Irish women writers to the problem of slavery 1789–1807’, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 100, Section C (2000). Walter Rodney, ‘African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the upper Guinea coast in the context of the African slave trade’, in Journal of African History, vii, 4 (1966). B. G. Scott, ‘Iron “slave-collars” from Lagore Crannog, Co. Westmeath’, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 78 Section C (1978). Carl Senior, ‘Limerick “slaves” for Jamaica’, in Old Limerick Journal, xix (Limerick, 1986). Maureen MacGeehin Wall, ‘The catholics in the towns and the quarterage dispute in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Irish Historical Studies, viii, 30 (September 1952). Maureen MacGeehin Wall, ‘The rise of the Catholic Middle Class in eighteenth century Ireland’, in Irish Historical Studies, xi, 42 (September 1958). David Wyatt, ‘The significance of slavery: alternative approaches to Anglo-Saxon slavery’, in Anglo-Norman Studies, 23 (2000).

Unpublished University Theses R. V. Gallen, ‘The structure of Anglo-Irish politics during the American Revolution: Sir Henry Cavendish’s diary of the Irish parliament’, 12 October 1779 to 2 September 1780; edition of the partial text and critical essay (2 vols PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1973, University Microfilms, a XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, MI). N. E. Gamble, ‘The business community and trade of Belfast 1767–1800’ (Trinity College, Dublin, 1978). David Lammey, ‘A study of Anglo-Irish relations between 1772 and 1782, with particular reference to the “free trade” movement’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1984). Joseph Liechty, ‘Irish evangelicalism, Trinity College Dublin, and the mission of the Church of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century’ (St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1987). Douglas C. Riach, ‘Ireland and the campaign against American slavery, 1830–1860’ (University of Edinburgh, 1975). Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘Frederick Douglass: mask or maroonage? Atlantic sites and the politics of representative identity’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University College Cork, NUI, 2002) pp. 94–5. Fionnghuala Sweeney (forthcoming publication) Frederick Douglass: Mask or Maroonage? Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool, 2007).

Dublin Liverpool Cork Rotterdam London Bristol

NEWFOUNDLAND

Nantes Bordeaux Boston New York PENNSYLVANIA Philadelphia MARYLAND Baltimore

Lisbon

SOUTH CAROLINA GEORGIA Charleston

Havana CUBA ST CROIX JAMAICA ST DOMINGUE ST KITTS, NEVIS AND EUSTATIA ANTIGUA PUERTO GUADELOUPE RICO DOMINICA MONTSERRAT MARTINIQUE SPANISH MAIN ST VINCENT BARBADOS

CAPE VERDE SENEGAL GAMBIA

TRINIDAD SIERRA LEONE El Mina

NIGERIA

GUIANA DEMERARA Tauregure

AMAZON

SAO TOME

ANGOLA

Map 1 Ireland and the Black Atlantic.

Malin Ramelton

Ballymoney

Derry

Carrickfergus

10 Dungannon Enniskillen

Belfast Lurgan

Newry

Carrickmacross Co. Mayo

Co. Louth Co. Meath Drogheda Longford

Galway

100

Athlone

DUBLIN Kildare Co. Wicklow

Kilkenny

Limerick

Ross Clonmel Cork

10 Waterford

Youghal

23 Kinsale

7

Map 2 Africans in eighteenth-century Ireland. Source: W.A. Hart, University of Ulster, Coleraine Campus.

Co. Down

Index abolition of slavery, 48, 74, 80–1, 191, 259, 267, 269, 306, 322, 353–4 (ch.8, notes 90, 108, 112), 358–60 (ch.10, notes 2, 8, 15, 16, 22, 35, 36, 58), 361–2 (ch.11, notes 36, 53), 366 (ch.14, note 1) Britain, 80, 267–9 USA, 306, 324 abolition of the slave trade, 3, 24, 79, 86, 91, 142–3, 158, 179, 187, 189, 231, 235, 237, 240, 244–5, 248, 259, 260–6, 331, 345 (ch.6, note 3), 361 (ch.11, note 24) abolitionists, 68, 73, 86, 89, 178, 182, 188, 218, 260–2, 264, 269, 271, 274, 276, 279, 281, 285, 295, 299, 300, 309, 316, 318, 321, 324–6, 335, (ch.1, note 73), 361 (ch.11, note 27), 363 (ch.12, note 18), 366–7 (ch.14, notes 1, 51) Adams, John, 320 Address to Hans Hamilton, M.P. on behalf of the injured African, 244 Africa, 1, 2, 7, 21–4, 28, 30, 38, 39, 57, 66, 80, 86, 96–103, 106–10, 114, 135, 142, 143, 173–4, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183–5, 188, 190, 210, 211, 221, 225, 226, 232–5, 238–41, 245, 254, 264–6, 270–2, 276, 282, 291–2, 299, 314, 328 African slave trade addressed to members of her own sex, 190, 240 Amazing Grace, 103 Aghagurty, 119, 201, 202, 203 agrarian discontent, 127, 267, 151–3, African trade, see slave trade Akan, 40, 72 Aksum, 21 Alabama, 228, 295, 298, 301, 319, 326–8 Aldridge, Ira, 278, 300 Allen, 323 Dominic, 60 Richard, 270, 273, 275, 278–80, 286–9 Amazon, 2, 27–9, 31, 32–4, 54

amelioration of slavery, 92, 94, 99, 180, 185, 248, 267–8, 345 (ch.6, note 4) American Revolutionary War, 64, 79, 104, 229, 232, Anglican, see Protestant Angola, 23, 28, 40, 72, 109, 291, 292 Antigua, 34, 36, 39, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 72, 75–8, 85, 113, 132, 135, 136, 148, 159, 179, 180, 287, 314 Antony, Thomas, 35 apprenticeship, 92–3, 259, 269–71, 73, 77, 342 (ch.4, note 31), 367 (ch.14, note 47) Arawaks, 36 Archdall, Mervyn, 166 Archdeacon, 65, 135–7, 140 Andrew, 135 John, 135–7, 348 (ch.6, notes 79, 84, 85, 86, 88) William, 135, 348 (ch.6, notes 76, 84) Archer, Henry, 122 Patrice, 110 Arkwright, Richard, 157 Armagh, Council of, 20, 259 Arthur, 105, 138–9 Catherine, 112 Thomas, 104 Ashton, John, 205 Asiento, 56, 105 Atholl, Duke of, 104 Australia, 227, 294, 299, 305 Aylmer, Fitzgerald, 166 Bachelder, 295 Backhouse, 98 Bagnell, Beauchamp, 166 Bagwell, John, 133 Baker, 64, 65, 183 John, 64, 339–40 (ch.3, notes 12, 28, 30, 32–5, 39, 42) Joseph, 64 Thomas, 64 Balfour, Townely, B., 166 Ballycastle, 146, 169

384

Index 385 Baltimore, Lord, 199–201, 320 Band of Hope, 288 Banks, Stuart, 153 Baptists, 73, 74, 92, 307, 325 Barbados, 37–41, 44, 48, 86 Barbauld, Mrs, 238, 247, 251, 359 (ch.10, note 36) Baillie, Alexander, James & Evan Baillie, 132 Barkin, 67 Barnewell, John, 210–11, 356 (ch.9, notes 42, 44) Barnewell Rhett, Robert, 302 Barrington, Catherine, 224 Barry, 97, 166 Barry, 166 Edward, 54 William, 97 Basseterre, 62, 64 Bateson, 156 Bath, 62, 63, 65 Baugh, Jim, 327 Beckford, 323 Peter, 134 Beddoes, Dr Thomas, 247 Beecher, Henry Ward, 295–6 beef, 19, 89, 98, 105–6, 120, 121, 125, 128, 130, 132, 135–8, 140, 147, 151, 171, 224, 314 Beef, Henry, 63 Behn, Mrs Aphra, 230, 239 Belfast, 89, 122, 144, 145–58, 159, 160, 164, 169, 174, 190, 191–6, 205, 212, 236, 256, 269, 270, 275, 283–4, 288, 289, 310 – 11, 313 Belfast Charitable Society, 106, 157 Belfast Mercury, 154, 158, Belinda, 250–4 Bell, 87 William, 275–6 Bellew, 158–9, 349 (ch.7, notes 8, 10), 350 (ch.8, note 3) Christopher Dillon, 195 Belmore, Earl of, 81, 92, 341 (ch.3, note 82), 342 (ch.4, note 34) Lord, 276 Benezet, Antony, 182–5, 231 Benin, 40, 66 Bentinck, Lord George, 287 Beresford, 175

Bermuda, 72, 76, 299 Betu Brigte, 14 Bewley, Molly, 188–9 Biafra, 66 Bicknell, John, 232–3, 238, 246 Birkett, Mary, 190, 239–45, 254, 330, 354 (ch.8, note 115), 359 (ch.10, notes 20, 21) Birr, 16 Blackamoor Lane, 280 Blair, 99, 342 (ch.4, note 37), 345 (ch.5, note 71) James I, 94 Lambert, 94 James II, 94 Blake, 51, 53, 59, 82–4, 127, 159, 324 Andrew Óg, 51 Henry, 38, 51, 62, 82–3, 93 John snr, 83 John, 38, 51–2, 61, 82–3, 122 William (poet), 238, 246 Martin, 51 Messrs Blake and Lynch, 141, 348 (ch.6, note 84) Thomas, 51 Blaney, 63 Blanquirie, Sir John, 259–60, 263 Bleak House, 272 bliadhain an a’ir, (the year of the slaughter), 136 Boates, 98 Bodkin, 127 Antony, 56 Edward, 52 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 79, 87, 245–6, 254, 260–2, 265 Napoleon III, 301 see also Napoleonic Wars Bond, Oliver, 328 Booterstown, 281 Boru, Brian, 10, right order? Boswell, James, 312 Boston Bazaar, 285 Bourke, 65 Edward, 42, Fitzmaurice, 150 John, 124, 346 (ch.6, note 22) Thomas, 124

386 Index Boyne, battle of, 105, 202, 204, 209 Bradburn, Samuel, 189 Bradley, Dr. Patrick, 63 Bradshaw, Richard, 128, 147 Brazil, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34, 119, 125, 156, 265, 266, 277, 291 Bridgetown, 41, 42, 85, 156, 159 Briskett, Antony, governor, 49 Bristol, 14, 35, 46, 65, 75, 96–8, 105, 112, 113, 132, 135, 160, 183, 186, 237, 247 British Emancipator, 272 Broghill, Lord, 46, 337 (ch.2, note 61), see also Orrery, Earl of Broicsech, 14 Brooke, Charles, 169 Sir Richard, 177 Brooklyn, 294, 295, 301 Brown, 323–23 Capability, 151 Count Julius Caesar Mars Napoleon Sinclair, 278 Hamilton, 88, 93, 273, 323, 341 (ch.4, note 26) John, 324–5, 365 (ch.13, note 75) Robert, 211 William, 34 William Wells, 245 Browne, 92, 164 Andrew, 51 Col. Arthur, 164 Elizabeth, 92 James, 164 John, 164, 309 Montford, 324 Otway, 93 Patrick, 51 Peter Howe, 323 Robert, 158 Ulysses, (Field Marshall), 138 Brownstown, 88, 273 Bruges, 132, 136 Bryan, Cornelius, 41–3, 103 Buchanan, James, 274, 298 Bull Run, 293, 302, 306 Burgh, Hussey, 172 Thomas, 162, 167, 206 Burial of Sir John Moore, 246 Burke, 186, 323, 324, 327 Aedanus, 212

Edmund, 126, 181–7, 189, 243, 254–5, 337 (ch.2, note 49), 351–3 (ch.8, notes 40, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90), 360 (ch.10, notes 58, 59) Samuel, 127, 324, 329 Richard, 130, 182–3 William, 182 Burke’s Peerage, 229, 347 (ch.6, note 59), 357, (ch.9, note 59) Burns, 246 Antony, 295, 300 Burrowes, 166 Kildare, 166 Peter, 312–13 Butler, 136, 166, 198, 215–16, 223, 225, 228–9, 357–8 (ch.9, notes 92, 122) Christopher, 99, 343 (ch.5, note 20) Edward, 104, 226 Frances, 227, 358 (ch.9, note 117) James, 198, 357 (ch.9, note 59) Mary, 216 Nell, 320–1 Major Pierce, 197, 215–19, 222–7, 295, 301, 355–8 (ch.9, notes 1, 2, 59, 60, 68, 71, 74, 94, 101, 107, 109, 116, 117, 119) Richard, 109, 226, 344 (ch.5, note 54) Sir Richard Pierce, 227, 358 (ch.9, note 117) Thomas, 215, 226 Weedon Butler, 226 Butler’s Island, 216, 219, 223 Butler’s Place, 223 Burton, Pierpoint, 166 butter, 9, 41, 90, 98, 105–06, 121, 123, 125–6, 128, 130, 132, 135–8, 149, 314, 346–7 (ch.6, notes 25, 46) Buxton, Charles Foxwell, 266–9, 272, 275 Byrne, Edward, 173–4, 194–6, 204, 312, 352 (ch.8, notes 47, 50) Cade, Waddell, 326 Cairnat, 10 Cairnes, John Elliott, 308–10 Calhoun, 197, 209, 213, 215, 219–21, 227–9, 355–7 (ch.9, notes 1, 84–7, 120) Ann, 213, 216, 229

Index 387 Calhoun – continued Catherine I (Montgomery), 209, 213, 229 Catherine II, 213, 229 Catherine III, 326 Ezikiel, 209–20, 213, 220, 229, 356–7 (ch.9, notes 53, 80) Floride Bonneau, 228 James, 209–10, 220, 229, 357 (ch.9, note 81) Jean Craighead, 222 John Caldwell, 194, 219, 221, 228, 274, 295, 297, 326, 356–7 (ch.9, notes 38, 40, 52, 55, 66, 83, 90 Martha Caldwell, 222 Mary I, 209–10, 229 Mary II, 213 Patrick I, 197, 209–10, 220 Patrick II, 209–10, 213–22, 227, 357 (ch.9, notes 82, 91) William, 209–20, 213, 357 (ch.9, note 91) California, 295 Callaghan, Michael, 97 Campbell, 88, 323 Cape Mount, 100, 107 Caribbean, 1, 2, 27, 31–9, 43–5, 50–8, 60–80, 82–8, 91–4, 96–100, 104–13, 115, 119–21, 124–9, 131–9, 141–9, 151, 155–60, 165, 170, 174, 179, 181, 183, 184–5, 189, 196, 201, 210–12, 248, 250, 256, 272, 287, 289, 291, 294, 312–14, 317, 329, 331–2 Caribbs, 34, 36, 50 Carlow, 168, 194, 197, 215, 226, 229 Carlyle, Thomas, 272, 294, 296, 299, 300 Carren, John, 103 Carew, Shapland, 166 Carrickfergus, 152, 154–5, 164 Carroll, 197–8, 200–09, 215, 219, 225, 228–9, 279, 355 (ch.9, notes 1, 3–8, 10–25, 27–29) Alexander, 204, 206 Antony I, 198, 205 Antony II, 199, 202, 205–07, 229 Antony (baby), 200 Antony (slave boy), 205 Charles I, 198–205, 209, 215, 219, 226–7, 229–30 Charles II, 202, 204–6, 224, 229

Charles III, 63, 202, 205, 229 Charles, Dr, 204 Daniel of Aghagurty, 198, 202 Daniel of Lisheenboy, 202–03, 206–07 Daniel of Rock Creek I, 203, 206 Daniel of Rock Creek II, 197, 203, 217 Dominick, 203 Eleanor, 203 Henry (bishop), 197, 205 James, 202–04, 226 John, (Montserrat), 54 John, 202–03 Keane, 203 Margaret, 203 Martha, 199 Mary, 200 Michael of Lisheenboy, 202, 204–07 Carysfort, Lord, 176 Cash, Wilbur H, 297, 325 Cashel, 8 Cassel, 92 Castle Rackrent, 100, 249–50, 251, 254 Castlereagh, 83, 259–66 Castletown Roche, 133 Castro, 332 Catholic emancipation, 2, 3, 191, 193, 227, 249, 259, 262–3, 266, 268, 271, 276, 280, 312, 322 Catholics, 30, 35, 47, 49, 53–5, 58–9, 62, 64, 70, 84, 99, 105, 124, 129–40, 157–8, 165, 173–7, 185, 187, 193–5, 199, 201, 205, 207, 208, 249, 262–3, 276–7, 307, 312, 317, 322, 326 Caton, Mary Ann, 227 Ceded Islands, 64, 147–8, 158 Celbridge, 281 Chalmers, Dr, 284 Charlemont, Lord, 187 Charles I, 31, 203, 215, 219 Charles II, 43, 49, 53, 62, 162, 198, 206 Charles, Edward, Prince, 108–09 Charleston Mercury, 302 Charleston Standard, 298, Chatterton, Thomas, 234–5, 237, 239, 359 (ch.10, notes 10, 15) Carlisle Bay, 45 Chesapeake, 35, 11–20, 122, 123, 135, 192, 200–1, 208 Chestnutt, Andrew Jackson, 326 Charles Waddell, 326, 367 (ch14, note 53)

388 Index children’s fiction, 231, 247, 256 Chillan, Gasper, 31–3, 336 (ch.2, note 14), see also Jasper Collins Christian-Sprengal, Matthias, 179 Citizen (New York), 293–6, 299 Civic Eclogue, 244 Civil War (English), 43, 45, 188 (U.S.A.), 3, 153, 228, 230, 289, 292, 293, 296, 307, 308, 310, 326, 327, 331 Clare, 134, 138, 177, 268, 287, 314 Clark, 334 (ch.5, note 48) Thoby (Theobald), 111 Clarkson, Thomas, 103, 178–9, 182, 187–8, 231, 236–7, 240, 243, 246 Clemens, James, 98, 343 (ch.5, note 14) Cleyburne, Patrick, 306 Clonmel, 131, 257, Clothilde, 245, Clotworthy Upton, Mr, 150, 152 Cobbett, 126 Codderington, Dixie, 166 Codrington, 76–7, 340 (ch.3, note 70) Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, 10 Coghlan, 166 John, 97 Colchester (siege of ), 46 Colclough, Vesey, 166 Colebrooke, Sir George, 159 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 237, 246 Colhoun, Floride Bonneau, 228 John Ewing, 197, 210, 220, 228 Collins, 32, 323 Jasper, 31–3, see also Gasper Chillan Columbus, 27, 239, 291 Conchobar of Ulster, 9, 316 Condon, 198 Confessio, 12–16 Congo, King of, 40 Connacht, 9, 15, 24, 41, 120–1, 126–7, 304 Conner, John, 56 Connolly, 166 Thomas, 176, 187 William, 162, 165–7, 206 Connor, James, 97 Convoy, 197, 210, 229, 203 Conway, 149, 155, 166 Conyham, Cpt, 306 Conyhaming, Mr., 85

Cooney, 103 Coppinger, 65, 112, 166 Bishop, 140, Mr., 136 Cork, 15, 39, 51, 55, 57, 75, 89, 97, 98, 104, 111–15, 124–38, 141–2, 145, 149, 153, 158, 159, 163, 164, 172, 174, 175, 179, 180–2, 194, 195, 211, 230, 236, 267, 269, 270, 276, 280–4, 286, 288, 289, 291, 313, 316, 324 Cork Foundling Asylum, 129, Corry, Armor Lowry, 166 Cormantines, 40, 66, 249, 252, 253 Cotter, 166 cotton, 28, 37, 50, 70, 96, 106, 143, 156–8, 169–70, 172, 177, 191, 194, 210–11, 213–14, 216, 221, 223–4, 228, 248, 256, 265–7, 279, 308, 310–11, 314, 318–19, 328, 367 (ch.14, note 31,) Couldhurst, Catherine, 48 J.B, 48, 93 Maria Elizabeth, 48 Mary, 48 William Matthew, 48 Courtnay, Lord, 143, 177 Cowper, William, 238–9, 246, 254 Craighead, Alexander, 222 Jean, 222 Cramsie, 89, see also Cramsie & McDowell James, 91 Cramsie & McDowell, 89–91 Creagh, 105, 134–5, 138, 143 David, 113 James, 113 John, 113 Patrick, 51 Paul, 113, 345 (ch.5, note 70) Susanah, 113 Crimean War, 115, 295 Croker, Catherine, 276 John, 133 Cromwell, Henry, 46–7, 65, 323, 337 (ch.2, notes 59–61) Oliver, 2, 36, 41–5, 75, 120, 146, 166, 198, 337 (ch.2, note 57)

Index 389 Cropper, James, 267–68, 361 (ch.11, notes 30, 31) Crow, Cpt. Hugh, 238 Cúchulainn, 9–11 Cullen, Paul, 181 cumal, see also female slave, 8–11, 13–16, 24, 27 Cummings, Mr., 87, 89 Cunningham, Waddell, 122, 145–58, 164, 174, 177, 187, 191–2, 195–6, 212, 311, 326, 345 (ch.5, note70), 349 (ch.7, notes 1, 17.) Currie, Dr James, 237 Curtin, John, 136, 348 (ch 6, notes 76, 82) Dáibhí Ó Croinín, 21 Dál Riada, 9 Daly, 55, 166, 323, 324 James, 87, 88 Darby, Abraham, 96 Darnall, 202–03 Col. Henry, 199–200 Mary, 200–01 Davenport, 98 Davis, Justina, 155 President Jefferson, 302, 306 Dawson, 54, 98 Day, Thomas, 232–5, 238–40, 247–8, 250–1, 254 Déisi, 8 Delacour, James, 230 Delap, 85, 87, 159 Charlotte, 87 Florinda, 88 Robert, 85–6 Samuel F., 87 Sarah, 87 Delaware, 210 Demerara, 73, 74, 86, 99, 256 Democratic Party, 274, 298, 305 Denny, Lady Arbella, 243, 354 (ch.8, note 113) Derby, Earl of, 104 Dermott, James, 168 De Valera, 332 Devenish, Thomas, 60–1 Dickens, Charles, 272 Digges, Thomas, 191–4, 202, 205

Dillon, 198, 324 William, 296 Dissenter, see Presbyterian Dobbs, 155 Arthur, 155, 350 (ch.7, note 30) Conway, 166 Richard Conway, 155 dóer (the unfree), 9 Dooley, John, 303 Dominica, 64, 132, 147–8, 158, 159, 164, 192, 195, 237 Dominicans, 52, 60–3, 74–5, 125, 138, 207 Donegal (county), 44, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 151, 174, 195, 197, 209, 220, 229, 298 Donegall, Earl of, 150–2, 154–5 Dooley, John, 303 Doran, James, 67–9, 71, 321 Felix I (cptn), 99, 343 (ch.5, note 20) Felix II, 99, 343 (ch.5, note 20) Patrick, 57, 67 Dougherty, Cornelius, 211 Douglas, David, 152–3 Senator, 298 Douglass, Frederick, 1, 3, 68, 225, 279–89, 295, 315, 318, 321, 325–6, 340 (ch.3, note 48), 358 (ch.9, note 108), 362–3 (ch. 11, note 43, ch.12, notes 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 19–29, 33–4), 367 (ch.14, note 42) Downshire, 150 Drennan, Dr. William, 190–3 Drogheda, 46, 99, 131, 174, Dromoland Castle, 287 Dublin Evening Mail, 280 Dublin’s Foundling Hospital, 243 Du Bois, W.E.B, 322 Dubthach, 14, Duffy, Gavan, 293–94 Dunbar (battle of ), 46 Dundas, Henry, 189 Dupleix de Bacquencourt, 110 Dutch, 22, 28–35, 43, 52, 57, 71, 73, 74, 94, 96, 100, 119–20, 128, 143 Dyer, 55 Dying African, 245 Dying Negro, 247, 250

390 Index Edgar, Dr, 288 Edgeworth, 350 (ch.8, note 10) Maria, 247–54, 316, 360 (ch.10, notes 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 52–7), 366 (ch.14, notes 22, 24) Richard Lovell, 247–50, 251, 360 (ch.10, notes 40, 42), 366 (ch.14, notes 22, 24) Edinburgh Review, 254 Edmundson, William, 187 Edwards, Bryan, 248, 250, 252–3, 360 (ch.10 notes 39, 41) Ely O’Carroll, 198, 202, 205 Emerald Guards, 305 emigration, 35, 45–6, 104, 150, 207–9, 225, 236, 267, 269, 273, 291–2, 332 Emmet rebellion, 84, 245, 260, 264 Engels, 332 Engerman, 310, 319 English country gentleman’s advice to the Irish members of the imperial parliament on the subject of the slave trade, 259 Epistle to Varro, 235 Ephraim, Duke, 114 Equiano, Olaudah, 1, 66–73, 184, 193, 205, 279, 281, 307, 321, 328, 340 (ch.3, notes 44, 47, 49, 52, 58, 59), 353 (ch.8, note 104), 358 (ch.10, note 4), 367 (ch.14, note 41), see also Vassa, Gustavus Essay on Plantership, 76 Ethiopia, 21 Ewing, 145, 156, 229, John Ewing Calhoun, see Calhoun Everard, Mr., 93 Fagan, Stephen, 98 Fage, J. D., 22–3 Fahey, Garrett, 56 Falkiner, Rigs, 166 famine, (see also Great Famine) 7, 16, 21, 22, 24, 90, 136, 235, 267, 315 Farrell, 55, 62, 65, 68, 94, 323 Mary, 65 Matthew, 61 Richard, 56 Farrell’s Mountain, 73 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 177 Fearon, 65

Fedelm, 10 female slave, see also cumal, 8, 9, 11, 19, 21, 89, 92, 103, 184, 303 Fenton, 323–4 Fergus, Howard, 329, 338–9 (ch.3, notes 6, 14, 29) Fermanagh, 195, 276, 285 Figueira, Father Luis, 29, 30 Fir Maige, 8 First Virginia Regiment, 302 Fisher, 143 Fisherwick Place, 150–1 Fitzgerald, 93, 166, 198 Charles, 324 Citizen/Lord Edward, 188, 324, 328, 368 (ch.14, note 56) Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 324 Sir Henry, 188 Vesey, 268 Fitzdennis, 55 Fitzmaurice, Tom, 124 Fitzredmond, William, 203 Fitzwilliam, Lord, 196 Flight of the Earls, 27 Flood, 166 Henry, 172, 175–7 Fogel, R. W., 310, 319, 332 Forbes, Edward, 99 William, 99 Patriot MP, 165 Forde, Garret, 324 Forsey, Thomas, 148 Forten, Sarah, 312 Fort Sumpter, 302, 303, 305 Foster, 166, 259 John, 169, 172–7, 263 Vere, 321 Fox, Charles James, 261–3 William, 187–9, 241, 244–5 France, 1, 2, 45, 49, 53, 58, 61, 64, 79, 80, 105–13, 123, 128, 129, 132, 135, 137, 147, 159, 160, 172, 182, 188, 189, 194, 201, 204, 242, 248, 259, 263, 264, 265, 301, 312, 314, 320, 329 Franciscans, 52, 138 Frederick V., 58 Free Church of Scotland, 284

Index 391 Freeman’s Journal, 38, 272, 273, 315 free soilers, 295 ‘Free Trade for Ireland’, 2, 83, 113, 140, 142, 144, 153, 155, 156, 158, 172, 173, 175, 176, 236, 247 Free trade (classic), 173, 267, 272, 286, 293, 309 French, 158–9, 166 Robert, 51 Freke, Philip, 97 Thomas, 97 William, 97 Frere, Tobias, 42 Tobias II, 42 Tobias III, 42 Fry, Elizabeth, 254 Frye, 55, 72, 75, 82, 94 Fugitive Slave Law, 218, 223, 295, 325 Galan, Peter, 145, 174 Gallagher, James, 103 Galphin, George, 211 Galway, 49, 55, 65, 73, 112 David, 56 Margaret, 65 Nicholas, 56, William (see also Sir William PayneGallwey), 65 Galway, 38, 54, 57, 105, 123, 127, 159, 174, 308 Galway (county), 52, 92, 112, 288 Gambia (Upper Guinea), 23, 24, 207, 327, 329 Garrison, William Lloyd, 271, 273, 277, 281, 282, 318 Garrisonians, 271, 274, 287, 289 Garsington, 53 Genovese, Eugene, 310 Gentleman’s Magazine, 179, 232, 234, 235, 237 Gerald of Wales, 20, 24, 95 George I, 201, 203 George II, 166 George III, 95, 185, 195 Georgia, 7, 198, 216, 218, 223, 224, 227, 228, 294, 299, 325–6 Germans, 208, 212 Gettysburg, 293, 303, 306, 309

Gibbon, 323 Gilbert, 173, 352 (ch.8, note 51) Ginkel, Godert, 105 Gladstone, William, 308–09 Gleeson, David T., 305, 364–5 (ch.13, notes 24, 53, 61, 63, 67), 367 (ch.14, notes 27, 32, 34, 39, 50) Glúniarainn (Iron-knees), 11 Gone With the Wind, 307 Good Aunt, 251, 254 Gookin, Daniel, 35 Gould, 112, 130, 309 Grace, 198 Richard, 198–9, 202–3, 206 Grainger, James, 76, 79 Grateful Slave, (Maria Edgeworth) 253–4 (Hibernian Magazine) 179 Grattan, 166 Henry, 140, 172, 175, 188, 353 (ch.8, note 105) Richard, 56–7, 67, see also the ‘Richard and Henry’ Great Famine, 1, 136, 170, 229, 285, 286, 288, 290–3, 304, 306, 307, 318 Greencastle, Martin, 79 Greg, 145 John, 147–8, 192, 212–14, 313 Samuel, 148. ?Gregg Thomas, (nephew) 148. ? Gregg Thomas, 145–58, 165, 187, 191–2, 195, 345 (ch.5, note 70), 349 (ch.7, notes 1, 17) see also Torrans, Greg & Pogue Grenada, 64, 132, 147, 156, 160, 182 Grenville, Lord, 261–3 Griffith, Amayas, 164 Arthur, 296, 364 (ch.13, note 20) Grogan, 166 Grosse Isle, 290–1 Grou, 110 Grubb, Robert, 188 Gwynn, Aubery, 38, 336–7 (ch.2, notes 1, 5, 6, 13, 28, 40, 57), 345 (ch.6, note 6.) Guadeloupe, 54, 57, 113, 125, 182 Haley, Alex, 327–8 Simon, 327

392 Index Haliday, Dr, Alexander, 151–2 Hall, 202 Brothers, 84, 87 Mr., 101, William, 90 Hamilton, Lord, 176 W.G., 182 Hancock, Prof. William Neilson, 307, 365 (ch13, note 68) Hanratty, John, 110 Hare, 134 Mary, 133 Margret Anne, 133 Richard, 131–3, 142, 145, 149, 163, 347–8 (ch.6, notes 49, 50, 52–7, 62, 92), 349 (ch.7, notes 1, 7) Richard II, 133 William, 94, 131, 133, 347 (ch.6, note 61) Harleston, John, 211 Harleston Coming, Aphra, 211 Harlon, Mary, 321 Harper, Mary, 111 Hart, Governor Robert, 201–4 Hartley, David, 182–5 Harvey, 143 Haslett, Dr John, 301 Sullivan, 301 Haughton, James, 270, 273, 278–81, 286–9, 295, 305, 307 Havana, 56, 214, 265 Healy, 325–7 Eliza I, 325 Eliza II, 326 James, 325–6 Michael, 325 Patrick, 326 Hearts of Steel/Steelboys, see agrarian discontent Henderson, 145 herring, 12, 125–6, 129, 151, 170, 175, 180, 314, 366 (ch.14, note 11) Hewitt, James, 154 Hibernian Anti-slavery Society (HASS), 270, 271, 274, 275, 285, 286, 287, 289, 307 Hibernian and Foreign Bible Society, 270 Hickel, 166

Higgins, G., 93 Hillsborough, Lord, 149 History Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies, 248, 250, 253 Hoban, James, 166 Hobart, Secretary, 194 Holloway, Augustus, 252 Hope, James / Jemmy, 245 Holm, Poul, 21 Holmes, 145 Honoraty, Jean, 110 Horan, James, 122 Horsfall, 115 Howard, 65, 243 Miss, 251 Howick, Lord, 275 Hughes, Bishop/Archbishop, 274, 296, 304–5, 307, 310 Bernard, 211 Humbert, General, 249 Hunter, Governor Robert, 45, 82, 135–6 Hussey, 62, 68, 94, 172, 175 Hutcheson, Francis, 151 Hutchinson, Hely, 158, 172 Hyde, 146 Elizabeth, 146 Margaret, 148, 153 Ibo, 1, 40, 65, 70, 72, 249, 252 Inchiquin, Lord, 121 India, 64, 80, 96, 104, 106, 143, 173, 179, 185–6, 187, 227, 235, 243, 252, 255, 267 Indians (native Americans), 28, 34, 36, 50, 52, 93, 153, 208, 210, 211, 213 indigo, 37, 50–1, 54, 70, 106, 119, 122–3, 172, 210, 213–14 Ine, 11 Irish (as a family name), 55, 75 Irish Brigade, 305–6 Irish Citizen, 300 Irish Confederation, 287 Irish law tracts, 8–12, 23 Irish Friend, 276 Irish parliament, 2, 139, 153, 155, 161, 162, 165, 166, 170–5, 177, 191, 194, 247, 263, 267 Irish Revenue Commissioners, 162, 165, 168, 172

Index 393 Irish Statistical Society, 308 Islam, 19, 22 Jackson, 327–8 Andrew, 328 Eleanor, 328 Henry, 328 James I, 327 James, 327–8 Jacobs, Harriet, 318, 326, 367 (ch.14, note 30) Jacques, Francois, 111 Jail Journal, 293 James I, 36, 120, 207 James II, 44–5, 53, 105, 107, 135, 145, 199, 202, 211 Jea, John, 320 Mary, 320 Jebb, Frederick, 177–8, 352–3 (ch.8, notes 56, 62, 69) Jeffereyes, St John, 166 Jefferies, Richard, 254 Jefferson, Thomas, 95, 245 Jefferson’s Daughter, 245 Jennings, 282, Isabel, 282, 284, 288 Jephson, Denham, 166 Jesuits, 40, 52, 199, 325 John IV, 33, 35 Johnson, 323 Thomas, 96 Jones, John Paul, 153 Valentine I, 155–6 Valentine II, 155–6 Jordan, Winthrop, 39, 336 (ch.2, note 33), 340 (ch.3, note 50) Joy, 156 Jump Jim Crow, 278 Kearney, 166 Kelly, 114, 135–7, 140, 143, 324, 348 (ch.6, note 76) Charles, 135 Daniel, 123 Darcy, 135 Denis, 92 Dennis, 135 Elizabeth, 164

Fergus, 21–2 John, 135–7, 141–2, 348 (ch.6, notes 71, 72, 75, 76, 81–3, 85, 87–8) Margaret, 137, 140 Martin, 141 Kemble, Fanny, 198, 224, 227, 355–8 (ch.9, notes 2, 100, 106) Kennedy, 323 Hyacinth, 60–1, 206 James, 61 Kenmare, Earl of, 124, 125, 150, 194 Kenyon, Father, 294, 296 Kerry, 48, 81, 93, 98, 123, 124, 125, 127, 133, 263, 269 Kiberd, Declan, 255, 335–9 (ch.1, note 58), 360 (ch.10, note 60) Kildare, 10, 16, 169, 177, 181, 186 Killala, 12 Killikelly, Martin, 141 King, of Mitchelstown,134, 224, of Roscommon, 224 Catherine, 224 Robert, 68–9, 71–2 Roswell snr, 224–5 Roswell jnr, 224–5 Kingston (Jamaica), 87, 89, 91, 93, 147 Kingston, Lord, 134–5, 322 Kinsale (Ireland), 35, 36, 96, 127, 346, (ch. 6, note 31) Battle of, 27, 30 Kinsale (Montserrat), 50, 62, 70 Kinte, Kunta, 327 Kirwan, 49, 57, 62, 127, 166, 339 (ch.3, note 8) Know – Nothings, 295, 298 Knox, Alexander, 259 Knoxville, 293, 297, 298, 300, 303 Kyrle, Sir Richard, 211 Lagore, 12 Lancashire, 99, 256, 266–7, 310 Langan, John, 249 Langrishe, 166 La Rochelle, 105 Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), 293, 315 Latouche, 164, 166 David, 175–6 Digges, 175

394 Index Laudem Aethiopissae: In Praise of a Negress, 230 Laughton, Phillip, 54 Laurens, Henry, 212, 222 Leadbeater, Mary, 186, 189, 238, 241, 243–4, 254, 310, 315, 350, 350–4 (ch.8, notes 10, 82, 101, 103, 110), 359 (ch.10, note 26) William, 189 Leary, Lewis, 324–5 Lebor na cert, (the Book of Rights), 8, 19 Leckey, John, 226 Lee, 55, 63, 94, 323–4 Edward, 260, 263 General, 303 Legg, 146 Lehinch, 51 Leigh, Alice, 227, 229 Frances, 227 Leinster, 14, 15, 17, 18, 267 Leinster, Duchess of, 324 Leinster, Duke of, 176, 188 Le More, Mary, 237 Letter to Coroticus,12, 14–15, 19, 95 Letters for Literary Ladies, 249 Lewis, John, 205 Leyland, 98 Life and Letters of John Brown, 309 Lignon, Richard, 37 Limerick, 10, 19, 52, 96, 104, 105, 112–13, 131, 133–43, 158, 169, 171, 174, 177, 194, 195, 202, 203, 211, 270, 273, 283, 285, 307, 314, 320 Limerick Reporter, 273, 283 Lincoln, 298, 306, 309 linen, 82–4, 90, 120–1, 126, 131, 143, 145–6, 149, 151–2, 155–9, 169–70, 172–3, 192, 196, 208, 276, 289, 310–1, 327–8, 366 (ch.13, note 81) Lines to Edward Rushton on the Recovery of his Sight, 244 Lines written on a Joyful Event, 244 Lisaduff, 92 Lisburn, 145, 149, 154, 157, 165 Lisheenboy, 202, 204, 205, 206 Literature, see saints lives, slave narrative, poetry, post colonialism, novels, children’s fiction, pamphlets, Little Black Boy, 238

Liverpool, Prime Minister, 264 Locke, 76, 166–7, 187, 195 lóg n-enech (honour-price), 8 Logue, Dominick, 88 London Committee for the abolition of the Slave Trade, 79, 143, 158, 179, 231, 237, 260 Londonderry, county, 152, 229 London, 32, 35, 44, 51, 61, 68, 75, 77, 86, 87, 89, 96, 104, 107, 113, 126, 130, 132, 134, 141, 148, 150, 151, 160, 162, 173, 178, 179, 181, 184, 185, 189, 192, 195, 199, 212, 227, 230, 237, 248, 250, 255, 266, 269, 270, 271, 274, 276, 279, 301, 312, 324 London, bishop of, 52, 212 Long, Edward, 119 Longford, 56, 60, 247, 249 L’Orient, 129 Lorrha, 60, 206 Louis XV, 109 Louis XVI, 332 Louis XVII, 265 Louisiana, 204, 228, 256, 274, 297, 299, 318, 325 Lovejoy, Paul, 22–3 Lovers, an African Eclogue, 232, 234 L’Overture, Toussaint, 73, 245 Lowdnes Yancey, William, 302 Lowther, Sir James, 246 Lynch, 57, 127, 158, 211 Antony, 159 Father, 61 John, 51 John Roy, 325 Nicholas, 52 Patrick, 325 Thomas, 211 see also Messrs Blake & Lynch Lucy Long, 278 Lyons, 75 Dr., 324 Lyrical Ballads, 235 Lysaght, 166 MacDonnell, Terence, 60–1 Mackenzie, 88 Mackey, 323 Macnamara, Denis, 104, 127 Thomas, 203–04

Index 395 Madden, Richard Robert, 93, 273, 277, 286, 316, 324, 342 (ch.4, note 35), 359 (ch.10, note 33), 362 (ch.11, notes 44, 52), 366–7 (ch.14, notes 23, 47) Dr. Samuel, 126 Madeira, 57, 76, 89 Magdalene Asylum, 243 Maginnis, John, 319 Maid Marian, 57 Malcolmson, 267 Malone, 166 Mandingo, 40, 207, 248, 327 Manning, Billy, 65 Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, 78, 231, 253 Marks & Spencers, 311 Maquay, George, 187 Mark, Thomas, 143 Martell, Anastatia, 112 Martin, Cptn, 75 George, 75 Henry, 75 John (from Newry), 294, 302 John (from Belfast), 89 Josiah, 76 Samuel, 75–9, 141, 185, 340–1 (ch.3, notes 64, 76–7, 79–80), 349 (ch.6, note 109) Martinique, 108, 113, 125 Maryland, 63, 119, 192, 197, 199–207, 217, 119, 225, 228, 279, 283, 287, 298, 301, 314, 320, 322 Marx, 332 Mathew, Father Theobald, 280–2, 286, 288 Matthews, Lieutenant, 179 Maunsell, 139 Maynooth grant, 262 Mayo, 11, 12, 52, 60, 120, 164, 195 McCabe, Thomas, 154, 157–8, 191–2, 196 McCammon/ McEamon, 94, 99 McCarthy, Justin, 66 McCartney, Lord, 170 McCormack, 323 McCracken, John, 157 Mary Ann, 196

McDermott, 323 McDonnell, Dr James, 193 Randal, 194, 204 McDowell, 89–91 McEvedy, Colin, 23 McGauley, James, 99 McGrath, 134, 142 Edmond, 134, 136, 142, 348 (ch.6, note 79) McIntosh, 307 McKenna, Dr, Theobald, 194 McKeon, 323 McMahon, 211 Thomas, 305 McNally, Leonard, 179 Meade, 55, 94, 323 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 289, 304–5, 310 Meath, 9, 62, 125 Megan, John, 103 Merriman, Brian, 160 Mervyn, Rochfort, 166 Methodists, 190, 275–6, 307 Michel, 110, 301 Middleton, 222 Mary, 215–16 Midgley, Clare, 190, 354 (ch.8, note 116), 360 (ch.10, note 56), 361–2 (ch.11, notes 35, 51) Miliucc, 12 Mill, John Stuart, 254, 308, 310, 359 (ch.10, note 27) Mind of South, 297 Mitchel, 293, 299, 304 Billy, 302–03, 309 Henrietta (Henty), 301 James, 302–03 Jenny, 302–04, 308, 364–5 (ch.13, notes 13, 15, 27–8, 46, 48–50, 52, 55–6, 58) John, 2–3, 287, 289, 293–306, 308, 310, 313, 315, 318, 328, 364–5 (ch.13, notes 12–14, 16, 18, 20–21, 23, 29, 31–7, 39–41, 44–5, 47, 51) John II (cpt.), 301–3 Mary, 301 William, 301 Mitchell, Margaret, 307 Moghadh, (serf), 21 Moira, Earl of, 92, 261

396 Index Molyneux, Capel, 166 William, 189 Molyneux, 187 Monck, Christopher (Duke of Albermarle), 45 Mongomerie, Thomas (Sir), 42 Montaudoin, 111 Montego Bay, 88, 104, 124 Montgomery, Hugh, 155 Catherine, 209 Montserrat, 1, 33, 34, 36, 41, 45, 49–54, 55–9, 61–75, 83, 94, 100, 107, 113, 119, 127, 166, 193, 260, 321, 323, 329, 332 Moore, 166, 311 Colville, 166 James, 211 Moore & Wineberg, 311 Moral Tales, 250–1 More, Hannah, 238–9, 243 Morning or The Complaint, 232–3 Morres, Lodge, 166 Morris, Sheriff, 132–3 Moylan, 130, 132 Francis, 129, 195 John, 129 Steven, 129, 347 (ch.6, note 56) Mug (male slave), 8–13, 16, 21, 27 Muirchú, 12, 15 mulatto, 30, 48, 72–4, 76, 85, 89, 91, 101, 179, 214, 252, 299, 320–9 Mullala, James, 190–1, 312, 354 (ch. 8, notes 114, 119) Mulligan, Hugh, 232–9, 245, 254–5, 358–9 (ch.10, notes 3–6, 11–12.) Mullin, Michael, 74, 340 (ch.3, note 62) Mullaghmore, 51, 83 Mulryne, 63 Munster, 104, 121, 126, 158 Munsterman, 60, 104 Murphy, Patrick, 115 Muslims, 40, 110, 185, 207, 327, 329 Musseden, 156 Myall man, 40 Nagle, Nano, 129, 140, 346, (ch.6, note 44) Philip, 98–9, 343 (ch.5, note 13)

Nantes, 105, 107, 125, 135 Napoleonic Wars, 88, 90, 114, 134 Napper Tandy, James, 181, 190, 244 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 279 Nation, 287, 294, 295 Neal, Samuel, 182 Negro; addressed to Edmund Burke, 243 Negro’s Complaint, 238, 246, Neilson, Samuel, 191, 193, 307 Netterville, Catherine, 179 Newenham, Sir Edward, 175, 177 Nevis, 34, 36, 45, 49, 50, 58, 65, 113, 132, 146 Newfoundland, 121 Newry, 85, 94, 99, 145, 155, 174, 176, 293, 294, 300, 304 Newton, 159 John, 78, 103 New York, 81, 146–8, 152, 229, 274, 290, 293–7, 299, 300, 304–6, 309, 320, 321, 324, 325 New York Coloured Orphan Asylum, 306 New York Times, 300 New York Tribune, 300 Nigger Question, 272 Nine Years War, 198 Noble, 220, 229 Clement, 104 John, 209–10 Mary, 209–10, 213 Patrick, 210 Norris, Richard, 96 North, Lord, 173, 175 North Carolina, 76, 155, 182, 210, 211, 248, 318, 326, 327 Novelle Heloise, 63 Novels, 12, 63, 192, 230–1, 245, 250–6, 289, 295, 327–9 Nugent, Lady, 314, 366 (ch.14, note 9) obeah, 249, 250, 253 O’Brien, 82, 136, 166 Bernard, 27–33, 35, 50, 119, 336 (ch.2, note 14) Cornelius, 27 Denis Thomas, 194 Kennedy, 211

Index 397 O’Brien – continued Lucius, 177 Smith, 287, 289, 293–4, 299, 307, 309–10, 315–16, 318, 366 (ch.14, note 18) O’Callaghan, 166 Sean, 38, 336 (ch.2, note 28) O’Carroll, 215 O’Connell, 2, 125, 229 Daniel, 3, 81, 124, 242, 259, 266–77, 280–2, 284, 286, 289, 294, 310, 330, 362 (ch.11, notes 45, 54) John, 272–3 Maurice (the Hunting Cap), 122–5, 345–6 (ch.6, notes 10, 18, 22, 24) O’Connor, 158, 324 Arthur, 322 O’Conor, Charles, 304 Ó Croinín, Dáibhí, 21 Ó Dálaigh, Muireadhach Albannach, 21 O’Ferrill, Jose Rickardo, 56 Ogle, George, 172, 175 O’Hara, 126, 166 Charles of Annaghmore, 158, 164, 194 Scarlet, 307 O’Kelly, Charles, 60 O’Leary, Art, 130, 132, 133 Dr., 191 Oliver, Silver, 166 Olmsted, Frederick Lee, 319, 367 (ch.14, note 31) O, More, 165 Rory, 211 O’Neal, 330 Dr Charles Duncan, 330 Edwin, 329–30 On the Death of Hugh Mulligan, 237 Opossum up a Gum Tree, 278, 284 O’Reilly, Father, 60 Dowell, 93 O’Riordan, 111, 344 (ch.5, note 48) Orkneys, 18 Oronooko, 230 339 Orr, James, 245, 359 (ch.10, note 31) James Lawrence 302 Orrery, earl of, 46, 337 (ch.2, note 61), see also Broghill, Lord, O, Sheil, Marie, 107, 344 (ch.5, note 48)

O, Súilleabháin, Eoghan Rua, 127 O, Sullivan, Cpt. Florence, 210 Ouidah. 107–8 Owen, Nicholas, 99–103 Blaney, 99–103 Oxford, 20, 53, 65, 133 Paine, Tom, 193, 244 Palmer, Bertha, 327–8 Palmerston, 115, 265, 291, 309 Palmetto Point, 42, 65 Pascal, cpt, 66–70 Pamphlets, 65, 80, 177–82, 184–5, 188–91, 194, 239–44, 255, 259, 267, 346 note 45 see also bibliography, section on contemporary pamphlets Parent’s Assistant, 247 Parnell, 166, 322, 332 Parsons, 55, 82, 94, 366 (ch.14, note 4) Sir Laurence, 260, 353 (ch.8, note 105) Pastorini, 271, 280 Paugh, see Pogue Payne, 65 Payne-Gallwey, Sir William, see also William Galway, 65 Pearce, Lovatt, 165–7, 169 Peel, Sir Robert, 133, 268, 272, 286 Peizley, Mary, 181 Pennsylvania, 181, 208, 209, 213, 217, 219, 220, 223, 229, 283, 304, 305, 306 Pery, 138, 140 Edmund, 140 Edmund Sexton, 138–43, 170–1, 349 (ch.6, note 104) Rev. Stackpole, 138 William Cecil, 138–40 Petty, Sir William, 122 Philadelphia, 57, 68, 85, 129, 152, 181, 182, 197, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 275, 278, 300, 312, 328 Philip IV, 27, 31–5, 119 Pickney, 217 Charles (lawyer), 217 Charles (general), 217 Pim, Jonathan, 288 Pinney & Tobin, 65 Pitt, Prime Minister William, 83, 170, 259–64 Plymouth (England), 320

398 Index Plymouth (Montserrat), 56, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71 Poems, chiefly on Slavery and Oppression, 255 Poetry, 8, 21, 24, 77, 80, 104, 122, 160, 186–7, 230–46, 250, 256, 359, note 27 Pogue, 327, see also Torrans, Greg & Pogue Ponsonby, 133, 175 Popular Tales, 252, 254 Porteous, Bishop, 276 Port Royal, 45, 93, 127, 135 Portugal, 27, 28, 30, 33, 96, 265 Portuguese, 22, 23, 27–34, 40, 59, 61, 101, 119, 121, 126, 128, 132, 143, 290, 291 post colonialism 254–5, 330 Postlewaite, Malachy, 178 Pottinger, Thomas, 145 Powell, William, 120 Presbyterians, 47, 82, 83, 85, 88, 94, 99, 131, 145–50, 153, 157, 168, 174, 191, 194, 197, 205, 207–9, 212, 213, 216, 218, 219, 221, 227 Preston, battle of 46 Protectorate, 36, 43, 46, 51 Protestant, 25, 27, 30, 33, 43, 44, 49, 52–5, 59, 64, 65, 75, 79, 93, 99, 103, 115, 125, 126, 127, 129–34, 137–8, 142, 152, 154–6, 158, 160, 165, 167, 170, 172, 174, 177, 187, 189, 191, 195, 197–9, 201, 204–5, 207–8, 211, 212, 215, 216, 225, 228, 231, 232, 249, 268, 270, 271, 273, 275, 276, 277, 282, 283, 285, 289, 304, 306, 307, 322, 326 Purcell, 32, 121 James, 27, 29, 30 Philip, 27–29 Quakers, 2, 80, 160, 181–2, 185–6, 189–90, 270–1, 275, 280–1, 284, 286, 232 Queen Maebh of Connacht, 9, 11, 24 Quinlan, Kevin, 304 Quinn, Daniel, 321 Wyndham, 166 Ramelton, 83–91, 103 Ramsay, 179, 184

Reconstruction, 300 Red Sea, 21 Redlegs/RedShanks, 47–8, 319 Reeves, 104 Regulators, 214, 215, 216, 228, 317 Remond, 274, 279 Renvyle, 52 Repealers, 273–4 Rheinau, 18 Richard II, 133 Richmond Montgomery Guards, 302 Ridgley, Robert, 200 Rirdan, 111–12, 344 (ch.5, note 48) Etienne, 111 Laurent, 111 Marie, 111 Roach, 94, 97, 324 Roche, 55, 57, 111–12, 133–40, 142–4, 147, 166, 174, 224, 339 (ch.3, note 8), 344 (ch.5, note 64). 347–9 (ch.6 notes 68, 76, 84, 110, 349) Anastatia Martell, 112 Boyle, 166 Dominick, 112 Francois, 111, 344 (ch.5, note 64) George, 133 James, 112, 134, 142, 347–8 (ch.6, notes 66, 95) James of Martinique, 112 John, 133–7, 140, 163, 169, 194 Julius, 112 Lodivicus, 112 Mathias, 111, 344 (ch.5, note 64) Maurice, 60 Richard, 112 Robert, 112 Nicholas, 112 Philip, 134, 137–40, 158 Stephen,134, 137–40, 158, 349 (ch.6, note 103) Roche’s Bank, 134 Roche’s Bluff, 73 Rockingham, Lord, 183, 185 Rodney, Walter, 23 Roland, Madame, 189 Roman empire, 7, 15, 21, 294 Rome, 18, 59, 61, 64 Roscoe, William, 237, 254 Roscommon, 75, 224, 290, 324 Rotterdam, 104, 133, 135, 143, 212

Index 399 Rowley, Clotworthy, 166 Royal Africa Company, 39, 95 Ruddock, Noblet, 56 rum, 36–7, 57, 60–1, 69, 100, 104, 106, 132–5, 137, 144, 146, 161, 163, 171–4, 188, 190, 201, 223–4, 241, 332, 354 (ch.8, note 108) Rush, Dr Benjamin, 226 Rushton, Edward, 237, 244–5, 359 (ch.10, notes 13, 14) Russell, Anne, 49 Governor, 42 Lord John, 272, 286, 309 Thomas, 191–92, 205 Rutland, Lord, 149 Rutledge, Edward, 211 John, 217 Ryan, 49, 62–5, 71, 94, 183, 323 Elizabeth, 65 John, 62–3, 71 Mary, 63–5 Patty (Martha), 63, 65 Thomas, 62, 99 see also Ryan/Baker Ryan/Baker, 183 Patty, 65 Sable Venus, 249 Said, Edward, 255 saints lives (hagiography), 9–12, 14–19, 21 Sandford and Merton, 247 Sarsfield Southerns, 305 Scandinavia, 18 Scots, 36, 41, 46, 50, 88, 98 Scotch Irish/Scots Irish, 209, 213, 218, 307, 326, 229, (see also Presbyterians, 209–16, 219–22) Scotland, 12, 47, 98, 108–9, 129, 136, 146, 195, 207, 284, 311 Scott, Dred, 283, 304 Jane, 91 Nancy, 89 Sir Walter, 12 Scully, Denys, 263, 361 (ch.11, note 20) Searle, Daniel (Governor), 43–4 Selby, 65

Nicholas Tuite, 66 senchléithe (hereditary serf), 9 Servants (black), 73, 77, 78, 94, 127, 274, 278, 282, 301, 303, 314 (bound or indentured), 33–50, 54, 55, 59, 75, 168, 200, 207, 210, 218, 323 Indian, 30, 31, 33 sét (gems), 8 Seven Years War, 64, 66, 111, 127, 137, 146, 147, 148, 158, 161, 182, 213, 235 Seward, 267 Sexton, 138 Mr., 136 Edmund Sexton Pery, see Pery Shackleton, 181, 186–8, 270 Abraham, 181, 186 Ebenezer, 315 Mary, 186–7, 353 (ch.8, note 82), see also Leadbetter, Mary Richard, 181–3, 186 Sally, 86, 188 Shannon, 122, 139, 143, 273 Shannon, Lord, 132 Sharpe, Granville, 78, 85, 231, 276 Shaughnessy, 103 Cpt J., 107–8 Shaw, 323 Robert Gould, 309 Mrs Susan, 309 Shawnee, 210 Shea, 130 Shepherd, William, 237 Shiel, 166 Shiell, 107, 111, 344 (ch.5, note 48) Barnaby, 107–8 Marie, 107 Luc, 107–08, 110–11 Queely, 94 see also O’Shiel Shields, 87, 103 Ships, Aetna, 67, 321 Anne Brigantine, 56, Aventurier, 107, 108 Blessing, 96 Boyne, 99 Brookes, 103–4 Catherine, 137 Charming Sally, 67, 68, 69, 70, 321 Countess of Donegall, 149

400 Index Ships, Aetna – continued Dauphin, 108 Dolphin, 99 Du Teillay, 108 Endeavour, 51, Grace, 99 Greg, 146 Heurex, 109 John Shaw, 136 Mary and Catherine, 57 Owner’s Goodwill, 57 Prince d’ Orange, 110 Prosperity, 96, 113, 149 Richard and Henry, 57 Robert Kerr, 273 Sarsfield, 107 Sainte Heléne, 110 St John the Baptist, 107 St Louis, 113 Tenedos, 299 Sierra Leone, 40, 100, 211, 240, 265, 276 Sinclair, William, 196 S.K. (Cork), A short and particular impartial account of the treatment of slaves in the island of Antigua, 179–181 Skerret, 49, 55–6, 62, 71, 127 Catherine, 56 George, 56–7, 67, 338 (ch.3, note 5.) Gregory, 56 Thitt, 56 slave emancipation, see abolition of slavery slave narrative 1, 12, 66 –73, 184, 193, 225, 279, 318, 321–2, add John Jea slave plantations, Belfast, 147 Clinlamira, 202 Concordia, 63 Doughoragen, 202, greencastle, Hertford, 147 Hillsborough, 147 Lees, 63 Litterluna, 202 Orange Estate, 87 Symes, 63 Shafton, 86 Vinegar Hill, 87 Mounteagle, 87

Marly, 164 Paradise, 63 YS, 92, Slave Power, Its Character, Career and Probable Designs, 308, 310 slave revolt, 44, 72–4, 102, 110, 253, 317, 325 Slavers throwing out the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on, 246 Slavery in Africa, 21–4, 66, 100–3, 107, 109–10 the Amazon, 28, 30–1, 66 Antigua, 75–7, 79 Barbados, 37–41, 44, 48, 86 Cuba, 56, in early Ireland, 7–26 Jamaica, 45, 87, 89, 91–2, 313, 314, 323, 324, Montserrat, 53, 55, 56, 62, 63, 66, 68–73, 94 North American colonies (13)/U.S.A., 200–01, 202, 205, 210–11, 214, 217, 219–6, 299–303, 314–15, 318–19, 325 St Croix, 58, 60, 75 slave trade 1, 3, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 54, 57, 65, 74, 77, 80, 86, 87, 91, 95–9, 102, 105–15, 132, 135, 142–4, 151, 158, 173, 177, 178, 181–5, 187–90, 192–3, 201, 203, 213–14, 222, 231–4, 235, 237, 239–44, 246, 247, 250, 253, 254, 259–66, 272–7, 291–2, 294, 297–300, 302, 308, 309, 312–13, 318, 332 Sleator, 169 Slemish, 12 Sligo, 92, 120, 126, 195, 262, 290, 316, 323 Sligo, Earl of, 92–3, 262–3 Smith, 323 Adam, 173, 250 smuggling, 28, 57, 96, 104, 112, 120, 122, 123, 130, 154, 164 Smyth, Rev. Thomas, 284 Somerset, James, 78, see also the Somerset Case/Mansfield Judgement Somerset Case/Mansfield Judgement, 78, 231, 253 South Carolina, 71, 74, 104, 113, 127, 135, 147, 152, 156, 168, 197, 210–12,

Index 401 215–23, 226, 228, 248, 276, 284, 299, 301, 302, 307, 309, 324, 326 Southern Citizen, 297–300, 302, 305 Southey, 237, 246 Spain, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 54, 61, 119, 145, 265, 272, 313 Spratt, Leonidas, 298 St Antony’s, 52 St Adomnan, 15–16, 19–20, 24, 333–4 (ch.1, notes 25, 39, 43, 47) St Brigit, 9–10, 14–17, 333–4 (ch.1, notes 12, 34, 42) St Ciaran, 15, 17 St Christopher/St Kitts, 31, 33, 34, 35, 42, 49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 62–5, 68, 71, 72, 77, 113 St Columba, 14–16, 333–4 (ch.1, notes 25, 39, 43, 47) St Croix, 58, 60, 75 St Domingue, 54, 58, 73, 107–9, 11–13, 125, 179, 272, 317, 332 St Eustatia, 57, 61, 71, 91, 99, 113, 147 St Finbar, 15 St Fintan, 1, 17–19 St Frumentius, 21 St Leger, 166 St Martin of Tours, 18 St Vincent, 64–5, 147, 183 St Patrick, 1, 11–20, 24–5, 72, 74, 95, 103, 242, 312, 316, 331, 334 (ch.1, notes 26, 33) Friendly brothers of St. Patrick, 211 St Patrick’s Day, 72, 74, 211, 332 St Patrick’s parish, 57, 62 St Peter’s parish, 52, 56 St Philip’s parish, 43 Stackpole, 135 Dymphna, 140 Patrick, 104 Philip, 135, 140, 348 (ch.6, note 72) Stanley, Lord, 272 Stansfield, James, 284 Stapleton, 134, 198 William, 49–55, 62, 65 Staunton, 158 Stephen, James, 261 Stephens, Alexander H., 293, 315 David, 328 James, 303 Stevenson, Mr, 94

Stewart, Cptn William, 146 Robert, 147 Stopfords of Courtstown, 94 Stormont, Viscount, 189 Stowe, Mrs, 289 Stritch, Father John, 52 Stuart, 32–3, 37, 50, 59, 109, 119, 198, 203, 215 sugar, 1, 33, 36, 38–9, 42, 44, 47–55, 57–8, 60–5, 69–71, 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 86–7, 89, 92, 94–6, 100, 106, 113, 115, 119–21, 123, 125–9, 132, 134–5, 137, 142, 155–6, 158–61, 164, 167, 170–7, 181–3, 187–8, 190, 194–6, 201, 223, 234, 239, 241, 244, 247–8, 256, 261, 265, 267, 272, 279, 297, 299, 308, 310, 312, 314, 324, 332, 336–8 (ch.2, notes 20, 22, 25, 27, 51, 67, 71, 85, 86), 338–40 (ch.3, notes 1, 10, 59, 64, 74, 78 ), 351–4 (ch.8, notes 11, 17, 18, 19, 41, 49, 50, 54, 56, 62, 69, 108), 365 (ch.13, note 68) Sugar Cane. A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes, 77 sugar duties, 2, 91, 156, 161, 175–7, 179, 265, 272, 287–7, 352–3 (ch.8, notes 56, 62, 69) Sullivan, Prof, 308 Surinam, 29, 31, 47, 75 Sutton, Bernard, 112 John, 174, 352 (ch.8, note 47) Swan, Mayor William G., 297 Sweden, 19 Sweeney, 323 Sweetman, Peter, 33, 34 Swift, 76, 126, 247 Swineburne, 63, 65 Patty, 65 Swiney, 92 Táin Bó Cuailnge, ‘the Cattle Raid of Cooley’, 1, 8–11, 24, 316 Talbot, 93, 166 Tallyrand, 264 Tarleton, 98, 132 Teague, John, 97 Temperance movement, 277, 280–1, 283, 285, 288

402 Index Tennessee, 294, 297–9, 306, 325, 327 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 250 Thistlewood, Thomas, 314 Thomond, Earl of, 27 Thompson, 145, 156, 323 E.P., 39 Mary, 294, 299, 364 (ch.13, notes 16, 34 Robert, 156, 174, 178 Thomson, George, 274 Thornton, John 23 Thurloe, Chancellor, 46–7, 337 (ch.2, notes 59–61.) Tighe, 166 Tipperary, 49, 65, 124, 127, 133, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 215, 227, 229, 284, 297, 301, 314, 318 Tírechán, 11 Tiree, 15 tobacco, 1, 27–37, 50–1, 54, 58, 63, 96, 100, 106, 113, 115, 119–23, 126, 135, 137, 141–3, 149, 153, 160–1, 164, 167, 172–3, 196, 200–1, 203, 210, 214, 219, 228, 230, 246, 279, 314 Tobin, 65, 114–15, 189, 339 (ch.3, note 40), 345 (ch.5, notes 75, 77) James, 65 John I, 114 John II, 114–15 Patrick, 114 Thomas, 114–15 Thomas jr (Sir Thomas Tobin of Ballincollig), 114–15 see also Pinney & Tobin Tone, Wolfe, 83, 191–6, 205, 352–5 (ch.8, notes 52, 105, 120, 123, 126, 129–31), 368 (ch.14, note 55) Torrans, Greg & Pogue, 147, 148, 212–14 Toulouse, 66, 129 Toussaint L’Overture’s Farewell to St Domingo, 245 Tralee, 98, 270 Trant, 55, 94, 344 (ch.5, note 48) Dominick, 113 James / Jacques, 113 Susanah, 113, Thomas, 98, 343 (ch.5, note 15) Trimlestown, Lord, 211 Trinidad, 36, 54, 156, 256 Trinity College, 167, 181, 190, 206, 230, 266, 308

Troy, Archbishop, 195, 205 tuath (population group),10 Tucker, Henry, 101–2 Tuit, 323 Tuite, 63, 71, 82, 94, 106–7 Elinor, 65 Nicholas, 57–66, 71, 106–7 Nicholas II (Tuite Selby), 66 Tuohy, 98, 99 David, 98–9, 343 (ch.5, notes 13–18) Turner, 246 Tyre, 21 Tyrell, Duke, 166 Uí Liatháin, 8 Ulster, 9, 10, 15, 75, 82, 88, 94, 112, 120, 145, 147, 148, 192, 197, 207, 208, 212, 216, 226, 284, 288, 307, 310, 311, 316, 326, 327, 328 Underwood, Antony, 200 Martha Ridgley, 199, 200 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 289, 295 Union (Irish Act of, 1801), 81, 83, 84, 133, 163, 249, 253, 259, 260, 262, 263, 266, 271 United Irishmen, 2, 80, 93, 179, 190, 191, 193, 196, 229, 237, 244, 245, 279, 312, 328, 322 USA, 1, 2, 3, 41, 74, 80, 95, 197, 205, 210, 217, 222, 228, 255, 256, 268, 269, 273, 274, 277, 278, 279, 281, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 295, 298, 299, 300–9, 313, 315, 320, 324, 327, 329, 331, 332 Utrecht, Treaty of, 56 Vandeleur, Crofton, 166 Vassa, Gustavus, 66, see also Olaudah, Equiano Vesey, Denmark, 169 Vienna, Congress of, 74, 80, 264, 266 Viking, 10, 11, 17–19, 21, 26, 101 Virginia, 34, 35, 36, 66, 74, 78, 119, 123, 155, 185, 207, 209, 210, 213, 219–20, 225, 232–3, 277–8, 295, 298, 302–3, 306, 314, 326 Vincent, Mr, 250–1 Vita Findani, 17

Index 403 Vita prima, 14, 15 Volunteers, 153, 157, 171, 173, 176, 177, 191 Waad, 94 Waddell, 326 Moses, 326 Wage slaves, 284, 313, 332 Wales, Prince of, 261 Walkers Hibernian Magazine, 79, 81, 91 Walsh, 106–112, 323 Antoine, 106–112, 329 Count of Serrat (Francois Jacques), 111 Mr., 136 Philip, 105, 107, 111 Washington, Booker T., 327 George, 129, 192, 195 War of the Austrian Succession, 108, 111, 128, 169 Warner, Sir Thomas, 31, 33, 340 (ch.3, note 72) Waterford, 104, 107, 111, 121, 131, 174, 260, 263, 270 Watt, 83, 98 Andrew, 84, 88 David, 84, 88 James snr, 83, 85, 90, 341 (ch.4, notes 14, 27) James jnr, 84–6, 88, 90, 341 (ch.4, notes 3–13, 15, 17, 20–3) John (of Ramelton), 89, 91 John (free coloured man), 91 Mrs, 85 Samuel, 83–91, 93, 95, 259, 273, 314, 341 (ch.4, notes 3, 5–15, 20–2, 27–8) Webb, Maria, 283, 288 Richard Davis, 270, 273, 275, 278–9, 309–10, 365 (ch.13, note 75) Wellesley, Richard, 227 Wellington, Duke of, 227, 268, 313 West Indies, see Caribbean Westminster government, 40, 45, 46, 48, 57, 60, 74, 75, 81, 84, 87, 91, 94, 95, 96, 120, 129, 133, 158, 161, 162, 166, 171, 172, 173, 182, 187, 188,

193, 194, 199, 136, 241, 253, 259, 260, 262, 263, 267, 269, 187, 293 Wheatley, Francis, 165–6 Whigs, 92, 183, 186, 268–72, 275, White, 323 Catherine, 325 Mary, 111 Maunsel, 297, 299, 318, 325, 367 (ch.14, note 29) Michael (governor of Montserrat), 70 Michael (of Waterford), 111 Whiteboys, see agrarian discontent Wilberforce, 65, 73, 89, 185–9, 234, 243, 247, 259–66, 269, 275, 313, 318, 360–1 (ch.11, notes 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 18, 25.) Mrs, 254 William III, 44–5, 202 Williams, 323, 324 George, 228 Father Joseph, J., 322–4 Willoughby, Lord, 43, 49, 62 Wolfe, Charles, 246 Wollstonecroft, Mary, 134 Women, 2–11, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 34, 36, 38, 46–7, 48, 50, 59, 65, 68, 70, 77, 80, 85, 87, 89, 91–2, 103, 110, 122, 125, 140–2, 166, 181, 184–90, 293, 297, 298, 300, 303, 309, 315 Woolman, John, 186–8, 243, 353 (ch.8, note 102) Worcester, battle of, 46 Wordsworth, 235, 245–7, 254 Wulfstan of Worcester, 19, 20, 24 Wyke, 55, 94 Edward, 75 Yaws, Cacao, 77 Yearsley, Anne, 237 Yelverton, 166 Barry, 172, 175–6 Yorkshire, 181, 260, 313 Young, Arthur, 134, 315–16, 366 (ch.14, note 19)

Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery

Ireland

Ireland

Ireland

Greek and Roman Slavery

Slavery and Freedom

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Sunlight and Slavery

Morality & Utility in American Antislavery Reform

Capitalism and Slavery

Life Under Slavery (Slavery in the Americas)

Sweet Slavery

Slavery And South Asian History

Empire and antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874

Sweet Slavery

Questioning Slavery

Psychiatric Slavery

Lincoln on Race and Slavery

Writings on Empire and Slavery

Writings on Empire and Slavery

Slavery and the British Empire

Doing Ireland!

Doing Ireland!

Cultureshock! Ireland

Slavery and South Asian History

Ireland and the British Empire

Travel Ireland

Deconstructing Ireland

Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America

Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery

Ireland

Ireland

Ireland

Greek and Roman Slavery

Slavery and Freedom

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Sunlight and Slavery

Morality & Utility in American Antislavery Reform

Capitalism and Slavery

Life Under Slavery (Slavery in the Americas)

Sweet Slavery

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