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Review article: Reclaiming the rebellion: 1798 in 1998*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Ian McBride
Ian McBride*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Durham
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Extract

Few Irish men and women can have escaped the mighty wave of anniversary fever which broke over the island in the spring of 1998. As if atoning for the failed rebellion itself, the bicentenary of 1798 was neither ill-coordinated nor localised, but a genuinely national phenomenon produced by years of planning and organisation. Emissaries were dispatched from Dublin and Belfast to remote rural communities, and the resonant names of Bartlett, Whelan, Keogh and Graham were heard throughout the land; indeed, the commemoration possessed an international dimension which stretched to Boston, New York, Toronto, Liverpool, London and Glasgow. In bicentenary Wexford — complete with ’98 Heritage Trail and ’98 Village — the values of democracy and pluralism were triumphantly proclaimed. When the time came, the north did not hesitate, but participated enthusiastically. Even the French arrived on cue, this time on bicycle. Just as the 1898 centenary, which contributed to the revitalisation of physical-force nationalism, has now become an established subject in its own right, future historians will surely scrutinise this mother of all anniversaries for evidence concerning the national pulse in the era of the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement. In the meantime a survey of some of the many essay collections and monographs published during the bicentenary will permit us to hazard a few generalisations about the current direction of what might now be termed ‘Ninety-Eight Studies’.

Type
Review Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 123 , May 1999 , pp. 395 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1999

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Footnotes

*

The mighty wave: the 1798 rebellion in Wexford. Edited by Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. pp 187, maps, illus. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1996. IR£29.95 hardback; IR£9.95 paperback.

The people’s rising: Wexford, 1798. By Daniel Gahan. Pp xv, 367, maps, illus. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 1995. IR£35 hardback; IR£12.99 paperback.

The women of 1798. Edited By Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. Pp 208. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1998. IR£30 hardback; IR£9.95 paperback.

On the road to rebellion: the United Irishmen and Hamburg, 1798–1803. By Paul Weber. Pp 205. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1997. IR£30.

United Irishmen, United States: immigrant radicals in the early republic. By David A. Wilson. Pp x, 223. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1998. IR£29.50 hardback; IR£14.95 paperback.

An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834. By Allan Blackstock. pp 320. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1998. IR£30.

References

1 O’Keefe, T.J., ‘The 1898 efforts to celebrate the United Irishmen: the ’98 centennial’ in Éire–Ireland, xxiii (1988), pp 51–73Google Scholar; idem, ‘ “Who fears to speak of ’98?”: the rhetoric and rituals of the United Irishmen centennial, 1898’ in Éire–Ireland, xxviii (1992), pp 67–91; Paseta, Senia, ‘1798 in 1898: the politics of commemoration’ in Irish Review, no. 22 (summer 1998), pp 46–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foster, R.F, ‘Remembering 1798’ in Boyce, D. George and McBride, Ian (eds), Memory and history in modern Ireland (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

2 For some exceptions see the reviews By Connolly, Sean and Kelly, James in History Ireland, iv, no. 3 (autumn 1996), pp 55-6, and iv, no. 4 (winter, 1996), pp 59–61Google Scholar; Dunne, Tom, ‘1798: memory, history, commemoration’ in Journal of the Wexford Historical Society, no. 16 (1996-7), pp 5–39Google Scholar.

3 An example is the argument that the insurrection cannot be explained by agrarian/sectarian factors, since Tipperary, notable for agrarian agitation, remained quiescent, and Armagh, with its history of sectarian clashes, failed to rise. Such claims assume monocausal explanations which sit uneasily with the conjunction of demographic, economic and political history which has distinguished the previous inquiries of both Cullen and Whelan.

4 From a wide literature see ‘The 1798 rebellion in its eighteenth-century context’ in Corish, P.J. (ed.), Radicals, rebels and establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), pp 91–113Google Scholar; ‘The 1798 rebellion in Wexford: United Irishman organisation, membership, leadership’ in Whelan, Kevin (ed.), Wexford: history and society (Dublin, 1987), pp 248-95Google Scholar; ‘Politics and rebellion: Wicklow in the 1790s’ in Hannigan, Ken and Nolan, William (eds), Wicklow: history and society: interdisciplinary essays on the history of an Irish county (Dublin, 1994), pp 411–501Google Scholar; ‘Late eighteenth-century politicisation in Ireland: problems in its study and its French links’ in Cullen, Louis and Bergeron, Louis (eds.), Culture et pratiques politiques en France et en Irlande, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle: actes du Colloque de Marseille, 28 septembre – 2 octobre 1988 (Paris, 1991), pp 137-57Google Scholar; also further articles cited below.

5 This contrast should not be overdrawn. McDowell, it is true, believed that few of the insurgents ‘could have fully apprehended the aims and implications of fin-de-siècle radicalism’, but he attributed a variety of motivations to the rebels: ‘Religion was one element in the compound — denominational loyalty, systematic radicalism, a vague belief in a better order of things, a sense of economic injustice, hostility to landlord and tithe owner, resentment of repression, admiration for France and hope of French assistance, community feeling — which, influencing different men in widely differing proportions, gave momentum to the insurrection.’ See McDowell, R.B., Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), pp 608, 612Google Scholar. David Fitzpatrick, reviewing Whelan’s Tree of Liberty, has pointed out that McDowell’s account did not rely heavily on contemporary memoirs, but on the Rebellion Papers (I.H.S., xxx, no. 120 (Nov. 1997), p. 620).

6 Elliott, Marianne, ‘The origins and transformation of early Irish republicanism’ in International Review of Social History, xxiii (1978), pp 405–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As always, the notion of a revisionist phase of Irish historiography obscures as much as it reveals. Elliott’s work, like Whelan’s, drew inspiration from E. P. Thompson and did much to stimulate interest in popular politicisation. Her Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982) concludes by asking ‘Who can deny that only a remarkable series of accidents prevented United Irish success in the heyday of their diplomatic activities abroad?’ — a counterfactual note which is again consonant with post-revisionism.

7 Cullen, ‘The 1798 rebellion in Wexford’, p. 283; idem, ‘The 1798 rebellion in its eighteenth-century context’, p. 110.

8 Cullen, L.M., ‘The political structures of the Defenders’ in Dickson, David, Keogh, Dáire and Whelan, Kevin (eds), The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp 179, 180, 181, 189, 191, 193Google Scholar.

9 Whelan, KevinThe Tree of Liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of an Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), p. 156Google Scholar (my italics).

10 Bradshaw, Brendan, ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’ in I.H.S., xxvi, no. 104 (Nov. 1989), pp 347-8Google Scholar. See also Jim Smyth’s study of the popular dynamics of early Irish republicanism, which advocates a return to the popular, traditional nationalism of Patrick Pearse, Liam Mellowes and T. A. Jackson, against the scientific perspectives of ‘austere’ revisionists (Smyth, Jim, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992), pp ix-xGoogle Scholar).

11 Whelan, Kevin, ‘Come all you staunch revisionists: towards a post-revisionist agenda for Irish history’ in Irish Reporter, no. 2 (1992), p. 24Google Scholar.

12 See Whelan, Tree of Liberty, p. x; also forthcoming work from Luke Gibbons.

13 Deane, Séamuset al. (eds), The Field Day anthology of Irish writing (3 vols, Derry, 1991)Google Scholar; Deane, Séamus, ‘Wherever green is read’ in Dhonnchadha, Máirín Ní and Dorgan, Theo (eds), Revising the rising (Derry, 1991), pp 91–105Google Scholar. Deane and others have also laid stress on the fictive nature of historical discourse in opposition to what they see as the pretensions to objectivity made by revisionists.

14 Kevin Whelan, ‘Reinterpreting the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in Keogh & Furlong (eds), The mighty wave, pp 9–10.

15 Ibid., p. 35.

16 Ibid., p. 34.

17 The phrase comes from Garvin, Tom, ‘Nationalism and separatism in Ireland, 1760–1993: a comparative perspective’ in Bermanendi, J., Maiz, R. and Nunez, X. (eds), Nationalism in Europe past and present (Santiago, 1994), p. 89Google Scholar. Contrast Whelan’s interpretation with Thomas Bartlett’s view that Defender ideology comprised a ‘complex web of archaic and modern forces’, in ‘Defenders and Defenderism in 1795’ in I.H.S., xxiv, no. 95 (May 1985), p. 374, or with Smyth, Men of no property, ch. 2.

18 Whelan, ‘Reinterpreting the 1798 rebellion’, p. 35.

19 Ibid.; McBride, Ian, ‘Memory and forgetting: Ulster Presbyterians and 1798’ in Bartlett, Thomas, Keogh, Dáire and Whelan, Kevin (eds), The 1798 rebellion: a bicentennial perspective (Dublin, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

20 Whelan, Kevin, ‘The religious factor in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in O’Flanagan, Patrick, Ferguson, Paul and Whelan, Kevin (eds), Rural Ireland, 1600–1900: modernisation and change (Cork, 1987), pp 62–85Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 75.

22 See also Cullen’s chapter, which deals in particular with Luke Cullen.

23 James Kelly, ‘Conservative political thought in late eighteenth-century Ireland’, paper presented at the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, 12 June 1998; C. J. Woods, ‘R. R. Madden, historian of the United Irishmen’, paper presented at the 1798 Bicentenary Conference, Dublin Castle, 23 May 1998.

24 Such writers include Henry Montgomery, Classon Porter, W. T. Latimer, W. S. Smith, J. W. Kernohan, James Barkley Woodburn and R. M. Young. For an outline see McBride, ‘Memory and forgetting’.

25 One, not fully explored here, concerns the enhanced status accorded the republican widows and daughters who acted as guardians of United Irish lore. It was to the ‘fidelity of female friendship’, demonstrated By Mary Ann McCracken, the daughters of Samuel Neilson and others, that Madden owed much of the biographical material which appeared in his memoirs of the United Irish leaders in the 1840s. See Madden, R.R., The United Irishmen, their lives and times (3 series, 7 vols, London, 1842-6), 2nd ser., i, 74; ii, 389Google Scholar.

26 See her previous monograph, The harp re-strung: the United Irishmen and the rise of Irish literary nationalism (New York, 1994).

27 Thomas Bartlett, ‘Bearing witness: female evidences in courts martial convened to suppress the 1798 rebellion’ in Keogh & Furlong (eds), Women of 1798, p. 67.

28 John Gray, ‘Mary Ann McCracken: Belfast revolutionary and pioneer of feminism’, ibid., p. 54.

29 The letters are preserved in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. A new, comprehensive edition is currently being prepared for publication By Jean Agnew, (The Drennan–McTier Letters, 1776–1793 (Dublin, 1998- ))Google Scholar.

30 McSkimin, Samuel, Annals of Ulster, ed. McCrum, E.J. (Belfast, 1906), p. 38Google Scholar; Gamble, John, Sketches of history, politics and manners taken in Dublin, and the north of Ireland, in the autumn of 1810 (London, 1811), p. 183Google Scholar.

31 Curtin, N.J., ‘Women and eighteenth-century Irish republicanism’ in MacCurtain, Margaret and O’Dowd, Mary (eds), Women in early modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), pp 133-44Google Scholar.

32 A phenomenon studied By Kevin Whelan, ‘The role of the Catholic priest in the 1798 rebellion in County Wexford’ in idem (ed.), Wexford: history & society, pp 309–10.

33 See, however, Jim Livesey’s edition of O’Connor, Arthur, The state of Ireland (Dublin, 1998)Google Scholar, which identifies ideological links between France and Ireland.

34 Durey, Michael, Transatlantic radicals and the early American republic (Lawrence, Kans., 1997)Google Scholar; idem (ed.), Andrew Bryson’s ordeal: an epilogue to the 1798 rebellion (Cork, 1998). See also Twomey, R.J., ‘Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo-American radical ideology, 1790–1810’ in Jacob, Margaret and Jacob, James (eds), The origins o f Anglo-American radicalism (London, 1984), pp 284-99Google Scholar.

35 See, for example, Samuel Wylie, Brown, The two sons of oil; or, the faithful witness for magistracy and ministry upon a scriptural basis (Greensburg, Pa., 1803)Google Scholar.

36 Durey, Transatlantic radicals, p. 191.

37 See the introduction to The life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, compiled and arranged by William Theobald Wolfe Tone, ed. Bartlett, Thomas (Dublin, 1998)Google Scholar.

38 See, for example, Colley, Linda, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), ch. 7Google Scholar; Dickinson, H.T. (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philp, Mark (ed.), The French Revolution and British popular politics (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hellmuth, Eckhart (ed.), The transformation of political culture: England and Germany in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Cookson, J.E., The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, Marilyn, The British monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar. For Ireland see Thomas Bartlett, ‘Militarisation and politicisation in Ireland, 1780–1820’ in Cullen & Bergeron (eds), Culture et pratiques politiques, pp 125–36.

39 But for some suggestive comments see Jarman, Neil, Material conflicts: parades and visual displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1997), ch. 2Google Scholar. Forthcoming work on the Orange Order By James Wilson promises to redress the deficiencies mentioned here.

40 Miller, David W., ‘The Armagh troubles, 1784–95’ in Clark, Samuel and Donnelly, James S. jr, (eds), Irish peasants: violence and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, 1983), pp 155-91Google Scholar. Miller has defended his views against Cullen’s criticisms in ‘Politicisation in revolutionary Ireland: the case of the Armagh troubles’ in Ir. Econ. & Soc. Hist., xxiii (1996), pp 1–17Google Scholar.

41 Whelan, Kevin, ‘The origins of the Orange Order’ in Bullán, ii, no. 2 (winter/spring, 1996), p. 19Google Scholar. For a different view see Miller, David W., ‘The origins of the Orange Order in County Armagh’ in Hughes, A.J., McCorry, F.X. and Weatherup, Roger (eds), Armagh: history and society (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

42 Whelan, ‘Origins of the Orange Order’, pp 26–7.

43 See also Blackstock, Allan F., ‘ “A dangerous species of ally”: Orangeism and the Irish Yeomanry’ in I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), pp 393–405Google Scholar.

44 Blackstock, Ascendancy army, p. 96.

45 Wright, Frank, Two lands on one soil: Ulster politics before home rule (Dublin, 1996), ch. 2Google Scholar.

46 McDowell, R.B., ‘The age of the United Irishmen: revolution and the union, 1794–1800’ in Moody, T.W. and Vaughan, W.E. (eds), A new history of Ireland, iv: Eighteenth-century Ireland, 1690–1800 (Oxford, 1986), p. 355Google Scholar.

47 Whelan, Tree of Liberty, p. ix.

48 Bartlett, Thomas, The fall and rise of the Irish nation: the Catholic question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), p. 237Google Scholar.

49 See, for example, Cullen, L.M., The emergence of modern Ireland, 1600–1900 (London, 1981), ch. 10Google Scholar; Whelan, ‘The religious factor in the 1798 rebellion’, pp 62–85.

50 I am grateful to James Kelly, David Miller and James Wilson, all of whom kindly allowed me to read work in progress.