Remembering and Rewriting 1798by Eoin MagennisIt has often been said that history is written by the winners and that the losers are erased from the page. One of the great historians of the twentieth century, the socialist E. P. Thompson, used the phrase "condescension of posterity" to describe how early British radicals and trade unionists were treated by those who wrote about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This has also happened in regard to the many forgotten people in Irish history who failed to fit into the "nationalist" or "unionist" moulds. However, this has not happened in the case of 1798. Rather what has been distorted are the nature of the United Irish movement itself, the response of the authorities and the character of the years leading up to the Rising. In fact long before 1998 and the deluge of books, pamphlets and magazines devoted to commemorating 1798 there was a "paper war" with perspectives ranging from the ultra-loyalist to the ultra-nationalist and the radical response to this debate. 1798 and the Act of UnionThe insurrection of 1798 and the Act of Union of 1800 have long - and rightly - been seen as intimately linked. From the standpoint of the British ruling class, the act was part of the process of preventing another rebellion or civil war. And this is exactly how historians of the nineteenth century described the events. Much of the private and official correspondence that was published from the 1930s onwards presented British politicians such as Lord Cornwallis, viceroy of Ireland from 1789-1801, and his colleague, Lord Castlereagh, as attempting to save the Irish from themselves. As these two men were the architects of the Act of Union, including the bribery and persuasion that went with selling such a measure to Catholic and Protestant elites, then their views of the savagery of the rebels and government supporters alike in 1798 became a key part of the British analysis of the 1790s and the need for Union. "Benevolent imperialism" was all the rage in Victorian England as was summed up in James Anthony Froude's three volumes, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. Loyalist AccountsIrish commentators, on the other hand, did not at all agree on the nature of the connection between 1798 and the Act of the Union. The ultra-loyalist argument was made very soon after the rebellion had been crushed. This centered on the assertion that the Rising was another installment in a long-running "popish plot" to exterminate Protestants. Loyalists sought to use such arguments to persuade British ministers during 1799-1800 that the Act of Union should not be accompanied by Catholic emancipation. Contemporary pamphlets that made these points bore names like Union or Not? By an Orangeman By the end of 1799, an ultra-loyalist Munster Protestant landlord, Sir Richard Musgrave, began collecting materials for his huge history of the rebellion. The queries that he sent out made it very clear that he would focus on the role of Catholics and their clergy and the sectarian intent of the rebels to kill all the Protestants they could get their hands on. The people that he sought depositions from were also those who could be relied upon to give the "correct" answers to his queries. They were often Anglican clergymen of a conservative bent or else magistrates with Orange links from Wexford and Wicklow who could provide harrowing stories of massacres and murders. All of this material came together in the massive Memoirs of the Various Rebellions in Ireland published in 1801 and selling out three editions by 1803. Musgrave set the tone for later loyalist versions of 1798 with the horrors of Scullabogue and Wexford Bridge placed in the context of massacres of Protestants in Portadown in 1641 and more recent attacks on Munster landlords by agrarian secret societies like the Whiteboys. In other words, the United Irish rebellion was just another chapter in the sectarian history of Ireland caused by Catholics being unable to coexist with neighbors they saw as heretics. In this account all visions of "liberty, equality and fraternity" go out the window. Other Early AccountsThis version of events did not go unchallenged by Musgrave's co-religionists, many of whom believed that the Orangemen and other loyalists had provoked the rebellion by their pitch-capping and other various forms of torture and oppression. An Anglican bishop in the West of Ireland, Joseph Stock, published a sympathetic account of the rising in Mayo and Leitrim which denied the idea that the rebellion had been aimed at wiping out Protestantism. In 1800, this was a brave attempt to deny the sectarian nature of 1798 and to raise the liberal banner. At that stage, Henry Grattan, the leader of the "Patriot" wing in the Irish parliament, had just emerged from a bruising pamphlet battle where he had been accused (possibly correctly) of having taken the United Irish oath in 1798. But Protestant liberals were also divided over the Act of Union. Stock's version of events may have had some initial support but with the Emmet rebellion of 1803 and the increasing association of nationalism with the Catholic middle classes and the Catholic hierarchy itself, Protestant liberals were driven over the following decades. The Grattanite Patriots were not the only people concerned with defending their reputations and distancing themselves from the United Irishmen. The Catholic Church which from the beginning was opposed to any attempt to import the secular ideas of the French Revolution into Ireland was engaged in the same exercise. The bishop of Ferns, James Caulfield, whose diocese included Wexford, was first into print with a pseudonymous pamphlet in 1799 entitled A Vindication of the Roman Catholic Clergy of the town of Wexford during the late unhappy rebellion. Caulfield dismissed those clergy involved in the rebellion, like John Murphy and John Martin, as being drunks who were the "very faeces of the church". The bishop's approach, supported by Archbishop Troy of Dublin, was to downplay any activity by United Irishmen in Leinster and to play up the role of oppression and provocation of deferential and submissive Catholics by the Orange Order and government forces. This approach was the one also taken by Daniel O'Connell in his Catholic Association days where he emphasized the loyalty of his co-religionists driven to rebellion by Orange terror. To hammer this point home it had to be made clear that the United Irish movement was a predominantly Presbyterian one and that they had fled the field leaving Catholics to their fate. To add insult to injury, in O'Connell's rendition, these same Presbyterians who were United Irishmen in the 1790s by the 1820s and 1830s had become violent Orangemen. Young IrelandThe next stage in the writing and rewriting of 1798 came in the 1840s when the Young Ireland movement, led by Thomas Davis, emerged to challenge Daniel O'Connell's conservative Catholic nationalism. By identifying themselves explicitly with the United Irishmen, the Young Irelanders laid the basis for putting the "men of '98" in the pantheon of nationalist heroes. R. R. Madden's seven-volume The United Irishmen, their Lives and Times, published in the 1840s, and the publication of memoirs by leading rebels, from James Hope to Thomas Addis Emmet, helped to fuel the revived interest in the rebellion. But the new interpretation favored by militant nationalists, including the Young Irelanders in the 1840s and the Fenians after 1865, both romanticized and depoliticized what had happened. A blurb for this interpretation might read: romantic rebels, fired up by the events in France, seek unity of all Irishmen but tragically fail due to spies and repression. The arrest and fatal shooting of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the death of Tone and the execution of the "Man from God knows where", Thomas Russell, all add to this picture. The Catholic Church, fearing the challenge from Fenianism, sought to challenge the new cult of '98. Father Patrick Kavanagh's Popular History of the Insurrection of 1798, harking back to O'Connell, portrayed the United Irishmen as no more than a short-lived secret society who had left the field before a defensive rebellion by Catholics provoked by the Orange terror happened, almost spontaneously. This clerically-approved interpretation pushed the priests of Wexford to the forefront as the real heroes of the rebellion. Thus Father Murphy, in Oliver Sheppard's statue, points a young Wexford pike-man towards his glorious death at Vinegar hill. This interpretation also suited the leadership of the constitutionalist Catholic nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the run up to the centenary of the rebellion in 1898. The IPP leadership, seeking to revive itself after the Parnell split of 1891-2, naturally wanted to wrap itself in the mantle of '98 as presented by Father Kavanagh. Of course, in all of this, the role of the Northern Presbyterians was now almost forgotten, especially in Ulster itself where the centenary was hardly marked at all. The Kavanagh version of 1798 allowed those in Ulster who did not want to remember the time when Protestants had been divided over issues of loyalty and democracy to bury inconvenient memories. Hence it can be seen that distortion of the nature of the United Irishmen and the 1798 Rising began early and continued on all sides. Some would say that such debates which can be found in relation to many great historical events prove that there is no real truth in history, just a host of propagandistic "interpretations". We certainly would not draw this conclusion. While it may not be possible to produce a purely "objective" history, it is still possible to distinguish fact from fiction. But in order to do this, it is vital to analyze every account in order to see clearly its bias, including its class bias. RevisionismThe debate on 1798 in recent times has been heavily affected by the "revisionist" attack on the nationalist writing of Irish history. This attack which is popularly associated with the work of Connor Cruise O'Brien beginning in the 1960s was not without its merits but its weaknesses were particularly evident in regards to the United Irishmen. Viewing Irish society as inevitable divided into two sectarian camps - at the extreme, it was argued that Ulster Protestants constituted a separate nation historically - the revisionists saw the United Irishmen as at best doomed to failure. They were romantic utopians leading the Catholic Defenders into what became in practice a sectarian bloodbath, especially Wexford. At worst, the United Irish leadership, infected by a dangerous totalitarian Jacobin ideology, helped to lay the basis for IRA terrorism. The revisionists wound up identifying more with Edmund Burke and Daniel O'Connell, both bitter enemies of the French Revolution, than with Wolfe Tone or Jemmy Hope. Whatever the motivations of individual historians, revisionism was in vogue because it suited the Southern establishment which was seeking to distance itself from its revolutionary origins while adopting a more "European" image. New work, however, challenges both "revisionism" and the more traditional views of a spontaneous rising of Catholic peasants against Orange oppression with the United Irishmen already sidelined. Some historians now emphasize that there was a definite plan. The rebellion was to begin in Dublin and spread outwards but this failed due to betrayals (and incompetence) in the capital. Thus Wexford and Wicklow were part of a strategy and not a desperate response to oppression. Ulster would have risen earlier but for bad communication and disagreements over having rebellion without the French landing. In other words, far from the Leinster rebellion being led by Catholics, it was a United Irish affair. Secondly, there is the issue of politicization. Those historians who dominate the television screens in 1998, like Kevin Whelan and Tom Bartlett, make the point that the United Irish project, inspired by the French Revolution, was to bring politics to every village and to combat the sectarianism associated with the past. This project was enlightened and democratic and this, it is argued, should not be lost sight of in the tales of battles and massacres in 1798. Thirdly, the sectarianism which the United Irishmen sought to eradicate from society was precisely the poison which the administration in Dublin Castle and London sought to inject into the situation to divide Protestant Catholic and Dissenter from one another. Thus the government set up Maynooth in 1795 and from that year gave first secret and then open support to the Orange Order. While not entirely dismissing the potential importance of French aid, the Irish context of the rebellion is rightfully restored and the ideas of the United Irish movement become not foreign but indigenous once more. Without for a moment taking away from the work done by Whelan and Bartlett and others in nailing many of the lies about the United Irishmen, it is worth pointing out that many of these points were made in the early part of the century by Ireland's greatest socialist, James Connolly. Already in 1898 at the time of the centenary, Connolly had challenged the distortions of the 1798 legacy by Father Kavanagh and the IPP. He produced a set of 1798 readings in order to popularize the real views of the United Irishmen in their own words. James ConnollyConnolly's most developed analysis of 1798, however, is contained in his major 1910 work, Labor in Irish History. The sixteen chapters, written in lecture style, addressed the successive betrayals of Ireland, not by the Protestant Ascendancy or the British government but by Ireland's own nationalist elite. Right from the foreword, it was clear just what Connolly was arguing:
"...we have in Ireland for over 250 years the remarkable phenomenon if Irishmen of the upper and middle classes urging upon the Irish soldiers as a sacred national religious duty the necessity of maintaining a social order against which their Gaelic forefathers had struggled, despite prison cells, famine and the sword for over 400 years." 1 Connolly opposed both constitutional nationalists who explicitly accepted the social system which underlay British imperialism as well as the "physical force" republicans who for the most part put all discussion of social questions off the agenda until after independence from Britain had been achieved. In Connolly's view the only consistent force in the struggle for Irish freedom was the Irish working class. All other classes had partially or completely sold out. The fight for independence in order to succeed had to become not just a fight against British rule but against the capitalist social order itself. This was also the only way to creak the allegiance of Protestant workers to "their" bosses. Connolly viewed the United Irishmen as serious revolutionaries who came far closer to succeeding than subsequent accounts suggested. It was precisely this point that the "moderate", well-heeled nationalist leaders sitting in Westminster wished to cover up. In his account of the rebellion in Labor in Irish History, Connolly contrasts the bravery of the insurgents with the poor performance of the British army regulars, despite their numbers and weaponry. This allows Connolly to make the point that had the United Irish plans worked and a nation-wide insurrection occurred, then the military defeat of Britain could have been effected. That is certainly very different from Kavanagh's view of a spontaneous Catholic peasant uprising and is far closer to the more recent scholarship. Connolly goes on to argue that the battle for democracy was won and lost on the high seas. Here United Irish agents sent into the British fleet had successfully recruited large numbers of sailors. Fitting to this interpretation of the United Irishmen as principled revolutionaries is the title of the chapter in Labor in Irish History which described them as "democrats and internationalists". Connolly went on to quote approvingly from Jemmy Hope in 1798:
Och Paddies, my hearties, Connolly argues that besides denominational or religious divides within Ireland there were social divisions between the rich and poor. The time was ripe to unite ordinary Protestants and Catholics. Tone sought to spread the message of unity by demanding equal representation for all in the Irish parliament. But Connolly goes on to point out that despite Tone's desire for independence from Britain, he also sought the union of the people of both islands against their native aristocracies and monarchy. In Connolly's words, the United Irishmen organization:
"...understood that the Irish fight for liberty was but part of the world-wide upward march of the human race, and hence allied itself with the revolutionists of Great Britain as well as those of France, and it said little about ancient glories, and much about modern misery." 3 Thus Irish socialists in 1910 and not nationalists should be the ones claiming Tone's mantle. In this regard, it has to be said that Connolly exaggerated Tone's radicalism, describing him as an advocate of "class war" and quoting approvingly his motto that the United Irishmen would base themselves on the "men of no property". In reality, Tone was an advocate of a war against the aristocracy in order to establish a bourgeois social order. But, like the French revolutionary Jacobins, he saw the necessity for an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the "lower orders" to achieve this. However, one can certainly agree with Connolly in his description of the latter-day nationalists:
"...all of his [Tone's] present day followers constantly trample upon and repudiate every one of [his] principles and reject them as a possible guide to their political activity." 4 CommemorationsOne can usefully compare the "remembering" of 1798 to the ways in which the Easter Rising of 1916 has been commemorated by "nationalist Ireland". In 1966, on the 50th anniversary of the Rising, the Southern state, led by de Valera put on a massive aggressively nationalist pageant, complete with military parade. In 1991, on the 75th anniversary, on the other hand, there was virtually no official commemoration in the South, as the bourgeoisie sought to put as much political distance as possible between itself and the Provisional IRA. The "revisionist" school of history was then at its height. As we have seen, the remembering of 1798 has gone through even more violent swings. In 1898, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Catholic Church sought to wrap themselves I n the mantle of 1798 to justify a conservative, clericalist nationalism. This could have no appeal to the descendants of the Dissented rebels of the previous century. But in 1998, the "peace process" is in bloom, the Celtic Tiger roars and an assertive bourgeois finds it convenient to rediscover Wolfe Tone and his comrades as the forefathers of a more tolerant, secular national identity. This is all connected to the much-ballyhooed - and essentially non-existent - reconciliation between the North's "traditions". So now it suits for a more truthful portrayal of the United Irishmen to be popularized. The republicans, of course, have their own reasons for commemorating 1798, none of them to do with historical accuracy. Interesting as the new research is, however, many of the points are not new for socialists as they echo arguments outlined by Connolly nearly a century ago. It is precisely because socialists have had no stake in either Orange or Green mythology that we have been able to look more objectively at Irish history. 1998, of course, is not just a year of historical commemorations. An enormous crisis has opened up in the world economy and many capitalist commentators have suddenly discovered that 150 years ago Karl Marx had a far better understanding than they of the workings of their system. Marx and Connolly may now be acknowledged (the latter implicitly) as having had some very interesting things to say. But for them analyzing historical developments or the workings of the economy were not ends in themselves. Rather, they saw scientific knowledge as the key to charting a path towards a socialist society. We intend to use the new knowledge about 1798 towards the same end. Footnotes |