This well-researched monograph addresses questions that have occupied historians for decades: Why did American abolitionists in the early 1840s lionize Daniel O’Connell, the Irish statesman who advocated repeal of the Union between Ireland and England? Why did O’Connell oppose American slavery, even when doing so offended many of his American supporters? And why did American Irish Repeal societies reject O’Connell’s antislavery appeals? In this book, Angela F. Murphy focuses primarily on the last of these questions, but she also proposes persuasive answers to the others, offering historians compelling proof of the value of transatlantic history.

By the end of 1843, when the Repeal movement peaked in Ireland, numerous societies in the United States had formed for the purpose of supporting O’Connell and his Dublin-based Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA). Murphy’s primary argument is that these American Repeal societies were determined, above all, to show that Irish Americans were loyal to the United States. American nationalism, she argues, explains why American Repealers gained so much support, why they refused to support abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (in defiance of O’Connell), and even why their movement declined.

Murphy acknowledges the work of Gilbert Osofsky, whose 1975 article blamed the “dilemmas of nationalism” for the well-known conflicts between Irish immigrants and American abolitionists, as one inspiration for her conclusions. But American Slavery, Irish Freedom draws on a much broader and deeper base of research than Osofsky’s article, which relied heavily on abolitionists’ publications. Murphy looks more closely at American Repealers’ own speeches, proceedings, and biographies, both to extend Osofsky’s conclusions and to challenge his tendency to conflate the American Repeal movement with Irish immigrants generally. Murphy also challenges more recent historians of “whiteness” who use the episodes of conflict between abolitionists and Repealers as examples of how racialized, working-class Irish Catholic immigrants opposed equal rights for African Americans and in so doing “became white.” Like historians such as David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev, Murphy situates Irish American responses to abolitionism in the context of increasing nativism and the changing demographics of the immigrant community. Unlike Roediger and Ignatiev, however, she emphasizes that American Repeal societies were religiously diverse and often middle class in composition and outlook. Many American Repealers had immigrated to the United States before 1845, and a surprising number were not even Irish-born.

These observations lead Murphy to conclude that antiabolitionist American Repealers were motivated less by a desire to gain a new racial or class identity than by a desire to demonstrate allegiance to the United States and assert their national identities as Americans. Distancing themselves from abolitionists and O’Connell allowed American Repealers to disavow a movement widely regarded as a threat to the American Union, while also demonstrating their independence from Repealers in Ireland. According to Murphy, the actions of American Repealers were not those of a working-class immigrant community struggling to prove they were white; rather, American Repeal was a movement of diverse, sometimes affluent, Irish and non-Irish Americans who had no doubt they were “white” but remained anxious to prove that Irish Americans were loyal citizens. That anxiety also explains why American Repealers ultimately disbanded in 1845, an ending that Murphy attributes less to their paper war with abolitionists than to the ominous possibility of war between the United States and Great Britain over Oregon and Texas, a possibility that O’Connell seemed to welcome in one widely reprinted speech. In the midst of Anglo-American saber rattling, the desire of American Repealers to prove Irish Americans’ loyalty to the United States trumped even their support for Irish independence and O’Connell, whose seeming willingness to embrace a bellicose British foreign policy accelerated the end of Repeal in America.

Richly suggestive and persuasively argued, American Slavery, Irish Freedom does leave some questions open for further research. For example, it is sometimes unclear how important the support of American Repeal societies was to O’Connell and LNRA leaders and how extensive their contacts were across the ocean. Conflicts in Ireland between O’Connell and the Young Ireland movement also appear late in the book, although Irish affairs may help explain the dissolution of American Repeal and also raise questions about the positions American Repealers took on home rule after O’Connell’s demise but before the end of slavery. Still, Murphy’s book deserves a wide readership among historians of antebellum America and Victorian England, not least because in placing the question of abolition and immigrant citizenship side by side, Murphy depicts an American society as riddled with anxiety about its own identity as were the immigrant groups who entered it. In explaining the fate of abolitionists like O’Connell and the American Repealers who ultimately deserted him, Murphy also helps chronicle the pervasiveness of Anglophobia in an Atlantic world whose history was still shaped, in the United States as well as in Ireland, by the fact or fear of England’s power.