Bucking against a fashionable and ostensibly progressive historiographical trend, G. K. Peatling has challenged the view that the experiences of the Catholic and/or nationalist Irish during and after the Union have been broadly equivalent to those of “nonwhite former or current victims of colonialism or racism” (p. 133). To take such a position, he argues, is to trivialize the much greater level of oppression and racism faced by nonwhite peoples; it is also to adopt deeply flawed notions of Irish exceptionalism and essentialism and to embrace a competitive victim culture. Along with this, Peatling challenges the view of L. Perry Curtis that anti-Irish racial stereotypes were the root cause of English opposition to Home Rule. Curtis's argument is faulted on two main grounds: it takes a selective (and thus simplistic) approach to the evidence, and it fails to demonstrate any meaningful connections between popular stereotypes and public policy. Insofar as anti-Irish racism existed, contends Peatling, it had little or no influence over the political decision-making process. On the contrary, he argues, it was the view that the Irish were really white that carried most weight. Irish nationalists who compared themselves to the whites in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand found a receptive audience in early twentieth-century Britain, particularly but not exclusively within Liberal circles. It is thus a “major distortion,” in Peatling's view, to explain English attitudes to the Irish through binary notions of race and to equate the racialized Celt with colonized nonwhites. At the same time, he warns us against the other extreme that the Irish have had “particularly xenophobic … propensities” (p. 133). Because Irish self-representation has been complex and contingent over time and space, he concludes, it cannot be reduced to a common consciousness of colonialism—or, by implication, to common concepts of “whiteness.”

Within this general analysis, Peatling's comments about the pitfalls of trivialization, exceptionalism, and essentialism are particularly compelling. In this respect, Peatling's arguments are very much in line with Liam Kennedy's comprehensive critique of comparisons between Ireland and Third World countries, along with Kennedy's dissection of the “MOPE” factor in Irish history and politics—the view that the Irish have been the “Most Oppressed People Ever.”Footnote 1 The Irish/nonwhite “colonial equivalency” argument appeared during the Third Home Rule crisis; while Erskine Childers was comparing Ireland to white British colonies, Roger Casement was drawing parallels between the Connemara Irish and the Putumayo Indians. “The ‘white Indians’ of Ireland,” Casement declared, “are heavier on my heart than all the Indians of the rest of the earth.” A few years earlier, he had attempted to enlist Irish nationalist support against imperialism in the Congo “in the light of our past history and of all that the native Irish suffered at the hands of exploiters and exterminators.” Casement's causes may have been progressive, but his comparisons were bizarre. Life may have been hard in Connemara, but brutal overseers were not working people to death. The history of British imperialism in Ireland was bad enough, but that of Belgian imperialism in the Congo was much worse; British rulers were not, after all, hacking off the limbs of recalcitrant workers.Footnote 2

Although he argues that English attitudes to the Irish cannot be contained within a racialist framework, Peatling does accept that the “racialization” of the Irish occurred, and that it was a significant factor in the mid-nineteenth century (pp. 126-27). Beyond that point, Peatling and Curtis part chronological company. Curtis contends that racialized anti-Irish prejudice remained a significant force in the late nineteenth century; he also writes that although such sentiments were stirred up during the debate over the Third Home Rule Bill, they had lost much of their earlier force by that time.Footnote 3 Peatling argues that such prejudice had become less powerful after the mid-nineteenth century and had dwindled into insignificance by the Edwardian era. There is, however, a sense in which Peatling's argument loops back to Curtis: only when notions of Irish “whiteness” became “widely and importantly accepted within the British political system” (p. 132), when anti-Irish racialization became less significant, did the case for Home Rule become more persuasive to more people.

At times, Peatling pushes his argument too far; in other places, he does not push it far enough. His observation that “Curtis reenacts late nineteenth-century party political positions” (p. 123) is perceptive and interesting but does not in itself invalidate Curtis's interpretation. Nor does it logically follow that the “particular narrative of ethnohistory” that Peatling describes and dissects “implicitly devalues narratives of oppression in Ireland arising on other grounds, such as gender” (p. 122). And although Peatling asserts that the “colonial equivalency” argument is “politically potent” and runs the “risk of pernicious political consequences” (p. 132), he does not demonstrate how or to what extent such a position may have influenced the policy-making process—a somewhat ironic omission, given his critique of Curtis. Elsewhere, Peatling could have developed and strengthened his argument by placing more emphasis on “complicity and participation in British imperialism from Irish sources” (p. 131), something that he notes only in passing. Yet the evidence that many Irish people were active and enthusiastic participants in the two great empires of the modern world—the British and the American—unquestionably puts them on the white side of the line.Footnote 4

These qualifications aside, Peatling has made an important and valuable contribution to the debate on “whiteness” and has provided a necessary corrective to some of the perversities of postcolonialism. With this in mind, I would like to consider the issues of equivalency, nativism, whiteness, and self-representation in the context of Irish experiences in North America. This, of course, raises the question of who “the Irish” actually were. Most of the existing Irish-American literature ignores Irish Protestants, even though they were (and remain) a larger ethnic group in the United States than Irish Catholics; there has also been a tendency to generalize from the experience of the minority of Irish Catholics who lived in the eastern seaboard cities. When factors such as gender, class, regionalism, immigration, and ethnicity are included, analyzing Irish experiences becomes as complex as playing multidimensional chess. Almost every sentence beginning with the words “the Irish people” is a lie.

For present purposes, however, I will confine my comments to the same broad group that forms the focus of Peatling's discussion—“the Catholic and/or nationalist Irish.” Within this framework, one of the most sophisticated arguments for Irish/nonwhite colonial commonality in its North American context comes from Luke Gibbons, whom Peatling includes in his list of targets. In a recently published article, Gibbons argues that “leading figures in the United Irishmen expressed profound misgivings over the treatment of slaves and Indians” in the United States and that as the United Irishmen became more radicalized, they turned their attention to “the rights of endangered, native cultures,” which were seen as comparable to the ancient Gaelic culture. The result, he argues, was the assertion of “cross-cultural solidarity,” the belief that the rights of man “applied to cultures as well as individuals,” and the emergence of “a more ethnographic Enlightenment.”Footnote 5

In fact, such an argument can only be sustained through a skewed reading of the sources. Gibbons's case rests on the writings of a handful of United Irishmen—Lord Edward FitzGerald, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Thomas Russell, James Hope, and, above all, William Sampson. One could also include such figures as Thomas Addis Emmet, David Bailie Warden, and the Irish Canadian writer Adam Kidd, whose poem The Huron Chief viewed Native American culture through an Irish patriotic prism. Against this, however, there is the hard reality that virtually every prominent United Irish exile who settled south of the Mason-Dixon line became a slaveholder—men such as Harman Blennerhasset, who owned a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Territory and constantly fretted over the price of slaves. Nor does the evidence support Gibbons's contention that the radicalized United Irishmen were more likely to identify with Afro-Americans and Native Americans. Few United Irishmen had more militant credentials than Denis Driscol or William Duane. Yet Driscol, as editor of the Augusta Chronicle, happily combined articles condemning “slavery” in Ireland with advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves in America and dropped his objection to capital punishment when the thieves happened to be Afro-American. During the War of 1812, Duane recommended that Afro-Americans be brought into the American army to “save so many of the whites,” and generally argued that enslaved blacks were much better off in America than their ancestors had been in Africa. There was no sign of “cross-cultural solidarity” here.Footnote 6

Native Americans did not fare much better. The most extensive United Irish treatment of Native American culture came not from William Sampson but from the much more militant John Daly Burk, in his History of Virginia. At one level, Burk appears to confirm Gibbons's thesis. Burk moved toward cultural relativism, compared Native Americans to classical republicans, and admired native leaders who attempted to resist “the mischiefs of a foreign establishment’ on their land. But whenever native resistance reached the point at which it threatened the existence of the colony of Virginia (and thus, in his view, the march of progress and liberty), Burk denounced the natives as devious, untrustworthy, unpredictable, and savage and argued that the settlers had no choice but to “strike terror” into them by burning their crops and habitations. Given that he had vociferously denounced the British government in 1798 for taking similar actions against Irish rebels, his position seems somewhat ironic. In effect, Burk the anticolonialist could indeed identify with Native American culture, but Burk the democratic republican proponent of the “rights of man” identified with white settlers. And Burk the democratic republican won.Footnote 7

All this complicates and calls into question Gibbons's argument. The most radical United Irishmen in the United States often became the most radical democratic republican nationalists in the country. And anything or anyone who apparently or actually got in the way of their democratic republican nationalism—black slaves whose emancipation threatened to tear the Great Experiment apart, or Native Americans who threatened to block the western progress of liberty—would be kept down or swept aside. It is important to note that there was nothing uniquely “Irish” about this; other advanced democrats from the British and Irish Isles shared such views. The Manchester radical Thomas Cooper, for example, wound up as a slaveholding South Carolina judge, and even the renowned libertarian Joseph Priestley owned a slave in his much-admired land of liberty.Footnote 8 Just as it is misleading to argue that the United Irishmen identified with black slaves and Native Americans, it is equally problematic to argue that they were exceptionally racist.

This raises the question of Irish “whiteness” in the United States and its relationship to anti-Irish nativism. According to Dale Knobel, mid-nineteenth-century anti-Irish stereotypes became increasingly racial in character, with the Celts being viewed as “low-browed,” “brutal,” and “simian.” While Knobel pointed out that the skin color of the Irish prevented them from becoming the victims of institutionalized race-based discrimination, he argued that such negative stereotyping marked them out for “special hostility” in comparison to other white ethnic minorities, and noted Frances Kemble's observation in 1863 that the more the Irish were compared to Afro-Americans, the more the two groups fought one another. It should also be noted that Knobel, in contrast to Curtis and in common with Peatling, believed that such racialized stereotyping faded out after its mid-nineteenth-century peak.Footnote 9

Picking up on Knobel's analysis, David Roediger emphasized the role of whiteness in enabling Irish-American workers to distance themselves from Afro-Americans with whom they were competing for work and to defend themselves from native-born artisans who resented Irish immigrants for undermining craft traditions and undercutting wages. Much the same argument was made by Noel Ignatiev, who viewed whiteness as a conscious and deliberate Irish strategy to counter American nativism. In Ignatiev's view, the Irish became white through an act of will; in an American variant of the “colonial equivalency” argument, he implicitly assumes that the Irish ought to have allied with Afro-Americans but “opted instead for the privileges and burdens of whiteness.”Footnote 10

One of the principal problems with this model is that it exaggerates the extent of anti-Irish prejudice in the United States, even at its height in the mid-nineteenth century. This is partly because the argument focuses on Irish Catholics in cities at a time when most of them did not actually live in cities, and partly because it ignores evidence to the contrary.Footnote 11 In a content analysis of 14,000 books and magazine articles, in which there were 48,000 references to the Irish, Richard Jensen found that “Americans rarely or never referred to Blacks as ‘smoked Irish’; they did not call the Irish ‘white Negroes’ nor [sic] characterize them as ‘Simian,’ ‘bestial,’ ‘savage,’ or ‘low-browed.’” Jensen also verified what a number of Canadian historians of the Irish in America had come to suspect—that there have been hardly any specific sightings of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in North American newspapers. This is not to deny the existence of severe anti-Irish prejudice. But it is to argue that such prejudice was more likely to be connected with their putatively “pre-modern” behavior, their Catholicism, and their supposed threat to the ideas of American republicanism, than with their place on a socially constructed racial hierarchy.Footnote 12

If Jensen's critique of Knobel mirrors Peatling's critique of Curtis, it is also worth considering in its North American context Peatling's argument that anti-Irish prejudice had little impact on public policy. The verdict here is mixed. The nativist movement scored some successes at the state and local levels during the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in relation to residency requirements for the vote, religious instruction in public schools, and the control of church property. But it failed in its major objectives of extending the naturalization period to twenty-one years and of preventing foreigners from holding any public offices. In some cases, nativist violence arose in reaction to policies that were perceived as being too accommodating to Irish Catholics; fears of a sellout, for example, lay behind the notorious Philadelphia Riots of 1844. The fact that such compromises occurred in the first place is at least as significant as the popular protests they sometimes engendered. On balance, the limitations of nativism are more striking than its occasional and ephemeral victories.Footnote 13 Reversing the angle, the more recent Irish “ethnic victim” stereotype has paid some recent political dividends, most notably in the inclusion of the Famine under the rubric of “holocaust and genocide” studies in the school curricula of New York and New Jersey.Footnote 14 In this variation on the equivalency theme, Peatling's “pernicious political consequences” are all too evident; the British government of the 1840s has many things to answer for, but “genocide” and a “holocaust” are not among them. Lord John Russell's Whig cabinet sought to apply the principles of doctrinaire political economy to the Famine; Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot had something rather different in mind.

While the ideological appeal and the practical consequences of racialized anti-Irish prejudice have been overstated, Ignatiev's assumption that the oppressed Irish should have been natural allies of the oppressed Afro-Americans, along with his view that the Irish adopted a conscious strategy of becoming white, proceeds from false premises to erroneous conclusions. The argument that “the Irish” were “oppressed” oversimplifies a rather more complicated reality, just as the emphasis on Daniel O’Connell's antislavery position obscures the fact that many of the more militant Young Ireland nationalists were quite prepared to acquiesce in slavery to win white American support for Irish independence. Ignatiev's view that “in becoming white the Irish ceased to be Green,” with its implication that their identification with white society was a betrayal of their Irish nationalism, is also wide of the mark.Footnote 15 As has been seen with some of the more militant United Irishmen in the United States, and as was the case with John Mitchel, Irish-American nationalism was fully compatible with support for slavery. Contrary to Ignatiev, the Irish in America were not generally viewed as black, and there is no evidence that they ever saw themselves as being anything other than white.

As Peatling has pointed out, any attempt to delineate “self-representation from solely Irish sources” (p. 133) is fraught with conceptual difficulties. Nevertheless, some patterns emerge within the “Catholic and/or nationalist Irish” from the birth of Irish-American nationalism in the 1790s through to the twentieth century. Most Catholic Irish in the United States were probably not particularly interested in Irish-American nationalism. But whenever Irish-American nationalists were confronted with the argument that their politics were “un-American,” they responded with a species of reverse nativism. To be American, contended Irish-American nationalists, was to be democratic, republican, and anti-British; it was an act of ideological will rather than an accident of birth. And since their own revolutionary republican and anti-British credentials were impeccable, they regarded themselves as much better Americans than those who happened to be born in the country. One common manifestation of this was the repeated assertion that the American Revolution would have failed without Irish-American support; the “native sons of America” could be described as “cowards and sons of cowards,” in contrast to heroic Irish soldiers such as Richard Montgomery, who fought and died for America's freedom.Footnote 16

Accompanying such political arguments, and frequently contradicting them, was an equally reactive assertion of religious superiority. When Protestants maintained that Irish Catholics were a superstitious, ignorant, and priest-ridden people, Irish Catholics replied that they alone possessed the right religion, sometimes adding the imperialist message that they were on a providential mission to transmit the One True Faith to the New World. The Protestants, from this perspective, had no creed and thus no religion; they were little more than heretics who were continuing in the United States their long and inglorious tradition of persecuting the faithful. Although ultramontane Irish-American Catholics could hardly play the revolutionary republican card, they sought to establish their Americanism by emphasizing their social conservatism. Catholicism, it was argued, provided authority and discipline as a counterweight to the anarchistic tendencies of a Protestant democracy. Begin with private judgment, and you wound up with “mad Millerites,” Mormons, Transcendentalists, and, horror of horrors, free love. But begin with Catholic morality, and you would have the foundations of a stable and orderly society in America.Footnote 17

Along with such political and religious attitudes, there was also a strong element of Irish-American racial superiority. But this was defined primarily against “Anglo-Saxons” rather than Afro-Americans, and it manifested itself through racialized concepts of the “Celt.” The word was nothing if not malleable; there were multiple meanings of what it was to be Celtic. On the one hand, the Celt could be seen as inherently democratic, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon characteristics of authoritarianism and aggression. On the other hand, the Celt might be defined as a law-abiding conservative Catholic, saving civilization from Anglo-Saxon immorality. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the editor of the American Celt, managed to hold both of these positions, although not at the same time. “In choosing the name this paper bears,” he wrote in its first issue in 1850, “we meant to adopt the opposite side of a popular theory, namely: that all modern civilization and intelligence—whatever is best and most vital in modern society, came in with the Saxons or Anglo-Saxons.” The Celts, he continued, were “a People brave, zealous for liberty, jealous of religious rites, capable of the highest discipline, and wielding the divinest powers of mind.” McGee's aim was to foster a “decent self-respect” among the American Irish and to enable them to stand as equals with the Protestant majority. But there was no doubt, at this stage of his career, which of the two races he believed to be superior.Footnote 18

In one sense, the racialized and idealized Celt can be understood as the defensive reaction of an ethnoreligious Irish Catholic minority in Protestant America. Some contemporaries, such as Father John McCaffrey, believed that the Irish were hypersensitive to criticism. “I’m afraid that, touch the Irish as you will, unless you tickle their vanity, you will stir a hornet's nest,” he remarked in 1848. “Their nationality is intense, touchy, suspicious, unreasoning, morbid,—as irritable & as easily hurt as a patient in inflammatory rheumatism.”Footnote 19 The possibility that there was an element of truth in this internally generated stereotype is strengthened by the persistence and prevalence of the No Irish Need Apply myth; there seems to have been a significant gap between perceived and actual levels of prejudice and discrimination experienced by Irish Catholics in the United States. Yet prejudice and discrimination did exist, and the perceptions did matter; together, they helped shape a sense of Celtic racial identity that could and did move beyond a merely defensive stance.

In fact, the racialized Celt was often seen as being not simply superior to the Saxon, but also to a wide range of rival ethnic or racial groups. Being Celtic marked the Irish out from black slaves. Precisely because of their rich cultural heritage, it was argued, Irish Celts had suffered far more than Afro-Americans, who came from a benighted country and for whom “slavery is freedom, comparatively speaking.”Footnote 20 Being Celtic distinguished the Irish from Native Americans. When one British politician in the United States compared the “savage Celt” with the “savage Indian,” the Irish in Boston reacted with outrage and underlined the sophistication of ancient Celtic civilization.Footnote 21 Being Celtic provided ammunition for Irish Canadian nationalists who were locked in conflict with Scottish Presbyterians. The Celts had wisdom and learning on their side, while the Scottish Presbyterians had little more than “oatmeal and predestination.”Footnote 22 Being Celtic could also feed into anti-Semitism. In 1933, the Montreal doctor Emmett Mullally combined a keen sense of his Celtic heritage with the notion that the “international jew” was a “deadly menace” to European civilization and felt in 1933 that Hitler was “like a surgeon who thinks that in order to rid the body of a dangerous tumor he must cut wide and deep; instead of using palliative methods.”Footnote 23

Such arguments were Celtic variations on broader attitudes; the Irish certainly did not have a monopoly on hostility to Anglo-Saxons, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, Scottish Presbyterians, Jews, or other ethnic groups. Nor did the “Catholic and/or nationalist” North American Irish have anything like uniform views on such matters; there was a significant rate of Irish intermarriage with the English, there were Irish opponents of slavery, Irish sympathizers with Native Americans, Irish who became politically allied with Scottish Presbyterians, and Irish who were appalled by Hitler's Jewish policy. To suggest otherwise would be to fly straight into the nets of exceptionalism and essentialism. The supposed superiority of the self-racialized Celt is not the story. But it is an important part of the story. Whiteness was assumed. When it comes to the construction of race, the central issue is how the Irish became Celtic, and what that meant in practice.