Jane McGaughey's Violent loyalties is the latest volume in the excellent Reappraisals in Irish History series from Liverpool University Press. I recall reviewing the first volume for this journal a number of years ago (Jonathan Wright's The ‘natural leaders’ and their world) and remarking that it promised to be a stimulating series. That has certainly proved to be the case, providing a showcase for early-career and established scholars to explore distinctive and often original topics. McGaughey's book is the sixteenth in the series and is a worthy addition to it.
Violent loyalties adds to a substantial historiography of the Irish in British North America/Canada. The Irish were the second largest ethnic group (after the French Canadians) in pre-confederation Canada and they have received significant attention. Classic works by Don Akenson (The Irish in Ontario, 1984), Hereward Senior (Orangeism: the Canadian phase, 1972) and many others have highlighted the richness and diversity of the Irish migrant experience in the region. McGaughey's claims to originality rest on her application of gender, and specifically constructions and perceptions of masculinity, as a category of analysis for the first time. Hence, while some of the people and topics she deploys as case studies will be familiar, the analytical lens through which she views them offers an insightful and illuminating reading of the nature of ‘manliness’ and ‘manhood’ amongst the Irish in Canada.
McGaughey examines the interplay between often conflicting versions of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic manliness through the life histories of pioneers and settlers like James Fitzgibbon, the Catholic-born, Anglican convert and British Army officer; and Wexford-native Ogle Gowan, the man who did most to establish the ascendancy of Orangeism in the country. Both men were associated with violence, albeit in different ways. Fitzgibbon was cast as a legendary peacemaker whose manly qualities of loyalty and service to the crown were seen as the perfect antidote to the drunkenness and riotousness of the ‘Irish mob’ (p. 73). Gowan, despite his best endeavours to achieve respectability and acceptance in colonial society, forged a violent and domineering Orangeism intent on enforcing ‘loyalty’ through violence (p. 99). On the other side of the political spectrum, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan's aggressive and confrontational editorship of the widely read newspaper, The Vindicator, positioned him as the most influential Irish nationalist in Lower Canada and spokesman for the patriote cause prior to the rebellion of 1837 (p. 168).
Useful as they are to highlight the diversity of the lived experiences of Irish settlers, prominent figures like Fitzgibbon, Gowan and O'Callaghan were atypical. They may well have been revered in some circles as exemplars of Irish masculinity, but the majority of Irishmen neither aspired to nor had the opportunities to emulate them. Most were concerned with the humdrum of daily existence, like the 50,000 or so Irish who arrived at the port of Quebec between 1815 and 1824 and invariably found employment as small farmers or as labourers on big infrastructure projects such as the Lachine Canal in Montreal (p. 169).
Few Irishmen in pre-confederation Canada were violent or disruptive, yet they faced an ingrained presumption that they were, simply because of their Irishness (p. 35). The infamy of groups like the Shiners ― a brotherhood of hard-drinking and brutal Irish Catholic lumberjacks in the Ottawa Valley during the 1830s ― coloured perceptions of Irish settler behaviour for decades afterwards (p. 134). In addition to dealing with negative stereotypes, Catholic and Protestant Irishmen in the Canadas experienced discrimination and restricted social mobility. Catholics had the added burden of being dual minorities because of their religion in the British world and their ethnicity and language in the French Canadian one. These factors and others, McGaughey argues, meant that being an Irish man in the Canadas was ‘consistently contentious’ (p. 10).
Irishmen in the Canadas were often expected to conform to traditional, rural conceptions of masculinity. Stoical individualism, the ability to endure extreme privations, isolation and danger, all while carving a successful farmstead from the rugged wilderness were the markers of manliness in the new world (p. 64). As was frequently the case for the Irish migrant, contemporaries viewed masculinity through a sectarian lens so that in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion Wexford Protestants were portrayed to the Colonial Office as loyal, industrious and self-sufficient, while Catholics from the same county were described as slovenly and only of ‘tolerably good conduct’ (p. 60).
Violent loyalties is a study of identity. As with all studies of identity, it eventually reaches the inevitable conclusion: that there was no singular form of masculinity and that Irishmen demonstrated, or were characterised by, numerous forms of manliness. An obvious conclusion does not mean a valueless one of course, and this is a fine book. It brings a refreshing and absorbing perspective to Irish diasporic studies, and will no doubt stimulate additional important work on Irish masculinities.
