David Sim

A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age

Historians of U.S. foreign relations have generally paid little attention to the political salience of the Irish question as a destabilising factor in Anglo-American diplomacy – but they should. Through the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction years, Irish nationalists used the United States as a base from which to contest Ireland’s partnership in the Anglo-Irish Union. And, more than this, many hoped to connect their own aspirations for an independent, republican Ireland with the growing power of the American republic. However, efforts designed to bring on a confrontation between the United States and Great Britain had unintended consequences and made Irish-American nationalists ironic agents of Anglo-American conciliation in the final third of the nineteenth-century. In response to Irish insurgent nationalism, British and American statesmen worked to address contentious questions regarding citizenship, neutrality and extradition, and to craft a new Anglo-American order.