Sean Farrell

Going to Extremes: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Slavery in Early Victorian Belfast

On 29 October 1840, the Rev. Thomas Drew opened a meeting of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society on a typically hyperbolic note, telling a lurid story about an unnamed African woman being brutally murdered on a slave ship that was seeking shelter from a storm in Belfast Lough nearly a hundred years before. Sailing off the north Down shore, the ship’s captain allowed his captives out of the hold to get some fresh air. A number of men attempted to escape by jumping overboard. Determined to intimidate the remainder of his captives into submission, the ship’s captain tied a young woman to the yard arm and lowered her into the water, where she was mauled by sharks that apparently had followed the ship in anticipation. Printed in the Belfast News-Letter (BNL), Drew’s description of the horror of the scene left little to the imagination: “Loud and heart-rending were the shrieks; but no cries would extract mercy from the bosom of her tormentors. At last, they lowered her to the deck; but it was only the mutilated remains of a human body” (“Anti-Slavery” 1). Belfast Lough was thus stained with blood, the Church of Ireland minister intoned, and that blood still cried out for vengeance, for “no conscientious man is innocent who does not protest against the atrocious injustice of slavery” (1). Given Drew’s penchant for controversy and rhetorical excess, observers might well have been skeptical about the historical accuracy of his narrative. On this occasion, however, his story seems to have had more than a grain of truth. In his award-winning history of the Atlantic slave trade, Marcus Rediker discusses a wide range of coercive techniques used by slave ship captains to enforce social discipline and terrorize crew and cargo alike— including the use of sharks. It is almost certain that Drew’s story was cribbed from Oliver Goldsmith’s discussion of the natural history of sharks in his An History of the Earth; and Animated Nature (1774), a widely serialized synthesis of two gruesome tales in which the captains of slave ships used sharks to prevent suicide rather than escape. Goldsmith’s narratives of oceanic terror were designed to illustrate the relentlessly carnivorous appetite of “cartilaginous fishes of the shark kind,” but for the Rev. Drew, the captain’s murderous actions showed how Atlantic slavery brought barbarity from Barbados to Bangor (qtd. in Rediker 39–40). If the facts of the Belfast minister’s story were adapted to his purpose (consciously or unconsciously), its melodramatic register sounded a more common note. Like so many of his Irish Protestant conservative compatriots, Drew’s public rhetoric was steeped in an emotive language of feeling and nostalgia—his confrontational and divisive antiCatholicism, his paternalist advocacy for Protestant working-class families and the

Feed My Lambs: The Reverend Thomas Drew and Protestant Children in Early Victorian Belfast

On Easter Monday, 1844, an estimated eight hundred children gathered at Christ Church in Belfast for the church’s annual children’s day festivities. Divided into girls and boys divisions, the children marched behind a church official bearing the school’s white silk flag, marked with a Bible and a crown and the school’s motto: “Feed my lambs.” The children moved from Christ Church to the Botanic Gardens and then marched on to the Twelve-Acre Field in Stranmillis. They remained there for the afternoon, enjoying “the most extensive views” of the city while listening to hymns and psalms performed by the church’s singing class. The Belfast Commercial Chronicle later reveled in the scene: “The free bounding air of the hills as it breathed upon these children of the loom and the factory, was welcomed with delight; and many a one exclaimed—‘Ah how healthful it must be here?’” After a few hours, the party returned home via Sandy Row, where the children met their parents before heading back to Christ Church in College Square. The Reverend Thomas Drew, the minister of the church, brought the day to a close, pronouncing that “he never had enjoyed a day of such unalloyed happiness. The order, kindness, self-denial and patience of all were deserving of great praise. He felt it a duty to call upon then, one and all, to give thanks to God, through Christ, for such a happy privilege as they had enjoyed that day.” After Drew concluded his remarks, children from the outlying parts of the district were given supper and the rest were dismissed to go home with their families. Children occupied a central place in both the social world and cultural imaginaries of the Rev. Thomas Drew and his large and important congregation at Christ Church. This should be no surprise. Scholars have long understood that children lay at the heart of the social and spiritual plans of Victorian evangeli-

Irish Rebel, Imperial Reformer: Charles Gavan Duffy and Australian Federation

Speaking at a June 1871 election meeting in Kyneton, a small town 50 miles northwest of Melbourne, Charles Gavan Duffy made it clear that his support for the federation of the Australian colonies was rooted in his optimism for the continent’s future: ‘We are lifting an Australian flag, we are promising an Australian policy, we are founding an Australian polity …’.1 Earlier that year, Duffy had been asked to lead a coalition government in Victoria, and his speech was designed to introduce the new administration’s major policy initiatives. Even his opponents conceded that Duffy’s arguments for Australian federation were persuasive, focusing their critique on the populist radicalism of his land policy, and his hyperbolic speaking style.2 One of the most famous Irishmen of the era, Duffy had been a prominent politician in the colony since his arrival in Melbourne in 1856, building a reputation as an advocate for land reform, colonial self-government, and Catholic education. The coalition government itself was short-lived, falling in 1872 amidst a clamor of internal dissension and sectarian bitterness. Australian federation would have to wait until 1890, when Duffy’s old friend Sir Henry Parkes initiated an effort to unite the continent’s colonies, launching a decade-long struggle that would finally produce a federal constitution for Australia in 1900. It was Parkes, not Duffy, who would be known as the Father of Australian Federation, a fact that the ambitious Irishman noted with some bitterness in his correspondence with the cagey veteran politician from New South Wales.3

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland (review)

for Ireland’s embrace of world capitalism—but critics of the revisionists—are in the “republican” party, Fianna Fáil. Leaders like Bertie Ahern have had no problem with being “green” and embracing the global economy. Indeed, the Celtic Tiger period witnessed a serious nationalist revanchism, highlighted by such events as the state-sponsored bicentennial commemorations of the 1798 rebellion and the state funerals afforded to the 2001 reinterment of ten IRA men buried in unmarked graves since 1920. Ironically, one of the most jaundiced views of the self-congratulatory nationalistic mood of Celtic Tiger Ireland and its molding of history to its new global image comes from the archrevisionist himself, Roy Foster. His Luck and the Irish (2008) is one of the best dystopic looks at Ireland’s new neo-liberal “post-revisionist” consensus. It is unfortunate that Miller did not acknowledge this real work instead of the straw man “revisionist” he takes on here. Had Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration dealt more directly with the criticisms of his work by such historians as Akenson, it would have gone much further toward helping us understand the “contested” nature of not just Irish emigration, but also its interpretations.

The Burning of Freeduff Presbyterian Church, 1743

On October 13,1743, R?ndle Donaldson received news that the Freeduff Pres byterian Church had been burned to the ground. Donaldson, a former high sheriff with considerable landholdings in South Armagh, had little doubt about who had committed this outrage. His certainty was confirmed when he and William Richardson, another member of the Armagh gentry, collected evidence about the incident. The information, taken from members of the Freeduff con gregation, was both consistent and wholly circumstantial; all understood the crime to be sectarian in nature. The Reverend Alexander McCombes testimo

Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845–1865

1905. “Killing home rule with kindness” was the backhanded description of their varying mix of land and other reforms, as well as local government restructuring. These policies were marked by a determination to use government power to control the disturbances that were characteristic of Ireland. Hudson, a lecturer and academic adviser at Texas A&M University, contends that these policies not only produced economic improvement and beneficial social change but also went far in achieving their underlying goal-winning Irish hearts and minds, and reconciling the Irish people to the Union. Hudson’s approach is in the tradition of a “life and times” analysis of the Balfour brothers and George Wyndham. Hudson is careful to distinguish their particular ideas and approaches to the making of Irish policy. He praises Gerald Balfour for his skill in promoting substantial and far-reaching land reform acts and is especially critical of the hubristic Wyndham’s failure to engage with detail and 10 control the Dublin Castle bureaucracy. It is Wyndham who receives much of the responsibility for the policy’s failure in this narrative account, which culminates with the near-total nieltdown and discrediting of Constructive Unionism in 1904-05, as a consequence of the Earl of Dunraven and undersecretary Antony MacDonnell’s ill-advised devolutionary schemes. Although Hudson does attempt, in two introductory chapters, to place the policy of Constructive Unionism in perspective, this work is best seen as an attempt to undermine historiographical orthodoxies. Hudson is critical of most takes on the period, in particular Catherine B. Shannon’s Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland (2002) and Andrew Gailey ’s Ireland iind the Death of Kindness (1987). for their deterministic assumptions about the inevitability of the triumph of Irish nationalism. This attempt to return contingency and agency to historical events and actors is ;always useful. Hudson’s argument can be t‘aulted for some of the same underlying weaknesses that characterized the policies he ;malyzes: an underappreciation of how deeply ingrained Irish bitterness or Unionist hostility and the genuine popularity of Irish nationalism which went beyond grievances arising out of land tenure, influenced events. However, The Ireland that We Made does add to our understanding of how Constructive Unionism was made and unmade as ideology and practical policy.

The Catholics of Ulster: A History: Elliott, Marianne: New York: Basic Books, 642 pp., Publication Date: Winter 2002

Marianne Elliott has never shied away from a daunting task. One of today’s leading Irish historians, her previous works have transformed the way we look at the 1790s, pushing historian.; i o place the Irish experience in a broader European context and revising our ideas about the founder of Irish republicanism, Thecibald Wolfe Tone. If anything, Elliott’s lalest work, The Catholics of Ulster, is even more ambitious. And yet again, Elliott succeedz. Charting the northern Catholic experience from its pre-Christian roots to the current peace process, The Catholics of Ulster is ii nuanced and well-written examination of a particularly complex and troubled past. One of Elliott’s primary goals is to challenge some of the powerful myths that surround the Ulster Catholic experience. In confronting the stereotypes that have played such an explosive role in forging and maintaining Ulster’s divided political culture, Elliott is remarkably evenhanded. She demolishes the commonly held idea that Ulster Catholics are the inheritors of some racially pure Gaelic legacy. Protestant myths about Catholics receive equally blunt correctives. For example, her analysis of the nature and attitudes of the northern Catholic Church explodes the long-cherkhed notion of an Ulster Catholic community dominated by Rome and naturally rebellious. Indeed, much of Elliott’s narrative is an indictment of an establishment that worked hard to insult and alienate Ulster Catholic leaders who, despite powerful resentment at historical inequities, were inclined to work within the system. Elliott’s ambition here does create some problems. The weakest chapter of the book examines the Catholic experience in twentieth-century Northern Ireland. Simply put, the narrativc focus on institutional discrimination results in a rather bland overview of welltrodden ierritory. Although her analysis recovers much of its depth in an interesting examination of northern Catholic culture in a chapter entitled “A Resentful Belonging,” it is clear that \he is less comfortable with twentieth-centut-y material. Abwe d l , what Elliott succeeds in doing is placing the Ulster Catholic experience in its correci hi.;torical and geographical context. Too often, historians have overlooked the simple fact that Ulster Catholic identity has been shaped by a historical experience rooted in the north of Ireland. Because of the imbalance of power relationships that was built into the very creation of Northern Ireland, Ulster Catholic.; have struggled to define themselves in a place too often aggressively defined as Protestant. That must change, she concludes, if the current peace process is to succeed in any meaningful way. It is a fragile hope, but given the dark and troubled history that Elliott describes so well here, such “optimistic pessimism” is surely warranted.