Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865

404 Pages·2007·1.68 MB·English

by  Nini Rodgers (auth.)

Ireland, Slavery and
Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865
Nini Rodgers
Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865
This page intentionally left blank
Ireland, Slavery and
Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865
By
Nini Rodgers
© Nini Rodgers 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-333-77099-3
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First published 2007 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-0-230-57477-9 ISBN 978-0-230-62522-8 (eBook)
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodgers,Nini.
Ireland,slavery and anti-slavery :1612–1865 / by Nini Rodgers.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1.Slavery–Ireland–History.2.Slave-trade–Ireland–History.
3.Antislavery movements–Ireland–History.I.Title.
HT1164.I73R63 2007
306.3(cid:2)6209415––dc22 2006049820
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I Away
1 Slaves and Scholars 7
2 Servants and Slaves: The Seventeenth Century 27
3 Creoles and Slaves: The Eighteenth Century 55
4 Sojourners, Slaves and Stipendiaries:
The Nineteenth Century 82
5 The Trade 95
Part II At Home
6 Protestant, Catholic 119
7 And Dissenter 145
8 Dublin, Sweet City 159
9 Dynasties 197
10 Anti-Slavery Literature, Mostly Imaginative 230
Part III Emancipation
11 Daniel O’Connell and Anti-Slavery 259
12 Frederick Douglass and the ‘Antieverythingarians’ 278
13 Famine and War 290
14 A Special Relationship? 312
15 Conclusion 331
Notes 333
Bibliography 369
Maps 382
Index 384
v
Introduction
This book examines the relationship between Ireland and black slavery. The
first chapter defines the institution of slavery, describing its operation in the
Old World by looking at the pastoralist economies of early Ireland and
pre-colonial Africa. The main body of the study is concerned with the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries when the growth of the transatlantic
slave trade and the tobacco and sugar plantations of the New World made a
dynamic contribution to the creation of a global-wide commerce and even-
tual take off into the first industrial revolution. The term Black Atlantic has
been adopted by historians to indicate the key role which slavery played in
this development.1The build up of slave plantations and the slave trade has
always been seen as significant for Africa, Britain, France and the United
States yet so far their growth has been viewed as extraneous to Ireland. The
following study suggests that this is not the case. Such a project is made possi-
bleby half a century of work by economic and demographic historians, thus
allowing the Irish situation to be set in historical context. Merchants’ letter
books, emigrant letters, wills, newspapers, memoirs and biographies furnish
much of the particular and personal detail. The following pages frequently
focus on individuals whose lives reflect or epitomise general historical
trends. Those chosen, with the exception of a number of black slaves, are all
people who would have described themselves as Irish, though not necessar-
ily exclusively or consistently so. Wherever possible this book tries to exam-
ine the experience of everyone concerned, white and black. Most elusive of
all are the slaves themselves, represented perhaps by unrepresentative fig-
ures, from St Patrick and St Fintan and the bondmaids of the Táin to
Olaudah Equiano, the eighteenth-century Ibo slave and autobiographer,
sold onto Montserrat the Caribbean’s ‘Irish island’, and Frederick Douglass,
America’s most famous runaway slave, who felt himself a free man for the
first time on landing in Ireland some months before the onset of the Great
Famine.
The story told here is a largely forgotten one, a neglected aspect of Irish
history. A number of possible reasons for this suggest themselves. Has
1
2 Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery
Ireland’s involvement with slavery been conveniently forgotten because it
came to be considered shameful? Or has it been justifiably neglected because
slavery was of marginal importance to Ireland? Evidence for both views
could be extracted from the following pages. But the collection of relevant
material suggests that Irish involvement with black slavery has been
neglected because its elements have been widely dispersed or ill-recorded.
The assembling of this transatlantic jigsaw puzzle reveals that black slavery
had a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across the Atlantic
and upon the economy at home.
Echoes of this do remain in Ireland’s historical consciousness. The
seventeenth-century flow of indentured labourers to the Caribbean surfaces
in the memory that Cromwell transported Irish men and women to the West
Indies as slaves. History books dealing with the constitutional crisis of
1779–83, which produced the independent Irish parliament, stress the
importance of the ‘free trade’ agitation in creating this change and, in doing
so, many of them make gnomic references to sugar duties. The knowledge
that the Irish Patriot and Young Irelander, John Mitchel, in exile in the
United States, supported slavery, is equally widely disseminated among his
admirers and detractors. Dealing with both shores of the Atlantic, this study
casts light on the view that the Irish, colonised at home, were colonisers
abroad.
Out of slavery came anti-slavery. This would never be a large scale move-
ment in Ireland, but at times it had enthusiastic and influential supporters
here. At the close of the eighteenth century, Quakers, Patriot politicians and
United Irishmen saw the cause of black freedom as symbolising a new world
order in which they too would acquire their rights. In the 1820s O’Connell
inherited this tradition, while the United States, increasingly a magnet for
Irish emigrants, moved into bitter crisis on the issue of slavery or anti-slavery.
This book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Away’, stretches from the fifth
to the nineteenth century. The first chapter compares early Irish and African
slavery. The remaining chapters (1612–1838) then focus on transatlantic
slavery and are concerned with Irish activities outside the homeland – on the
Amazon, in the Caribbean, Britain, France and Africa. Part II, ‘At Home’ con-
centrates on the eighteenth century and discusses how the slave plantations
in the Caribbean and North America influenced eighteenth century Ireland’s
economic, social and political development. The revolutionary changes at
the end of the century are emphasised by the inclusion of a chapter which
examines the Irish roots, and traces the transatlantic activities, of three polit-
ically influential Irish slave holding families in the North American colonies/
United States. The section then concludes with an investigation of the role
of imaginative literature in promoting anti-slavery attitudes and discusses
the Irish contribution to this genre. Part III, Emancipation, moves from
Britain to Ireland to the United States. It traces the links between Catholic
emancipation and slave emancipation by investigating the role of Irish
Introduction 3
Members of Parliament (MPs) in Britain’s abolition of the slave trade 1806–7
and examines Daniel O’Connell’s adoption of the anti-slavery cause. The
activities of the anti-slavery societies in Ireland are analysed by focusing
upon the visit of Frederick Douglass. The position of the Irish in the United
States, before and during the Civil War, is discussed largely through an inves-
tigation of the fate of John Mitchel and his family in their new home.
Chapter 14 explains why the Irish were often described (both by themselves
and others) as slaves and attempts to assess the validity of this analogy.
Part I
Away