Abstract
The surge of revolutions though the transatlantic world at the close of the eighteenth century has generally been seen by historians as empowering for America and embittering for Ireland. The claim that Irish emigrants (Scotch Irish, i.e. Ulster Presbyterians) played a significant role in securing American independence has been frequently made and increasingly queried. Less contested is the view that plantation owners headed the struggle for colonial freedom and a study of these founding fathers shows that three of the most important slave-holding dynasties in North America were established by Irishmen. This chapter will investigate how the ownership of slaves enabled three Irish emigrants to become important figures in mainland America and helped them to bring the politics of their old home into the development of the new. Like the merchants examined earlier, this trio contains a Protestant, a Catholic and a Dissenter. The Carrolls of Maryland produced the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (1776), a signatory of the constitution (1787) and America’s first Catholic bishop (appointed 1789). From the Presbyterian Calhouns of Convoy, Donegal and Long Canes, South Carolina came Patrick Calhoun, Indian fighter, Regulator, judge, colonial and state legislator. Patrick’s nephew John Ewing Colhoun was signatory to the constitution and senator, and his son, John Caldwell Calhoun, was twice vice-president.
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Notes
The idea which stimulated the writing of this chapter, and most of the material within it, comes from two recent, detailed and impressive family studies, Ronald Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, a Carroll Saga 1500–1782 (Chapel Hill and London, 2000);
Malcolm Bell jr, Major Butler’s Legacy, Five Generations of a Slave Holding Family (Athens and London, 1987); Hoffman, while drawing a careful and detailed picture of the Carrolls, is sympathetic to their achievement. Bell, though equally careful and informative, is much more critical of the Butlers, finding the major’s legacy a distinctly unpleasant one.
Perhaps inevitably this chapter reflects the same attitudes. No similar work has been done on the Calhouns, though R.N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, the Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990) provides an illuminating understanding of the world Patrick Calhoun helped to build.
F. A. Kemble, Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838–9 (London, 1961); Butler’s Legacy, p. 335.
David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade’, in W.R. Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998), vol. xi, p. 456.
L. H. Parsons. ‘The mysterous Mr. Digges’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 22 (1965), pp. 490–1.
Kevin Kenny, The American Irish, a History (Essex, 2000), p. 7;
K. A. Miller ‘Scotch-Irish’, ‘black-Irish’ and ‘real Irish’: emigrants and identities in the Old South,’ in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000), pp. 139–40.
Patrick Griffen, The people of no name; Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764 (Oxford, 2001), p.79.
R.J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America 1718–1775 (Belfast, 1966), p. 36.
Billy Kennedy, The Scots-Irish in the Carolinas (Belfast, 1997), p. 90.
C. M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Nationalist, 1782–1828 (New York, 1944), p. 12.
Arthur E. Mitchell, The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina 1799–1981 (South Carolina, 1981), p. 2;
Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York, 1998), p. 32.
Patrick Melvin, ‘John Barnewell and Colonial South Carolina,’ in The Irish Sword, (1973–4) vol. xi, pp. 1–6.
Eirlys M. Barker, Indian Traders, Charles Town and London’s Vital Link to the Interior of North America 1717–1755, unpublished paper presented to the College of Charleston Program for the Study of the Low Country and the Atlantic World, May 1995, pp. 6–9, 26.
Mitchell, Hibernian Society, p. 12; E.C. Lynch, Lynch Record, Biographical Sketches (New York, 1925), p. 116.
R. K. MacMaster, Flaxseed, and emigrants: Scotch-Irish merchants in eighteenth century America (unpublished paper delivered at xiv Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, June 2002, York County, South Carolina)
R. N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, the Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry 1760–1808 (London, 1990), p. 42.
M. L. Coit, John C. Calhoun, American Portrait (Boston, 1950), p. 7.
F. A. Kemble, Journal of residence on a Georgian plantation 1838–9 (London, 1961), pp. 75–6, 98, 223, 230, 315.
Kemble, Journal 1838–9 (London, 1961).
See Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery, a Problem in American Constitutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago 1959);
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, H.A. Baker jr (ed.) (London, 1992), pp. 47–54.
John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1879, reprint Surrey, 1971), p. 69.
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© 2007 Nini Rodgers
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Rodgers, N. (2007). Dynasties. In: Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625228_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625228_10
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