Abstract
Whatever might be said of political thought, political feeling in Ireland was running very high in and around 1782. This was the year the Volunteer Movement reached its peak of power and influence at its Dungannon Convention; it was also the year which inaugurated Grattan’s Parliament. A sense of violated rights had precipitated the successful armed revolt of the American colonists, some of whom were disaffected Irish, or of Irish descent, and the Volunteers, formed in response to domestic fears of invasion, had remembered that their country too had violated rights. Volunteering soon became a focus of patriotic pride and the Volunteers represented a stimulus to constitutional reform.1
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Notes
For the events of 1782, with background, see R.B. McDowell, ‘Colonial Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, in Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1691–1800, T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds.), A New History of Ireland IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 196–235;
and R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London, Faber, 1944) is still invaluable. I am particularly indebted to Ian McBride and Brian Young for scholarly advice and help with aspects of this discussion.
Henry Flood, Speech in the Irish Parliament reprinted in C.A. Read (ed.), The Cabinet of Irish Literature, 4 vols (New York: P. Murphy, 1903), II, p. 6.
‘Ireland’s Glory, or a Comparative View of Ireland, in the Years 1776 and 1783’ (Newry [c. 1783]), quoted in G.-D. Zimmermann, Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780–1900 (Geneva: La Sirène, 1966), p. 123.
For Crawford’s discussions with his local MP Colonel James Stewart of Killymoon on the regium donum issue, see the Campbell MSS in the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, Belfast: Crawford to Campbell, 23 September 1783 and 24 October 1783. Stewart for his part had always found Crawford ‘a very sensible man’ (Stewart to Charlemont, 2 August 1781, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland D.3167/1/2). For a recent discussion of ‘New Light’ issues in Irish Presbyterianism, see R. Finlay Holmes, ‘The Reverend John Abernethy: the Challenge of New Light Theology to Traditional Irish Presbyterian Calvinism’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Religion of Irish Dissent 1650–1800 (Blackrock, Co Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 100–11.
See, for example, the chorus of Henry Clay Work’s famous song, ‘Marching through Georgia’, ‘Hurrah! hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!’ and D.W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1989), esp. p. [vii], quoting Douglass: ‘We want…to record the death and burial of slavery, and to sing the glad song of jubilee to the sable millions.’
For ‘Rational Dissent’, see Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion. Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See, for instance, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. p. 507.
The standard account is John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985).
J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Empire, Revolution and the End of Early Modernity’, in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 289f.
See W.D. Love, ‘Charles O’Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Leland’s “Philosophical” History of Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 13 (March 1962), pp. 1–25.
An Account of Denmark (1694), p. 258f, quoted by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 98n.
See A. Albert Campbell, Notes on the Literary History of Strabane (Omagh: Tyrone Constitution Office, 1902), pp. 64–9. The annual stipend attached to the Strabane congregation in 1799 was estimated as some £105, among the top twelve congregations in the Synod of Ulster, while the Holywood stipend was only £36.
See C. Vane, Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 12 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1849), II, pp. 165–71.
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Vance, N. (2001). Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane. In: Boyce, D.G., Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan, V. (eds) Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932723_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932723_11
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