Booknotes: Embracing Emancipation

New Arrival:

• Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865 by Ian Delahanty (Fordham UP, 2024).

From the description: Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865 "tackles a perennial question in scholarship on the Civil War era: Why did Irish Americans, who claimed to have been oppressed in Ireland, so vehemently oppose the antislavery movement in the United States?" Historian Ian Delahanty sees answers to that complicated question emerge from both sides of the pond, with the beginnings growing out from the Ireland experience itself.

More from the description: "Challenging conventional answers to this question that focus on the cultural, political, and economic circumstances of the Irish in America," Embracing Emancipation "locates the origins of Irish American opposition to antislavery in famine-era Ireland. There, a distinctively Irish critique of abolitionism emerged during the 1840s, one that was adopted and adapted by Irish Americans during the sectional crisis. The Irish critique of abolitionism meshed with Irish Americans’ belief that the American Union would uplift Irish people on both sides of the Atlantic―if only it could be saved from the forces of disunion."

Very prominent Irish participation in the New York draft riots of 1863 and the widespread violence they perpetrated against the black population of the city are often seen as indicators of the depth of Irish-American opposition to emancipation as a new war aim, but Delahanty finds that there's much more to the story. Indeed, his research "uncovers a history of Irish Americans who embraced emancipation." In envisioning emancipation as a valuable instrument for undermining the Confederate war effort, the views of Irish-Americans on the matter were often no different from those of many others in the North. Thus, a much more complex picture of the Irish-American response to emancipation emerges in the book.

More: "Wartime developments in the United States and Ireland affirmed Irish American Unionists’ belief that the perpetuity of their adopted country was vital to the economic and political prospects of current and future immigrants and to their hopes for Ireland’s independence. Even as some Irish immigrants evinced their disdain for emancipation by lashing out against Union authorities and African Americans in northern cities, many others argued that their transatlantic interests in restoring the Union now aligned with slavery’s demise. Many Irish Americans ultimately abandoned their hostility to antislavery, but their continuously renewed connections with Ireland remained a consistent influence on how they viewed the future of American slavery." Delahanty's Embracing Emancipation is another example of how adoption of a trans-Atlantic approach to American Civil War research and writing can bear fruit, in this case offering fresh answers to old, difficult questions.