Book Review

The bicentennial of the Rebellion of 1798 has generated a considerable literature that reexamines the politics and personnel of the Society of United Irishmen and reinterprets the rising's domestic and international significance. In United Irishmen, United States, David A. Wilson surveys the activities and attitudes of United Irish émigrés in light of that scholarship and reassesses their contributions to politics and culture in the United States. Their revolutionary endeavors in Ireland, he maintains, shaped their careers in the United States; their American experiences, in turn, informed their expectations for Ireland. Irish American nationalism, Wilson suggests, was more than the response of famine-era emigrants. It originated with the United Irish émigrés as they conjoined the ideologies of American and Irish republicanism.

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While repression from 1795 onward and the failures of 1798 forced hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rebels to flee to the United States, Wilson's protagonists are fewer in number. He focuses on some two dozen or so members of, or sympathizers with, the society. Among them were journalists, lawyers, and playwrights such as Mathew Carey, William Duane, William Sampson, and John Daly Burk. While aware that they were not typical United Irish exiles, or Irish immigrants, Wilson stresses their roles as leaders and posits—but does not prove—a correspondence between their opinions and those of the émigrés in general.

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