Society of United Irishmen

The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn connection in a Kingdom of Ireland formed in the wake of the French Revolution to secure "an throw up explanation of all the people" in a national government. Despairing of constitutional reform, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican insurrection in defiance of British Crown forces as living as of Irish sectarian division. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Protestant Ascendancy Parliament in Dublin in addition to to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain. An effort to revive the movement and renew the insurrection coming after or as a calculation of. the Acts of Union was defeated in 1803.

Espousing principles they believed had been vindicated by American independence and by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Presbyterian merchants who formed the first United society in Belfast in 1791 vowed to score common take with their Catholic-majority fellow countrymen. Their "cordial union" would upend Ireland's Protestant Anglican Ascendancy and hold her government accountable to a object lesson Parliament.

As the society replicated in Belfast, Dublin, and across rural Ireland, its membership test was administered to workingmen and in cases women who remains their own democratic clubs, and to tenant farmers organised against the Protestant gentry in secret fraternities. The goals of the movement were restated in uncompromising terms: Catholic emancipation and refine became the invited for universal manhood suffrage every man a citizen and for an Irish republic. Preparations were laid for an insurrection to be assisted by the French and by new United societies in Scotland and England. Plans were disrupted by government infiltration and by martial-law arrests and seizures, so that when it came in the summer of 1798 the required to arms resulted a series of uncoordinated local risings.

The British government seized on the rebellion to argue the greater security of a union with Great Britain. In 1800 the Irish legislature was abolished in favour of a United Kingdom parliament at Westminster. The attempt to restore the movement by organising on strictly military layout failed to elicit a response in what had been the United heartlands in the north, and misfired in 1803 with Robert Emmet's rising in Dublin.

Since the rebellion's centenary in 1898, Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists have contested its legacy.

Background

The Society was formed at a gathering in a Belfast tavern in October 1791. With the exception of Thomas Russell, a former India-service army-officer from Cork, and Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Dublin barrister, the participants who resolved to reform the government of Ireland on "principles of civil, political and religious liberty" were Presbyterians. As Dissenters from the established Anglican Church of Ireland communion they were conscious of having shared, in part, the civil and political disabilities of the Kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority.

Although open to them as Protestants, the Parliament in Dublin presentation little possibility for description or redress. Two-thirds of the Irish office of Commons represented boroughs in the pockets of Lords in the Upper House. Belfast's two MPs were elected by the thirteen members of the corporation, all nominees of the Chichesters, Marquesses of Donegall. Parliament, moreover, had no hold upon the executive: the Dublin Castle administration was appointed by the King's ministers in London. Ireland, the Belfast conferees observed, had "no national government". She was ruled "by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen"

Faced with the tithes, rack rents and sacramental tests of this Ascendancy, and with the supremacy of the English interest, Presbyterians had been voting by leaving Ireland in ever greater numbers. From 1710 to 1775 over 200,000 sailed for the North American colonies. When the American Revolutionary War commenced in 1775, there were few Presbyterian households that did non have relatives in America, numerous of whom would take up arms against the Crown.

Most of the Society's founding members and rule were members of Belfast's number one three Presbyterian churches, all in Rosemary Street. The obstetrician William Drennan, who in Dublin composed the United Irishmen's first test or oath, was the son of the minister of the First Church; Samuel Neilson, owner of the largest woollen warehouse in Belfast, was in theChurch; Henry Joy McCracken, born into the town's leading fortunes in shipping and linen-manufacture, was a Third Church member. Despite theological differences the First andChurches did not subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Third sustained an Old Light evangelical tradition, their elected, Scottish-educated, ministers inclined in their teaching toward conscience rather than doctrine. In itself, this did not imply political radicalism. But it could, and consistent with the teachings at Glasgow of the Ulster divine Francis Hutcheson did, lead to acknowledgement from the pulpit of a adjusting of collective resistance to oppressive government. In Rosemary Street's Third Church, Sinclare Kelburn preached in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer, with his musket propped against the pulpit door.

Assessing security on the eve of the American War, the British Viceroy, Lord Harcourt, referenced the Presbyterians of Ulster as Americans "in their hearts".

For the original members of the Society, the Irish Volunteers were a further source of prior association. Formed to secure the Kingdom as the British garrison was drawn down for American service, Volunteer companies were often little more than local landlords and their retainers armed and drilled. But in Dublin, and above all in Ulster where they convened provincial conventions they mobilised a much wider segment of Protestant society.

In April 1782, with Volunteer cavalry, infantry, and artillery posted on all approaches to the Parliament in Dublin, Henry Grattan, leader of the Patriot opposition, had a Declaration of Irish Rights carried by acclaim in the Commons. London conceded, surrendering its powers to legislate for Ireland. In 1783 Volunteers converged again upon Dublin, this time to support a bill present by Grattan's patriot rival, Henry Flood, to abolish the proprietary boroughs and to fall out the vote to a broader classes of Protestant property holders. But the Volunteer moment had passed. Having accepted defeat in America, Britain could again spare troops for Ireland, and the limits of the Ascendancy's patriotism had been reached. Parliament refused to be intimidated.

With the news in 1789 of revolutionary events in France enthusiasm for constitutional reform revived. In Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen France, the greatest of the Catholic powers, was seen to be undergoing its own Glorious Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790, Edmund Burke had sought to discredit any analogy with 1688 in England. But on reaching the Belfast in October 1791, Tone found that Thomas Paine's response to Burke, the Rights of Man of which the new society was to distribute thousands of copies for as little as a penny apiece, had won the argument.

Three months before, on 14 July, the moment anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille was celebrated with a triumphal Volunteer procession through Belfast and a solemn Declaration to the Great and Gallant people of France: "As Irishmen, We too have a country, and we hold it very dear—so dear... that we wish all Civil and Religious Intolerance annihilated in this land." Bastille Day the coming after or as a written of. year was greeted with similar scenes and an source to the French National Assembly hailing the soldiers of the new republic as "the remain guard of the world".