Irish Rebellion of 1798

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The Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Éirí Amach 1798 in Irish), or 1798 rebellion as it is known locally, was an uprising in 1798, lasting several months, against the British dominated Kingdom of Ireland. The United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of the American and French Revolutions, were the main organizing force behind the rebellion.

Contents 1 Background 2 Society of United Irishmen 3 Government crackdown and counter-revolution 4 Plan 5 Outbreak of the rebellion 6 The rebellion spreads 7 Atrocities 7.1 Government 7.2 Rebel 8 French landing 9 Aftermath 10 Legacy of 1798 11 Sources 12 See also 13 External links

Background

Since 1691 and the end of the Williamite war, Ireland had been controlled by a Protestant Ascendancy loyal to the British Crown, which governed the majority Roman Catholic population by a form of institutionalised sectarianism codified in the Penal Laws. As the 18th century progressed, liberal elements among the ruling class were inspired by the example of the American Revolution and sought to form common cause with the Catholic populace to achieve reform and greater autonomy from Britain.

When France joined the American colonists in support of their revolution, London called for volunteers to join militias to defend Ireland against the threat of invasion from France. Many thousands joined the Irish Volunteers who used their new powerful position to force the Crown to grant the landed Ascendancy self-rule and a more independent parliament. In 1793 Catholics with some property were allowed to vote, but could neither be elected nor be appointed as state officials.

Society of United Irishmen

The promise of reform inspired a small group of Protestant liberals in Belfast to found the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791. The organisation crossed the religious divide with membership of Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Protestant "dissenter" groups excluded from the Protestant Ascendancy. The Society openly put forward its policies of further democratic reforms and Catholic emancipation, reforms that the Irish Parliament had little intention of granting and the British government were just as unwilling to enforce, until pressured to do so in 1793. The outbreak of war with France earlier in 1793 following the execution of Louis XVI forced the Society underground and toward armed insurrection with French aid. The avowed intent of the United Irishmen was now to "break the connection with England"; the organisation spread throughout Ireland and had at least 100,000 members by 1797. It linked up with Catholic agrarian resistance groups, known as the Defenders, who had started raiding houses for arms in early 1793.

Despite their growing strength, the United Irish leadership decided to seek military help from the French revolutionary government, and to postpone the rising until French troops landed in Ireland. Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen, travelled in exile from America to France to press the case for intervention. These plans seemed to come to fruition when he accompanied a force of 15,000 French troops under General Hoche which arrived off the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay in December 1796 after eluding the Royal Navy. However unremitting storms, indecisiveness and poor seamanship all combined to prevent invasion, prompting the despairing Wolfe Tone to remark, "England has had its luckiest escape since the Armada."

Government crackdown and counter-revolution

The shaken Establishment responded to widespread disorders by launching a campaign of repression and coercion using tactics that could in modern terms be described as "state terrorism", including house burnings, torture, pitchcapping and murder, particularly in Ulster as it was the one area of Ireland where large numbers of Catholics and Protestants (mainly Presbyterians) had effected common cause.

However, sectarianism was quickly recognised as a usefully divisive tool for the British establishment to employ against the United Irishmen in a classic instance of the divide and conquer method of colonial dominion and officially encouraged by the Government. For example, Brigadier-General C.E. Knox wrote to General Lake (who was responsible for Ulster):"I hope to increase the animosity between Orangemen and United Irishmen. Upon that animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the North." The Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John Fitzgibbon wrote in a letter to the Privy Council in June 1798; "In the North nothing will keep the rebels quiet but the conviction that where treason has broken out the rebellion is merely popish".

Loyalists all over Ireland had already organised themselves in support of the Government, supplying recruits and vital local intelligence through the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795. The opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland to the expected rebellion had been secured by the establishment of Maynooth College in the same year and the church was, with a few individual exceptions, firmly on the side of the Crown throughout the entire period of the rebellion.

Intelligence from informers also swept up much of the United Irish leadership in raids in Dublin in March 1798. A preemptive rising in March in Cahir, County Tipperary broke out in response, but was quickly crushed. Martial law was consequently imposed over much of the country, the unrelenting brutality of which put the United Irish organisation under severe pressure to act before it was too late. By May 1798 Lord Edward FitzGerald and most other leaders of the Dublin rebellion were arrested and the rump United Irish leadership finally decided to launch the rising without French aid, fixing the date of the rising for May 23rd.

Plan

The initial plan was to take Dublin, with the counties bordering Dublin to then rise to prevent the arrival of reinforcements, whereupon the remainder of the country would rise and tie down other garrisons. The agreed signal for the rest of the country to rise was to be the interception of the outward bound mail coaches from Dublin.

Last minute intelligence from informers however provided details of rebel assembly points at Smithfield and Haymarket, and those places were occupied by a huge force of military barely one hour before rebels were to assemble. Deterred by the preparedness of the military, dismayed groups of rebels slunk away from their intended rallying point, dumping weapons in the surrounding lanes. The plan to intercept the mail coaches miscarried with only the Munster bound coach halted near Naas on the first night.

Outbreak of the rebellion

The nucleus of the rebellion had imploded but the counties surrounding Dublin rose as planned and the long threatened rising finally began. Surrounding districts of Dublin were first to rise and rebels quickly began to assemble in Wicklow, Meath and Kildare. The first clashes of the rebellion took place just after dawn on May 24th, and the fighting quickly spread throughout Leinster with the county of Kildare bearing the brunt of the initial clashes.

Despite the Government successfully beating off almost every rebel attack, all military forces in Kildare were ordered to withdraw to Naas for fear of their isolation and destruction as at Prosperous which temporarily handed control of much of Kildare to the rebels. However, rebel defeats at Carlow and the hill of Tara, County Meath, effectively ended the rebellion in those counties. News of the rising spread panic and fear among loyalists in Wicklow who responded by massacring rebel suspects held in custody at Dunlavin Green and in Carnew.

The rebellion spreads

In Wicklow large numbers rose but largely operated away from settled areas and engaged in a bloody rural guerrilla war with the military and loyalist forces. "General" Joseph Holt a Protestant, led up to 1,000 Catholic men in the Wicklow Hills forcing the British to commit substantial forces to the area until his capitulation in October.

In the north-east, mostly Presbyterian rebels led by Henry Joy McCracken rose in Antrim on 6th June and briefly held most of the county but the rising there collapsed following defeat at Antrim town. In Down, after initial success at Saintfield, rebels led by Henry Munro were defeated in the longest battle of the rebellion at Ballynahinch.

The rebels had most success in the south-eastern county of Wexford, where they seized control of the county, but a series of bloody defeats at New Ross, Arklow, and Newtownbarry prevented the effective spread of the rebellion beyond the county borders. 20,000 troops eventually poured into Wexford inflicting defeat at the battle of Vinegar Hill on 21 June. The dispersed rebels spread in two columns through the midlands, Kilkenny and finally towards Ulster. The last remnants of these forces fought on until their final defeat on 14th July at the battles of Knightstown Bog, Co. Meath and Ballyboughal, County Dublin.

Atrocities

The intimate nature of the conflict meant that the rebellion at times took on the worst characteristics of a civil war, especially in Leinster. Sectarian resentment was fuelled by the remaining Penal Laws still in force and by the ruthless campaign of repression prior to the rising. Rumours of planned massacres by both sides were common in the days before the rising and led to a widespread climate of fear.

Government

Being regarded as traitors to the Crown, captured rebels were not treated as prisoners of war but were executed, usually by hanging. Almost every British victory in the rising was marked by the massacre of captured and wounded rebels, and the British were responsible for particularly gruesome massacres at Gibbet Rath, New Ross and Enniscorthy, burning rebels alive in the latter two. In addition, countless civilians were murdered by the rampaging military, who also practiced gang rape, particulary in county Wexford. Many individual instances of murder were also carried out by aggressive local Protestant and Loyalist Yeomanry Units who often targeted "pardoned" rebels and terrorized the countryside especially after nightfall.

Rebel

The rebels in turn were guilty of massacres in near Saintfield, Co. Antrim and at Rathangan, County Kildare, but the vast majority took place in County Wexford at the Vinegar Hill camp, Scullabogue, Wexford bridge and in the vicinity of Gorey. Despite the United Irishmen being an avowedly non-sectarian organisation, the rebel atrocities at times took on a sectarian nature especially where rebel discipline broke down, with Protestantism often being equated with loyalism. There were also some reported instances of loyalist civilians being forced to "convert" to Catholicism to safeguard their lives and property.

French landing

On 22 August, nearly two months after the main uprisings had been defeated, about 1,000 French soldiers under General Humbert landed in the north-west of the country, at Kilcummin in County Mayo. Joined by up to 5,000 local rebels, they inflicted a humiliating defeat (known as the Castlebar races to commemorate the speed of the British retreat) on the British at Castlebar and set up a short-lived "Republic of Connaught", before final defeat at the Battle of Ballinamuck, in County Longford, on 8 September 1798. The French troops who surrendered were repatriated to France in exchange for British prisoners of war; the captured Irish rebels were massacred at the site of the battle.

On 12 October 1798, a larger French force consisting of 3,000 men, and including Wolfe Tone himself, attempted to land in County Donegal near Lough Swilly. They were intercepted by a larger Royal Navy squadron, and finally surrendered after a three hour battle without ever landing in Ireland. As a result of this French involvement, 1798 was often referred to as "The Year of the French".

Aftermath

Pockets of rebel resistance remained in Wexford with the last rebel group under James Corocoran not vanquished until February 1804. County Wicklow experienced a form of guerilla or "fugitive" warfare under the leadership of "General" Joseph Holt

and his Captain Michael Dwyer for several years after 1798 until the final demise of the United Irishmen with failure of Robert Emmet's rebellion in 1803 finally convinced the last organised rebel forces under Michael Dwyer to a negotiated surrender.

The Act of Union on January 1st 1801 took away the measure of autonomy granted to Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy. This act passed largely in response to the rebellion and was underpinned by the perception that the rebellion was provoked as much by the brutish misrule of the Ascendancy as by the efforts of the revolutionaries.

Religious, if not economic, discrimination against the Catholic majority was gradually abolished after the Act of Union but not before widespread radical mobilisation of the Catholic population under Daniel O'Connell. Discontent at grievances and resentment persisted but resistance to British rule continued to manifest itself along sectarian lines as in the Tithe War of 1831-36.

Presbyterian radicalism was effectively tamed or reconciled to British rule by inclusion in a new Protestant Ascendancy, as opposed to a merely Anglican one. The resulting effect was that Irish politics in the 19th century was steered away from the unifying vision of the United Irishmen, encouraged by Unionists, Dublin Castle, and exploited by politicians such as Daniel O’Connell, towards a sectarian model which has largely endured to the present day.

Legacy of 1798

The 1798 rebellion was probably the most concentrated outbreak of violence in Irish history and resulted in an estimated 15,000-30,000 deaths over the course of just three months. Research into casualty figures suggests that a maximum of 1,500 troops and 1,000 civilians died at the hands of the rebels and that the remainder were killed by Government troops and loyalist militias. Atrocities were committed on both sides, the great majority being committed by the government forces but rebel killings of Protestants in Wexford were given much greater emphasis by the victors in the following years, as the loyalist version of events reduced the rebellion to a sectarian Catholic plot to massacre Protestants - a repeat of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.

The aftermath of the rebellion caused a reluctance to speak of it; both to forget horrific experiences of the fighting and fear of the ensuing repression. As a result almost all initial histories of the rebellion were published by loyalists and their versions distorted the role of the Catholic Church in the rebellion. This version of events is still, to some extent, the lasting popular memory of the rebellion as, by the centenary of the Rebellion in 1898, conservative Irish nationalists and the Catholic Church claimed that the United Irishmen had been fighting for "Faith and Fatherland", emphasising the role of Catholic priests in the Rising and deliberately obscuring the secular Enlightenment ideology of the mostly Protestant United Irish leadership.

At the bi-centenary in 1998, the non-sectarian and democratic nature of the Rebellion was emphasised in official commemorations, reflecting the desire for reconciliation at the time of the Good Friday Agreement which was hoped would end the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Sources

• Thomas Bartlett, Kevin Dawson, Daire Keogh, Rebellion, Dublin 1998

• W. Tone, The Life of T. W. Tone (Gales & Seaton, Washington 1826).

• James Smyth, The Men of No Property - Radical Politics in Ireland in the 1790s, 1992.

• Miles Byrne (1780-1862)- Memoirs

• T. Packenham, The Year of Liberty (London 1969) reprinted in 1998.

• Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty (Field Day series, Cork UP 1996).

• J.B Gordon "History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the year 1798" (1801)

• Edward Hay "History of the Insurrection of County Wexford" (1803)

• H.F.B Wheeler & A.M Broadley "The war in Wexford: an account of the rebellion in the south of Ireland in 1798, told from original documents" (1910)

• Richard Musgrave "Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland" (1801)

• C. Dickson "The Wexford Rising in 1798: its causes and course" (1955)

• G.A Hayes-Mc Coy "Irish Battles" (1969)

• CD by Martello Multimedia (National Library of Ireland, Dublin 1998).

• R. Madden, The United Irishmen (4 vols. to 1862).

See also

• Ireland 1691-1801
• Battles of 1798 rebellion
• United Irish Uprising in Newfoundland
• Croppy
• Boys of '98
• Boolavogue, a rebellion song

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