CHAPTER 7
The Affirmation of Naturalized Citizenship in America
On June 15, 1864, the men of the Ninth Massachusetts gathered at Faneuil Hall in Boston to celebrate their homecoming after the expiration of their three-year term of enlistment. The city’s mayor thanked the veterans for doing as much as any citizens had to sustain the Union, and Massachusetts adjutant general William Schouler declared that their service helped to undermine prewar nativism. Afterward, the regiment marched to Boston’s Irish American district in the North End for a grand reception. Before spread tables in a decorated hall, a band played “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” and an officer of the Columbian Association welcomed the men and noted how they had proved that Irish Americans upheld the government of their adopted country. Meanwhile, a militia company and band escorted Colonel Patrick Guiney, still recuperating from a severe head wound suffered just weeks earlier at the Wilderness, from a reception at the Parker House downtown to his home in Roxbury.1
As the war wound down, ceremonies honoring Irish American service to the Republic underscored the inclusion such loyalty earned them within the American people. On April 19, 1865, sergeants from the Sixty-third, Sixty-ninth, and Eighty-eighth New York Infantry regiments carried the Irish Brigade’s banners in Lincoln’s funeral procession from the White House to the Capitol. Elderly General Winfield Scott wistfully raised his hat to the green flags, carried besides the Stars and Stripes, as they passed by him on the somber day. The Irish American Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania, 116th Pennsylvania, and the regiments of the Irish Brigade (which later marched in a triumphant July 4, 1865, parade in New York City), participated on May 23, 1865, in a more festive pageant: the Grand Review. Two hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch 150,000 troops from the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s army parade over two days from the Capitol to the White House and then to Georgetown. The Grand Review celebrated the Union victory and linked regiments from across the country, including Irish American ones but excluding African American ones, in a triumphant and nationalizing spectacle through the reunited nation’s capital.2
Through the war, a sense of American identity strengthened within many Irish Americans over time. Irish Americans did not abandon the ethnic component of their identity, yet, just as it did for African Americans, the Civil War era marked a moment when many Irish Americans became an integral part of U.S. society. During the war, Irish Americans advanced an interpretation of American nationalism that incorporated immigrants, and they argued that their defense of republicanism in the United States benefited Ireland and the entire world. Irish Americans openly practiced their culture and Catholic religion in the army, something which the nativists of the 1850s would have vigorously opposed. Now, as they did for many African Americans, mustering-out and homecoming ceremonies in the war’s closing days publicly cemented Irish Americans into the broader community. In some ways, the typicality of such ceremonies emphasized society’s acceptance of the new Irish American position: most regiments, whether ethnically identified or not, experienced similar events.
In assessing the impact of Irish American service, the Boston Pilot in July 1865 accordingly declared, “When the next generation records with flushed cheeks…this heroic age, they can say with proud consciousness ‘we too, are Americans, and our fathers bled and died to establish this beloved country.’” The following year, the Pilot reported that “there is a large, an honorable, and influential, a liberal and an increasing number of Americans who welcome Irish American citizens to an equal share in the prizes of business and political life, and who are proud to associate with them upon the same social plane. There is neither patronage nor condescension in this but simply a full and cordial recognition of political and social equality.” More dramatically, Irish-born Colonel Guiney seized on the ripe moment to juxtapose military service with a new order that more generally accepted Irish Americans as members of “the people.” In a pro-Grant speech before the 1868 presidential election, Guiney declared to his audience, “Go up to the State House and you will find the torn and faded banners of the Ninth Regiment, and so long as they remain there no man will ever be heard to say that the Irish people living in Massachusetts are enemies of the republic.”3
One tangible display of this shift came as Irish American veterans and civilians attained political positions with increasing frequency soon after the war. Irish-born officer Charles G. Halpine won election as register of New York City in 1866 with the endorsement of Union Democrats and Republicans, while Irish-born St. Clair A. Mulholland, commander of the 116th Pennsylvania, served as Philadelphia’s police chief from 1869 until early 1871. By 1870, the voters of Albany, New York, elected a number of Irish-born representatives to the State Assembly, and in 1878 elected an Irish-born Democrat as mayor. Irish-born Patrick Guiney, who started a political career before the war by serving on the Roxbury Common Council, won appointment in 1865 as an assistant district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and won election as register of Probate and Insolvency for that county in late 1871. In 1868, Irish-born Democrat Patrick A. Collins served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and by 1870 he took a seat in the state Senate; he later represented the Bay State in Congress from 1883 to 1889. Moreover, the need for additional labor generated by economic expansion and industrialization helped foster increased tolerance of immigrants. Capitalist development and slow but sustained financial improvement for some Irish Americans increasingly trumped nativism.4
Ethnic celebrations, such as the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in the Army of the Potomac, continued in civilian life after the war and emphasized an Irish American identity. In 1871, as many as sixty thousand people marched through New York City’s muddy streets on a two-hour-long St. Patrick’s Day parade. Mayor A. Oakey Hall, a Tweed Ring henchman, observed the parade wearing a suit of green and black striped cashmere, and common council members wore green kid gloves and a sprig of shamrock in their buttonholes. The Sixty-ninth New York participated in the parade, along with five hundred members of the Legion of St. Patrick, two Fenian companies, divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, sections of the Quarrymen’s United Protective Society and Longshoremen’s Union Benevolent Society, eighteen temperance groups, and fifty bands. After the parade, working-class Irish Americans celebrated in various bars, the noncommissioned officers of the Sixty-Ninth New York enjoyed a ball in Irving Hall, and members of the Knights of St. Patrick and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick attended banquets. The Irish American upper-class packed Steinway Hall for a concert to benefit a church in Ireland.5
The Pilot accordingly declared, in April 1865, that Irish Americans could “be proud” of their “race and religion.” At a meeting of the Irish Republican Campaign Club held in New York on September 30, 1868, Irish-born Democrat turned Republican senator from California John Conness similarly announced, “It should be our boast particularly that we are Americans…not forgetting our origins, not forgetting the trials of the land that we came from, and the race from which we spring, for that but sharpens the mental appetite for liberty as we find it here; but as American citizens simply, owning a part in the great cause of the Republic established by the fathers, maintained by their sons, to go down, I trust, forever to posterity.”6
The Uncertain Meaning of Naturalized Citizenship
In this context, Irish Americans sought a more defined meaning of naturalized citizenship in the law in America, as well as when naturalized Americans traveled abroad. Understandably, blacks had little interest in this issue, being preoccupied with their own agenda for obtaining recognition of their American citizenship in the first place, as well as defining the rights this citizenship encompassed. When blacks did address the naturalization debate, they generally did so to highlight reasons why they, too, should be included as citizens.
By 1865, most of Europe still adhered to the principle of perpetual (or indefeasible) allegiance, that a subject could not disclaim birth allegiance even by swearing an oath of loyalty to another country. For centuries, for example, British legal doctrine held that subjects born within the realm owed inalienable allegiance to their sovereign from birth, and that the sovereign protected these subjects as a natural and reciprocal obligation. Under this bright-line rule, no act by that subject, not even naturalization in a foreign land, could remove this allegiance (although certain acts could forfeit the sovereign’s protection). Britain accordingly considered naturalized American citizens born in the United Kingdom, including Irish Americans, to be subjects. This status exposed them to treason and other charges. British law also attached subjectship to the children of subjects even if those children were born abroad and, in 1731, to the second generation born abroad.7
Strict legal doctrine wavered in the New World regarding the nature of allegiance. In the 1700s, Parliament promoted naturalization of foreigners within the North American colonies, in contrast to its position on the naturalization of British subjects. Meanwhile, colonists sometimes naturalized newcomers out of military and economic necessity, and some colonial assemblies claimed their own right to admit the foreign-born to the ranks of British subjects, until Britain disallowed such local admissions in 1773. The realities of a diverse colonial society, which included settlers from the United Kingdom but also French Huguenots and large numbers of German immigrants, among others, further blurred the applicability of the doctrine of perpetual allegiance. Colonists increasingly viewed citizenship as based on a consensual, contractual relationship, in which a foreigner could naturalize and claim citizenship by committing allegiance, and much-welcomed labor, to the commonwealth.8
As Britain’s North American empire fell apart, so also did the United States’ adherence to the doctrine of perpetual allegiance. Both the disruption and the ideals fostered by the War of Independence motivated many states to embrace the idea that citizenship, in contrast to subjectship, originated through an individual’s right to choose allegiance. Although not adopted uniformly or in unison, for the most part states during the Revolution gave residents a period of time to elect whether to remain within the state, acknowledge its independence and the legitimacy of its laws, and accept the protection it gave in return for allegiance. In the alternative, individuals could leave. More broadly, while the revolutionaries recognized the need for regulation to govern how one went about changing one’s allegiance in the future, they held the individual’s right to do so as inalienable and undeniable.9
The United States thus embraced expatriation rights, the notion that one could relinquish one’s birthright citizenship, without permission from one’s native government, and choose allegiance to a different country. Yet, at the same time, the United States failed to articulate a coherent policy regarding the practical mechanics and boundaries involved in the exercise of expatriation rights. In the decades before the Civil War, various authorities stood in conflict regarding the limits of an individual’s right to expatriate, and what role both native and naturalizing country played in its exercise.10
For starters, the meaning of naturalization remained nebulous. Congress did not address the nature of citizenship even when obvious opportunities to do so arose: early naturalization regulations, passed in 1790, 1795, 1798, and 1802, instead focused on procedural issues and the length of time one should acclimate to the United States. This idea that one should serve as an “apprentice” in the Republic before becoming a citizen implicitly affirmed the idea that individuals created citizenship by embracing the ideals of the Constitution, in exchange for protection granted by the state. While national security threats occasionally produced severe reactions, as historian James Kettner noted, the overarching theme marking federal policy was that “citizenship should ultimately depend not on some magical result of birth alone, but on belief, will, consent, and choice.” Yet early legislation failed to define what rights, privileges, protections, and duties attached to naturalized citizens, or address their relation to their native country.11
Thomas Jefferson identified expatriation as a natural right, while Hamiltonian Federalists maintained that one could not renounce allegiance without the sovereign’s consent (even though at first glance, this position conflicted with the Revolution). The federal and state judiciaries failed to clarify the matter. Some judges continued to look to British law for guidance, and they upheld perpetual allegiance. Other jurists recognized a qualified right of expatriation, if not always the absolute right identified by Jefferson, and held that one could change allegiance but not by unilateral action. In the absence of explicit federal legislation, the judiciary failed to agree that expatriation existed as an unqualified right, much less create a consensus of case law defining its boundaries.12
Britain, on the other hand, relied on the doctrine of perpetual allegiance to justify the impressment of British-born sailors on American vessels. In the wake of a June 1807 incident, during which sailors of the HMS Leopard boarded the USS Chesapeake to search for deserters after firing three broadsides into the ship, killing or wounding twenty-one of its sailors, a royal proclamation on October 16, 1807, restated the doctrine that foreign naturalization did not absolve the relationship of British-born sailors to their crown. After war with Britain erupted in 1812, the United States offered as part of a peace proposal that it would prohibit further use of British subjects on public or private American ships except those who had already naturalized. Britain responded by asking the United States to deliver up these naturalized sailors. The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, failed to settle the issue of British impressment.13
Meanwhile, the State Department vacillated on the rights of naturalized citizens when they returned to their native country. In 1840, ambassador to Prussia Henry Wheaton wrote an influential opinion on the issue, which adhered to a modified policy of perpetual allegiance. Wheaton held that the United States could not shield a Prussian-born naturalized American from compulsory military service while in his native country. “Had you remained in the United States, or visited any other foreign country, (except Prussia,) on your lawful business,” Wheaton informed the naturalized American, “you would have been protected by the American authorities, at home and abroad, in the enjoyment of all your rights and privileges as a naturalized citizen of the United States. But, having returned to the country of your birth, your native domicile and natural character revert, (so long as you remain in the Prussian dominions,) and you are bound in all respects to obey the laws exactly as if you had never emigrated.”14
Permutations of Wheaton’s doctrine dominated American foreign policy on this issue through the Civil War. As Democrat James K. Polk’s secretary of state, James Buchanan vigorously called for equal protection of naturalized American citizens, but he also recognized that the United States would have a difficult time enforcing the principle. Buchanan accordingly advised naturalized Americans to remain in the United States if possible. Buchanan’s successors in Whig Millard Fillmore’s administration, Daniel Webster and Edward Everett, supported the right of expatriation but they affirmed Wheaton’s doctrine and held a naturalized citizen’s status unconditional and unqualified anywhere except in the naturalized citizen’s homeland.15
Franklin Pierce’s Democratic administration weakened the Wheaton doctrine. Austria in 1853 seized Hungarian Martin Koszta while he was in Turkey. Koszta, a refugee of the 1848 revolution, had declared his intent to become an American citizen while previously in the United States. Captain Duncan Ingraham of the USS Saint Louis secured Koszta’s release under the threat of force, and Secretary of State William L. Marcy refused Austria’s demand for reparation. Marcy joined the right to pursue happiness elsewhere with the doctrine that allowed people to resist oppressive government, and he extended American protection even to those aliens merely domiciled in the United States. Marcy backtracked two years later when he gave the minister to Sardinia instructions consistent with Wheaton’s doctrine. In October 1856, Pierce’s attorney general Caleb Cushing affirmed that the American Revolution promoted granting individuals as much personal freedom as possible within regulation for the general welfare, and bitingly noted that British law affirmed perpetual allegiance but simultaneously permitted aliens to naturalize in Britain, leading him to condemn “jurisprudence of England [which] asserts an assumed rule of public law, or denies it, according to the caprices of apparent local interest.”16
Buchanan’s Democratic administration continued the Pierce administration’s break with the Wheaton doctrine, though slow steps and vacillation marked official policy changes. Secretary of State Lewis Cass mildly limited Wheaton’s doctrine in April 1859 by applying it to naturalized citizens who were in their native country’s army, or actually called into it, at the time they left. Edward Bates, Lincoln’s future attorney general, scorned Cass’s cautious approach: “The right of expatriation is denied by many of the Governments of Europe,” Bates confided to his diary, “but our Government has always affirmed it.” According to Bates, once naturalized, a person “is a citizen, as perfectly and absolutely as any native born,” and he questioned why such an individual should be “less entitled to the protection of this country than a native born American citizen.” Years later, Bates affirmed his belief that taking the oath of naturalization transformed foreign-born individuals into Americans, after they spent the “few years of probation, required for the very purpose of changing them into Americans,” and he added that this also made them “the political equals of natural-born citizens.”17
Under presidential and public pressure, Cass subsequently criticized perpetual allegiance in a letter to one of his ambassadors abroad as “a relic of barbarism.” Despite more tentative language elsewhere in the letter, Cass held, “The moment a foreigner becomes naturalized, his allegiance to his native country is severed forever. He experiences a new political birth…. Should he return to his native country he returns as an American citizen, and in no other character. In order to entitle his original government to punish him for an offense, this must have been committed while he was a subject and owed allegiance to that government.”18
By the eve of the Civil War, at least the executive branch had developed a general rule extending diplomatic protection to naturalized citizens except where native governments, within their own jurisdiction, sought enforcement of obligations owed by the expatriate prior to departure. Buchanan as president declared in his fourth annual message to Congress, “Our Government is bound to protect the rights of our naturalized citizens everywhere to the same extent as though they had drawn their first breath in this country. We can recognize no distinction between our native and naturalized citizens.” The legislature did not codify Buchanan’s policy, however, and it remained open to rejection by subsequent administrations, as well as a judiciary that had never resolved the issue. At roughly the same time, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston affirmed Britain’s adherence to the doctrine of perpetual allegiance, though he noted that one could, by misconduct, lose British protection. In short, decades after the Revolution, America remained diametrically opposed to Britain’s doctrine of perpetual allegiance in theory, but the practical meaning of naturalization and the boundaries of expatriation rights remained unsettled.19
During the Civil War, maintaining the delicate balance of European nonintervention precluded any strong American stance on expatriation rights. Furthermore, Secretary of State Seward complained of instances where naturalized American citizens returned to their homeland to avoid serving their new country in the federal army but then invoked the protection of the United States to screen them from military duty there. Not intending to expend diplomatic capital on naturalized citizens who fled the Union in its time of need, and then sought its protection after shirking service to it, Seward ordered his minister in Prussia, “You will make no further applications in these military cases without specific instructions.” Meanwhile, the issue received little mention in either the letters of Irish American soldiers or ethnic newspapers.20
Immediately after the war, the debate over expatriation rights and perpetual allegiance resurfaced. The United States emerged from the war conscious of its increased power and ability to exert influence on the international stage. Moreover, the participation of tens of thousands of immigrants in direct military service, as well as Irish American calls for the equalization of citizenship status and growing political clout, renewed the federal government’s commitment to enforce expatriation. In the end, the actions of the Fenian Brotherhood unexpectedly brought the issue of expatriation to the forefront at a time when the United States was in the process of defining for itself what national citizenship meant in America. While Fenianism did not succeed in liberating Ireland, Britain reacted to its potential. The ensuing diplomatic crisis, and Irish America’s coalescence as a political bloc, directly generated changes both in American and British citizenship doctrine and practice.
Britain’s Reaction to Fenianism
Across the Atlantic, the growth of the Fenian movement, and the fact that many of its members wore Union blue, generated Britain’s protest against the openness with which the Brotherhood operated in the United States. By 1865, Britain acknowledged that American law made it more difficult for authorities in this country to interfere with Fenian meetings but complained that the participation of military and civil officials implied federal sanction. How could the United States protest British actions during the Civil War, the United Kingdom further questioned, in light of Fenian activity in America? The War Department’s grant of a fortnight’s leave of absence to Colonel John H. Gleason so that he could attend a Fenian convention particularly earned Britain’s protest. In response, Secretary of State Seward assured the British of the sufficiency of existing neutrality laws and that the American government foresaw no imminent crimes, “unless renewed and systematic aggressions from the British ports and provinces should defeat all the efforts of this government to maintain and preserve peace with Great Britain.” British protests against Thomas W. Sweeny proved more effective. An Irish-born division commander in the Army of the Tennessee who lost his right arm in the Mexican War, Sweeny accepted an appointment as Secretary of War in the Senate wing of the Fenian Brotherhood in late 1865. After reports arose that Sweeny conferred with U.S. Secretary of War Stanton about the possibility of transferring surplus military supplies to the Fenians, the British minister to the United States, Sir Frederick Bruce, contacted Seward. “It seems to me that he ought to be called to choose between the North American and the Irish Republic,” Bruce urged Seward, and he added, “The effect of his acting as Secretary of War is to confirm the Fenian dupes in the belief that the Government of the United States favours the movement.” Within two weeks, the army cited absence without leave to dismiss Sweeny from the service.21
British authorities arrested about a hundred suspected Fenians in Ireland between mid-September and mid-October 1865 and began searching the baggage of visiting Union veterans. The acting consul in Dublin, William B. West, wrote to Seward with concern that some of those confined claimed American citizenship and that this would cause a problem when they stood trial for treason as British subjects under the doctrine of perpetual allegiance. To complicate already tangled matters, the British arrested several Union veterans, among them Captain James Murphy of the Twentieth Massachusetts, and Lieutenant Colonel John W. Byron of the Eighty-eighth New York, who West described as “the hero of 32 fights in the service of his adopted country,” and who Britain released relatively quickly. Captain Michael O’Boyle of the Sixty-Ninth New York claimed naturalized status but was committed for trial, while another naturalized American who served four years in the Ninth Connecticut, Lieutenant Joseph H. Lawlor, fumed at his imprisonment for a week in solitary confinement before his release. The secretary to the American legation in London, Benjamin Moran, dreaded the “trouble” he anticipated the “insane Fenians are about to give us.” In Dublin, West scorned “Fenian mania,” which “induced a great many of our adopted Irish citizens to visit this country…and many of them are now suffering most severely, and, I might add, justly punished for their folly, in abandoning the comforts and happiness of their American homes for the insane project of aiding revolution here.”22
Limited arrests failed to allay British fears, as increasing numbers of Irish Americans, many of them Civil War veterans, continued arriving in Ireland. At the urging of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Parliament suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Ireland on February 17, 1866, out of fear of an impending Fenian attack. Prime Minister Lord John Russell justified to Parliament that, after the Civil War, Irish Americans—many of whom had participated in the war and became American citizens—conspired to assist an Irish insurrection. The suspension bill met with little opposition, and by the end of the day, a hundred fifty suspected Fenians found themselves under arrest in Dublin alone, about a third of them claiming naturalized or native-born American status. Though he disapproved of Fenianism, William West criticized the arbitrary measures implemented as the British imprisoned Americans regardless of whether probable cause for suspicion existed, and simply because they came from the United States or served in its army. On the other hand, West wrote one prisoner, “It is to be regretted that so many of our Irish-born citizens should leave their adopted country, when they have all they can reasonably desire, and if sober and industrious, could never experience the want and misery which you now complain of.” West also recognized that some Fenians who urged the United States to take “decisive measures” sought to “bring about a collision that will redound to their benefit.”23
Within a week of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Ireland, American ambassador Charles Francis Adams complained of the difficulties presented by the conflicting views America and Britain held regarding expatriation and allegiance. Adams realized that the arrests reopened the issue of expatriation rights during a time when the American public, at least the Unionist portion, felt aggrieved at British pro-Confederate actions during the Civil War. This state of affairs, Adams also knew, afforded Fenians an opportunity to promote their own interests. Adams had always cast a wary eye on Irish America. Though not a full nativist, Adams worried that large-scale Irish immigration would affect detrimentally American institutions. Over a decade earlier, Adams admitted that he understood why so many people worked for the “exclusion of foreign-born persons and Roman Catholics from all share of power over public affairs”: because “neither of these classes has yet shown any thing else than a great repugnance to embrace the doctrines which we uphold,” a notion which Irish Americans later claimed their support for the Union discredited. Yet, at the same time, Adams had scorned the nativist movement as detracting focus from the more important issue of abolition and rejected the philosophical paradox of antislavery Know Nothings who declared “that the slaveholder is a tyrant, who puts his heel on the neck of his slave, only because God made him of a different color from his own, and set him in Africa instead of in Europe,” but would “to-morrow build a wall between themselves and others of their fellow-men, because God placed them, at the time of their birth, somewhere else than in the United States.”24
Now, issues generated by and about Irish Americans overshadowed another matter Adams identified as more important: obtaining reparations for British violations of strict neutrality during the Civil War. The United States, Adams believed, would cede the moral high ground in negotiations if it protected or even ignored the activities of American Fenians. Furthermore, Adams noted the recent inclusion of Irish Americans into the broader society of the United States, and he questioned the duality of the Fenian movement when he wrote William West that “it behooves…all such as desire to enjoy the benefit of their incorporation into the people of the United States to take particular care not to forfeit their rights by taking part in political struggles of what to them should be nothing but a foreign country.” By the end of 1865, Adams enforced a policy less vigorous than Seward would have liked and sought to protect innocent Irish Americans but not those who “justly subjected themselves to suspicion of complicity with treasonable projects.”25
British authorities had temporarily averted a full-blown Anglo-American controversy by quickly releasing most of the men arrested in 1865 on the condition that they return to America, but arrests after the suspension of habeas corpus in February 1866 reheated the issue. On February 28, the under secretary for Ireland told West that he could see any native-born American prisoner but refused to allow the Dublin consul to interview three men bearing certificates of American naturalization, claiming them “as ordinary subjects of her Majesty,” who “must be dealt with accordingly.” As arrests proliferated, Adams called on the British foreign secretary, Earl Clarendon, on March 5, 1866, to release the naturalized Americans, or at least for the British to articulate some rationale for their imprisonment, before they became objects of American sympathy. Clarendon relied on perpetual allegiance to respond that Britain recognized no interference from any foreign country on behalf of any subject naturalized abroad. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland similarly refused to communicate with American diplomats about the prisoners, and the British law officers on March 9, 1866, held it “impossible that Her Majesty’s Government should recognize any title in a Foreign Power to interfere on behalf of natural born subjects of Her Majesty…on ground that such natural born subjects have become naturalized…in a Foreign Country.”26
In America, Seward reminded Bruce that American politicians could not ignore the rights of naturalized citizens, especially in light of Irish American service during the Civil War and American resentment at British actions during the conflict. Bruce further assessed for his superiors that the Johnson administration would not actively combat Fenianism due to the power of Irish American votes. Seward proposed a resolution in which Britain did not concede the doctrine of perpetual allegiance, but allowed American consuls to intercede for all Americans nevertheless. Seward’s plan would thereby eliminate distinction between native and naturalized Americans as a practical matter.27
Around the same time, Seward urged Adams to bring separate pressure to bear on the British government and reminded him that, under American policy, naturalization “completely absolves the person complying with it, from foreign allegiance” and invests him with protection from the U.S. government equal to that of native-born citizens. Seward’s statement echoed sentiments by some of his Democratic predecessors at the State Department, particularly Buchanan, but circumstances in 1866 greatly differed from the ones existing before the Civil War. The United States now had the military and industrial strength to assert itself and, as Seward recognized, could not as a matter of principle allow Britain to imprison Union veterans. Additionally, Seward pointed out something Adams already knew: if unresolved, the controversy would energize anti-English hostility in the United States. Seward also recognized the growing political influence held by the Irish American community, and the power their votes potentially held in upcoming elections, a circumstance that stood in marked contrast to the almost wholly disfranchised African American community at that time.28
After Adams showed Seward’s missive to Clarendon, the British gradually released both naturalized and native-born American citizens so long as they agreed to return to the United States. Clemency did not solve the disagreement between Britain and America regarding the meaning of naturalization, however, and Clarendon refused to concede the doctrine of perpetual allegiance after another conference with Adams at the end of May. Seward remained unsatisfied at this response, as did the Fenians and the Irish American community at large, and none of them intended to rest on this issue until America both codified and enforced the idea that naturalized citizens enjoyed the same protections as the native-born. Continuing Fenian activities, and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act Continuance Bill passed in August 1866, guaranteed that the questions surrounding expatriation rights would persist until resolved once and for all.29
Irish American Mobilization
Britain’s actions in arresting Irish Americans, coupled with already tense Anglo-American relations, made it the perfect time for the Fenians to take their cause to the American public. Britain’s recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent power, and its failure to prevent the outfitting in British ports of Confederate privateers such as the Alabama, generated immense American hostility. By early 1865, both British prime minister Lord Palmerston and Queen Victoria feared the strong possibility that the United States would attack Britain or Canada after the Civil War concluded. Rallies in America now raised funds for the Brotherhood and afforded opportunities for Irish Americans to further explore the paradox of concern for Ireland and loyalty to the United States. Moreover, while Irish American votes comprised important blocs in local elections in the past, this moment allowed for the construction of a broader constituency worthy of greater attention from American political leaders. Public meetings focused increasing attention on the status and protections afforded to naturalized citizens and gave birth to Fenianism’s unintended but lasting legacy in the United States: the opportunity for Irish Americans to resolve successfully their demands for equality of citizenship before the law. Charles Francis Adams already recognized that Irish Americans gained recent “incorporation into the people of the United States”; they now acted accordingly by asserting their desires within the context of the American legal and political traditions, and further linking Irish and American nationalism through shared antipathy toward Britain.30
George Archdeacon, a naturalized American imprisoned by the British during the arrests of autumn 1865, summarized to President Johnson the urgency with which Irish Americans now held the issue of expatriation rights. Archdeacon informed Johnson that he felt “a deep interest, in common with hundreds of thousands of true Irish American citizens, in the question of our rights as openly sworn citizens of the United States,” and he asked the federal government to “set this matter at rest, so that adopted citizens generally may know their real standing in foreign countries, and the value from home of that citizenship of which they are so proud here.”31
Meanwhile, Fenian rallies pressured politicians and inspired an American public already livid at Britain. Rallies in New York City on Sunday, March 4, 1866, and similar meetings held the same day at Troy, New York, and Rivington, Vermont, indicate the level to which this sympathy spread. Although New York archbishop John McCloskey condemned the meeting as a profanation of the Lord’s day (especially as the Catholic Church opposed Fenianism), and the portent of a winter storm hung in the air (it did snow toward the end of the meeting), an estimated hundred thousand attendees poured in from Brooklyn, Westchester, and New Jersey to gather at Jones’s Wood. Music played and booths provided billiards, bowling, and liquor. Fenian bonds on sale depicted Erin pointing to a sword lying on the ground, while a kneeling Union soldier readied to take the sword and leave for Ireland. Speeches delivered that afternoon from stands decorated with American and Irish flags proved the main attraction. After several orators exhorted the audience to donate money to the cause, Fenian Stephen J. Meaney rose to condemn Adams and other American diplomats as “English hirelings” for not acting more vigorously to free imprisoned Americans.32
A few days later, people paid a fifty-cent admission fee and packed into a meeting at Cooper Institute on March 9. While speakers addressed the cause in Ireland, two American flags adorned the stage alongside a banner displaying the Fenian sunburst and harp. Just as African Americans used USCT banners at their conventions, the regimental colors presented to the Ninety-ninth New York State Militia for its brief Civil War service evoked Irish American support for the Union. In contrast to African American efforts, however, George Francis Train criticized nationwide concern about the “oppressed and degraded black” instead of the “holy cause” of Irish liberation before he linked Fenianism to Irish Americanism. Train recalled speaking near Independence Hall in Philadelphia the week before, and reminded his audience that several Irish had signed the Declaration of Independence and thus helped establish “our magnificent Republic.” Invoking these Founders, and the tens of thousands of Irish Americans who fought in the Civil War, Train “demanded” congressional assistance for the Irish cause. Train further reminded Irish Americans that they could use their position in this country to influence its policy. Identifying President Johnson as an ally of the Fenian movement, and predicting that a “neutral” Secretary of State Seward would do little to halt their activities, Train summoned his audience to boycott British goods, pressure the government to discourage British trade, and donate money to the cause.33
Another event drew further attention to the Brotherhood, though it did little for the liberation of Ireland: from May 31 to June 5, 1866, the Fenians invaded Canada. As concern for Canada’s safety mounted in the months leading up to this operation, Seward sought to balance Irish American interests and British calls for preventative action with a policy of conscious inactivity, hoping that Fenian enthusiasm for invasion would chill with time. President Johnson, wrestling with the Republican Congress over Reconstruction, and wary of alienating traditionally Democratic Irish American voters, similarly vowed to respond only to an overt act of Fenian aggression. The Fenians, meanwhile, interpreted the U.S. government’s position as one of approval for their plans or, in the least, neutrality. Once the attack began, however, the United States prevented thousands of reinforcements from joining the Fenian invasion’s advance force under Colonel John O’Neill, dooming the assault to failure. At Britain’s urging, as the invasion entered its death throes, Johnson ordered the arrest of “all prominent, leading or conspicuous persons” acting in violation of American neutrality laws. In the end, the invasion left several thousand members of the Brotherhood stranded and feeling betrayed. The government and New York Democratic leaders like William M. “Boss” Tweed and Mayor John T. Hoffman paid their return fares home. The invasion had turned into a debacle but it kept the issues surrounding Irish Americans and the meaning of naturalization in the public eye.34
Irish Americans, Politics, and Equal Rights in the mid-1860s
In the fluid context of Reconstruction, politicians from both parties used the Fenian/expatriation issue to connect with traditionally Democratic Irish American constituents. Both Democrats and Republicans linked support for Ireland’s liberation with a more global struggle for republicanism under the leadership of the United States. During the invasion of Canada, Republican Reader W. Clarke from Ohio asked the House to grant the Fenians belligerent’s rights on June 4, 1866. On June 11, Pennsylvanian Democrat Sydenham E. Ancona urged a bill repealing the Neutrality Law of 1818, which punished persons who, within the United States, began or aided any military expedition against any foreign state with which the United States was at peace. Ancona condemned British actions during the Civil War, and further noted that “the active sympathies of the people of the United States are naturally with all men who struggle to achieve” Ireland’s independence, “especially when those engaged therein are the acknowledged friends of our government, as are the Irish race, they having shed their blood in defence of our flag in every battle of every war in which the republic has been engaged.” In response, Republican Robert C. Schenck of Ohio (later minister to England from 1870 to 1876) called for strict neutrality, recognizing both parties as belligerents but, as Schenck explained, “‘Hands off,’ is the motto I would prefer.” Republican Abner Harding of Illinois immediately offered a substitute to Ancona’s resolution that would recognize the Irish nation as a belligerent power, express further sympathy with “all true Irishmen in their holy struggles for freedom,” and “remember with gratitude that many brave Irishmen periled their lives and mingled their blood with the patriots of the Union Army on many hard-fought fields against rebels…aided by England with ships and money and materials of war.” Both Ancona’s and Harding’s proposals were referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs for its consideration. Adding to the moment, the House of Representatives on June 21 welcomed into its chamber future congressman William Roberts, then president of the Brotherhood’s Senate wing, arrested on the Canadian border and nearly prosecuted by the American government. Roberts spent the next night meeting with congressmen and senators.35
More important, and with indelible constitutional implications, something quietly occurred in the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment. Where the original version proposed by the House of Representatives remained silent, on June 8, 1866, as the Senate considered amendments to the House version, moderate Republican senator William Pitt Fessenden from Maine inserted without objection the phrase “or naturalized” into the amendment’s first section so that it read, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Without debate or fanfare, the Senate adopted the revision and on June 13, the House assented to the Senate version and adopted the amendment for ratification by the states.36
In this moment lost on scholars of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Reconstruction-era Congress, naturalized citizens were constitutionally affirmed as part of “the people.” Nativist measures targeting naturalized citizens became unconstitutional pursuant to the remainder of Section 1, that “no State…shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process or law,” or “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Inclusion recently confirmed by the military service of Irish American and German American soldiers, as well as the understanding that if ex-slaves could comprise citizens so also must naturalized Americans, perhaps rendered the moment uncontroversial and thus unnoticed. Nonetheless, Fessenden’s addition to the Fourteenth Amendment, made within days of the Fenian invasion of Canada, represented a profound constitutional sanction, prior naturalization laws notwithstanding. Where the Civil Rights Act passed on April 9, 1866, remained silent about naturalized citizens, and dealt only with birthright citizens, the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionally expanded the concept of citizenship to mandate equality for people in either category, at the same time the rights associated with national citizenship began to be defined in the law for the first time.
Some Irish Americans and Republicans even began a surprising rapprochement at this time. On one level, pragmatism motivated the alliance: Fenians sought Republican support, and Republicans courted Irish American votes, especially because every one obtained increased their party’s vote totals and weakened a traditionally Democratic base as well. Republican campaigners cast Johnson as a turncoat who encouraged the Fenians to invade Canada and then betrayed them once on British soil. The alliance rested on more than Machiavellianism, however, and provides another example of intertwining ideology and political pragmatism similar to the circumstances that led to suffrage rights for black men. As many Fenians defined their movement within a broader transnational one that promoted republicanism across the globe, an unexpected, albeit temporary, alliance of principle developed between some Irish Americans and Republicans who advanced universal respect for liberty and rights.37
During the Civil War, some Irish Americans, such as Thomas F. Meagher and Patrick R. Guiney, embraced the Republican Party and its broader view of rights. A number of prominent Fenians officered black regiments, a surprising moment of radicalism linking some Irish Americans with African Americans during the Civil War, and blurring the boundaries of antagonism between both groups. John O’Neill, for instance, served as a captain in the Seventeenth USCI before he led a Fenian detachment in the June 1866 raid on Canada. Of Belgo-Italian lineage, Octave Fariola served as lieutenant colonel of the Ninety-sixth USCI, during which time he vigorously sought clemency for one of his soldiers convicted of murder by a general court-martial and sentenced to death, before he became adjutant general of the Fenian self-proclaimed Irish Republic. Building on these seeds, Irish Americans now held themselves out as a source of votes but some of them also argued in petitions, rallies, Fenian conventions, and private letters in favor of the egalitarianism espoused by Republicans, even where many members of this ethnic community still held deep-seated prejudice against blacks.38
As the Republican New York Tribune explained, increasing numbers of Irish Americans began to realize “that the direct and sure way to win liberty and opportunity for [their] race is to concede…that [there] are…natural, inalienable rights, not of superior races, but of every race.” This growing impulse within the Irish American leadership and community converged with Radical Republicans’ promotion of equal rights and rejection of distinction based on racial or ethnic differences. In articulating an inclusive vision of the United States that embraced the assimilation of different people into a unified American nationality based on loyalty to republican values, Fenians, their Irish American supporters, and Radical Republicans found themselves in ideological agreement.39
Thus, in Philadelphia, the local Republican Party actively recruited Irish Americans into its machine. Irish Americans shouted their support at a Republican rally in Milwaukee in 1866, infuriated by what they perceived as the Johnson administration’s lack of support for the Fenian cause. Illinois Republican governor Richard J. Oglesby, Senator Lyman Trumbull (at various times affiliated with the Democrats, Republicans, Liberal Republicans, and then Democrats again), and Republican speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax joined John O’Neill at a Fenian picnic in Chicago on August 15, 1866. Among speeches criticizing Britain, praising Irish American Civil War service, and urging attendees to vote Republican, Colfax spoke of the philosophical convergence between Republicans and some Irish Americans. Colfax, an early supporter of the Fenians, described the Brotherhood as promoting “liberty to all and justice to all” and declared that this “noble and patriotic motto…thrills my heart” and inspired him to “clasp the hand of every man as a brother who proclaims that noble sentiment in our land.” While taking the opportunity to attack the Democrats and impugn Andrew Johnson as “acting under the dictation of the British Minister,” Colfax found a brotherhood of liberty that linked both the racial agenda of the Republicans and the global defense of republicanism Fenians espoused, and he declared to Irish Americans: “You have stood together on the battlefield. Now stand together at the ballot box. If you believe in liberty for Ireland, you must go to work and speak for liberty in America. The true way to aid your cause is to fight as the great Union Republican organization does, for human rights and impartial justice, and for the downfall of tyranny and oppression wherever it may exist.” At another Fenian picnic, Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Wilson similarly quoted a definition that Fenianism supported “the cause of liberty everywhere” and declared, “If that be Fenianism, then I am a Fenian.”40
Meanwhile, postwar Fenian meetings manifested the increasingly American focus that developed during the Civil War. Echoing arguments made by African Americans in their own call for inclusion, William Roberts invoked the history of Irish American service to the United States at a convention his wing of the Brotherhood held in Cleveland in early September 1867, declaring that “from the first shot at Lexington in 1775, to the last in 1865, the citizens of Irish birth gave the noblest proofs of their devotion to America and her institutions.” Addressing the issue of dual allegiance, Roberts proclaimed that activities of Irish Americans on behalf of their natal land in no way diminished their loyalty to the United States but instead showed themselves to be the defender of its republican ideals. Roberts declared illogical the argument that, “because we love the mother that bore us, we cannot adore the bride of our choice,” and he interpreted this contention as asserting that because Fenians sought to spread the freedoms enjoyed in America, they somehow rendered themselves “not in harmony with the spirit of free institutions, or conscientiously true to our oath of citizenship.” Assuring his audience, and those who would read a printed version of his speech, that “the Republic has nothing to fear from her Fenian citizens, who hope to establish a similar government on Irish soil,” Roberts also cast Irish Americans who supported the Brotherhood as following the noble example foreigners such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Thaddeus Kosciusko, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who helped secure American independence.41
Moreover, during this September 1867 convention came a stunning moment that reveals the broader recognition, in at least some Irish Americans, of a more expansive understanding of liberty and human rights, and further blurred the lines of hostility with African Americans. The delegates learned that several thousand black men of New Orleans offered to fight for Irish freedom and, despite any antipathy between Irish Americans and African Americans, swiftly resolved to “accept the services of every man who truly loves liberty, and is willing to fight for Ireland, without distinction of race, color, or nationality.” Although these blacks never did fight under the Fenian standard, the offer and its acceptance reveal the unexpected links and mutual goals affirmed by the outcome of the Civil War: multiracial and transnational promotion of liberty and republican values. In addressing the delegates, Roberts claimed that “in the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood are men of various nationalities, many of whom, neither by the ties of blood nor education, have the slightest affinity with the Irish people. They may differ in matters of religion, politics, and even in social feelings; but there is one common bond of Union, broad, deep and strong. It is Liberty, priceless Liberty.”42
By 1868, New York’s Irish People endorsed Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant for president, and Irish American Republican Clubs, including chapters in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Troy, New York, actively campaigned for the Republican Party. Michael Scanlon, editor of Chicago’s Irish Republic, accused the leaders of the Democratic Party taking Irish American votes for granted and thinking “they could use them for their packing horses forever, on whose shoulders every ignorant and unprincipled ruffian could ride into office.”43
Not all Republicans welcomed the rapprochement. In November 1868, the black newspaper the Christian Recorder complained of an Irish American journal that claimed that its endorsement of Grant for president converted ten thousand Irish American votes from Democratic to Republican, and then voiced its expectation that Grant would be sympathetic to the Irish. After first asking, “If loyalty to the right is to be thus liberally rewarded, what under conscience cannot the Negro demand?” the paper answered that blacks requested “nothing.” “The Negroes who, through fire and blood, voted for General Grant, ask no especial favors, they ask of him what the Negro has ever asked of the American people, not mercy, but justice. Let the new President treat us just as he treats the other thirty millions of the land, protect us in our rights and immunities as American citizens, and we ask no more.” Earlier that year, an article in the newspaper condemned Fenians for engaging in an “illegitimate mode of warfare,” which inspired “almost universal terror” in England, and questioned the dual loyalties of Irish Americans: “What is their right of citizenship, and to what government do they really belong?” Assuming that “every Fenian is a sworn subject” of the Irish government in exile, the paper observed that “perhaps hundreds of thousands of them…come up to our polls with their naturalization papers in their hands, people of another government, but allowed to use their Irish Catholic vote to press the policy of ours into the service of their own.” Exposing the paradox, the article observed that “either the ‘Irish Nation’ is a myth, or the citizenship of these people is not American, and they have no more right to interfere in our politics than a subject of Russia.”44
Not all Irish Americans eagerly embraced the Republican agenda either. Many Irish Americans continued to espouse a conservative viewpoint, and ethnic pro-Democratic newspapers such as the Pilot called on readers to ignore Republican efforts to woo them with rhetoric concerning the Fenian and expatriation issues, and to reject the purported Radical view that an African American held superiority over an Irish American. Editor John Mitchel of New York’s Irish Citizen continued to champion the Democrats, attacked the Republican Party as threatening to bring about a race war, and accused Radical Republicans of serving British interests.45
The Central Executive Committee of Irish Citizens, vanishing after publishing one pamphlet in 1866, displayed concern for the shifting political allegiances of Irish Americans and argued for rejection of both the Democrat and Republican parties. Led by Irish-born Union veterans Thomas Antisell, who served as a brigade surgeon, and James R. Beirne, an officer in the Thirty-seventh New York who won a Medal of Honor for bravery at Seven Pines, the committee in some ways urged an antebellum agenda. As if the war had never happened, the committee contended that crises in Europe generally resolved by bloodshed but argued that in America, determination occurred at the ballot box. The committee then interpreted that Civil War as one initially waged by the North to preserve the Union, but which became corrupted by abolitionism, so that soldiers were “betrayed into fighting for the emancipation of the negro and the support of an intolerant and oppressive Radical majority in Congress,” which forced Confederate states to extend suffrage to blacks as a form of domination over the South. “Do you want to aid in forcing the South into rebellion again?” asked the committee, which further declared that “the Irish citizen…will not lend himself to the oppression of one-third of the country for the benefit of a small and blatant minority, who have…been ever ready to deny him that measure of political and religious liberty which is the right of every citizen of the land.”46
Here, then, lie the committee’s concern: Irish Americans had begun joining a Republican Party that “sought out the Irish patriotic societies,” offering them “honeyed phrases and high-sounding promises,” in order to sway the Irish American voter “from his plain duty to aid” President Johnson’s efforts to restore the country “to its former political status.” The committee warned that in New England, Puritan descendants maintained unabated “bigotry” through “anti-Catholic crusades,” and their “hobby is now negro suffrage, and the party who persecuted the Irishman in his mode of worship, who declared him unworthy to bear arms in a New England State, or enjoy a civil office of trust in the Commonwealth, gloats with insane delight over its negro fetishism, and openly boasts that it prefers the negro to the foreign-born citizen, whether German or Irish.” Joining an “unholy pact” with Republicans, the committee argued, comprised a decision to oppress the South, depress its white population by lifting up blacks, and assist despotism worldwide, including in Ireland, by aiding it in America.47
At its missive’s end, the committee acknowledged that a new order would emerge from the cataclysm of war and urged Irish Americans to form a new, national party and elect their own officials to political office. While trying to remain loyal to a conservative agenda, the committee nonetheless supported radical doctrines by supporting a worldwide struggle for republicanism (so long as it did not include blacks) and urging the construction of a “more united and powerful” national Irish American voting bloc outside of the Republican or Democratic parties. Recognizing Reconstruction as a fluid moment, when “all old party bonds and issues are broken up, when new elements have swept into the political circle,” the committee argued that “now is the time for the Irish citizens to place themselves in that position in which, instead of being at the heels of a party, they may become the arbiters of the welfare of the land.” Shunning both parties as neglectful of Irish Americans once elections had been won, the committee argued that a unified Irish American vote would benefit not only the United States but Ireland as well.48
Thus Irish Americans of different political stripes recognized the burgeoning voting power of their community as a national voting bloc, this circumstance alone a powerful symbol of inclusion and citizenship identity that sharply contrasted with the position blacks occupied at this point in time. The day after Congress defeated, on July 2, 1866, Reader W. Clarke’s proposal to grant belligerent rights to the Fenians, Fenian leader William Roberts gave a speech in Buffalo, New York, in which he warned that Fenians would vote only for candidates allied with their cause. Heeding Roberts’s call, Congressman Nathaniel P. Banks, formerly elected to Congress in 1854 as a member of the Know Nothing Party before becoming a Republican and serving as a second-rate general during the Civil War, earned Irish American praise by reporting a bill in the House to weaken U.S. neutrality laws. With Roberts prominently canvassing the congressional floor, the House passed the bill on July 26, 1866, without a negative vote and with 123 in favor (though with 63 abstentions).49
Within days, Banks found himself a popular figure among Fenian circles, hailed by Roberts as a “great statesman” who had secured “the love and lasting friendship of all Irishmen.” A letter noted to Banks that his resolution might even help the Republicans take New York, insofar as “all the Irish ask is an expression of sympathy; that being given, their leaders, who are already right, will be ready to break openly with the Democratic Party.” Banks’s bill provided that expression, showing that Republicans, “sympathize with [the Irish] in their patriotic purposes and endeavors.” Of course, Fenian disappointment mounted when a split between Republicans led the Senate to fail to act on the bill. Radical Republican Zacariah Chandler of Michigan tried to convince the Foreign Relations Committee to amend the nation’s neutrality laws even before Banks’s bill came up, but Charles Sumner of Massachusetts killed any such initiatives with inaction (though he shrewdly left Banks’s bill pending through the election). The Senate’s refusal to act prompted Roberts to remind Banks that if the Republicans eschewed their preelection promises of support, “our disappointment and chagrin would be intense.”50
Whether accurate or not, many contemporaries ascribed the Republican victory in the 1866 congressional elections to fluid Irish American political allegiance. In Massachusetts, a substantial portion of Irish Americans normally very loyal to the Democrats recognized the Republican stance on Fenianism and expatriation rights, and refrained from voting in the 1866 election. While this may not indicate a pervasive or permanent defection by Irish Americans into the Republican ranks, this behavior, in a state that had a potent nativist heritage, is surprising and significant. Some Irish American voters could not bear to vote Republican, but their abstention produced the same effect nonetheless. A Democratic leader in Rochester, New York, wrote Samuel J. Tilden that “we were beaten by the Fenian vote. We had the state by 25,000 majority if we had received our accustomed Irish strength,” while the defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidate, New York City mayor (and Fenian sympathizer) John T. Hoffman, declared that “it looks as if the Radicals have succeeded in capturing by their false statements a large number of Fenian votes and that accounts for our losses.” Hoffman learned his lesson and became more vocal in his pro-Fenian statements.51
Conclusion
Fenianism brought to the forefront postwar discussions of Irish American citizenship status. The movement served as a vehicle though which many Irish Americans, particularly those who served in the Civil War, further expressed their inclusion in the American polity and called for additional changes in American citizenship doctrine. In contrast to Know Nothingism’s halcyon days, Irish Americans now addressed the ethnic community and the broader public in open rallies, forging in the process a national constituency worthy of the attention of American political leaders. Irish Americans acted as citizens not only by gathering in public spaces but by asserting their wishes within the context of American political traditions.
Although an easier political mobilization than that of blacks, this moment proved similarly critical regarding legal change. The emergence of an Irish American national political bloc helped consummate inclusion in the American people, and it allowed this ethnic community to assert coherent arguments about changes it expected to be made to the legal concept of American citizenship. The experience of African American and Irish American political mobilization at this point also reveals a major contrast between the status of both groups during this period. African Americans at this time sought to attain even the right to vote, much less the political inclusion more readily granted to Irish Americans. This circumstance helps to explain why African Americans placed emphasis during this time on defining what rights national citizenship encompassed, along with the concepts of equality before the law, while Irish Americans focused on eliminating distinction between native-born and naturalized citizens but spoke less about what that citizenship meant in practice in the United States.
Fenian activism in the 1860s would have terrified nativists a decade earlier as an example of purported Irish American disloyalty, especially after the Brotherhood declared itself the Irish government in exile, invaded Canada, and flew a harp and sunburst flag outside its “capital” at the Moffat mansion near Union Square in New York City. Instead, the Fenian movement gained popularity with both the Irish American and native-born communities after the Civil War, even as it continued to highlight the dualities present in Irish America. Fenian activities afforded Irish Americans, whether members of the Brotherhood or not, an opportunity to demand that the United States provide equal protection to its citizens regardless of their naturalized status. Moreover, Fenianism allowed Irish Americans a way to more fully explore and engage in the egalitarian impulse of the Radical Republican movement, and helped blur, at least for some Irish Americans, racism against African Americans.52
In courting Fenianism for political and ideological reasons, both Democrats and Republicans recognized and affirmed the new location Irish Americans claimed for themselves within the American polity. Praising Irish American service, and agreeing that it consummated American citizenship, these leaders also accepted and publicized a new identity for members of this community: that of the guard of republican principles, even where this required them to ignore continuing Irish American racism against African Americans. Instead of viewing Fenians in particular, and Irish Americans in general, as a threat to the United States, as nativists had, American political leaders now publicly embraced the idea that Irish Americans acted as global leaders furthering a transnational republican movement with the United States located at its apex. These officials also joined with the Irish American community to demand equality of citizenship between naturalized and the native-born, something enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the end, the intense pressure applied by this ethnic community, supported by society at large, compelled the United States to more fully define what rights and protections naturalized American citizenship afforded. As another factor that fueled the increasing importance and definition of federal citizenship, the debate over expatriation rights precisely coincided with and influenced national consideration of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the movement reinforced the amendment’s principles even where it did not specifically discuss its language. While antebellum nativist elements sought to limit Irish American influence in politics, an Irish American–led movement now gained in widespread popularity. Irish Americans helped successfully motivate a major reconsideration of American citizenship doctrine and established themselves as a national political bloc in the process.
Yet, at the same time Americans considered the Fourteenth Amendment, Britain stood fast in its policy of indefeasible allegiance, and the meaning of naturalized citizenship abroad remained unresolved. Continued Fenian activities, and the pressure of Irish American activism, had the potential to cause a war or, in the alternative, force Britain and the United States to resolve their differences over expatriation rights once and for all. As naturalized citizenship became equalized to birthright citizenship as a legal concept in the United States, Irish Americans and the larger American community now turned to resolving its meaning abroad.