Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798

In recent years few events in Irish history have been the subject of more intense scrutiny than the 1798 rebellion. The bicentenary of the rebellion witnessed enormous academic and public interest, marked by an amazing variety of publications and events throughout Ireland and abroad. Two of the more impressive and important exhibitions were held by the major museums in Ireland: “Up in Arms” was presented by the Ulster Museum, while the National Library and National Museum organised the “Fellowship of Freedom” exhibition at the newly opened Collins Barracks site in Dublin. Kevin Whelan’s book was the “companion volume” to the Dublin exhibition. Combining images and text, the book examines the causes, course, and consequences of the rebellion. Chapters one to four explore the origins of the rebellion, stressing the impact of the American and French Revolutions, as well as the role of the United Irishmen and the government response in the 1790s. Chapters five and six present the rebellion in Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught. Chapters seven to nine are devoted to the aftermath and analyze the immediate consequences, notably the Act of Union and the historiographical debate about the rebellion. The final chapter, titled “The Materiality of Memory: Objects from the 1798 Exhibition,” consists of a series of photographs of artefacts drawn from the National Museum’s collections.

Whelan’s command of the sources ensures a compelling selection of texts, images, paintings, cartoons, maps, diagrams, and tables. The mix of image, primary source text, and commentary is cleverly used to present a multi-faceted approach to key issues. For example, dealing with the most important battle of the rebellion, the defeat of United Irish forces at Vinegar Hill outside Enniscorthy, Whelan deploys prose (a contemporary United Irish diary entry), song (a rebel parody of the loyalist classic “Croppies Lie Down”), a very useful map, and a range of images, including a rare contemporary depiction of a female rebel. Images are sometimes arranged for maximum impact: For instance, on page 16 an impoverished Catholic chapel and hedge school sit uneasily beside the commanding presence of the Irish Parliament on College Green in Dublin. Whelan makes excellent use of contemporary cartoons and caricatures. Humor is also present in a selection of ironic texts, notably the wonderful announcement, dated Cork, 27 July 1798, of the capture of Bonaparte following a naval engagement south of Malta and the inclusion of the brewer “Guinness” in an edition of Watty Cox’s scurrilous Union Star, in which he was offered “to public justice” as “an active spy.” Indeed, there is such a variety of images in this work that it is difficult either to summarise them or do them justice. The maps deserve special mention as models of their kind.

The book reflects recent shifts in 1790s historiography and integrates sections on such diverse issues as the role of women in Irish radicalism, the influence of freemasonry, the social thought of the United Irishmen, the impact of the United Irishmen abroad, and the post-’98 commemoration of the rebellion.  Historians like James Donnelly Jr., Nancy Curtin, and Whelan himself have emphasized the success of United Irish propaganda, and the visual emphasis allows the author to demonstrate this aspect of the 1790s. Startling examples include a political catechism written for children and the rosettes, cards, and rings designed to commemorate the death of the United Irishman William Orr. Of course, while the emphasis on the visual lends itself to the documenting of such unashamed propagandists as the United Irishmen, it threatens to minimise the importance of groups like the Defenders who left little in the way of visual (not to mention textual) evidence behind.  It should be pointed out, however, that the Defenders feature in Whelan’s text and he includes two very useful maps illustrating their geographical spread.

Recent debates about the 1790s have ensured that no overview could command complete approbation, and this work is no different. The narrative of the rebellion is rather traditional. The section on “The Rebellion in Leinster: The Mighty Wave” concentrates on the action in Wexford, devoting only three pages to events elsewhere in the province. (Indeed, the section is subtitled “The Heather Blazing,” which is a specifically Wexford reference.) There is no room for the Gibbet Rath Massacre outside Kildare town or the Battle of Ovistown in north Kildare, which marked key turning points in the north Leinster rebellion and claimed over four hundred rebel lives. Some of the diagrams are problematic and reduce complex and messy realities to simple patterns; that illustrating the structures of the Republic of Wexford—a subject of ongoing debate—is a case in point. There is one rather surprising error in the book. Beside a section of text on the massacre at Scullabogue one finds, not George Cruickshank’s iconic image of the event, but his depiction of the “Surprise of the Barracks of Prosperous” during which government troops were trapped inside a burning building in the early hours of the rebellion in County Kildare. Cruickshank’s famous Scullabogue image is reproduced later in the book, where Whelan discusses the historiography of 1798 and the recycling of the image by Irish unionists in the later nineteenth century.

One of Whelan’s main purposes in this book was to address a popular as well as an academic audience. He was particularly keen to underline the relevance of the 1790s for the late twentieth century. Indeed, it is no accident that one of the final sections of text is a quotation from the radical United Irishman James Hope: “History is only important while it is being made: what matters most is what you do today and tomorrow” (143). In this sense, Fellowship of Freedom is much more than a standard exhibition catalogue. Indeed, it could even be read as a kind of visual companion to Whelan’s thought-provoking collection of essays, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760-1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). Fellowship of Freedom provides a fascinating record of the way the rebellion was exhibited and interpreted two hundred years later. But if one thing became clear in the midst of academic and popular interest during the bicentenary year, it was that there was no academic (or, indeed, popular) consensus concerning the rebellion. The remarkable range and diversity of new research and opinion is reflected in the recently published collection of essays edited by Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, titled 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). The collection includes a series of commentaries by Kevin Whelan, which constitute his most recent contributions to the continuing debates about the United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion.