Book Review: Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865

Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865. By Ian Delahanty. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024. Paperback, 321 pp. $34.99.

Reviewed by Max Longley

The experience of Irish-Americans during the Civil War era is a subject that has received considerable scholarly attention over the years. However, in Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865, historian Ian Delahanty tackles a specific aspect of that line of study with new questions. Availing himself of previously untapped Irish soldiers’ letters home, private papers of abolitionists in Ireland, newspapers, and other primary source evidence, Delahanty shifts the focus away from the standard narrative. Previous studies often examined Irish-Americans’ opposition to the antislavery cause through the lens of the social, cultural, and economic conditions they experienced in America. After experiencing oppression themselves both in their native land as well as in America, why did Irish immigrants who settled in the American South so readily embrace slavery and those in the North often espouse militant anti-abolitionist and anti-Black sentiments? Delahanty seeks to explain the origins of this apparent paradox.

With his innovative questions and research, Delahanty traces out a narrative that looks not to exclusively domestic causes within the United States, but examines Irish-Americans as a self-conscious exile community, determined to end their native island’s oppression by England, while at the same time demonstrating loyalty to the United States. Irish-Americans enthusiastically kept up with events in Ireland by reading Irish newspapers (or articles in Irish-American newspapers) and through personal correspondence with friends and family that remained in Ireland. Monitoring the news kept them on the alert for opportunities to hopefully strike for freedom using the power of the United States against England. Before the war, this perspective manifested itself in hostility to abolitionists and antislavery advocates in general. England had become an abolitionist power in the 1830s, and to many Irish immigrants, the English were recruiting American abolitionists, wittingly or not, into a divisive and destabilizing attack on the unity of the United States via antislavery agitation.

This attitude permeated all classes of Irish immigrants before the Civil War, from the poverty-stricken Irish Famine settlers to the small, but growing professional classes. The standard account of Irish anti-Black sentiment, focusing on the competition between Blacks and Irish for low-wage jobs, wouldn’t explain why those who would be called “lace curtain Irish”—priests, editors, lawyers, etc.—shared in the hostility and applied it similarly. Events back in Ireland were key, Delahanty explains. Despite some abolitionist sentiment on the Emerald Isle itself—especially those in the camp of the “Liberator,” Daniel O’Connell—once the Irish got to America they often turned against abolitionists and Blacks because fighting over slavery would only divide the United States and make the Union weaker in a possible confrontation with England for Irish liberation. Many immigrants believed their adopted country had to remain strong for its own sake and in order to battle the ancient enemy.

When the Civil War broke out, the Irish split into different factions over the issue of preserving the Union. The Irish of the South supported their section, while the more numerous Irish of the North, maintaining their hostility to the antislavery movement, divided over whether the Confederates were a new treasonous threat to national unity. Those holding this view supported the war effort and often fought bravely in it against secession. In the war’s early stages, this did not entail supporting emancipation as a war measure, but as the war ground on, it altered the views of many.

Other Northern Irish were “Copperheads” who put all the blame for the war on Northern Republicans and abolitionists and called for a negotiated peace leaving slavery intact and the nation reunited. The infamous draft riots of 1863—much of it a pogrom against Blacks—can be viewed as the most extreme manifestation of anti-emancipationist sentiment, with the Irish police and soldiers who attempted to repress the rioters vividly illustrating the community’s internal conflicts.

As emancipation became a war aim, though, Irish-Americans kept joining the army, and their desertion rates actually decreased. This growing support may be related to the growth of the militant Fenian movement which favored an armed confrontation with England—many Irish Union soldiers thought their military experience might come in handy against England once the Confederates were defeated. But not only did many Irish keep supporting the war in spite of the Emancipation Proclamation, some, as evidenced in letters found by Delahanty, reconciled themselves, in more or less grudging degrees, to emancipation or even embraced it as a way to end the war and remove its causes. Some soldiers even supported Black service in the Union army, albeit as one soldier-author expressed this support in an offensive poem called “Sambo’s Right to be Kilt.”

The vision of an reunited America, freed from slavery, began appealing to some Irish-Americans. This may not have been based on a belief in racial equality, but on the view that a reunited and free America would be even more formidable than before when facing the English. Love of their new American home and a closely-linked hatred of England do more to explain this evolution of Irish views than generic progress in racial enlightenment, Delahanty seems to suggest.

Delahanty’s new evidence gives a transatlantic perspective to the story of Irish America in this period. He puts a good face on many Irish-Americans turning against slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation, seeing it as proof that, based on their interpretation of the needs of Irish liberation, as these converts were willing to set aside their previous cruel prejudices. Their conversions did not produce many racial egalitarians, but at least enrolled many Irish in the forces of liberation.