Tone and Russell travelled to Belfast on 10 October. The recently established mail coach from Dublin left from the Belfast Hotel in Capel Street at 10.30 three mornings a week. At £1. 16s. 3d. for an inside seat (five times the average weekly wage for a weaver), the fare was expensive and the journey long, taking until the following evening. Tone had cavilled at the expenditure involved when Russell invited him to attend the July celebrations, and throughout his two-week stay in October his journals reveal that characteristic consciousness of the cost of things. They arrived in Belfast on the evening of Tuesday, 11 October.

I

Belfast in 1791, with its population of 18,320, was small and intimate in comparison with Dublin. Whig Club members, Volunteers and United Irishmen shared the same membership, mixed socially and attended the same Presbyterian meeting houses. This was the middle-class capital of Ireland, and like many other towns in Ulster Belfast had a very Protestant aspect, which made English travellers feel at home. It was, according to Arthur Young, ‘a very well-built town of brick. The streets are broad and strait … lively and busy’. The town was dominated by its entrepreneurial business class and Tone found its members as animated about the loss of a new power loom to the town as about radical politics. Indeed all too often their enthusiasms were dictated by economic issues and their opposition to the American war owed as much to that war's closure of markets as to patriotism.

In 1791 Belfast was thriving. Its mill owners were passionate innovators, particularly in the field of new technology. The auction of John Haslett's Waring Street cotton factory in 1798 listed carding machines, spinning jennies and ‘a horizontal wheel for turning the machinery’ among its contents. In 1791 there were 695 looms operating in the town and by 1800 11 factories gave employment to 27,000 people within a ten-mile radius. Although cotton still dominated Belfast's economy, the damp climate and abundant streams tumbling from the Antrim plateau made it perfect for linen production and its hills were dotted with bleaching greens.