Ireland, America and nationalism during the war

By 1854, nationalism in Ireland was, in the view of some former Young Irelanders, future Fenians and even elements of the contemporary nationalist press, ‘dead’, or at least ‘asleep’. Debate exists as to whether or not constitutional and militant nationalism failed to offer an answer or a remedy to the Irish famine from 1845 to 1851. However, what is clear is the extent to which apathy developed towards both movements in the early and mid-1850s. As was noted in Chapter 1, during this period many former agitators and nationalists (Repealers) turned back towards Liberalism and the Liberal Party (with some turning their hand, at least briefly, towards agrarian and religious issues). Those men turned away from, and in some cases simply suppressed or buried, their nationalist tendencies, rhetoric and policies to such an extent that they became all but indistinguishable from their Scottish, English and Welsh political counterparts during the war. On the other hand, by the time the war broke out many of those who had advocated armed conflict in 1848 and 1849 were exiled, incarcerated or keeping a low profile, or had emigrated or simply abandoned the concept altogether. The endeavours of the Confederates – militant nationalists – in 1849 had left behind a network of secret clubs, which stretched from Dublin to Cork and incorporated all the major towns of counties Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford. However, by 1854, only a skeleton nationalist organisation remained, comprising two definitive nuclei, Kilkenny and Dublin, with Dublin being the greater of the two. Yet the famine, and the efforts of the authorities, before and after the Balligarry debacle in 1848, through the Treason-Felony Act, packed juries, a host of trials, troop concentrations and the dispatching of warships, ensured that the ideals of militant nationalism and Young Ireland were scattered far beyond Ireland, finding fertile ground across the Atlantic Ocean, in America. Thus, it is there that one must look to find the origins of Ireland's nationalist response to the Crimean War.