IN EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY as in constitutional inflexion, Liverpool was the pivot of Irish politics in Britain. A cause of much concern to the authorities, there were persistent fears of violent disturbance and commercial catastrophe, in particular the destruction of shipping and warehouses, either in simultaneous support of a ‘rising’ in Ireland or as a diversion to hinder the despatch of troop reinforcements across the Irish Sea. The hub of the wider Irish diaspora, Liverpool was also the first point of contact for returning Irish-Americans with their ‘republican spirit and military science’. The source of funds and arms for separatist physical force endeavour, Irish America also supplied the requisite accentuated anti-British sentiment. ‘I have been speaking to persons recently returned from America who tell me that there is a very strong feeling of enmity amongst all classes of the Irish against the British Government’ one of the Dublin police officers stationed in Liverpool to keep watch on trans-Atlantic shipping reported: ‘That the emigration caused by eviction, the sufferings, deaths, and hardships during the voyage, the disappointments and heartburnings on the other side, are all laid to the charge of the Government ... for imaginary causes or otherwise a very bad feeling exists among the Irish.’

This chapter examines three episodes which illustrate the critical but changing nature of this American connection. The Confederates of 1848 were emboldened by the prospect of the arrival of an Irish Brigade from New York but waited in vain. As if by amends, Liverpool became the centre of operations for the ‘Irish-Yankee’ officers of the Fenian army, battle-trained in the American Civil War. These were the years of greatest anxiety for the authorities, their fears compounded by the increasing traffic in hazardous materials such as petroleum and ‘American Burning Fluids’, and the recent relaxation of old restrictions prohibiting the use of fire and lights on ships in port. Where Fenianism was an exercise in co-operation with considerable popular resonance throughout Irish Liverpool, the dynamite campaign of the 1880s was conducted by Irish-Americans in isolation, without the sanction or approval of the local Irish by then well attuned to electoral pursuit of Home Rule.

While the rich merchants of the Catholic Club chose not to deviate from constitutional (and Liberal) norms, others in the Liverpool-Irish enclave were drawn beyond the ‘moral force’ ways and means of Daniel O'Connell to support Ireland's cause.