“Heirs of Freedom” or “Slaves to England”? Protestant Society and Unionist Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Ulster

Abstract

Drawing partly on Ulster Protestant emigrant correspondence and partly on new research in Irish religious demography, this article challenges
conventional (‘revisionist’) interpretations of the evolution of Ulster Protestant, especially Presbyterian, society and political culture, from Irish nationalism to British loyalism, in the half-century after the Irish Rebellion of 1798. It posits, for example, that Presbyterian nationalism and republicanism were not so much ‘naturally’ diluted in Ulster by industrialism, Orangeism, and evangelicalism as they were exported overseas, by mass migration to the USA, 1800-1850, and suppressed in Ulster by hegemonic and reactionary (and largely Anglican) systems and pressures, which many Presbyterians consciously rejected and, they believed, ‘escaped’ through emigration to an idealized American republic.