Belfast's first bomb, 28 February 1816: class conflict and the origins of Ulster Unionist Hegemony

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2004 by Kerby A. Miller

How and why had this remarkable transformation occurred? How had Ulster's turbulent Protestant underclass been transformed into alleged exemplars of industry and deference? Put another way, how had Protestant Ulster's upper and middle classes, so beleaguered in the early 1800s, succeeded in forging a sense of pan-Protestant identity and community, characterized by unionist loyalties and bourgeois social norms, that usually transcended social and denominational divisions?

According to Rev. Henry Cooke and others, Belfast's and East Ulster's vaunted economic growth explained their Protestant inhabitants' contentment with both the union and elite rule, and their all-class unity in the face of Catholic nationalist agitation. But as we have seen, the North's prosperity was by no means widespread, even among Protestants. Another explanation for Protestant workers' apparent docility was put forth by Alexander Moncrieffe, a Belfast manufacturer, who in 1838 testified before a Parliamentary commission that "Catholic and Orange rivalries made trade unionism impossible and ensured a supply of cheap labor." (24) Yet Moncrieffe's assertion confuses cause and effect. It appears based on the assumption that Protestant-Catholic animosities were, if not primordial and inevitable, at least always sufficient in themselves to mitigate intracommunal class conflict and to ensure that poor Protestants would defer to the leadership and embrace the capitalist values of their wealthy co-religionists.

The processes by which Ulster's Protestant elites achieved socio-cultural and political hegemony over the Protestant poor may have been much more complex than either Cooke's or Moncrieffe's explanation implies. Indeed, it is likely that the construction of the "Ulster Unionist community" had many of its most important origins neither in shared Protestant prosperity nor in Protestant-Catholic strife (local or national), but rather in the upper- and middle-class resolutions of the class struggle revealed by the incident described in William Coyne's 1816 letter.

For example, in the early 1800s it was by no means certain that Ulster's predominantly Anglican upper class and its largely Presbyterian middle classes (themselves bitterly divided over contemporary political and religious issues, including the United Irishmen's legacy) could join to present a united front to their own subtenants and laborers. (25) Yet in the aftermath of the weavers' assault on Francis Johnson's home, Belfast's and East Ulster's gentry, magistrates, merchants, and manufacturers--Anglicans and Presbyterians, Whigs and Tories-united as "gentlemen" and mobilized their considerable resources against the workers' threat to property and order. (26) Surely this was not an isolated instance of such convergence. Given the prevalence of lower-class unrest and violence in the early 1800s, the mobilization of elite opinion, if not overt power, concerning class issues must have become semi-permanent and self-perpetuating, creating common interests and sympathies that could transcend other differences.