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

Equally important is that after 1800 a re-formed Ulster Protestant elite could no longer rely solely or even primarily on its own legal and military resources to confront lower-class insubordination, because after the union statutory power and its enforcement were centered in London and Dublin Castle. To be sure, members of the Ulster Protestant gentry and magistracy often chafed at British reforms that, by professionalizing the Irish legal and policing systems, reduced their autonomy and increased their dependence on British authority. In the crisis of the early 1800s, however, when it appeared that "commercial good order" teetered on the brink of collapse, their own spokesmen cried out for strong, effective action that could emanate only from Westminster and Dublin. Thus, in late 1816 the Belfast News-Letter's exasperated editor announced that, since "declarations, resolutions, and subscriptions have been tried and found unavailing[, new] energy must be infused, [new] measures must be matured and acted upon to reclaim the misguided multitude." If landlords and manufacturers could not convince their tenants and workers by traditional means of "the illegality of their proceedings, ... stronger [methods] will have to be resorted to"; for otherwise, he warned, "the turbulent [will only] become more audacious." (27)

In short, Ulster's Protestant upper and middle classes were obliged not only to unite but also to rely heavily on the coercive mechanisms of the post-union British state to regain authority over their refractory inferiors. In the process, they inevitably developed a community of interest both among each other and with the union that was now their first and last reliance in their efforts to tame the nocturnal armies of "idle vagabonds" who assailed them. (28) For the union protected Irish Protestants, generally, by submerging Ireland's Catholics in a British Protestant majority. At least equally important, it protected propertied Irish Protestants against Protestant "men of no property" by merging the interests of the smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable Irish elite with those of Britain's ruling classes--then perhaps the most dynamic and powerful in the world.

Unlike Ireland's Catholic elites, who felt alienated and betrayed when denied their promised Emancipation for three decades after 1800, propertied Protestants soon enjoyed every reason to be loyal to a British government that long proved able, in Ireland and Britain alike, to protect essential upper-class privileges, to placate middle-class (Protestant) demands, and to suppress or neutralize lower-class challenges. For seventy years after the Act of Union, Westminster denied Ulster farmers' every plea for the legalization of tenant-right, passing instead a series of subletting acts and other laws that augmented landlords' authority over their tenants. Ulster's manufacturers were no doubt equally gratified, as in 1803, for example, when Parliament legislated for Ireland a special anti-combination act, the terms of which were "decidedly harsher" than either the earlier laws passed by the Irish Parliament or the post-union acts that applied only to British workers. (29) In addition, the union's alliance of Irish and British property buttressed Ulster's Protestant elite in its class-biased interpretation and enforcement of both those and ordinary laws. Thus, in late 1816, only a few months after the two weavers were hanged in Belfast for bombing Francis Johnson's home, John McCann, a manufacturer in Lisburn, was acquitted of murdering his employee, Gordon Maxwell, the leader of the muslin weavers' union, on Belfast's Malone Road, despite Maxwell's dying declaration that McCann was his killer. And of course it was ultimately by British authority that thousands of convicted Irishmen and women were transported to the Australian penal colonies-nearly six thousand between 1825 and 1835 alone--many of them for violating the combination acts. (30)