United Irishmen is the name generally given to the insurgents of 1798 (or 'Ninety-Eight), whether in Ulster, Leinster, Munster, or Connacht, in spite of the different character of the various uprisings in regard to leadership, motivation, and progress. Strictly speaking the term refers to a political society founded in Belfast in October 1791 by Samuel McTier and Robert Simms. Originally intended as a response to the continuing failure of the Irish Parliament to reform itself, the Society aimed at securing a measure of parliamentary reform, and for several years pursued its goal by constitutional means. It was hoped to unite all Irishmen in the pursuit of universal male suffrage; but despite the rapid establishment of a Dublin branch by Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell, the Society's early membership was drawn mostly from the Ulster Protestant community. In May 1794 the Dublin Society was included in the wave of proscription which was then afflicting most anti-government organizations. Following the disastrous revelation of the Government's ‘gradualist’ approach to Catholic Emancipation, the United Irishmen re-emerged as a secret, oath-bound, elaborately organized and centrally-directed body. It was now Republican in outlook and aimed to separate the two kingdoms. Connections were established with the Defenders [see secret societies], originally a clandestine Catholic defence organization. The chief episodes of the 1798 Rebellion as reflected in popular tradition began with the brutal attacks on Presbyterian Republicans by militia and the yeomanry unleashed by General Lake throughout east Ulster. An early victim of judicial murder was William Orr, whose hanging for sedition in Antrim on 14 October 1797 became the subject of a famous ballad by William Drennan. In Leinster the organization was counting on a rising of an estimated 300, 000 insurgents on 23 May, but the arrest of members of the Dublin Directory, including Lord Edward Fitzgerald, broke the chain of command. Martial law was declared on 30 March. In Co. Wexford, even though many Protestants joined the insurgents, the rising developed into a sectarian war with atrocities on both sides. The chief town fell to Fr. John Murphy of Boolavogue on 30 May. On 5 June, however, the insurgents under Bagenal Harvey were defeated at New Ross by British contingents led by Major-General Henry Johnson. The ruthless destruction of the insurgent remnant at Vinegar Hill, where Fr. Murphy and some 10, 000 rebels were encamped outside Enniscorthy on 21 June, epitomized for folk memory the fate of the Croppies—so-called because of the short hair-cut of French revolutionary activists—who faced muskets and ordnance with pikes and farming implements. During the ensuing reprisals Fr. Murphy was brutally flogged, beheaded, and burnt in pitch. In Ulster the insurgents were mainly Presbyterians in religion and Republicans in politics. Martial events began with an attack on Antrim town on 7 June, resulting in the capture of Henry Joy McCracken on Slemish Mountain and his execution by hanging in Belfast. In Co. Down Henry Monro led the insurgents at Saintsfield, and again in a pitched battle at Ballynahinch on 13 June. As in Wexford so in Co. Down: after the defeat of the insurgents, the militia and yeomanry indulged in several days of indiscriminate killing, with the connivance of General Lake. The final chapter of the 1798 Rebellion occurred in Mayo following the landing of French forces under General Humbert at Killala on 22 August. After an initial victory at the Races of Castlebar, when a large contingent of mixed British forces was ignominiously routed on 27 August, came the defeat of the 1, 000-strong French party with their Irish allies when General Cornwallis surrounded them at Ballinamuck. Some time later the Hoche was taken in Lough Swilly by the British navy, and Wolfe Tone arrested on board. His death by suicide in order to avoid hanging ended the ‘conspiracy’ of the United Irishman. Robert Emmet's Rising of 1803, conducted in the same political spirit, is traditionally regarded as a separate event, chiefly because the Anglo-Irish ascendancy was stampeded into passing the Act of Union in the interim. The large literature of the 1798 Rebellion begins with the patriotic ballads by weaver poets and others, to which may be added Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies and the commemorative poems that later appeared in The Nation, notably ‘Who Fears to Speak of '98' by J. K. Ingram, and ‘The Croppy’ by William McBurney (d. ?1902). R. R. Madden's Lives and Times of the United Irishmen (7 vols., 1842-6) and W. J. Fitzpatrick, in Lord Edward Fitzgerald and His Betrayers (1869) and Secret Service under Pitt (1892), were nationalist apologies for the rebels. The lives, loves, and betrayals of the insurgents became one of the most enduring themes of 19th and 20th cent. Irish literature.
Bibliography
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Appendix C) (1919) and James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (1983).
