Bishop Patrick Lynch is an Irish-American who has been forgotten in his homeland. He was born in Fermanagh in March 1817, two years before his parents emigrated to the US with their children. The family settled in Cheraw, South Carolina, a locale still known as the prettiest town in Dixie. Bishop Lynch was ordained in 1840 and rose quickly through the ranks. He was a famously shrewd operator, both worldly-wise and ostentatiously God-fearing. After his appointment as Bishop of Charleston in 1857, he attained great wealth and power by becoming one of America’s most prominent slave traders.
Slave ownership was not an uncommon feature of diocesan administration in the deep south before the civil war. Eager to secure preferment in the afterlife, Catholic plantation owners often bequeathed their estates or parts of their estates to the church, so bishops were well used to managing large quantities of land, cash and human livestock.
What distinguished Bishop Lynch from other prelates was the fact that he augmented his ecclesiastical income by going into business for himself, buying and selling slaves for profit. The Lord helps those who help themselves.
There are probably some among us who will be surprised to discover that the Catholic Church and some of its senior clerics kept slaves. However, those who take their history lessons from Gerry Adams will be positively gobsmacked to learn that Irish people were beneficiaries of the slave trade. For much of the past week, the Sinn Fein leader has regaled the nation with a befuddled version of the American narrative in which the Irish experience and the black experience were presented as virtually identical.
Mr Adams made an international embarrassment of himself last Sunday with a spectacularly misjudged late-night tweet. He fired off the self-immolating missile while watching Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody revenge fantasy about a freed slave’s settling of scores with a sadistic Mississippi plantation owner.
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Mr Adams subsequently apologised for using the n-word, saying he had been stupid to do so. However, he said he stood by his central “political point” — that Catholics in Northern Ireland were treated like slaves. Over ensuing days, he gave several interviews in which he expanded on this thesis. Every time he spoke he compounded his original offence a thousandfold.
The contention that the injustices endured by Northern nationalists are in any way comparable to the degradations inflicted on African-American slaves does not withstand a moment’s scrutiny. Not surprisingly, therefore, Mr Adams endeavoured to broaden the scope of his musings. He conflated the taking of slaves from Africa with recurring waves of emigration from this country and drew parallels between the plights of Irish-Americans and African-Americans. He also spoke about his own natural affinity with black people. “I’ve never seen myself as white,” he declared.
Ill-founded claims about the large-scale enslavement of Irish people in the US have circulated for decades. Most of these claims arise from confusion about the difference between chattel slavery based on race and indentured servitude (the latter being an arrangement whereby migrants would agree to work for up to seven years in return for the cost of their voyage across the Atlantic). Indentured servitude was not a happy state but it was a far cry from slavery.
Liam Hogan is an Irish-American historian and expert on slavery. He has devoted considerable energy to refuting what he calls “the myth of Irish slaves”. Mr Hogan is exercised about the issue because this particular piece of historical revisionism has been gleefully promoted in America by white racists, in an attempt to counter growing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
One popular internet meme proclaims: “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the US. When is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching and moaning about how the world owes them a living?”
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Mr Hogan’s response to such rhetoric is unequivocal: “The exploitation and dehumanisation of African people by Europeans in the Americas has no analogy in Irish history and this fact should be respected.”
Mr Adams is not a political bedfellow of the racist American right. He embraces the Irish slave myth from the perspective of a doctrinaire republican who seeks to accentuate the wickedness of the British by exaggerating the blamelessness of the Irish. His garbled account of Irish-American history is a Disneyfied fairytale in which the exiled Irish made common cause with downtrodden Africans at every opportunity. The most conspicuous flaw in his argument is the blind eye he turns to the fact that many Irish-Americans were slave owners.
In the 17th century, most Europeans saw slaving as respectable and indeed righteous. The major Christian religions were more ambiguous about slavery than their modern-day spokespeople care to admit. The practice was frequently justified in polite society with reference to pro-slavery passages in the Bible. Irish immigrants who settled in the deep south, even those of relatively modest means, saw slave ownership as a legitimate route to success.
However, that’s far from the whole story. Influential Irish figures such as Daniel O’Connell and Father Theobald Mathew were high-profile anti-slavery campaigners. Some of the most effective supporters of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were Irish-American. Thousands of Irish and Irish-American people died on both sides of the civil war.
History is complicated. Irish republicans talk about Irish-Americans as though they were a single-willed entity with a uniform past. But, for every Irish-American who despised slavery, there was another who profited from it. As a community, Irish-Americans looked after their own, first and foremost. Their most common collective impulse was to exclude: to bar more recent immigrants and people of colour from jobs, unions and positions of authority.
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Unfortunately, republican propagandists are not alone in their refusal to accept that Irish-Americans have been victimisers as well as victims. The pious political lip service paid to the so-called diaspora — itself a vaguely religious term — has infected the version of history we tell ourselves and sell to tourists, many of whom of course just happen to be Irish-Americans.
Much of the commemoration surrounding the 1916 centenary has been marked by a new willingness among the Irish populace to look again at the history of the state, in all its light and shade. It’s high time we took a similarly rounded approach to the history of the diaspora. Contrary to what simplistic yarn-spinners like Mr Adams would have you believe, it is not a matter of black and white.