Or, Radical Reminders from a 19th Century Broadside Ballad
Figure 1: Notre Dame’s Copy of “The Fenian Men” – Title Harp Illustration
Within Hesburgh Libraries’s Special Collections, a page of 19th century Irish song rests in 21st century American quiescence. “The Fenian Men” is one of many Irish ballads owned by the university, one of many romantic narratives entrenched in the geography of Ireland: “from the Nore, from the Suir, / and the Shannon” (“Irish Broadside Ballads”). As the song unfolds, however, this initial insular rootedness transmutes into a global call for Irish solidarity against despotic overclasses: “Let the tyrant come forth, we’ll bring force / against force…From East to the West, from the South / to the North, / Irish men! (“Irish Broadside Ballads”). One may notice how the ballad does not pronounce “to the east, west, south, and north of just Ireland.” The narrative insinuates the existence of far-reaching Irish partisans. Outwardly, “The Fenian Men” is a ballad of rebellion, a call to arms for those living on the island of Ireland, and a warning to imperialists living on the island of Britain. But, further investigation into the ballad’s publishing history and its diasporic syntax reveals a distinctly international, and decidedly modern, outlook regarding Irish identity in the last half of the 19th century. By expanding Irish imageries and personas beyond the bounds of Ireland proper, “The Fenian Men” depicts the Irish as a transnational population in total opposition to oppressive regimes on both sides of the Atlantic, specifically the British Empire and the plantocracy that was the Confederate States of America, a portrayal that is not completely veracious. The ballad’s complicated beginnings in the mid-19th century, however, do not diminish its current relevance or underlying revolutionary import. “The Fenian Men” is a radical text, one that contemporary persons who think of themselves as the “Fightin’ Irish” must critically interrogate in order to embody responsibly.
Notre Dame’s Special Collections trace many of their Irish broadside ballads back to the Dublin printer P. Brereton; they estimate the pieces were created between 1860 and 1876 (“Irish Broadside Ballads”). However, Hesburgh archivists also acknowledge that many of their pieces may originate from elsewhere. After preliminary review, “The Fenian Men” appears to be one of these uncertain cases. While it is difficult to exactly determine where Notre Dame’s copy of “The Fenian Men” was first published, multiple sources affirm transatlantic crossing as essential to the popularization of nationalistic Irish ballads in Ireland and abroad. Both the Library of Congress and the Bodleian Libraries record New York City’s H. De Marsan as a publisher of “The Fenian Men,” Bodleian noting that the ballad’s creation date was likely around 1860 (“The Fenian Men”, “V8282”). According to Georgetown University’s Special Collections, “The Fenian Men” was included within the American Song Sheet Collection, “a relatively cohesive group of 234 song sheets published in the United States (and principally in New York, by de Marsan) in the 1850s and during the early years of the Civil War…of principal note are the fairly large number of songs dealing with the immigrant Irish or their native land” (“American Song Sheet Collection”). Dan Milner’s The Unstoppable Irish also corroborates the timeline of Georgetown’s records: “Broadsides were common in Ireland between 1760 and 1920 but enjoyed greatest popularity there between 1780 and 1870…Such songs were occasionally printed in Manhattan; for example, publisher H. De Marsan…Broadsides were published in New York as early as colonial times but enjoyed a shorter heyday (1850–70)” (19). Scholars across several institutions note De Marsan as an important purveyor of pro-Irish broadsides, but close reading of “The Fenian Men” also reminds one of the ample Irish audience on the other side of the Atlantic.
Notre Dame’s copy of “The Fenian Men” could very well be an American product, but typographical inspection suggests the possibility of different printers, and ergo, unconfirmed origins:
Figure 2: Scan of the Bodleian Library’s De Marsan copy vs. Notre Dame’s copy of “The Fenian Men”
Upon examination of “The Fenian Men” printed by De Marsan and Notre Dame’s copy, one’s eye is drawn to De Marsan’s emphatic “IRISH LAND, IRISH MEN…” (“V8282”). Notre Dame’s example does not feature this assertive capitalization, a textual expression which exudes the Irish-American pride De Marsan imbued into their ballads. Milner notes that “there is no subtlety” in De Marsan’s Irish-centric material, a collection of songs which gave voice to the exploited Irish populace of 19th century America, ballads which employed “ever louder and angrier” Irish nationalist rhetoric to argue for a more democratically inclusive and economically just polity (109). Moreover, the printed iconography of the Bodleian and Notre Dame examples also offer separate national images. Consider the visual frames of three patriotic, pro-Union De Marsan ballads:
Figure 3: Visual Snippets of “Columbia’s Greatest Glory,” “Our Native Land,” and “The Charge at Roanoke”
All are distinguished by signifiers of Americana: decorative stars, stripes, and banners (“‘Columbia’s Greatest Glory!’”, “‘Our Native Land’”). The artwork of “The Charge at Roanoke” is particularly notable. Published by De Marsan two years after “The Fenian Men,” it recycles its predecessor ballad’s design:
Figure 4: Visual Snippet of “The Fenian Men”
Differing from Notre Dame’s copy with its recognizably Hibernian harp symbol (see Figure 1), De Marsan establishes a conspicuous link between “The Fenian Men” and “The Charge at Roanoke,” between Ireland and America, a link with martial historical grounding (“V11104”). Throughout the Civil War, Irish soldiers proved to be consistent recruits for the Union Army; The Battle of Roanoke Island was no exception to this trend of battle. As recorded by Zatarga, Admiral Louis Goldsborough, a principal naval leader of the Union assault on Confederate Roanoke Island in February of 1862, personally chose “Captain Stephen V. Rowan, a fifty-seven-year-old Irish-born curmudgeon,” who possessed a “sharp eye and rapier wit,” to descend upon the Southern rebels (74). Ultimately, Rowan’s tactical cunning helped secure Union victory: “Rowan’s ships tracked down Lynch’s Mosquito Fleet at Elizabeth City and, in a short battle, destroyed the last vestiges of Confederate naval power in North Carolina…As planned, the victory laid bare North Carolina’s interior to Burnside’s troops” (Zatarga 161). De Marsan’s mingling of American Unionism and Fenian anti-imperialism encourages one to understand “The Fenian Men” as both a work of Irish nationalism and diasporic Irish-American integrationism, an interlinkage that present-day socialists must both learn from and consider with firm skepticism. The progressive march of liberty celebrated by “The Fenian Men” and “The Charge at Roanoke” only partially recollects the historical reality of the Irish nationalist response to the evil of slavery.
It is more than reasonable to state that Irish soldiers were a robust branch of the Union Army, pivotal regiments that aided in the dissolution of American chattel slavery. But, it is vital to recall that Irish nationalists and American abolitionists were not unilaterally aligned. In reality, they were often in trenchant conflict. Gleeson records that “leaders of Irish nationalist opinion became tired of the reports of casualties, especially among Irish units in the Union army, who were, as one put it ‘shedding their blood for an alien cause’” (627-628). Many Irish and Irish-American politicians of the era were explicitly more anti-war than they were anti-slavery. Other prominent Irish nationalists vehemently upheld white supremacy and Christian chauvinism, professing the falsehood that “‘the American slave system is a civiliser and a Christianiser, because it has taken the negroes out of utter savagery and heathenism in Africa, and brings them to the knowledge of civilization and the Gospel in America,’” a belief which, with disheartening irony, echoes ideological justifications the British Empire used to legitimize its violent expansion in Ireland and across the Global South (qtd in Gleeson 629). Concisely, the Irish of the American Civil War years were not unanimously progressive or unconditionally allied with enslaved African peoples.
Despite its glaring historical obfuscations, “The Fenian Men” expresses a vision of revolutionary internationalist Irishness that the Fightin’ Irish of 2023 should aim to salvage. In order to achieve this recovery, Irishness must be disentangled from the racial consciousness of American whiteness, an intertwinement that tightened in the Civil War period, in the aftermath of The Great Famine. Many studies of 19th-century Irish fiction, both its North American and native forms, center on how diasporic famine narratives were essential to the ethnocultural construction of 19th and early 20th-century Irish identity. According to Corporaal, late 19th-century Irish fiction transitions “from an idealization of the homeland from which the trauma of Famine has to be dispelled to a stronger focus on New Irelands that can be established in North America,” Irish identity becomes “multidirectional…employed in different sociopolitical and cultural settings” (224-225, emphasis mine). The lack of absolute geographic specificity in the conclusive lines of “The Fenian Men” similarly conveys this multidirectionality, opening Fenian fervency to Irish populations across the world.
The voice of the ballad asks, “Sons of Old Ireland now, / Love ye your sireland now? / Come from the Kirk, from the Chapel / and Glen” (“Irish Broadside Ballads”). The admission that Old Ireland reproduces is fascinating; the ballad acknowledges New Irelands, New American Irelands, with their own kirks, chapels, and glens. During the mid-to-late 19th Century, popular American folk songs and ballads persistently strove to join Irish mettle and American battle. “The Fenian Men” may not explicitly describe Irish involvement in the Civil War, but its American publishing plausibly reinforces what Bateson deems “an ethnic military identity,” an Irishness marked by the “transnational cultural heritage” of military prowess (119). The resonance of “The Fenian Men” in both Ireland and the United States evidences the revisioning of the Irish people as a transatlantic body and the extension of the Fenian ethos from the homeland to the immigrant Irish, a historical development which contributed to the end of American slavery but did not abolish the larger racialized class society which propagates capital. Nelson argues that American whiteness extinguished the radical potential of late 19th Century Irish America, an enclave that eventually refused “‘to go directly against the American white supremacist racial grain,’” to unite with “‘a despised and powerless race,’” and to reject “‘the holy grail of white identity’” (qt in Gleeson 623). The text and tune of “The Fenian Men” signify these revolutionary and reactionary historical currents, fights the Fightin’ Irish fought and fights the Fightin’ Irish refrained from fighting. Further cultural materialist analysis can detail how this uneasy dichotomy functions and can offer methods of preserving the fundamental revolutionary meaning of the ballad.
Raymond Williams would consider the tensions of “The Fenian Men” to be endemic to the whole of Anglophone popular art. As he writes in Culture & Materialism:
Thus we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, and even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture. This has been much underemphasized in our notions of a superstructure, and even in some notions of hegemony. And the underemphasis opens the way for a retreat to an indifferent complexity. In the practice of politics, for example, there are certain truly incorporated modes of what are nevertheless, within those terms, real oppositions, that are felt and fought out. Their existence within the incorporation is recognizable by the fact that, whatever the degree of internal conflict or internal variation, they do not in practice go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant definitions (62).
The shifts of countercultural movement and the subsuming power of capital mediate popular culture and all of its constituent genres. For example, “The Fenian Men” demonstrates how the zeal of revolutionary Irish nationalism was channeled and redirected, only to be eventually tapered, during the American Civil War. Or, as Bateson notes, “Irish American Civil War songs articulated patriotic allegiance to the nation through singing about how the diaspora shared in the ideals of liberty, democratic republicanism, and freedom,” ideals that were not necessarily deemed racially universal by not unnoticeable numbers of Irish politicians and partisans. Irish-American integrationism, or assimilative American whiteness, and its defeat of Irish internationalism, is a failure of solidarity that today’s Fightin’ Irish must aspire to remedy.
When the nationalist persona of “The Fenian Men,” declares “Side by side for this cause have our fore- / fathers battled- / When our hills never echoed the tread of a / slave–/ In many a green field where leaden hail / rattled, / Through the red gap of glory they march– / ed to the grave,” they appear to solely invoke the history of Ireland. But we, as contemporary students, do not need to learn from the text so rigidly, so exclusively. Following Williams, we can detect revolutionary, universal knowledge in seemingly reactionary, insular declarations. When dissecting multifaceted artworks like “The Fenian Men,” we must “look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice…we should find ourselves attending first to the reality of their practice and the conditions of the practice as it was then executed” (Williams 74). We are aware that the late 19th-early 20th century Irish-America acquiesced to racial caste. By comprehending the compromised solidarity of Irish political organizations, we can properly review “The Fenian Men” and use it to revisit what it means to be a Fightin’ Irish in the now.
With only a few minor, but discernible, tweaks, De Marsan was able to recontextualize “The Fenian Men” as both an Irish and Irish-American rallying cry. Contemporary students, scholars, artists, and radicals must continue to increase the decibels of this proletarian yawp. Irishness, as in a drive to combat the compounded oppressions that stabilize capitalism, need not be tethered to the blanched racecraft of surname. As Notre Dame students, we are meant to embrace the Irish legacies purportedly foundational to Domerdom. And so, we should pursue an improved practice of Irishness: not “Fenian Men,” but “Post-Fenian Workers,” a clan populated by people of all races, sexualities, genders, and bodies. Together, this multitude can secure the victory, the truly liberated world, “The Fenian Men” described over a century ago:
“Down with all faction old!
Concert and action bold” (“V8282”).
Works Cited
“American Song Sheet Collection.” Georgetown University Archival Resources, findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories/15/resources/10145. Accessed 12 Sept. 2023.
Bateson, Catherine V. “Irish American Loyalty and Identity in Civil War Songs.” Irish American Civil War Songs, LSU Press, 2022, pp. 190-218.
Bateson, Catherine V. “Lyrical Cultural Identity.” Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. Louisiana State University Press, 2022, pp. 113-133.
“‘Columbia’s Greatest Glory!’” Bodleian Libraries, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/4587. Accessed 13 Sept. 2023.
Corporaal, Marguérite. “Conclusion.” Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846-1870, Syracuse University Press, 2017, pp. 221–26.
“‘The Fenian Men’. H. De Marsan, Publisher, 60 Chatham Street, N. Y.” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/amss.as201000.0/?loclr=blogloc. Accessed 10 Sept. 2023.
Gleeson, David T. “Failing to ‘Unite with the Abolitionists’: The Irish Nationalist Press and U.S. Emancipation.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 37, no. 3, 2016, pp. 622–37.
“‘The Irish Brigade,’ and ‘The Fenian Men’, circa 1860.” Hesburgh Libraries , archivesspace.library.nd.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/1055331. Accessed 12 Sept. 2023. “Irish Broadside Ballads .” Hesburgh Libraries , archivesspace.library.nd.edu/repositories/3/resources/1644. Accessed 12 Sept. 2023.
Milner, Dan. The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783–1883. University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.
“Our Native Land!” Bodleian Libraries, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/4707. Accessed 13 Sept. 2023.
“V8282.” Bodleian Libraries, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/4327. Accessed 11 Sept. 2023.
“V11104.” Bodleian Libraries, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/4277. Accessed 12 Sept. 2023. Zatarga, Michael P. The Battle of Roanoke Island: Burnside and the Fight for North Carolina. History Press 2015.