Research Symposium

BIO

Lauren Cavanagh is an first-year, honors student pursuing a Bachelor of English with a minor in Humanities. Her on-and-off campus involvements include being an editor on the Kudzu Review, creative writing, literary research, and volunteering at the local animal shelter. Currently, she intends to become a professor of literature.

Fighting Irish in Florida: Irish Allegiances during the Revolutionary War

Abstract

Irishness is often mistaken to be a monolithic identity. Standing as proof against this reductive mold of nationality, the American Revolution reveals that a diverse set of motivations drove the Irish during the war. Consequently, I, along with Dr. Benjamin Gunter, study whether the Irish utilized the Revolutionary War as a battleground to articulate their sentiments about British intrusion. Figures like Oliver Pollock—an increasingly famous financier of the fight for independence—and Mary O'Brien Pollock are paradigmatic of the Irish instinct for resistance; the Volunteers of Ireland led by Colonel Lord Rawdon, conversely, represent alignment with the British cause. I practice a speculative approach, extrapolating from primary and secondary documents, but I redirect attention to disregarded settings of the war: Florida and Louisiana. By crafting case studies and using emblematic primary documents related to each figure, insight is gained about the peripheral forces that intensified American rebellion. Further, my findings substantiate that revolutions do not occur in a vacuum: foreign actors beyond the insurgent nation-group and the oppressive nation-group intervene inconspicuously, yet effectively. The Irish revolt did not begin in 1916 during the Easter Rising. Over a century prior, they had been expressing their fury through the mask of the American Revolutionary War, a clash that fed the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Although their efforts would not succeed domestically till 1922, the Irish characters left an indelible mark during the fight for independence in the United States—one best remembered when properly understood.

Keywords: Ireland, American Revolution, History