FOREWORD
Iwas delighted to be asked to provide a foreword for Paisanos, this attractive, important and, I believe, necessary volume on the role played by Irish men and women in the emergence of the new, modern and independent republics of Latin America. The story of historic Irish migrations to Latin America – of Irish service, military and administrative – is known by most only in its broad lines. This valuable piece of scholarship will do much to help redress the balance by introducing to an Irish audience lives that are revered all over Latin America. It will help to bring out the texture, colour and personality of the Irish and those of Irish descent in Spanish-speaking America and the part they played in the establishment of republics throughout the continent.
I would like to pay tribute to the author of Paisanos, Tim Fanning, for the depth and breadth of his research, and to Conor McEnroy, who encouraged and assisted him in this endeavour. Conor, along with Michael Lillis and Justin Harman, the Irish ambassador in Buenos Aires, are Irishmen who today are seeking to bridge the Atlantic, bringing Ireland and Latin America closer together, by encouraging work such as this.
Latin America and the course of its political and economic development have occupied a special place in my own heart for over fifty years. During the course of my political and academic career, I have been privileged to witness the conflicts, struggles for human rights and, above all, the generous heart of this continent. It is a region I have journeyed to twice as president of Ireland, visiting, at their invitation, six countries, from Chile at its southern tip, through Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador and Costa Rica, up to Mexico at the northern frontier where English and Spanish-speaking America meet.
This book starts with exile and those exiled, the Wild Geese. In a year dedicated to recalling the founding moments of our Irish independence, when we are asked to fine-tune in an ethical and inclusive way our use of memory, to encounter complexity afresh, it is so appropriate that we pause to discover the contribution made to world history by those exiled Irish men and women, who, after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 and the punitive laws of the eighteenth century against their religion, settled in Spain and France and moved to the centre of the international conflicts of the day. Their children would go on to deliver the ideas of the Enlightenment under royal patronage as engineers, administrators, cartographers and geographers in Spanish colonies across the world. And their children’s children in turn would see the prospects, sow the seeds and deliver the reality of independence from the Spanish Empire, engaging in all the essential conflicts and adjustments that resulted.
I had the great honour, during an official visit to Chile in 2012, of laying a wreath at the monument to Chile’s great liberator, Bernardo O’Higgins. Bernardo’s father, Ambrose O’Higgins, was born in County Sligo to a modest farming family and went on to become mayor of Concepción, governor of Chile and later viceroy of Peru, the highest office in South America in colonial times. Among the many interesting historical asides in the book, I was intrigued to learn that he introduced the prefix ‘O’ to his surname later in life in order to strengthen his claim to a Spanish noble title. Ambrose is remembered in Chile for his great achievement in abolishing the encomienda, the system of forced labour and dependency for indigenous people that was imposed by the Spanish crown during the colonial period.
However, as the book notes, Ambrose was, fundamentally, an unflinching royalist and an austere and conservative administrator for the Spanish Empire. How remarkable, then, that Bernardo O’Higgins, the son of this loyal servant of the Spanish crown, went on to become one of the greatest exponents of pan-American revolution and liberal republicanism.
Beyond the great historical figures like Bernardo O’Higgins and Admiral William Brown, whose names are remembered in the streetscapes of the great cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago, Tim Fanning has succeeded in bringing to light the stories of lesser-known figures, such as Francis Burdett O’Connor and Daniel Florence O’Leary, both Corkmen, who served as senior officers in the armies of Simón Bolívar.
This book is valuable in bringing the story of Ricardo Wall to a wide audience. How a French-born man of Irish descent became, at the age of 60, chief minister of the Spanish government until he resigned in 1763 is one of the great stories of intrigue of the eighteenth century. How he employed other goslings of the Wild Geese in the administration of European relations with America is recalled today in South America while it gets insufficient attention perhaps in Ireland.
Paisanos also explores the famous Irish battalion, the San Patricios. On my official visit to Mexico in 2013, I had the opportunity to pay tribute to the Irish soldiers of the Batallón de San Patricio, who gave their lives for Mexican independence during the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. These Irishmen were fleeing poverty and famine in their homeland for a better life in the New World but they had no hesitation in showing their solidarity with the Mexican people in their hour of need, creating what I described at the time as ‘an unbreakable link’ between the two countries, which happily still exists today.
The relationship between Ireland and Latin America draws on our shared history of struggle against colonialism. At the same time that Irish patriots were challenging the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain in the late eighteenth century, an emerging sense of nationhood was taking shape in Spain’s American colonies. That the modern-day Latin American republics came into being in the early part of the nineteenth century was in no small part thanks to the contribution, in their different ways, of Irish men and women, many of whom were driven by their forefathers’ experience of oppression and dreams of liberty for their homeland. In a coincidence of timing, 2016 is not only the centenary of the 1916 Rising in Ireland but also the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence in Argentina at the Congress of Tucumán. It is a fitting occasion to examine the role played by Irish men and women in the fight for independence at home and abroad.
In this well-researched volume, Tim Fanning highlights the many ways in which the Irish left their stamp on the history of the modern Latin American republics and, conversely, how Irish advocates of home rule such as Daniel O’Connell were inspired by the heroes of Latin American independence, such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins. And indeed it was an Irish-Argentine born in Buenos Aires, Éamon Bulfin, who raised the tricolour above the General Post Office during Easter Week 1916, which goes to show that history is no respecter of borders.
They are all here, those who allied themselves with, differed from, reconciled, shared love and dreams: the Paisanos.
In this year of commemorations, it is appropriate, finally, that the author has reminded us of how the Irish were, and continue to be, remembered in Latin America. It is vital that we cherish the ‘unbreakable link’ between the peoples of Ireland and Latin America, and what better way to do this than to further explore our common history. As the author points out, while a good literature serves this history in the Spanish language, there is not a comparable literature available in English. This fine book is a welcome contribution to that literature on the history of our exiles and their descendants to which, without hesitation, I suggest we need to pay so much more attention. Tim Fanning gives us a great help in that regard with an exciting and accessible book that is a pleasure to read.
MICHAEL D. HIGGINS
UACHTARÁN NA HÉIREANN
PRESIDENT OF IRELAND
26 APRIL 2016
The contribution of the Irish to the development of the English-speaking part of the Americas has been well documented; less well known is the role Irish men and women played in the modern history of Spanish-speaking America. While the names of William Brown and Bernardo O’Higgins are not unknown in Ireland, and are indeed celebrated, these tend to be thought of as exceptions rather than as the most famous names in a long list of characters, both Irish-born and of Irish heritage, who were pivotal in the transformation of the Spanish colonies in the Americas into modern republics.
The principal reason why the Irish contribution to the achievement of independence in Latin America is not better known is the language barrier. Countless books in Spanish have been published in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, Montevideo, Asunción and Bogotá about the Irish heroes of national independence. There are only a few notable exceptions in English.
The second reason is cultural. We know from the cinema and television about the Old West, the gold rushes, the American Civil War, tenement life in nineteenth-century New York and the Kennedys; our knowledge of modern Latin American history is hazier, often translated for us by the Anglo-American eyes of Hollywood.
However, the story of those Irish who came to Latin America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is no less interesting than that of their cousins in the United States and Canada. Many of them did not go directly to Spanish America from Ireland or England but through Spain. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Irishmen occupied key positions in the Spanish military and political administration. They were emigrants who had escaped political and religious persecution in Ireland for a new life on the continent. Most of them began their careers as soldiers or merchants, using their talents to secure enviable and lucrative jobs in Spain and its American colonies. Born in France to Irish Jacobite exiles, Richard Wall became Spain’s prime minister in 1754. Ambrose O’Higgins was the son of small farmers from County Sligo who emigrated to Cádiz in southern Spain and rose to become the viceroy of Peru, the highest-ranking colonial official in the whole of the Spanish Empire. Wall and O’Higgins were among the Irishmen (for they were nearly all men, women then being excluded from high office by legal and social barriers) who helped govern the enormous Spanish Empire.
The children and grandchildren of Irish emigrants to Spain in the eighteenth century also feature on the list of illustrious names in the history of Latin American independence. The most famous is Ambrose O’Higgins’s son, Bernardo O’Higgins, who led the fight against the Spanish in Chile and became one of the first leaders of the independent republic.
Though not born in Ireland, these soldiers, merchants and diplomats of Irish ancestry, born in Spain or Latin America, retained a strong feeling for the homeland of their ancestors. The title of this book, Paisanos, is a Spanish word that roughly translates as ‘fellow-countrymen’ or ‘compatriots’. Members of the Irish community in Spain and Latin America used this word to describe themselves and their Irish-born family and friends. It encapsulates that feeling of Irishness that was shared by those of common ancestry in Spain and its American colonies before, during and after the wars of independence.
Ramón Power y Giralt is a good example of how Irish communities could retain a sense of shared ancestry while adopting new identities. Power was the son of a Basque of Irish ancestry who emigrated to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century. The Powers were part of an Irish community of rich planters. Like the children of many rich criollos – those of Spanish descent born in the Americas – Ramón was sent to Spain to be educated. He served as an officer in the Spanish navy before returning to Puerto Rico. In 1810 he was elected Puerto Rico’s delegate to the Cádiz Cortes, the national assembly that sprang up in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Not only did he win important economic concessions for Puerto Rico, he played a central role in redefining the wider relationship between Spain and its American colonies. In the process he helped forge a Puerto Rican national identity and is today regarded as one of the nation’s founding fathers.
The story of the Irish in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world – the first part of this book – provides the context for the revolutionary period – the second part – during which Irish-born volunteers travelled to Latin America from Irish and English ports to fight in the patriot armies under the command of Simón Bolívar. Irishmen such as William Brown, Peter Campbell, John Thomond O’Brien, Francis Burdett O’Connor, Daniel Florence O’Leary, James Rooke, Arthur Sandes and Thomas Charles Wright are still remembered in South America for the part they played in the liberation of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela from Spanish rule. All of them served as senior officers, and two of them, O’Connor and O’Leary, wrote memoirs that became important sources for historians researching the revolutionary period. While they are justly celebrated, there were thousands of other Irishmen who fought for independence in Spanish America who are all but forgotten, not least because some of them have gone down in the annals of history as English. Not only were there a self-styled Hibernian Regiment and Irish Legion but also the majority of the officers and enlisted men who fought in what became known as the British Legions were Irish.
The Irish were present at all the major battles that were fought by Simón Bolívar, the leader of the independence movement in the northern part of South America, during the campaigns that transformed Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from Spanish colonies into independent republics. But because the whole island of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and neither the sources nor the histories discriminated between the nationalities of that state, the Irishmen who fought for the independence of the South American republics were often referred to as ingleses.
They fought for different reasons. Some had no money and needed to make a living; others felt the call of adventure. And then there were those, such as Francis Burdett O’Connor, who travelled to Venezuela as a member of the ill-fated Irish Legion and later played a prominent role as a senior staff officer in Bolívar’s campaigns in Peru and Bolivia, who drew parallels between the colonial experience of Latin America and Ireland.
The great hero of Catholic Emancipation and advocate of Irish home rule, Daniel O’Connell, drew inspiration from Bolívar. He raised money for the Irish Legion and sent his 14-year-old son, Morgan, to Venezuela to serve as an aide-de-camp to its commanding officer, the roguish County Wexford man John Devereux. Bolívar had already become known as the Liberator before O’Connell was honoured with that title in Ireland.
Irishmen fought on both sides during the wars of independence; so that, while many Irish volunteers were recruited by Bolívar in Irish and English cities or, for economic reasons, joined the patriot armies after emigrating to South American cities, there were also Irish officers serving in the royalist forces who believed they owed everything to the Spanish king, such as Diego O’Reilly, who committed suicide after being captured by the patriot forces in Peru. There were also those who changed sides, like John Mackenna of County Monaghan, a soldier in the Spanish army, who was appointed governor of Osorno by Ambrose O’Higgins in Chile before he joined the independence struggle alongside Ambrose’s son, Bernardo.
The Irish contribution to independence is recalled in Latin American public memory by the names of streets, towns and schools. There are four football teams in the Argentine league named after William Brown, the mariner from County Mayo who is credited with founding the country’s navy. The Pedro Campbell is a frigate in the Uruguayan navy named after the guerrilla-cum-gaucho from County Tipperary who helped win that country’s independence.
The role played in the achievement of South American independence by a coterie of Irishmen working for the British government is less well known. In the eighteenth century, Britain was desperate for a share of Spain’s colonial markets. The two countries were at each other’s throats throughout the period over the Atlantic trade; yet, just at the moment when the first calls for independence were heard on the streets of Buenos Aires, Caracas and Quito, Britain and Spain ceased hostilities and became allies against a common foe, Napoleon Bonaparte. The British now found themselves in the position of having to remain openly neutral regarding independence for the colonies, so as to placate their Spanish allies, while secretly negotiating with the revolutionary juntas that were forming throughout the South American continent. A couple of Anglo-Irish politicians, George Canning and Lord Castlereagh, were central to the formulation of British policy in South America, while the Anglo-Irish diplomat Lord Strangford played a crucial role in implementing it. They were aided in their efforts by an Irish-born Buenos Aires merchant, Thomas O’Gorman, and a colourful French-born Irish spy, James Florence Bourke.
The final part of the book examines the later careers of some of the most notable Irish volunteers to serve in the war who settled in Latin America, many of whom suffered in the civil wars and political intrigues that followed independence. The volunteers for Bolívar’s army who braved the Atlantic on overcrowded ships sailing from Irish ports were soldiers – and emigrants. They included William Owens Ferguson, who was shot dead in a dark alley in Bogotá, a victim of a failed assassination attempt on Simón Bolívar. He was buried with full honours in Bogotá’s cathedral and was among those Irish soldiers who were accorded a place in the patriotic pantheon of the new, independent Latin American republics.
In the wake of independence, many foreigners began flooding into Latin America to take advantage of the new economic opportunities afforded by the introduction of free trade. Bernardo O’Higgins, John Thomond O’Brien and Francis Burdett O’Connor were among the revolutionary leaders who sought to introduce Irish settlers to work the depopulated lands of the continent’s interior. Some of these schemes proved unsuccessful, but one in particular endured and saw tens of thousands of Irish families emigrate en masse from towns and villages in counties Offaly, Longford and Westmeath in the middle of the nineteenth century. The children of these Irish families who struck out from Irish and English ports for a new life in Argentina and Uruguay were to make substantial contributions to the economic, cultural and social life of their new countries. While these Irish families integrated into their new communities within a few generations, many of their progeny remained proud of their link to their distant homeland across the Atlantic Ocean, exemplifying the ability of Irish communities throughout the world to retain a sense of identity while fully integrating into the host culture.
The Spanish-speaking Irish community has been less visible in Ireland than Irish emigrants in the English-speaking world. It is the purpose of this book to redress that imbalance and recall the Irish soldiers and sailors, entrepreneurs and merchants, diplomats and politicians, priests and pamphleteers, who, just like their cousins who played such a significant role in the creation of the United States, helped forge modern Latin America.
NOTE
Irish and English forenames and surnames tended to be hispanicised in the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Richard became Ricardo, John became Juan, Fitzgerald became Geraldino and O’Donoghue became O’Donojú. Throughout the text I have used the English spelling of the name for those born in Ireland, but for those who were born in Spain or Latin America I prefer the Spanish version, so that the Chilean patriot Juan Mackenna, who was born in County Monaghan, is referred to throughout the text as John Mackenna, while his friend and ally, who was born in Chile, remains Bernardo O’Higgins. Where the birthplace is not clear, I have chosen the Spanish version.
I have used the authentic version of place-names in Spain and Latin America except where there is a well-known alternative English spelling: for example, Seville is preferred to Sevilla.
I have taken the decision to concentrate on the independence struggle in Spain’s former colonies on the South American continent during the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as examining the historical context in Spain and its American colonies. This is because the Irish played a significant role in the independence movement in the southern part of the continent – through the actions of individuals such as James Florence Bourke, William Brown, Peter Campbell, Bernardo O’Higgins and John Thomond O’Brien – and in the northern part through the Irish volunteers in Bolívar’s armies. This approach precludes looking at Cuba, which remained a Spanish possession until 1898.
The independence struggle in the Viceroyalty of New Spain – the Spanish administrative territory that covered Mexico, much of the modern United States of America and most of Central America – followed a different course from that of South America. It was at first a popular rising, as opposed to the middle-class-led revolutions. I have included a chapter on Mexico, in addition to those about South America, for two reasons. The first is that the Spanish general who signed the treaty that brought about Mexican independence in an extraordinary act of pragmatism was an Irish-Spaniard by the name of Juan O’Donojú. The second reason is that Mexico honours to this day a battalion of Irishmen known as the San Patricios who fought to preserve Mexican independence from the aggressive designs of the United States.
Brazil is a vast country, which covers almost half the South American continent. It requires its own separate study. However, that is not to say that the course of events in Brazil, especially the machinations of the Portuguese royal family during their exile in Rio de Janeiro and their decision to invade what is now Uruguay, remains completely outside the scope of this book.
The story of the Irish in Latin America is a huge subject. I have tried to give an idea of their broader involvement in the independence struggle while interspersing the narrative with the histories of the most important leaders.
Finally, this is a history not only of the Irish soldiers who helped achieve independence for the republics that came into existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century by force of arms but also of their compatriots in the service of Spain who created the conditions in which independence became possible.