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E-mailTrading With The Enemy: How Irish merchants fanned the flames of revolution in America
On November 2, 1759, a veritable riot broke out along several blocks of lower Manhattan. The target of the torch-bearing crowds was a man deemed to be a “rogue” and informer named George Spencer. Spencer survived the crowds’ wrath, though he was banged up with bruises and cuts. What Spencer – or the mob – did not know was that they would be swept up into events which would have ramifications across the British Empire, which, in 1759, included New York and all of the colonies up and down the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States.
Within 15 years, those colonies would, of course, revolt, an event marked for the 239th year this past July 4.
The heroes of that American Revolution are well known, as are many of the events in the 1770s which led to the colonists’ famous Declaration of Independence.
What is less well known is that events stretching as far back as the 1750s had planted the seeds of American Revolution. At the center of one key conflict was a small but influential group of Irish merchants and traders who had settled in New York. They were there – as most people in 18th-century New York were – to make a buck.
But if, along the way, they also hurt the British Empire, well, that probably didn’t bother them too much.
The French, The British, The Irish
How did these Irish merchants hurt the British? They continued to trade with the French in the 1750s, even as tensions between Great Britain and France eventually led to the full-blown conflict Europeans call The Seven Years’ War and Americans know as the French and Indian War.
British colonial forces had tried to stop the commercial activity of the Irish merchants by passing numerous laws. The British hoped to keep key goods out of the hands of their enemy, the French. And yet, many merchants in New York continued the clandestine practice of trading with the French. They skirted laws by using faked records, by making stopovers on neutral islands or even routing goods through Ireland.
The Irish – many of whom viewed France as a sympathetic Catholic ally going back to the Protestant Reformation – continued to trade with the French, thus undermining the British war effort, as the French and Indian War raged in the 1760s.
True, the war ended in 1763 favorably for the British. “The British Army had routed the French from Canada and the American colonies,” Don Cook writes in his book The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760– 1785.
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