The Society of United Irishmen, also simply known as the United Irishmen, were a sworn society in the Kingdom of Ireland formed in the wake of the French Revolution to secure "an equal representation of all the people" in a "national government." Despairing of constitutional reform, in 1798 the United Irismen instigated a republican insurrection in defiance of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Protestant Ascendancy Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain. An attempt to revive the movement and renew the insurrection following the Acts of Union was defeated in 1803.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a major uprising against British rule in Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of the American and French revolutions: originally formed by Presbyterian radicals angry at being shut out of power by the Anglican establishment, they were joined by many from the majority Catholic population.
Henry Joy McCracken was a leading member in the north of Ireland of the republican Society of the United Irishmen. He sought to ally the largely Presbyterian movement with the Catholic Defenders, and in 1798 to lead their combined forces in Antrim against the British Crown. Following the defeat and dispersal of the rebels under his command, McCracken was court-martialled and executed in Belfast.
The Royal Belfast Academical Institution is an independent grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With the support of Belfast's leading reformers, it opened its doors in 1814. Until 1849, when it was superseded by what today is Queens University, the institution pioneered Belfast's first programme of collegiate education. Locally referred to as Inst, the modern school educates boys from ages 11 to 18. It is one of the eight Northern Irish schools represented on the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. The school occupies an 18-acre site in the centre of the city on which its first buildings were erected.
John Templeton (1766–1825) was a pioneering Irish naturalist, sometimes referred to as the "Father of Irish Botany". He was a leading figure in Belfast's late eighteenth century enlightenment: he attached himself to democratic programme of the United Irishmen, and figured prominently in the town's scientific and literary societies.
William Drennan was an Irish physician, poet and radical democrat. In Belfast he moved the formation of the Society of United Irishmen dedicated, in defiance of Protestant Ascendancy and British Crown authority, to representative government for Ireland. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, Drennan sought an avenue to reform in education: he was the leading figure in the establishment of the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, Drennan is best known for his eve-of-rebellion, "When Erin first rose", and its reference to Ireland as "the emerald isle".
Events from the year 1792 in Ireland.
The Battle of Saintfield was a short but bloody clash in County Down, in Northern Ireland. The battle was the first major conflict of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 in Down. The battle took place on Saturday, 9 June 1798.
The Belfast Charitable Society, founded in 1752, is Belfast's oldest charitable organisation. It continues its philanthropic work from Clifton House which the Society opened, originally as the town's poor house and infirmary, in 1774.
William Bruce (1757–1841) was an Irish Presbyterian minister and educator.
Reverend William Sinclair was an Irish Presbyterian minister and, as a radical democrat, a member of the Society of United Irishmen. Forced after the rebellion of 1798 into American exile, he became of leading figure in the Irish immigrant community in Baltimore.
Thomas McCabe, a prominent merchant in Belfast, was an abolitionist credited with defeating a proposal to commission ships in the town for the Middle Passage, and, with his more active son William Putnam McCabe, a member of the Society of the United Irishmen.
William Tennant (1759–1832), often spelled William Tennent, was an Ulster Presbyterian banker and a leading member in Belfast of the Society of the United Irishmen which by insurrection in 1798 sought to secure a representative and independent government for Ireland. After a period of imprisonment he returned to the commercial and civic of Belfast, in 1810 helping to found what is today the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.
David Bailie Warden was republican insurgent in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and, in later exile, a United States consul Paris. While in American service Watson protested the corruption of diplomatic service by the "avaricious" spirit of commerce and condemned slavery. Warden continued in Paris as an academician, widely recognised for his pioneering and encyclopaedic contributions to the understanding of international law, and of American history and government.
Martha "Matty" McTier was an advocate for women's health and education whose correspondence with her brother William Drennan and other leading United Irishmen documents the political radicalism and tumult of late eighteenth-century Ireland.
Jane "Jenny" Greg in the 1790s was an Irish republican agitator with connections to radical political circles in England. Although the extent of her activities are unclear, in suppressing the Society of United Irishmen the British commander, General Lake, described Greg as "the most violent creature possible" and as someone who had caused "very great [political] mischief" in her native Belfast.
Thomas Ledlie Birch (1754-1828) was a Presbyterian minister and radical democrat in the Kingdom of Ireland. Forced into American exile following the suppression of the 1798 rebellion, he wrote A Letter from An Irish Emigrant (1799). Assailing the landed Anglican Ascendancy and vindicating the call for an Irish republic, it was the first published apologia for the United Irish insurrection. In the United States he found himself at odds with the spirit of evangelical revivalism.
David Manson (1716-1792) was an Irish schoolmaster who in teaching children basic literacy sought to exclude "drudgery and fear" by pioneering the use of play and peer tutoring. His methods were in varying degrees adapted by freely-instructed hedge-school masters across the north of Ireland, and were advertised to a larger British audience by Elizabeth Hamilton in her popular novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808).
John Campbell White (1757–1847) was an executive member of the Society of United Irishmen in 1798 as it prepared in Ireland for insurrection against the British Crown and Protestant-landed Ascendancy. In American exile, he became a leading physician, and prominent anti-Federalist, in the city of Baltimore.
James MacDonnell was an Irish physician.
