Thomas Ledlie Birch
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).[1] Assailing the landed Anglican Ascendancy and vindicating the call for an Irish republic, it was the first published apologia for the United Irish insurrection.
Reverend Thomas Ledlie Birch | |
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| Born | 1754 Gilford, County Down, Kingdom of Ireland |
| Died | 1828 |
| Nationality |  Kingdom of Ireland, Irish |
| Occupation | Presbyterian Church Minister |
Notable work | A Letter from an Irish Emigrant (1799) |
| Movement |  Society of United Irishmen |
| Criminal charge(s) | Treason 1797, 1798 |
Early life
Birch was the sixth and youngest son of a County Down farmer and merchant. He studied at the University of Glasgow and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in Saintfield in 1776, with one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Ireland. He married Isabella Ledlie, a second cousin from Arboe, County Tyrone in 1783.[2]
His exposure in Glasgow to the ideas of the Scottish enlightenment heightened the sympathy he shared with his congregants for their American kin in the struggle for independence from Britain. In 1784, through a brother-in-law in Philadelphia, Birch presented George Washington with he an address he had written for the Yankee Club of Stewartstown, Tyrone, expressing their joy that the Americans had succeeded in throwing off “the yoke of slavery”. Washington returned the thanks.[2]
Volunteer and United Irishman
When in the American War the Irish Volunteers were mustered to defend against a French invasion, Birch recognised an opportunity to broaden the political franchise against both the Ascendancy, that monopolised representation in the Irish Parliament, and the Dublin Castle executive appointed by the King's ministers in London. He became chaplain to the volunteer Saintfield Light Infantry, and called his manse "Liberty Hall".
With other prominent Volunteers, in the 1783 and 1790 general elections Birch campaigned in Down for the candidates of the Stewart family; first for Lord Londonderry and then, with success, for his son Robert Stewart. In 1790 the younger Stewart, the future Lord Castlereagh, was still an avowed Presbyterian with liberal sympathies. Down was one of the few parliamentary seats in which the Forty-shilling Freeholders had opportunity to contest the nominee of the largest landowner, in this case Lord Downshire.[3][4]
For Birch the coming of the French Revolution was confirmation that the emancipation was at hand for those who, by virtue of their refusal to acknowledge the supremacy of the English king, both temporal and spiritual, had been systematically excluded from land and office. It would be achieved, however, only by making common cause with the kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority.
In 1792 Birch joined the United Irishmen, intervening with them in a crucial Bastille Day Volunteer debate in Belfast to defend a resolution in favour of immediate, unqualified, Catholic emancipation.[5]
Birch's Saintfield Resolutions
Birch convened the Saintfield Society of United Irishmen and on Christmas Eve 1792 moved their first resolutions.
Resolved, that we will steadily pursue every reasonable, legal and constitutional means in our power, to obtain a more equal representation of the people in Parliament and a shorter period of parliamentary delegation
Resolved that a radical reform can never be affected, but by extending the right of suffrage to all sects and denominations of Irishmen.
Resolved, that we look upon our brethren Roman Catholics as men deprived of their just rights--that we highly approve of their present mode of proceeding and sincerely and heartily wish them success.[6]
An almost identical resolution was carried by Birch's church congregation, but with the anticipation that they would opposed by the landowner-led yeomanry and loyalist vigilantes. The Belfast News Letter (4 January 1793) reported that the congregation unanimously applauded a proposal that "for the defence of their families and properties" a further 500 of their number "be added to the National Guards [the Volunteers] of Ireland".[2]
Birch's visions from the pulpit were often millenarian: he spoke of the approaching "overthrow of the Beast", the "Battle of Armaggedon" that would be the "prelude to a peaceful reign of 1,000 years." At the same time Birch asked his asked his congregants to consider that "we live in a very advanced and enlightened period of the world, when ignorance and superstition are falling like lightening from heaven" and that, as a minster, he had a duty to bear witness against the corruptions of government.[4]
Birch told Wolfe Tone that his congregation were completely converted to his views; and that they had celebrated French victories over the Austrian and Prussian armies. Now, however, that the government was rendering both the Volunteer and United Irish movements illegal, they were "dissatisfied" with his comparative moderation.[7]
Rebellion and exile
A year in advance of the insurrection in Down, Birch was arrested and tried in Downpatrick on a charge of High Treason. The presiding judge, finding the conduct of the prosecutor "base and malicious", directed his honourable discharge.[2]
Birch, as chaplain of the United [Irish] Army in County Down, took to the field with his men on 8 June 1798. They converged a thousand strong on the house of the loyalist McKee family who had informed against Birch the year before. All eight members of the family died in a siege that saw by the house set alight. A relief column of 300, consisting of Newtownards Yeomanry cavalry and 270 York Fencibles were ambushed by the rebels and obliged to retreat, withdrawing through Comber to Belfast.[8]
The day after the Battle of Saintfield, "Pike Sunday", Birch preached to the whole rebel army assembled at Creevy Rocks, a hill outside the town:
Men of Down, we are gathered here today ... to pray and fight for the liberty of this Kingdom of Ireland. We have grasped the pike and musket to fight for the right against might, to drive the bloodhounds of King George the German king beyond the seas. This is Ireland, we are Irish and shall be free.[9][2]
On Monday, Birch marched with the army to Ballynahinch, but returned the same day to Saintfield to help marshal reinforcements. After the rout of the rebels at Ballynahinch on Wednesday 13 June, Birch returned to his manse, where on the 16th he was arrested.
The authorities had the opportunity to make an example of Birch in a high-profile Court Martial. But he avoided the worst by agreeing to remove himself to the United States.
After some weeks on a prison ship in Belfast Lough where he encountered William Steele Dickson and David Bailie Warden (Presbyterian licentiate and future U.S. diplomat) who had led an attack upon the garrison in Newtownards, Birch sailed in August 1798 sailed on the ship Harmony with other marked men, to New Bedford.[10][11]
A Letter from An Irish Emigrant
Birch may have started writing his Letter on the trans-Atlantic crossing. It was end dated 26 October 1798, and published the following month in Philadelphia. The politics of the Irish immigrant communities in Philadelphia and in New York City were democratic and opposed to the Federalist commitment to a understanding with Britain. The Letter was addressed to an American audience and sought to counter Federalist propaganda in which the rebellion in Ireland was discredited as part of a larger effort to generate and sustain alarm over revolutionary developments in France.[12]
Birch decried the "unnatural war" that, under the British Crown, Irish Presbyterians had been forced to wage against their "bretheren" in America. Their only wish was to be "indulged (like you) as citizens, in enjoying rights without religious distinctions, and fair vote of chusing [sic] their Representatives in the Commons House of [the Irish] Parliament". But their "humble petitions" ignored, and visited with "rapines, burnings, rapes, murders, and other sheddings of blood", the people were "goaded" into insurrection.[13] "Nothing", they were persuaded, "will satisfy (no matter at what price) but a republican form of government".
Birch did not restrain himself from proposing that in this resolve, the people of Ireland "are inspired (as they think) with a well grounded belief, and hope that the time is arrived, when the [Biblical] Prophecies concerning the Universal Dominion of Christ's Kingdom, and the peaceful happy state upon earth ... are to be fulfilled".[14]
Last years: at odds with American revivalism
In the United States, Birch returned to the ministry, first in Philadelphia and then, unhappily due to various disputes, political and religious, with the Ohio presbytery in Allegheny County, western Pennsylvania.
The Ohio presbytery disapproved of Birch's radical republicanism, which hed had translated into support for Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party. But "more fundamentally" the presbytery responded to Birch's hostility to a new American-frontier theology. Despite his own millenarianism (based on his reading of the Books of Daniel and Revelation he concluded that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in Washington in 1848), as in Ireland Birch robustly defended the Presbyterian orthodoxy. He was repelled by a revivalism that emphasised personal faith experience. The Ohio clergy and elders repeatedly rejected Birch as "unconverted".[15][16]
In 1804 Birch purchased a farm five miles west of Washington, Pennsylvania, where a local paper records him officiating at a wedding in June 1819. He died near Freeport, Pennsylvania in 1828. His widow Isabella died in Cadiz, Ohio in 1836, and a son Hamilton died there in 1847.[2]
References
- Birch, Thomas Ledlie (2005). A Letter from an Irish Emigrant (1799) (Originally published in Philadelphia ed.). Belfast: Athol Books. ISBN 0850341108.
- McClelland, Aiken (1964). "Thomas Ledlie Birch, United Irishman" (PDF). Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (Sessions 161/62-1963/64}. Second Series, 7. Retrieved 18 November 2020.
- Smyth, #Jim (1998). The Men of No Property Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 183. ISBN 9780333732564.
- Courtney, Roger (2013). Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation. pp. 86–89. ISBN 9781909556065.
- William Bruce and Henry Joy, ed. (1794). Belfast politics: or, A collection of the debates, resolutions, and other proceedings of that town in the years 1792, and 1793. Belfast: H. Joy & Co. pp. 52–65.
- Northern Star, 26 December 1792
- T. Wolfe Tone, Journal, 15 August 1792
- Stewart, A.T.Q. (1995), The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1995,ISBN 9780856405587.
- quoted by J. C. Robb, Sunday Press, 1 May 1955. The source is not given.
- Kenneth Robinson, Chronology in Introduction to A Letter from an Irish Emigrant
- Roger Courtney (2013), Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition, Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, pp.133-134
- Kenneth Robinson, Introduction to Birch (2009)
- Birch (2005) pp. 36, 56
- Birch (2005) p. 60
- Gilmore, Peter; Parkhill, Trevor; Roulston, William (2018). Exiles of '98: Ulster Presbyterians and the United States (PDF). Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation. pp. 61–70. ISBN 9781909556621. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
- Gilmore, Peter. "A Rebel Amidst Revival:Thomas Ledlie BirchAnd Western Pennsylvania Presbyterianism". academica.edu. Retrieved 21 January 2021.
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