Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States. Issue 1 (3rd February 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sim, David
• Is Part Of: Past & present. Volume 247:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 77
• Page End: 112
• Publication Date: 2020-02-03
• Subjects: History -- Periodicals; 905
• DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtz036
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0031-2746

Abstract

Abstract: This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of 'special money' and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.