Profs and Pints Online presents: “The St. Patrick’s Day Revolt of 1741,” with John Donoghue, associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and scholar of Irish American history.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1741, Ft. George, the largest military base in Britain’s North American Empire, went up in flames. Located at the tip of Manhattan Island, it did not burn by accident. Instead, Irish soldiers serving there were joined by enslaved African Americans from Manhattan in reducing the fort to ashes as part of a larger, revolutionary plot.

As the 280th anniversary of that event approaches, learn the fascinating details of what transpired from John Donoghue, a historian who has received rave reviews from Profs and Pints audiences.

You’ll learn how race did not always limit the world views of early Americans. In 1741 New York, African and Irish people, the two most marginalized groups in colonial American cities, believed that what they shared in common outweighed what set them apart. Both the white and black participants in the rebellion revered St. Patrick as a freedom fighter, a reason for honoring him that would mystify most people who celebrate his memory today.

The rebels had hatched their plot in Hughson’s Tavern, a place where Irish soldiers, Irish indentured servants, and African American slaves gathered to eat, drink, dance, and make merry. The tavern’s owner, John Hughson, also fenced the goods that Irish and African men and women stole from Ft. George and the homes and shops where they worked. The Irish and Africans who patronized Hughson’s Tavern felt little guilt about such theft. For the Irish, the British had stolen their very nation and reduced it to famine, one of the worst striking across the years before and of the revolt. For Africans, enslavement stole their very lives and labor.

After destroying Ft. George to weaken New York’s imperial forces, the rebels lit thirteen fires around the city to terrify the city’s slave trading merchants and political elite. Amidst the chaos, the rebels planned to take over the city; if that failed, their next scheme involved escaping New York by ship to join a colony of fugitive slaves near Cape Fear, North Carolina. An informer led city officials to the heart of the plot at Hughson’s Tavern, enabling authorities to suppress the revolt before the rebels accomplished their final aim.

This talk recovers St. Patrick’s older legacy as an inspiration for both Irish and African rebels in early America.

Profs & Pints Online: The Saint Patrick's Day Revolt of 1741