Daniel O’Connell’s impact on US fight against slavery

TWO hundred fifty years ago this August, Daniel O’Connell was born in rural County Kerry, Ireland.

- CHRISTIAN E. O'CONNELL

His name may no longer ring in American ears - although Dublin’s grandest boulevard, O'Connell Street, bears it proudly - but in his own time, the lawyer and statesman was one of the most celebrated orators in the world, known simply as “the Liberator” for dismantling Britain’s Penal Laws and winning Roman Catholic emancipation in 1829.

That reform ended legal disadvantages suffered by Ireland’s Catholic majority, restoring Catholics’ right to vote and sit in Parliament for the first time in generations.

With that triumph, O’Connell (no known relation, I should note) cemented a kind of moral authority - proof that a mass movement could force an empire to yield without raising a musket.

But that authority rested on more than a single striking victory.

It grew out of years of sustained agitation, O’Connell’s refusal to answer opponents with violence, and his reputation for discipline and principle - respected by allies and acknowledged, however grudgingly, even by those who opposed him.

O’Connell’s story is a lesson about the way the model of nonviolent resistance can travel across borders - and how moral authority still has the power to shape our public life today. O’Connell’s influence carried far beyond Ireland.