The waves of Irish immigrants pouring into America after the Revolutionary War changed the political calculus for the two emerging political parties, and likely altered the outcome of the1800 presidential election.
One of those was a Corkman named Denis Driscol, and he would have a role in Augusta’s history as well as America’s.
The Irish over the centuries in the CSRA have been mayors, newspaper editors and some of the most successful business people in the city’s history.
Driscol’s name, though, is largely forgotten, but he undoubtedly had an impact on the formation of the early United States through his work as a partisan journalist in 1800 when Democratic Republican Thomas Jefferson ran against the sitting Federalist president, John Adams.
Irishmen like Driscol fled to America in the aftermath of the 1798 United Irishmen rising, and they brought with them republican ideas that fit neatly with Jefferson’s platform. Driscol came following time spent in jail on a sedition charge for his role in the rising.
Unlike other prominent Irish-born Augustans, there is no monument in the city memorializing Driscol, even though he was relatively famous for his time.
Driscol was born in 1762 in Co. Cork, Ireland. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biographies, Driscol’s wealthy Catholic parents sent him to Spain to train as a priest.
The hopes and dreams Driscol’s parents had for their son were devastated in 1789 when he did the unthinkable.
Driscol renounced Catholicism and joined the Church of Ireland.
The world was in flux at the time with the American Revolution having just ended and the French Revolution just heating up.
A radicalized Driscol would start his first newspaper, the Cork Gazette, where he denounced monarchies and spread the ideas of Deism, a theology that American elites such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson had already embraced, according to EnlighenmentDeism.com.
Jefferson was such a proponent of the theology that he created his own version of the Bible that conformed to his Deist thoughts. That Bible remains on display at Jefferson’s home, Monticello.
Deism bases its theology in rational thought with the belief that a supreme being exists but does not interfere with everyday human life. Such beliefs would have been considered heresy just a century before.
While Driscol was never punished for heresy, his writings were not appreciated by everybody, including those in government.
According to the Dictionary of Irish Biographies, Driscol was convicted for seditious libel in 1794 and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.
After serving his time, Driscol decided to emigrate to America and take advantage of the Constitutional protections of free speech and freedom of the press. Upon arriving in New York, Driscol joined the Deism philanthropic society, the Theophilanthropists, and became editor of the newspaper, The Temple of Reason.
Driscol later moved the publication to Philadelphia where the movement was larger and included elites of the time.
Historian Hubert van Tyull says that, in Philadelphia, Driscol found similar thinkers.
“Deism presented an extreme view of liberty and helped shape America’s ideas of liberty,” Hubert van Tuyll said.
While Thomas Jefferson was credited with the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state,” he and other Deists such as Driscol believed there could be a co-mingling of religion and politics. Politics as something separate from, according to newspaper historian Debbie van Tuyll.
Driscol would become a very vocal supporter of Thomas Jefferson for president in 1800. That election would go down in history as one of the most hard fought and nasty presidential campaigns as both the Jefferson and John Adams camps hurled invective that is shocking even today.
Several years after the election, Driscol moved to Augusta where he owned and operated the Augusta Chronicle, according to Debbie van Tuyll.
It is believed that Driscol also ran a bookstore that specialized in Deist literature until his death in 1811.
…And that is something you may not have known.
