‘The People's Advocate, Champion and Friend’: the transatlantic career of Citizen John De Morgan (1848-1926)

Abstract

John De Morgan was a notorious professional agitator in Ireland and England during the eighteen‐seventies, but little is known of his life in the U.S., to which he emigrated at the age of thirty‐two. By making available an extended history of this later period in particular, this article provides both a full examination of his radical life profile on both sides of the Atlantic, and aims to provide new insight into the continuities and affinities between British and U.S. radicalism and populism in the later nineteenth century. In particular it considers how the underpinning principles of Chartism, republicanism and Christianity supported De Morgan's consistent claim on both sides of the Atlantic to be the ‘People's Advocate, Champion and Friend’.