Convinced that so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the interest of England and of its client aristocracy, in 1791 Tone helped form the Society of United Irishmen.

They had coalesced around the proposal of one of their number, now resident in Dublin, William Drennan, for "a benevolent conspiracy, a plot for the people" dedicated to "the Rights of Man" and to "Real Independence" for Ireland.

[18] Tone was himself suspicious of the Catholic priests (regretting that the Irish people had been "bound" to them by persecution)[21]: 369  and hostile to what he saw as "Papal tyranny"[22] (In 1798, he was to applaud Napoleon's deposition and imprisonment of Pope Pius VI).

Others were urged to follow their example: to "form similar Societies in every quarter of the kingdom for the promotion of Constitutional knowledge, the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen".

[26] The impression was confirmed when the convention decided to make its appeal directly to London where the government, in advance of war with revolutionary France, had signalled a willingness to solicit Catholic opinion.

This lifted the sacramental bar to the legal profession, to military commissions and, in the limited number of constituencies not in the "pockets" of either landed grandees or the government, to the property franchise, but not yet to Parliament itself or to senior Crown offices.

In July 1793, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare, had seized upon Tone's suggestion in a letter to Russell that independence "would be the regeneration to this country", to denounce all United Irishmen as committed separatists.

At the summit of Cavehill overlooking the town, Tone with Thomas Russell and three other members of the movement's Ulster executive, Samuel Neilson, Henry Joy McCracken and Robert Simms, took the celebrated pledge "never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and asserted our independence".

As it did so, William Drennan's “test” or pledge, calling for "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion",[41] was administered to artisans, journeymen and shopkeepers, many of whom had maintained their own Jacobin clubs,[42] and to tenant farmers and their market-town allies who had organised against the Anglican gentry in secret fraternities.

He found the Americans to be a "churlish, unsociable race totally absorbed in making money", and was appalled by the reactionary anti-French sentiment of George Washington and his Federalist Party allies—a "mercantile peerage"—entrenched in the U.S. Senate.

[44]: 103 [13]: 16–17 Tone bought a farm near Princeton, New Jersey, an area made desirable by the attraction of "a college and some good society", and thought to spend the approaching winter writing a history of the Catholic Committee.

[5] Tone was not aware of it at the time, but his picture of Ireland as primed for liberation was being reinforced by the still more enthusiastic reports from two new United militants, formerly in the ranks of Grattan parliamentary opposition, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O'Connor.

After Tone and other troops assembled had disembarked, it eventually put to sea in the hope of reaching the French naval base at Brest, only to be destroyed by Admiral Adam Duncan in the Battle of Camperdown on October 11, 1797.

Hoche who, straying from Tone's plans for Ireland, had begun to consider descent upon Scotland (where following the Irish example, radicals had formed the United Scotsmen),[48]: 143–144  had died of tuberculosis on September 19.

[7]: 364–367  The most that he and the other Irish lobbyists had won from the Directory was the undertaking that once the news was received that the country had risen, they would seek to break through to the more open Atlantic coast of Ireland and land smaller numbers of men and supplies.

[59] Later generations of Irish republicans have broadly been content with Tone's own succinct summary of his purpose: To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England (the never failing source of our political evils) and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects.

Anticipating the terms under which Catholics were eventually admitted to a United Kingdom parliament in 1829,[67] his Argument proposed raising the property (or tenure equivalent) threshold for the vote fivefold to match the English ten-pound freehold.

As these could be driven to the polls by their landlords, "as much their property as the sheep or the bullocks which they brand with their names",[18] Wolfe may have reasoned that was lost in democratic principle was gained in the practical check on the ability of the squirearchy to swamp county-seat elections.

[46]: 386 In general, Tone appears to have followed the resolve of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen to "attend those things in which we all agree, [and] to exclude those in which we differ", and consequently to avoid directly engaging questions of economic inequality.

[74]: 126  but James Hope, the self-educated weaver who organised in the Liberties,[75] did not place Tone alongside his friend Russell as one of those “few” United Irish leaders who "perfectly" understood the real causes of social disorder: "the conditions of the labouring class".

To Tone's dismay from Humbert's account of his misadventure in September 1798, the Directory concluded that the Irish were indeed more Jacobite than Jacobin: that they might be compared with the devoutly Catholic and royalist peasantry they had battled at home in the Vendée.

[81]: 210 [82]Praising his courage and his "keen" and "lucid" judgement, the otherwise unsympathetic Whig historian William Lecky set Tone "far above the dreary level of commonplace which Irish conspiracy in general presents".

[84]: 18–19  With his fellow Young Irelander (and Protestant) John Mitchel, Davis found in Tone an "alternative national hero" to O'Connell, "the Liberator", with whose solicitation of Whig government favour and Catholic clericalism they were increasingly disillusioned.

[74]: 113–114  In his History of Ireland (1864),[85] Mitchel drew uncritically from the Life, beginning what historian James Quinn suggests is a "long tradition in nationalist historiography of treating Tone's writing as sacred scripture".

[84]: 103  Once De Valera's Fianna Fáil gained office in 1932, pro-Treaty Fine Gael abandoned Tone's graveside for an annual ceremony at Béal na Bláth, in County Cork, where Michael Collins met his death in an ambush in August 1922.

A Republican Congress "James Connolly" contingent from the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast (accompanied by Jack White and by Winifred Carney) was blocked on their approach to the graveside and their "red" banner—"Break the Connection with Capitalism"—torn by IRA stewards.

[109][110] In 1998, the rebellion's bicentenary, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern made separate appearances at Bodenstown to claim Tone's sanction for their endorsement of the "Good Friday" Belfast Agreement.

Acknowledging "with pride" the roots of its republicanism in "the mainly Presbyterian United Irish movement,” Adams declared Sinn Féin equal to the task Tone had set for those truly committed to a sovereign Ireland: to "cast off the manacles of religious sectarianism and 'abolish the memory of past dissensions'".

[111] Ahern offered that in that Article 1, the Agreement conceded the "central tenet" of Tone's vision and that of all those who in succeeding generations "worked for reconciliation and peace between the different traditions on this island".

It is described as "an elaborate roman à clef, satirizing the lives of several prominent figures of the Anglo-Irish establishment and redressing a painful love affair [with Lady Elizabeth Vesey] from Tone’s past".