The Irish and American revolutions were united by a common foe – the British, but the differences between the two revolutions are more numerous than the similarities.
The Irish revolution was both a cultural and military revolution. Despite hundreds of years of being dominated by the British, the Irish always believed themselves to be a people apart.
The colonists in America were rebelling against their own kind. They were culturally and politically British. They spoke English (they still do), followed the Common Law, and practised the same Protestant religion for the most part.
They had a nominal allegiance to the British Crown as a unifying force among 13 colonies which saw themselves, and operated as, independent republics.
RM Block
The American Revolution of the late 18th century was a war of independence, but it was also a British civil war in America. When it started in 1775, British America was divided evenly between those committed to the cause of independence (patriots), those against (loyalists), and neutrals.
There were no censuses in pre-independence America. Best estimates put the population at 2.5 million (in an area as large as Western Europe). Among the population there were half a million enslaved people, and the white population was overwhelmingly British or Irish in origin, with a small number of Germans and Dutch.
The British had begun colonising North America from the 16th century. The first colony in the modern United States that survives today was Jamestown, founded in 1607. The Mayflower voyage followed in 1620, and with it the beginnings of Puritan New England.
‘By and large, the mother country had been content to allow her colonies a great measure of self-rule. The people who emigrated, often in appalling conditions, and their descendants were, by definition, independent-minded’
The Puritans had fled England to the Protestant Netherlands because they refused to conform to the edicts of King James I that all his subjects must follow the Anglican creed.
Over the next 150 years, British America attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers who wanted the freedom to practise religion as they saw fit. The Bill of Rights of 1690, which inspired the US Declaration of Independence, guaranteed fundamental liberties, but not to Catholics or those who did not conform to the Anglican tradition.
This would provide a willing pool of nascent revolutionaries who were culturally British, but suspicious of the Crown and of all authority. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Penal Laws relentlessly sought to exclude non-conformists, most notably Scottish and Irish Presbyterians, and Catholics, from public life.
When the Plantations of Ulster began in 1609, King James I (he was also King James VI of Scotland) sought to transplant the Border Reivers or Lowland Scots to Ulster. This would ideally solve two problems – remove a troublesome people renowned for their lawlessness and penchant for violence, and have them subdue the native Catholic population in Ireland.
Their lot scarcely improved in Ireland, however. Despised by the Catholic population, they were distrusted by successive British monarchs. They were persecuted by the British state for refusing to conform to the Anglican religion, forced to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland, barred from public life, and their marriages were unrecognised.
The 18th century was a time of periodic economic hardship in Ireland. A century after first arriving, many Ulster-Scots had enough. Between 1730 and 1775, 250,000 of them migrated to America.
Their reputation as a querulous people went before them, and they were not welcome in New England or New York, where most of the good land had been taken. When they arrived in the port of Pennsylvania, they found most of the good land had been taken there too.
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However, the founder of the colony, William Penn, was a Quaker who believed in religious tolerance. He had pragmatic reasons for welcoming the Scots-Irish.
The lands of western Pennsylvania were mountainous and rugged. They also marked the frontiers of the 13 colonies. Beyond that was “Indian territory”, which was also nominally French.
Penn needed a resilient frontiers-people, and the Scots-Irish took him up en-masse on his offer to populate Appalachia.
Among them was Andrew Jackson, the son of Presbyterian immigrants from Co Antrim, Andrew Jackson and Elizabeth Hutchinson. Families such as the Jacksons would provide the backbone for George Washington’s Continental Army, which won the War of Independence.
When he was 13, Jackson was slashed across the face by a British officer who demanded that he clean his boots.
Jackson, as a general, later took up arms during the 1812 war against the British and became the seventh US president in 1829. Jackson claimed to represent the common people against an out-of-touch elite. US president Donald Trump has a portrait of Jackson on his desk.
By and large, the mother country had been content to allow her colonies a great measure of self-rule. The people who emigrated, often in appalling conditions, and their descendants were, by definition, independent-minded.
That changed after the Seven Years War (1756-1762), a first World War in miniature which spread to the colonies and became known in America as the French and Indian War.
The British eventually triumphed, but the conflict left Britain and France bankrupt, and the extra burden of taxation would partially lead to both the American and French revolutions.
‘Many of those who took up arms on the American side were not viscerally anti-British. Among them was George Washington, who actually fought for the British in the French and Indian wars’
The British government sought to recoup the costs of defending its colonies by imposing direct taxation on them. What might have seemed a reasonable request from London was regarded as an affront to the colonies, which refused both in principle and practice any taxation imposed upon them without representation.
When the American Revolution began with the battles of Concord and Lexington in April 1775 (known historically as the shot that rang out around the world), it seemed a foolhardy enterprise for many Americans. As George Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, observed many years later, the American flag was a “friendless standard” in the early days of the revolution.
The Declaration of Independence, signed on July 2nd, 1776 (two days were given for word to spread around the colonies), was not the end, but only the beginning of the struggle for American independence. The decisive intervention of the French in 1778 helped to turn the tide, and the war effectively ended with the defeat of General Charles Cornwallis in October 1781 at Yorktown. Even still, it was two years before the United States of America was recognised as an independent country.
Many of those who took up arms on the American side were not viscerally anti-British. Among them was George Washington, who actually fought for the British in the French and Indian wars and might have remained a loyal subject had he not been passed over for promotion.
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As late as 1774, the First Continental Congress of the combined colonies sent a loyal address to King George III beseeching him to intervene on their behalf to have the British parliament lift the coercive Acts imposed upon them for refusal to pay tax. The king refused. Two years later he would be described in the Declaration of Independence as a “prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant – unfit to be the ruler of a free people”.
The Scots-Irish and Irish, though, for historical reasons, were anti-British to start with and proved to be willing recruits to the Continental Army.
According to historian Michael O’Brien, 38 per cent of Washington’s army was of Irish or Scots-Irish heritage. In his book George Washington and the Irish, Niall O’Dowd cites figures which show 695 Kellys, 494 Murphys, 331 McCarthys, 327 O’Connors and 322 Ryans among those who served.
The role of the Irish in the American Revolution has often been downplayed, according to Philip Tucker, author of How the Irish Won the American Revolution.
They were towards the bottom of the social hierarchy in America. History is written by the victors, but many of those who took up arms were barely literate, and their role was not acknowledged the way it should have been, Tucker concluded.
The story of the American Revolution was mostly written by adherents to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) tradition, who downplayed the role of the Scots-Irish and Irish.
They were mostly forgotten in Ireland also, but two new documentaries have sought to remedy that omission.
‘The United States did not elect a Catholic president until John F Kennedy in 1960, who had to stress that he owed his allegiance to the US and not to Rome’
Réabhlóid Mheiriceá: Na Laochra Gael, a two-part series by broadcaster Cormac Ó hEadhra on TG4, highlights the role of the Irish involved.
Former US diplomat David McKean has also made a documentary for RTÉ about his ancestor Thomas McKean, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence whose father came from Ireland.
The American Revolution was primarily a Protestant revolution. American presidents regularly cite the eight signers of the Declaration of Independence who were Irish-born or of Irish descent, but only one of the 56 signatories was Catholic – Charles Carroll, whose family originated in Co Offaly.
Carroll was barred from public office at one stage because the prohibition on Catholics crossed the Atlantic, but his influence and wealth – he was a hugely wealthy plantation owner, with 300 slaves – trumped religious reservations.
The Declaration abolished religious discrimination in the colonies, though anti-Catholic prejudice remained for centuries afterwards. The United States did not elect a Catholic president until John F Kennedy in 1960, who had to stress that he owed his allegiance to the US and not to Rome.
Irish Catholics, who had it even worse than the Presbyterians in Ireland had, also emigrated to British America, though in smaller numbers. Many did not have the financial wherewithal to emigrate, but those who did had an outsized impact on the American Revolution.
Stephen Moylan, from a Catholic merchant family in Cork, was a trusted aide to George Washington, and is the one widely attributed to have come up with the name for the new nation – “the United States of America”. John Barry from Wexford used his knowledge and skills learned in the Royal Navy to become the father of the US navy.
Co Wicklow man John Fitzgerald settled in Virginia and became Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolution. Washington was notably well disposed to Catholics at a time when they were viewed with suspicion by his Protestant peers.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to the Irish in the American Revolution was the backhanded compliments paid by the defeated.
The British army’s commander-in-chief in America, General Sir Henry Clinton, who came to the dawning realisation that the British could not win, famously complained that “the emigrants from Ireland are to be looked upon as our most serious antagonists”.
Speaking at an inquiry into the American Revolution in 1783, the Irish-born peer Viscount Mountjoy concluded: “America was lost by Irish emigrants.
“I am assured from the best authority: the major part of the American Army was composed of Irish, and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English; I am also informed it was their valour that determined the contest.”
